Word: paganisms
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...Ralph Rayner, a Tory, made an eloquent plea to Food Minister John Strachey. All that he asked on behalf of his constituents in the tiny Devonshire village of Kingsteignton was one ram. Each spring for many centuries (no one knew exactly when it began) the villagers celebrated a legendary pagan rite: they thanked the gods for their spring water by sacrificing a ram. Then they drank and danced, roasted the ram and feasted on the mutton. Rayner pleaded: "Is the Minister aware . . . that it is very unlucky to interfere with customs and traditions which have been prevalent for so long...
Such covens, Author Hole explains, were in essence Christian England's last, fading traces of pagan religion, stemming from the same roots as the animal sacrifices of the Greeks and the fertility rites of the Egyptians. When King Saul found himself out of favor with his Maker, he turned to the Witch of Endor for advice and succor-and for centuries after King Saul, kings, scholars and peasants alike turned the same way for the same reason. Witches might be good or bad (i.e., they might practice white or black magic, or a mixture of both), but it never...
...Witch in Time. Sharp practices, thefts, murders were often promptly confessed by the evildoer when he heard that the local white witch was on his trail. It was this popular, pagan confidence in witchcraft that caused the Church to fear it like the Devil himself. On the European continent, a steady procession of harmless men, women and children went to terrible deaths as witches. In England, where religious problems were less acute, and the authorities considered witchcraft more a criminal offense than a heresy, the record was not so dark. Torture, to extract confessions, was rarely employed, and Author Hole...
...unending alternation, to make a necklace handsome enough for a 5th Century princess. Ivory saints beckoned from panels small enough to put in a wallet. Rams and lions from ancient Antioch displayed their gold and silver manes in 5th Century mosaics. There was a polished statuette of Astarte, the pagan goddess of fertility, whose memory died hard among the Christian farmers of Northern Syria. Bronze oil lamps, surmounted by leaping lions and the hooked beaks of griffins, stood dry and wickless under glass. Once the lamps had flickered, fiercely golden, on the night-tables of dying bishops and children afraid...
...show spanned eleven centuries, from the reign of Constantine I to the killing of the last Constantine by his Moslem conquerors in 1453. Throughout those dark ages Byzantium had blazed, fitfully bright, as the half-classical, half-oriental capital of pagan and Christian art alike. Baltimore's entire exhibition would have been barely enough to ornament a single villa for a favorite courtesan of the 9th Century Emperor Theophilus. In a day when Rome was a vast ruin, and Paris and London mud-walled towns, Theophilus was tearing down palaces in Byzantium (which Constantine I had renamed Constantinople) simply...