Word: paganization
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...challenge, and the debate has gathered velocity ever since: in private faculty discussions, in the columns of the Daily and the Des Moines Register and between state legislators. One lawmaker, State Senator Bass Van Gilst, noted indignantly that Weltha, in his reincarnation course, "seems to be teaching a pagan religion. To me, it's not the duty of land-grant colleges to pursue these things...
...members attend to the debate at hand, others read, amble, joke or even doze. It is not beyond the frontiers of possibility that a member might show up drunk, or threaten to punch another member. Into such an atmosphere, TV cameras would arrive like censorious missionaries landing on a pagan island...
...moved the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to Constantinople. But across the still vast spread of the imperial territories, which ran from the Euphrates to Gibraltar, there was no clean break with the old religions. For 400 years, the remnants of the pagan gods contended against Christianity and with the various mystery faiths of Egypt and Asia Minor...
...religion ever started with a full-blown iconography. The earliest Christian work was crude and secretive, a code of graffiti?crosses and fish scratched on walls. To enrich that, to give its visual discourse a dignity to match imperial power, Christian art needed pagan symbolism. Once its early frenzies over idolatry had been resolved, the new religion picked over the bones of antiquity, preserving many of its forms in doctrinal art but switching their meaning...
From the 7th through 12th centuries, medieval Spain, isolated on the Iberian peninsula, developed an artistic tradition distinct from the rest of Europe's. Visigoth and Muslim influences brought a pagan exoticism to Spain's Christian art, particularly in illuminated manuscripts. Early Spanish Manuscript Illumination by John Williams (Braziller; 119 pages; $19.95 hardcover, $9.95 paper) provides illuminations of its own, offering plates from such works as the Beatus Commentary on the Book of Revelation that dazzle the reader with apocalyptic visions of weeping angels and rapacious beasts, saints and sinners, heaven and hell...