This essay also appears at From The Forests of Arduinna.
In the 6th century, the archbishop Martin of Braga — known as Saint Martin of Braga — wrote to a fellow archbishop regarding the ideal method for dealing with the persistence of pagan beliefs among Christians. His letter, “De correctione rusticorum,” (“on correcting the rurals”), first describes the creation of the world, then lists the many pagan practices local converts to Christianity had not yet eradicated. Martin’s list of demonic rural practices is quite intriguing, since he includes many things that people — including Christians — still do: lighting candles by holy fountains, decorating dinner tables, holding weddings on Fridays, and celebrating the beginning of the year on the first of January.
Martin of Braga’s letter, like many similar sermons and letters written by monks, missionaries, and bishops during the earliest parts of the middle ages, reveals a fascinating look into the struggle between an emerging Christian worldview and the older pagan practices and cosmologies that persisted throughout Europe. Such writing gives us glimpses of traditional European pre-Christian practices, even if sometimes the writers may have misunderstand what they were describing.
What’s particularly fascinating about De correctione rusticorum, however, is the title itself. Martin of Braga specifically wished to address and uproot the persistence of older pagan beliefs among the rūstica, “rural people.” They were people who had thus far not fully adopted the newer Christian beliefs of the more urban Christian leadership.
This association between rural people and paganism is not unusual, and the tension between rural and urban beliefs expressed expressed in the letter predates Martin of Braga’s complaints. In fact, this tension is rooted in one of the original meanings of the word “pagan” itself.
In pre-Christian Rome, the term paganus referred initially to those who lived in the countryside, often outside the direct influence of the cultural and societal norms (the civitas) of Roman cities. This division was akin to modern tension between cities and the countryside. Consider, for example, the fashions, fads, and social norms of those living in sprawling urban centres such as London, Paris, or New York, versus those living in small villages in Britain, France, and the United States. Though we’d consider both groups in each situation part of the same nation, their ways of seeing the world and their values can often feel as if they are foreign to each other.
After Christianity became the official religion of Rome, pagan took on a negative connotation, becoming an insult. No longer did it only describe rural people, but it also came to describe the kinds of beliefs they held. After centuries of rarely appearing in writing, paganus became a common term — often meant as a slur, meaning something like “backwards” — for those who had not yet converted to Christianity. Something similar happened to a Germanic word often used as a synonym for pagan beliefs in the middle ages, “heathen.” Heathen originally meant literally “heath dweller,” those living on relatively difficult land far from the urban centers. They, like the pagans, were rural folks who had not been fully converted by the new, primarily urban, religious system.
It’s worth considering the kinds of lives such people would have lived in relationship to the urban centers and its fashions. Often dwelling in very small villages consisting of just a few families, they lived relatively self-sufficient lives, growing their own food, making their own clothes, building their own homes, and trading their “surplus production” (extra things they made or grew which they didn’t need themselves) with each other and with nearby villages.
This mode of living had, until capitalism, been the general default of human life for millennia. This is true whether we are describing ancient peoples on the European sub-continent or on any other continent, and it was also the primary mode of living of the indigenous peoples before European colonization in the Americas. So, though the words “pagan” and “heathen” were specific slurs designating peoples living this way in Europe during the ascendancy of Christianity, the life-ways those slurs described were much more widespread. This is why Catholic and Protestant missionaries and colonial forces to the Americas often described the people they encountered there with those same words.
Such peoples shared not just a similar material mode of living, but also a similar cosmological outlook. While the specific forms of those cosmologies differed, they were generally what later Western theorists summarized as “animist.” A key feature of animism is the belief that spirits exist and are intrinsic to parts or all of the natural world, and that being in relationship to those spirits is a crucial aspect of human life and survival. While what constitutes a spirit and what categories of spirits there are often differs greatly across animist cultures, the basic belief in their existence is the same.
Though this belief in spirits was widespread, the often stark differences between the names and types of spirits across particular animisms makes it incredibly difficult to codify animistic belief. This difficulty persists even among peoples who are geographically close to each other. For example, here in the Ardennes where I live, Celtic and Frankish peoples who lived in villages no more than 10 kilometers from each other focused their relational rituals on completely different gods and spirits, yet they were both equally animist.
The variations across such peoples, even living next to each other, is a crucial point to remember. Rural peoples cannot easily be categorized by the specific forms of their beliefs, their “religious” lives and cultural modes. Attempts to generalize across such peoples, to abstract or distill out the essence of their cosmologies into religious doctrine, will always leave us with nothing to work with. Rural (“pagan,” “heathen,” “animist,” “savage,” etc.) peoples and beliefs cannot be reduced, only compared and contrasted against another category.
That’s why, when the Roman Empire tried to codify the varying beliefs of the people it conquered and contained, it relied on the distinction between the civitas and the paganus, the urban and the rural. Urban beliefs, customs, and material modes of living became the standard against which all non-urban peoples were judged. The cities had formal temples and state-sanctioned priesthoods, while the rural had rudimentary shrines (often centred on sacred sites in nature) and informal priesthoods following a more shamanic method of initiation.
Think a bit like an empire for a moment, and you’ll start to see the breadth of the problem Rome encountered when trying to codify religious life. The Roman Empire consisted of multiple provinces and almost countless people groups, all governed from an imperial (and urban) center. Each of those people groups had their own gods and spirits, as well as their own methods of relating to them. Often those gods, spirits, and methods conflicted, leading to political strife, rebellions, and even all-out war, especially when the Roman urban center tried to push its own fashions upon the people it ruled.
Rome’s solution to this problem was an effective one, at least for a little while. Rather than trying to force others to give up their own gods in favor of the Roman ones, it was much simpler to try to merge the gods. This process, called the Interpretatio Romana (“Roman translation”), involved finding similarities between foreign gods and the Roman ones, and then arguing that they were really the same god. Frequently, this just required the adoption of one name over another (Zeus to Jupiter, for instance). Another method was used primarily for the Celtic gods: the names of gods were strung together. Thus, here in the Ardennes, the Celtic goddess Arduinna and the Roman goddess Diana became Diana Arduinna, while in Celtic Gaul, Maponus and Apollo were merged into Apollo Maponus.
While this worked for larger people groups, not everyone had heard or even cared about these new translations. Though the Romans renamed Woden as Mercury, most Germanic peoples in the Roman Empire still kept calling him Woden. Much of this persistence had to do with the strength of their beliefs, but another important factor was that such peoples had only minimal contact with the Roman civitas, its influence, its pressures, or its fashions.
To understand the power of the Roman civitas, consider the influence that a city like New York, Paris, or Los Angeles has on the fashions, beliefs, tastes, and economic life of others. You may never have gone to Paris or even speak French, but you probably know what Chanel is or what the Eiffel Tower looks like. You might never go to New York City, but you’ve heard of the Yankees, Broadway, and Harlem. And L.A. might be the last place you’d ever consider visiting, but I’m guessing you’ve seen at least one Hollywood movie in your life.
Urban centers exerts a powerful influence on the cultural forms of people around them. The way this happens in our modern age is primarily through broadcast and social media, but these methods only accelerate their influence. Even without them, the vast economic power of a city is enough to extend its influence far beyond its limits and to draw people into its orbit.
The Roman civitas exerted a strong gravitational pull on those outside of its geographical reach, both through its economic and its military strength. However, there were always people who were relatively immune to its influence, those who were generally self-sufficient and living in remote areas. Germanic peoples living in small villages and homesteads upon heaths, for example, or rural “pagans” who didn’t rely on the civitas for their livelihoods or trade often with the urban centres. Such people were also more likely to persist in their own beliefs, to keep to their own rituals to their own spirits and gods, and maybe never even to hear about the new religious interpretations declared in the cities.
Their situation didn’t change much when a heretical Jewish cult became the dominant fashion and official religion of the Roman Empire. Christianity was just one more urban fad that had nothing to do with their daily lives or the rich tapestries of their cosmologies, as relevant to them as the latest Kardashian drama might be to an “un-contacted” tribe in the Amazon Rainforest now.
This is the context for Martin of Braga’s De correctione rusticorum. Written in 575, just ninety-nine years after the fall of Rome, the Archibishop repeats a lament any pre-Christian Roman prelate would have immediately recognized. The rural people weren’t acting like the urban people, were still holding on to their old beliefs, and were either unaware of — or stubbornly ignoring — the latest theological fashions of the civitas.
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