Pagan/Animists

[albion]

Hi jacq63.
I believe the Hell Stone was thought to be a megolithic portal hence the Offerings.

[jacq63]

Thanks albion..there was an amazingly charged (I thought) atmosphere there..I didn't know anything about dolmens, or Hellstone at the time. It was quite an experience.

[albion]

Thanks jacq63,
The legend Is that these megolithic structures were built on top of "lay lines" magnetic fields of force which the people at the time were somehow sensitive to.
To me paganism Is to worship the elements, the wind through the trees, the sound of water hitting rocks, the stillness, harmony.

[Sculptor]

Originally Posted by Lisa_from_Debary
There was a point where one of the Popes in the hopes of attracting Pagans to the Catholic church, immalgamated Pagan holidays with christian ones

...

Which Pope and which holidays do you mean?

That must have been way after all the others who ordered pagans, heretics, non believers, "witches" and non Christians be basically jailed and or executed during the reformation, inquisition, crusades etc- they were all seen as "enemies of god"

Here's some history lessons;

In France, the largest Protestant group was known as the Huguenots. They were mercilessly persecuted, and King Henry created a heresy court known infamously as The Burning Chamber because that was the standard punishment for heretics. On the night of August 24, 1572 - known as St. Bartholomew's Day - Catholic soldiers swept through Huguenot neighborhoods of Paris in a foreshadowing of what would happen to the Jews under Nazi rule.

Thousands were slaughtered in their homes and other massacres timed for the same night occurred in cities across France. In response to this, Pope Gregory XIII wrote to France's King Charles IX: "We rejoice with you that with the help of God you have relieved the world of these wretched heretics."

Pope Pius sent Catholic troops into France to aid in the repression efforts, ordering the army commander to kill all prisoners. Pius, unsurprisingly, was later canonized as a saint. In the Catholic Church, sainthood is an honor which goes not to the nicest person or to someone who has aided humanity, but to those Catholics who have done great deeds to advance the cause of Catholicism.

In Flanders, all heretical Protestants were ordered executed and thousands were burned at the stake. But queen Mary was merciful to Protestants who recanted - instead of burning, the men would be killed by a sword and women buried alive. Philip II, Spanish king and also ruler of Holland and Belgium, was positively obsessed with eliminating Protestantism and ordered that all prisoners be killed so that there would be no chance that they might escape through neglect or mistakes. The Duke of Alva was sent in and began what became known as the "Spanish Fury" in which thousands of Antwerp Protestants were killed and almost all "heretics" in Haarlem were massacred.

Sources

Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History.
James A. Haught, Holy Horrors.
J.N. Hillgarth, Christianity and Paganism, 350-750.
Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy.
Edward Peters, Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe.
R. Dean Peterson, A Concise History of Christianity.

Two systems which emerged in the church deserve special mention has having contributed greatly: penance and indulgences. Penance was a type of worldly punishment, and a common form was a pilgrimage to the Holy Lands. Pilgrims resented the fact that sites holy to Christianity were not controlled by Christians, and they were easily whipped into a state of agitation and hatred towards Muslims. Later on, crusading itself was regarded as a holy pilgrimage - thus, people paid penance for their sins by going off and slaughtering adherents of another religion. Indulgences, or waivers of temporal punishment, were granted by the church to anyone who contributed monetarily to the bloody campaigns.

Emich's followers decided that before they traveled across Europe to kill God's enemies, it would be a good idea to eliminate the infidels in their midst. Thus suitably motivated, they proceeded to massacre the Jews in German cities like Mainz and Worms. Thousands of defenseless men, women and children were burned or otherwise slaughtered.

This sort of action was not an isolated event - indeed, it was repeated throughout Europe. Jews were given a last-minute chance to convert to Christianity in accord with Augustine's doctrines.

Chronicles record a story of a crusader-bishop who referred to the impaled heads of slain Muslims as a joyful spectacle for the people of God.

When Muslim cities were captured by Christian crusaders, all inhabitants - no matter what their age - were summarily killed. Jews who took refuge in their synagogues would be burned alive, not unlike the treatment they received in Europe.

In his reports about the conquest of Jerusalem, Chronicler Raymond of Aguilers wrote that "It was a just and marvelous judgment of God, that this place -the temple of Solomon should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers." St. Bernard announced before the Second Crusade that "The Christian glories in the death of a pagan, because thereby Christ himself is glorified."

Sometimes, atrocities were excused as actually being merciful. When a crusader army broke out of Antioch and sent the besieging army into flight, the Christians found that the abandoned Muslim camp was filled with the wives of the enemy soldiers. Chronicler Fulcher of Chartres happily recorded for posterity that "...the Franks did nothing evil to them [the women] except pierce their bellies with their lances."


Augustine's exhortion to compel entry into the church was used with great zeal when church leaders dealt with Christians who daredto follow a different sort of religious path. This was not always the case - during the first millennium, death was a rare penalty. But in the 1200s, shortly after the beginning of the crusades against the Muslims, wholly European crusades against Christian dissidents were enacted.

The first victims were the Albigenses, sometimes called the Cathari, who were centered primarily in southern France. These poor freethinkers doubted the biblical story of Creation, thought that Jesus was an angel instead of God, rejected transubstantiation, and demanded strict celibacy. History has taught that celibate religious groups generally tend to die out sooner or later, but contemporary church leaders weren't anxious to wait. The Cathari also took the dangerous step of translating the bible into the common language of the people, which only served to further enrage religious leaders.

In 1208, Pope Innocent III raised an army of over 20,000 knights and peasants eager to kill and pillage their way through France.

When the city of Beziers fell to the besieging armies of Christendom, soldiers asked papal legate Arnald Amalric how to tell the faithful apart from the infidels. He uttered his famous words: "Kill them all. God will know His own." Such depths of contempt and hatred are truly frightening, but they are only possible in the context of a religious doctrine of eternal punishment for unbelievers and eternal reward for believers.

Followers of Peter Waldo of Lyon, called Waldensians, also suffered the wrath of official Christendom. They promoted the role of lay street preachers despite official policy that only ordained ministers be allowed to preach. They rejecting things like oaths, war, relics, veneration of saints, indulgences, purgatory, and a great deal more which was promoted by religious leaders. The church needed to control the sort of information which the people heard, lest they be corrupted by the temptation to think for themselves. They were declared heretics at the Council of Verona in 1184 and then hounded and killed over the course of the following 500 years. In 1487, Pope Innocent VIII called for an armed crusade against populations of Waldensians in France. Some of them still apparently survive in the Alps and Piedmont.

Dozens of other heretical groups suffered the same fate - condemnation, excommunication, repression and eventually death. Christians did not shy away from killing their own religious brethern when even minor theological differences arose. For them, perhaps no differences were truly minor - all doctrines were a part of the True Path to heaven, and deviation on any point challenged the authority of the church and the community. It was a rare person who dared to stand up and make independent decisions about religious belief, made all the more rare by the fact that they were massacred as fast as possible.


Sources

Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History.
James A. Haught, Holy Horrors.
J.N. Hillgarth, Christianity and Paganism, 350-750.
Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy.
Edward Peters, Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe.
R. Dean Peterson, A Concise History of Christianity.