Folk Religion: The (Heretical) Elephant in the Room

Perhaps the most pervasive and perdurable "heresy" of them all now falls under the politically correct moniker of "folk religion". What this phrase really refers to are supplemental spiritual practices and beliefs which various Christian cultures throughout time have engaged in but which fall outside the Judaeo-Christian Tradition. In short, folk religion is really an heretical amalgamation or hybridization of pre-Christian beliefs and rites in which the ostensibly converted Christian culture still engages. In such cases one will encounter various combinations of either pagan gods and spirits being worshiped in parallel form beside the worship of the Christian God, or a rationalized association of various pagan supernatural beings with Judaeo-Christian saints and angels. Such forms of folk religion were practiced without any crisis of conscience or internalized logic in the rural regions of Europe for centuries, with only occasional outside disturbances from "witch hunters", whose most violent efforts of persecution did nothing to extinguish pagan survivals. Even before the invention of the "Holy Inquisition", which labeled all such practices "maleficia" (Latin for "evil deeds"), and ascribed them to a worship of Satan, there were laws continuously passed(for example) from king to king in England up through the 11th century, making it illegal by penalty of fine for making ritual offerings at sacred trees, stones and springs. Much later, the Puritans of Early Modern England tried to extinguish the old rural festivals of dancing, song and ritual use of alcoholic beverages at key interchanges of the agricultural year, branding them as "Papist Pagan Corruptions of Christian Society", and these busy-bodied Puritans did enough damage that the later Romantic Period antiquarians found far less folklore surviving in England than that found by their counterparts in other European countries. However, only the Industrial Revolution was able to accomplish the real erasure of folk customs, and yet gentle remnants such as ribbon charms were still being tied on the branches of "holy" trees, even into the latter-half of 20th century in England, with no linkage whatsoever to the Neo-Pagan movements begun by young counterculturalists in the late '60s and onward. Traditional folk religion such as described above still flourishes in the rural regions of Catholic Latin American countries. Why always rural? Well, let's begin with the term "pagan": it comes from the Late Latin word, "paganus", meaning "peasant". Rural people are the most culturally conservative element of any society. Yet the question remains of how people could hold onto these old beliefs so stubbornly when there is much evidence that their dedication to Christian faith was (and is, in the aforementioned Latin American countries) quite sincere and passionate? Comparisons to this cultural phenomenon can be found going back even to the Hebrew Testament, where Ancient Judaeans were persistently relapsing into the parallel worship of Baal and Astarte alongside that of Yahweh. The challenge of worshiping in an abstract monotheistic faith, whose purpose is entirely wrapped up in individual moral betterment and a successful spiritual afterlife of heavenly bliss, is that it does not always fulfill the human needs of the here and now. In the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (and indeed in the Early Modern Period before the ideology of natural science saturated even popular thinking), there were two absolutely vital concerns to which orthodox Christian doctrine and Yahwist Judaism only secondarily addressed themselves at best: the fecundity of the land and the fertility of the body (human and the animals they husbanded). Living and working in the midst of the natural world, rural folk also underwent constant influence psychologically from the mysteries of their elemental surroundings and the numinous implications of these. While it is easy for Jews and Christians to flatly state that "God in everywhere and in every thing", there is no invitation to directly explore or commune with this intuitive human awareness of the divine inhabiting the ecological realm. This has resulted for many centuries in a spiritual schizophrenia in the Western World, wherein the otherworldly and the "this-worldly" suffer an artificial separation in the human psyche. Of course, the scientific world born out of the European Enlightenment inherited this dichotomy of mutual exclusion, resulting in a thoroughly commidified perspective on the natural world as merely a collection of exploitable resources, and mechanistic concept of the human mind itself. One wonders if the two spheres of spirituality had not been segregated. whether the totally despiritualized world of today that we must now negotiate in practice would ever have resulted. Yet in both Judaism and Christianity there have existed mystical traditions that bear the seed of harmonization between the two realms (which some metaphorically designate the "Earth Mother Realm" and the "Sky Father Realm"). Among Jewish mystics there has long developed the concept of "Shekinah" (a pregnant Hebrew term with the meaning, "She who sets up the tent stakes of social interaction"). For Jewish Kabbalists, Shekinah expressed the "female" aspect of God, and represented something equivalent to the Christian concept of the "Holy Spirit", but also meant in mystical terms (and using modern parlance) the ecological flow of the Earth's chain of being. There was an analogue to Shekinah among certain mystical Christian sects of Ancient and Medieval Times, where they referred to the feminine facet of God as "Sophia" (Greek for, "Lady Wisdom"). Perhaps Christians could think of the Trinity in a way that would redeem the biosphere which our own spiritual incompleteness has brought into such sickness.