“You may say this to Theoden son of Thengel: open war lies before him… None may live now as they have lived, and few shall keep what they call their own.”– Aragorn, speaking to Eomer on the eve of the War of the Ring; from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers

A month ago, my wife attended [...]

In the previous post, I outlined a model of prestige and stigma which predicts whether a language or religion will grow or wither in a society. Now let’s take the prestige/stigma model and look at Neopaganism today. By these measures, Neopaganism is in trouble.

Stigmatized Neopaganism

Imagine trying to revive the Latin language. Imagine [...]

Modern religions that are derived from or inspired by the indigenous polytheistic traditions of Europe (I’ll call them Neopagan) have experienced a great resurgence in the last couple of hundred years, and especially in the last fifty or so. This is surprising, because prior to that, everyone pretty much thought they were gone for [...]