The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #20699   Message #216994
Posted By: GUEST,Okiemockbird
24-Apr-00 - 11:18 AM
Thread Name: The Pagan Alternative. What's the music?
Subject: RE: The Pagan Alternative. What's the music?
Malcolm, my comment wasn't intended to be against anything you posted. I was just trying to be helpful by coming up with some genuine pagan music.

A comment you made earlier is most important in this whole discussion: any artistic or ritual activity carried on by baptized Christians is prima facie Christian art or ritual, however much it relies on, or perhaps fortuitously echoes, prior art or ritual. Hence when fishermen of one Scots town made an invocation to "Shoney" they might have been repeating a traditional ceremony from pagan times. But the same fishermen subsequently went up to the church and recited the Lord's prayer. (This all assumes that I am remembering the account correctly.) Whatever the origins of the "Shoney" custom, those who most recently practised it were clearly Christians, and had incorporated their (possibly ancient) custom into a Christian context. This is not the same sort of survival (if it is that) that Margaret Murray imagined in her tendentious and now discredited writings on paganism.

T.