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Every week on Undeceptions we’ll explore some aspect of life, faith, history, culture, or ethics that is either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they’re talking about, we’ll be trying to ‘undeceive ourselves’ and let the truth ‘out’.
I think the one thing which ties these... You know, a Christian worldview together with these kind of pre modern folkloric worldviews is a kind of general commitment and an unquestioned commitment to the existence of spiritual reality. And I think what really gets to me about the modern world is that you will have this kind of knee jerk reaction in so many people to just deny, deny, deny. It doesn't exist. I can't see it with my own eyes.
Francis Young:It it doesn't exist. And to me, that... You know, I have... In in that sense, I have more sympathy with the pre Christian pagan worldview than I have with the atheist materialist worldview because I cannot get my head around this kind of endless denial of spiritual reality.
Newsreader:Fairies photographed an epoch making event described by Arthur Conan Doyle. Should the incidents here narrated and the photographs attached hold their own against the criticism which they will excite, it is no exaggeration to say that they will mark an epoch in human thought.
John Dickson:That's a reading from the Strand Magazine cover story way back in December 1920 by sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who's the author of the famous Sherlock Holmes series, of course. Later in life, Doyle took a strange turn. His famous character, Sherlock Holmes, was an incredible rationalist, of course, always just chasing down the evidence. But Doyle became a leading spokesperson for what's called spiritualism. He saw photographs of the Cottingley fairies taken in Yorkshire in 1917, and he thought they really were evidence of a supernatural world.
John Dickson:The fairies at the bottom of the garden are real. But the photos were fake, and it took another sixty three years for the girls who took the photos to admit that it was all just a bit of fun that got out of hand. Conan Doyle was hungry for enchantment. He wrote, the recognition of the existence of fairies will jolt the material twentieth century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and it will make it admit that there is a glamour and a mystery to life. Indeed.
John Dickson:Over a century later, reenchantment has become something of an identifiable trend. Now some are remaining staunchly in the rationalistic camp, but others are disillusioned with this way of looking at the world, and they're searching for something else. They're not rushing toward Christianity, I should say. Plenty are looking to pre Christian paganism and folklore to connect with their spiritual side. My guest today has spent a career studying paganism, folklore, and Christianity's connection with both.
John Dickson:Is reenchantment opening a door to darker practices we should avoid, or is it a good thing? Is it a stepping stone back to the spirituality of Christianity? So let's look deeper. I'm John Dickson, and this is Undeceptions. What on earth is a folklorist, Francis?
Francis Young:Well, we are people who study folklore, and folklore is essentially vernacular culture. That is to say culture that doesn't come from written down sources or from literature or from imagination alone, but comes organically from ordinary people, stories told by ordinary people. But also it encompasses, oral culture more generally, so things like folk music, things like folk ritual. It's a whole variety of things and it can be quite tricky to define.
John Dickson:That's doctor Francis Young, a historian and folklorist, if you've ever heard of that. He's a teacher at the University of Oxford's Department for Continuing Education, and he's written over two dozen books, including Silence of the Gods, The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples, Paganism Persisting, A History of European Paganisms Since Antiquity, and the best of all titles, Fairies, a history. Check out his Substack as well, All Old Strange Things. We'll link to it in the show notes. There are obviously, folklores across the world from indigenous Australia through to the great Norse myths.
John Dickson:What's your particular focus academically?
Francis Young:So I focus on two areas, England, which is where I'm from, but also I focus on Lithuania. I've got a long standing interest in the Baltic region, so I do a lot of research on Lithuanian folklore. But I'm what you might describe as a historical folklorist, So my main interest is in looking at records of folklore that have been collected, quite a long time ago, so, you know, in the nineteenth century and earlier. I sometimes describe myself as a folklorist, but I think probably more often I will describe myself as a historian of belief. Because really what I do is is similar to the methodology that most historians use, except that my subject matter is supernatural belief.
Francis Young:I'm interested in what ordinary people believe and have believed. So... Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm I'm as much a historian as I am a folklorist, but certainly, yeah, if you say folklorist, it it can sound a bit more interesting than just saying you're a historian.
John Dickson:Indeed. Indeed. Okay. So let's do a bit of level setting. Before Christianity came into Europe and destroyed all these beautiful stories, so the story goes, people didn't think of themselves as Pagans with idiosyncratic folklores.
John Dickson:So give us a sense of how they thought about themselves and the world they inhabited.
Francis Young:Well, you're absolutely right that this term we tend to apply to pre Christian religious traditions, pagan, is very much a term of our devising. It's something which appears in the early Christian era, and it's applied to anyone who is a worshipper of of deities other than the Christian god.
John Dickson:Of course, no one in the ancient world went around saying, I'm a pagan. That's really a twentieth century way of speaking. Until then, pagan was the term Christians, in particular, used to describe people who followed traditional indigenous spiritualities rather than Judaism and Christianity. So there is no one unified paganism. The Vikings were Pagans until they were converted.
John Dickson:That was a cracking double episode. Go and have a listen to that one. I have no idea what number it is, but the Vikings won. And, of course, the ancient Greeks were Pagans with their Olympian gods, so too the Celts, the Gauls, and so on.
Francis Young:So when we actually look at what it was like, when we think about what it was like to belong to one of these pre Christian religious traditions, people didn't have a distinctive religious identity. What's important to bear in mind about these traditions is that they were not confessional religion. The Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, for example, they are confessional. They require the believer to make a profession of of certain, tenets, whether explicitly or or implicitly as part of a a believing community. That was not required for these earlier religions.
Francis Young:And we see that, for example, in the religions of the ancient world, the Greco Roman religions, that you just worship the gods, you didn't have to sign up to any kind of basis of doctrine in order to do that. And these are to a large extent culturally reflexive modes of religiosity they they are just things that you do you've been taught you've been brought up to sacrifice in particular ways to follow certain rituals to a large extent they're also things that people do not because they believe in something in the way that we would understand it in terms of confessional belief that is salvifically important but they do it partly to avert misfortune so in other words if you fail to sacrifice to the gods bad things will happen and this is the objection that you know many of the old Roman patrician families make to the adoption of Christianity in Rome in the fourth century they say well it's all about whether it's true or false if we do this if we close the temples if we stop sacrificing to the old gods terrible things will happen and then when the Western Roman Empire falls they they turn around and say well I told you so terrible things have happened.
Francis Young:So yeah it's very difficult I think for us to understand because we think of religion as an identity we think of religion as one of those things along with language or nationality or ethnic group or whatever that defines your identity and I don't think that people in pre Christian Europe thought of religion in those terms. At the most, it was something that kind of went along with your tribe, your people, your nation, but it didn't have a distinctive identity, The very concept of religion being something separate from your civic or national identity just wasn't a thing.
John Dickson:The separation of religion and civic life is a relatively recent thing, speaking of the long game of history. In ancient Greece and Rome, participation in public festivals and sacrifices was almost a requirement of citizenship. Your civic duty and your religious duties were basically intertwined. Separating civic life from religious life is pretty much a Judeo Christian tradition with a dose of enlightenment philosophy, and the book to read on this history is by Robert Wilkam. It's called Liberty in the Things of God, Yale University Press 2019.
John Dickson:Or you can just listen to our episode with professor Wilkam. It's amazing. Just called Religious freedom. Anyway, in the pre Christian world, farmers, for example, wouldn't have seen the act of harvesting, paying taxes, and selling stuff in the marketplace as something separate from the sacrifices they made to the spirits and the gods to try and placate those gods so that the harvests would be good.
Francis Young:Absolutely. I mean, every activity can be infused with the supernatural. And, you know, one of the reasons why I study the Baltic Region is because that was an area which came very late to Christianization. So it's almost like a laboratory in which you can see some of these characteristics, which presumably also existed in England or in France or in Western Europe, we can see them at a much later era. So in the eighteenth century, for example, you've got accounts of missionaries who are going to Lithuania, and they're finding people who their entire agricultural life, as you say, is totally integrated with acts of libation, acts of sacrifice and placation of of deities.
Francis Young:And it's not set piece, it's not impressive, it's not the kind of thing that you might have seen in the Roman Forum. We're a very long way from that, but it's just something which is integrated into everyday life as as a natural part of what you do.
John Dickson:When Christianity arrived, so one popular cliche goes, Pagan temples and literature were destroyed, superstitious folklore banished, and the fun police banned all the wonderful festivals of singing and dancing and being at one with nature. Some Christians did that, sometimes, but mostly not so much. That's after the break.
Video Debate between AC Grayling and Tom Holland:There's no contradiction between saying that the the early Christians tried to efface pagan culture. They failed. They smashed a lot of temples and they burned a lot of books. We only have... Evidence...
Video Debate between AC Grayling and Tom Holland:Hang on a second. What evidence do we have for that? Oh, well, let me give you an example. We have seven of Aeschylus' plays that we know the titles of 70. We have something like, you know, a dozen or so of Euripideso.
Video Debate between AC Grayling and Tom Holland:But we we may think know the that we don't have them because Christians destroyed them. Well, because the the transmission of these things through antiquity, we know right up until the time of Sicero, right up until the time of of Dardines, Laertius, later on, how many of these documents had survived. And then we But start how do we know it was Christians who destroyed them?
John Dickson:That's a clip from the 2020 debate between the atheist philosopher AC Grayling and historian Tom Holland, one of the hosts of the amazingly popular podcast, The Rest is History. Tom is a friend of the show, and while not a Christian himself, he's written extensively about Christianity's influence on Western culture. Now Grayling argues that Christians destroyed pagan temples and classical literature in the early centuries of the church, and they continued to do it all the way through the so called Dark Ages, an idea that was really popularized in the Enlightenment period. Now it's true. I know of a couple of temples that Christians destroyed in a riot in the ancient world and a couple of synagogues too, but the vast majority of our evidence points in the opposite direction.
John Dickson:Monks preserved classical texts on a massive scale. 90% of the texts that classicists get to play with today, even the stuff that was wildly pagan and even anti Christian, was carefully copied by Christians, either in the Eastern Byzantine Empire or in the Western monasteries. And, typically, pagan temples weren't destroyed. They were repurposed. Anyway, you can watch the full debate.
John Dickson:We'll put a link in the show notes. Frankly, Tom Holland has no time for this particular argument. Neither does Francis, but for slightly different reasons. One cliche is that when Christianity arrived in England, in Europe, it destroyed all the pagan temples, banished the superstitious folklores, banned the singing and the dancing. How true is that?
Francis Young:I don't think it is true. I think that when we look at Christianization, we underestimate how resilient popular culture was, and we overestimate how far the reach of Christian missionaries really was. I think the difficulty is that we struggle with sources that were largely written by missionaries. Let's take, for example, Boniface, who is the the apostle of Germany, an Englishman, who goes from the West country of England to Germany and and eventually Frisia, where he ends up being martyred. And this deserves
John Dickson:an entire episode.
Francis Young:Oh, Absolutely. I can't wait to do Yep. Yeah. And, yeah, Bon Boniface is our main source for the stuff that he was doing. Mhmm.
Francis Young:Or in many cases, you will have a hagiographer, a biographer biographer of a saint, of a missionary, who will be recording what they're doing. So we have these very, very well, they are biased sources, effectively. They are portraying the missionary in the best possible light, and they're trying to portray their work as very successful. You know, because naturally, you would... If you're a hagiographer who wants to portray a saint as having a great reach, then you would say, you know, this person was very successful.
Francis Young:And in one way, of course, they were very successful. They sowed the seed that eventually results in a Christian nation. But the reality is that on the ground, this is gonna be a slow process, will only involve a very small number of people, demographically speaking. A missionary going to a pre urban, pre industrial society, which is largely forested with no towns, they're going to preach to a few people. They're not going to meet everyone by definition.
Francis Young:And so I think what we have to bear in mind is that Christianity radiates very slowly through these vast landscapes. And the structure to establish Christianity which existed in the former Roman Empire, so the structure of the diocese which is a Roman concept the structure of the parish that comes after it you simply cannot establish these kind of structures immediately it will take you a century and more to get this kind of thing going. And in the meantime, people's folk culture will continue to flourish. And in fact, the misconception people have about the church is that church is destructive. Now there are elements of the introduction of Christian theology which are highly exclusive and transformative of people's worldviews, and most importantly, the elimination of the higher gods and their replacement by the god of Christianity.
Francis Young:But beyond that beyond that kind of basic change of worldview, there isn't that much immediate change.
John Dickson:There's a really interesting question here about the status of other gods and spirits according to the Christian view of reality. Are they real? Are they completely made up? Are they demons? Well, yes.
John Dickson:Sort of. I'll say something about that a little later, but back to Francis.
Francis Young:So, for example, the church doesn't take much interest initially in how you bury your dead. They don't take much interest in how you get married, as long as you're avoiding things like polygamy, which are totally unacceptable. But you don't need to get married in church or anything like that. That was, you know, that's centuries before that starts. They're not really interested much in how you commemorate the dead, so you can kind of carry on doing things like burying people with grave goods that carries on for centuries after the introduction of Christianity in most countries in Northern Europe.
Francis Young:Certainly festive culture yes you'll get lots of complaints about it and the complaints survive but the very fact that we're getting the complaints about it shows that it just carries on and so for example dicing where you put on costumes which often would be animal skins or masks of of animals at certain times of the year, like New Year's Day, All Hallows' Eve, which becomes Halloween eventually. These are customs that just carry on. Are they pagan? Are they pre Christian? I think this is a very difficult question to answer because people are gradually becoming more and more Christianized and more and more cut off from their pre Christian traditions.
Francis Young:And oral memory within European societies doesn't have a particularly long lifespan. It can last maybe a couple of generations, perhaps three generations at most. But the nature of European culture, the changes that take place, the population exchanges that take place, means it's very difficult for oral tradition to be passed on over vast stretches of time in the way that you might, for example, see among indigenous Australians. So you can't draw those kind of analyses, it's a very different context. So yeah, think that the church is not as destructive as people generally think because the church did not have the reach into people's lives that people often think.
Francis Young:That kind of reach doesn't arrive until later. It starts to arrive in the very late Middle Ages and it intensifies in the Reformation period but in the early Middle Ages it's not about that it's about what I call in one of my books 'mere christianization' with apologies to CS Lewis who of course wrote the book 'Mere Christianity' but 'mere christianization' is the idea that it was enough often for the church to say these people have accepted baptism, these people now identify as Christians, the rest we leave it up to time and gradual work.
John Dickson:In five ninety seven AD, Augustine of Canterbury, not to be confused with bishop Augustine of Hippo, and a group of about 40 monks were sent by Pope Gregory the first, known as Gregory the Great, from Rome to England on a mission to convert the Anglo Saxon Pagans. A few years later, a monk named Meletus was also sent to England equipped with a letter from Gregory with some advice about how to go about work with the Pagans.
Voice Actor:Tell Augustine that he should by no means destroy the temples of the gods, but rather the idols within those temples. Let him, after he has purified them with holy water, place altars and relics of the saints in them. For if those temples are well built, they should be converted from the worship of demons to the service of the true god. Thus, seeing that their places of worship are not destroyed, the people will banish error from their hearts and come to places familiar and dear to them in acknowledgment and worship of the true god. Further, since it has been their custom to slaughter oxen in sacrifice, they should receive some solemnity in exchange.
Voice Actor:Let them therefore, on the day of the dedication of their churches or on the feast of the martyrs whose relics are preserved in them, build themselves huts around their one time temples and celebrate the occasion with religious feasting. They will sacrifice and eat the animals not anymore as an offering to the devil, but for the glory of God to whom as the giver of all things, they will give thanks for having been satiated. Thus, if they are not deprived of all exterior joys, they will more easily taste the interior ones. For surely, it is impossible to efface all at once everything from their strong minds. Just as when one wishes to reach the top of a mountain, he must climb by stages and step by step, not by leaps and bounds.
John Dickson:What do you make of the famous letter by Gregory the first, Gregory the Great, to England? Describe it for my listeners, and and what do you make of that approach from the leader of the Western church?
Francis Young:Yeah. Well, the context of this letter is that a guy called Meletus, who is one of the missionaries that Gregory... Pope Gregory the first has just sent to England in 597, led by Augustine. So Meletus is much less known. He, in fact, becomes the first bishop of Rochester, the second, sea that is established after after Canterbury.
Francis Young:And Melitus goes to Rome because, as often happened, he is coming back from the mission field with questions that the new Christians have got, particularly the Christian king, the newly Christian king, King Ethelbert of Kent, questions they have about how they should do things and, you know, what's acceptable, what's not acceptable. Now, what's unfortunate about Melitus' letters, we we we don't know exactly what these queries were. We have some idea, because we have other materials that Augustine sent back to Gregory. But we do know that Gregory issued this letter to Melitus, gave it to Melitus in Rome for Melitus to take back to England. And so this is basically a letter which says, you don't need to destroy the temples of the pagan gods.
Francis Young:You can turn them into churches. It's probably the most famous example. Other things, for example, you know, when the sacrifices take place, turn the sacrifices into festive meals in honor of the true god. You
John Dickson:you And just to be clear, the... These were pagan sacrifices of cattle to the gods and the spirits. Right?
Francis Young:Yeah. That's right. But they result in feasting. So it's not just the sacrifice. It's also the fact that you're then feasting at certain times of year.
Francis Young:And, you know
John Dickson:And the pope says it's kind of cool. It's it's But
Francis Young:says, you know, there's nothing wrong with feasting at certain times of year as long as you can tie that in with some Christian festivals. You know? So for example, most famously, you can feast at midwinter in honor of the nativity of the son of God, and you can turn this into Christmas.
John Dickson:Why exactly Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus on December 25 is a matter of scholarly debate. December 25 fell near enough to the ancient Roman festival of the birth of the invincible son, Solo Victus. Basically, it was a big party celebrating the return of the longer days after the harsh northern winter. Evidence for the date of that festival is actually pretty late, so we're not really sure about it. But either way, it's unlikely Christians simply copied the celebration.
John Dickson:Some early Christians thought Jesus was conceived on the same date on which he later died, which they calculated as March 25. So if you count nine months after March 25, it's boom, December 25. And it's kind of a happy coincidence that it falls vaguely in the same period as a Roman festival. So it's probable that December 25 was already a solemn Christian day based on those sacred calculations, but it's also possible that Christians made more of it because of the nearby Roman festival. Instead of canceling celebrations because Pagans were celebrating, the church offered an alternative, the son of God instead of the celestial sun.
John Dickson:By the way, I've heard people claim that the similarity between s u n and s o n proves that Christians copied the Roman festival. They just swapped out sun with sun. But, of course, that homophone only works in the English language, not in Greek impossible. Personally, though, I like the idea of Christians amplifying a Christian festival to draw people away from a pagan one, sanctifying the secular instead of running away from it or barring it. It speaks of an open, confident, generous faith, and you see a lot of that through Christian history.
Francis Young:And, basically, you know, this is taken back to England, and it supposedly, as far as we know, informs the way that the English mission proceeds. And we do know from archaeology that there are examples of hayags, which are these kind of sites of sacrifice, these these pagan shrines, which underlie some churches. So take for example Harrow On The Hill, which is now in Greater London, Harrow School named after this as well. Harrow is basically the modern English version of Hayak, so it means a place of sacrifice. And you've got quite a lot of places called Harrow around the country, and most of them have got a church on the highest point in that community, and those churches typically will be surrounded by groves of trees, most notably yew trees.
Francis Young:So this long standing argument about archaeologists, you know, what are these yew trees? Are they in some sense the successor of these sacred groves that were there and the church was was merely built there? There's a wonderful church at a place called Knowlton. Sadly, the church is a ruin, but the church is in the middle of a a prehistoric henge, so rather like Stonehenge, but without the, without the, the the uprights. But you've got the, you know, the ditches and so forth enclosing this church so again you've a church plonked directly in the middle of this pre christian pagan site and you know there's a great argument about you know to what extent is there continuity now the counter argument to this is to say that Gregory's letter comes from a man who's sitting in Rome.
Francis Young:This is by now the very early years of the seventh century. Rome is a city which is falling into ruin, but still, you know, the glory of Rome is all around. Temples are constantly being turned into churches. So Gregory is very familiar with this process whereby you take these enormously impressive temples, you turn them into churches. You can still, if you go to the Roman Forum today, can see there are some, temples there which either have in the past been converted into churches and and were, you know, turned into tourist attractions in nineteenth century, or in some cases, they still are.
Francis Young:You know, you can walk into quite a lot of churches in Rome.
John Dickson:Well, the Pantheon is a... Is an amazing Yeah. Example because it used to house gods, and they just replaced it with various apostles and saints and so on.
Francis Young:Yeah. Absolutely. But the thing about Rome is that you've got enormously impressive buildings, are of such structural magnificence that, of course, they're still standing today like the Pantheon. Anglo Saxon England by contrast is a society where everything is made of wood you know this is pre christian Anglo Saxon England they don't start building in stone until around about the eighth century, you know long after the christianization. So, we're talking about very, very unimpressive shrines.
Francis Young:Probably they are little huts that effectively just contain wooden images of the gods. Bede describes one in the famous story of the priest Koifei, he's a Northumbrian priest of the old gods, of the pagan gods, who Paul Linus manages to convert Kofi. Kofi says you know Christ is the only true God, gets a spear, throws it into the shrine that he had once served as a shrine of the gods, and presumably that shrine is then turned into a church of some kind. But the reality is that probably, in most cases, the Anglo Saxons didn't even worship in buildings. So probably we're talking about sacred groves, open air worship, very typical of pre Christian northern European religion and the reason is that in pre Christian northern European religion you're worshipping sky gods so Thor or Thor as he's known in the Norse myths would have been the you know the thunder god for the Anglo Saxons and you don't want to worship inside a building because you want access to the sky.
Francis Young:The concept of worshiping in a closed building that's a very Christian idea the idea of you know you move into the basilica which is you know to some extent modeled after the temple in Jerusalem you know with the sanctuary and the various elements of the Christian church. So very very alien, very different from the way that these pre Christian cults are are worshipping. So yeah it's possible that there are hardly any temples at all and so there's some skepticism among scholars but having said that it's enormously influential so it informs Boniface when Boniface goes out to convert the germs It even informs the missionaries who go to convert Bulgaria, and this is in the ninth century. So they appeal directly to the authority of this letter. So it has...
Francis Young:It's one of the really important doc... Documents, not just in English history, but in the entire history of missionary, activity.
John Dickson:Gregory's letter was definitely influenced by a statement of the apostle Paul in the New Testament in one Corinthians chapter nine, where he says, I have become all things to all people so that I might save some. His point was that Christianity is not culturally specific. It's grounded in a very specific context, of course. Jesus lived and worked in The Middle East. Paul himself lived and worked around the Mediterranean, but Christianity was never bound to either of those cultures.
John Dickson:It wasn't bound to a particular custom or dress or language or food or whatever. Now this is surely one of the things that made it such a successful missionary religion. It had its special news report about Jesus' life, teaching, healings, death, and resurrection. Yes. It had its particular ethical demands.
John Dickson:Yes. But these things could always find a pretty happy home wherever it went in the world, whatever culture it found itself in. The early Christians reflected on this point a lot. In between Paul in the first century and Gregory in the dawn of the seventh century, we have a wonderful text titled the letter to Diognetus that declares these words.
Voice Actor:The Christians are not distinguished from the rest of humanity by country, language, or custom. They live in their own countries, but only as non residents. They participate in everything as citizens and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign country is their fatherland, and every fatherland is foreign.
John Dickson:I love it. In the village of Abbots Bromley in the West Midlands of England, the Saint Nicholas Church houses six huge pairs of painted reindeer antlers hanging in its northern chapel. On the first Monday after the fourth of September every year, the antlers are taken down and used in the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, one of the oldest dancing traditions in England. The dancing goes all day with a 10 mile trek through the village. Some have suggested that it's odd for the antlers to be housed during the year in the church because they assume the ritual has pagan origins, so why would Christians support that?
John Dickson:Even the parish priest told the BBC this.
BBC Clip:How does it sit against being a church?
BBC Clip:For me, it sits alright. I mean, it's pagan with a small p,isn't it? It's not exactly... You it's not... It's friendly pagan.
John Dickson:But for much of his career, Francis has challenged the assumption that many of today's rituals and folklore have pre Christian origins. In fact, more often than not, they don't.
Francis Young:Yeah. Well, there's always a debate about to what extent things that we find being practiced today in folklore may have pre Christian antecedents, and it's one of the big sort of controversies in the history of religion in in England. Let's take one example, which is the the Abbots Bromley horn dance. Abbots Bromley is a village in Staffordshire, and every year they have a special dance which involves a group of men dressed in very silly costumes wearing tights and holding in front of them, not wearing, but holding on sticks in front of them as if they are wearing an enormous pair of stag antlers. Now what's interesting about this particular custom is that the stag antlers are kept in the church, so they live in the church throughout the year until it's time for the Abbots Romney horn dance, and they have also been carbon dated, and they've been dated to the eleventh century.
Francis Young:So in other words, the, the ten hundreds or the one thousands, so it would be the period shortly before the Norman conquest of England. So they are Anglo Saxon, And that gives rise to the probability that this has been happening at least since before the conquest. And because you get quite a lot of imagery, for example, from the ancient Celts of deities wearing horns, you've got stories like the folklore of Herm the Hunter who crops up in Shakespeare, Windsor Great Park supposedly this this kind of gamekeeper who who grows stag antlers and all this kind of stuff there is this argument that, you know, maybe the Abbots Prominent Horm dance is a survival, a pagan survival, that has been going on since pre Christian times. Morris dancing, there's a long argument that, you know, this peculiar dance that is done throughout England where you put bells on your ankles and on your on your hands, and you, dance with ribbons. And it's a very ritualized kind of slow dance where sometimes it involves jumping over swords and things like that.
Francis Young:And a hobby horse, it often involves this kind of animal, totem, which goes around the place. There are loads of hobby horse traditions. In Wales, for example, you've the Marilloid, which is this, horse's skull, rather uncanny, creation where it's a horse's skull with ribbons that somebody carries around or wears and it goes around at Christmas time, and you've got versions of this, you know, go all over, the British Isles. And people say, oh, this this looks pagan. This feels pagan.
Francis Young:Oh, this has got to be pagan. And I'm not... I must be a real party pooper here because I do not think that we can just look at a custom and say, this has a pagan vibe. This feels pagan, and say, oh, this must be pagan. I think what we have to be very aware of is that our idea of what is pagan, in inverted commas, is very much informed by certain nineteenth century theories and nineteenth century literature, which was obsessed with this idea of going back and discovering primeval rites going on in modern England.
Francis Young:Sir James Fraser is a notorious figure in this regard. So he writes a book called The Golden Bough in the nineteenth century. It goes through many editions. And Fraser has this rather naive belief that culture is passed on from primeval times in a kind of unwavering succession amongst rustic people so it's this kind of Victorian romantic idea that you know, urban people have lost touch with, you know, the the folklore of the land. But, know, if you go into country areas, people are passing this stuff down.
Francis Young:These kind of rustics, are very uncreative, and therefore, they just pass things down without thinking.
John Dickson:We did a whole episode about anthropology, which delves into sir James Fraser and the golden bow. That book set off the kind of parallelomania that you still see today, you know, spotting similarities between religions, particularly between pagan ideas and Christian ideas. Fraser argued that you could find patterns in mythologies and rituals across the world. He popularized the idea of survivals. These customs and beliefs that persisted from earlier stages of human development.
John Dickson:Folklore and rural superstition weren't random. They were lingering survivals of pagan beliefs and rites. He also proposed an evolutionary model of human thought from magic to religion to science, of course. Hugely exciting at the time, especially for those who didn't like Christianity, but it turns out most of it was complete bunker. Check out our episode 148 on the anthropologists.
Francis Young:And so there's this idea that, you know, mumming and, you know, Morris dancing and hobby horses and things like the Abbots Bromley horned arts they must be these pagan survivals but the reality is when you look at the sources the earliest records for these things kind of go back to the late middle ages now that doesn't mean that they don't predate that because it could just mean that nobody wrote anything down but the reality is that festive culture is something that we find written about by Christian clerics right the way throughout the Middle Ages and it concerns them because you know they're morally concerned about the fact that, you know, often involves drunkenness and lewd behavior and the sort of stuff that clerics don't like. But it's not usually interpreted as openly pagan, and it's very unclear as to whether these things really are pagan. And I'm not sure that festive culture requires any encouragement. I think when you actually look at the peasantry rural people, they're very inventive. They make stuff up all the time.
Francis Young:Any excuse for a party, any excuse to get drunk, any excuse to extort money from people. Because often these customs would be kind of ritualized begging. Begging normally would be something you don't want to be associated with. If there are certain times of the year when it's acceptable to go around and take up a bit of a collection then that's okay. So, yeah, I think we should take all these kind of claims with a bit of a pinch of salt.
Francis Young:I think that there are some customs which perhaps we could trace back a bit further. And the one custom which I think is does seem to have continuity with with very very ancient times is the English, well, broad... More broadly British custom of throwing metal objects into bodies of water. This today takes the form that if you go to any site, you know, National Trust sites, English Heritage sites, anything you care to mention, theme parks like Alton Towers, If you find some kind of body of water like a well or a stream or or even like a fountain, a water feature, people will have been throwing pennies in that, and there will be pennies, there will be coins in there. And and this is something which goes way, way back, goes all the way back to the invention of metal, in in the British Isles, so back to the Bronze Age.
Francis Young:In the Bronze Age, you got people, throwing swords, spears, shields, and so forth into rivers, got enormous archaeological collections of stuff which have been recovered from these rivers. In the iron age, it becomes an absolute obsessive practice of throwing iron objects. Even the the ancients talk about this, like Tacitus talks about how there's this place in Anglesey where they throw all of the, all of the iron objects. In fact, we know it's now in Anglesey in Wales. So, you know, this carries on into the Roman period.
Francis Young:They're doing it. The Anglo Saxons are doing it, and we're still doing it today. So that's one example of a... This obsession with water and bodies of water and the sacredness of water. I would say that is perhaps the one thing I would point to to say there is genuine continuity.
John Dickson:So they're not playing games? They're not playing games throwing spears and throwing... They're they're placating or something like that?
Francis Young:Well, yeah, I think that what what indicates that something ritual is going on here is that often these objects will have been deliberately bent, destroyed, ritually killed is the terms archaeologists use. In other words, you put it beyond use. And in some cases, they're actually making, objects which have no, practical use whatsoever and throwing them in. A good example is the Battersea shield, probably the most beautiful of all iron age shields to survive utterly useless in warfare, you know, purely a ceremonial object. Was it made specifically to throw into the River Thames to placate the gods?
Francis Young:Well, the underlying theory that, you know, Celtic scholars have come up with is that bodies of water in a Celtic well, in a pre Christian Celtic way of thinking, they are an interface with the realm of the other world. And in fact, we find this in Irish mythology, which, you know, gives a fairly accurate picture, I think, of of pre Christian beliefs. And there, you've got this idea of the water is a kind of veil that separates us from the world of the other world, which is accept... Which is accessible perhaps by going through under the water. So whereas our idea of other worlds is a sort of spiritualized idea, they have a very concrete concept that the other world must be accessed through some aspect of the natural world, in this case, bodies of water.
Francis Young:You know, other parts of Europe, like, for example, in the Baltic, it's the forest. The other world is the forest. So, yeah, it's a kind of... It's a conception of the other world in all likelihood.
John Dickson:Francis says the modern attempt to recapture the noble pagan past is largely impossible. There just aren't surviving links between then and now. I asked him, of course, about Stonehenge, you know, that prehistoric monument of huge standing stones on Salisbury Plain in England. It's captured our imaginations for centuries, with many believing it was built by Celtic druids, and it represents a continuous connection to the pagan past in England. Probably not, says Francis.
John Dickson:Club members are gonna get that entire part of the conversation. If you're not a member, head to undeceptions.com/club for loads of extras that producer Kaylee hides behind that paywall. It's also a great way to support the show. Anyway, after the break, we're off with the fairies. What about fairies?
John Dickson:Francis, have you got any fairies for us, or are you a party pooper on that as well?
Francis Young:Well, fairies fascinate me, for many reasons. But one reason, why I'm so interested in fairies is this claim that they are some kind of pagan survival, this question of whether they are perhaps kind of dwindled remnants or relics of the pagan gods. And I'm afraid on this subject as well, I'm gonna have to disappoint you in that this is not really the the the true story when it comes to fairies. Fairies are not totally unconnected with the pre Christian past. I would say that they are...
Francis Young:They do represent a pre Christian impulse to sort of personify nature and have a relationship with nature through these kind of manifested persons who kind of emerge from the rocks and the trees and the earth and things like that. But I think when we look at the origins of the stories that people specifically tell about fairies from the early Middle Ages onwards, it's quite clear that this is inflected by Christianity. So I... In my books, I've described fairies as parareligious beings or para Christian beings. They don't really have a place in Christian cosmology, but people make a place for them.
Francis Young:So the stories that are told about fairies are deeply rooted in Christian mythology. For example, in Ireland, the story that when the angels rebelled against God in heaven led by Lucifer, there were some angels who resisted, like Michael, but there are other angels who decide to be neutral, so they join neither side. Of course God must punish them for failing to side with him so he throws them down to the earth but they don't fall as far as hell they only fall to the earth or fall into the sea and they become fairies and mermaids. And so again you know deeply rooted in Christianity or the Norse myth of the Hildu folk, the hidden people, is that after Adam and Eve left paradise God goes to check up on them find out how they're doing Eve is not ready, she hasn't washed her children's faces, so she brings out some of the children, you know that she's washed presumably Cain and Abel, but there are other children that Adam and Eve have had and she shoves them in the back room and says stay there, don't show yourself to God but of course God knows that they're there and so he says as the punishment for hiding your children from me I will make sure they are always hidden from the eyes of men and so they then become the hidden people who are effectively an invisible shadow community that exists alongside Scandinavian societies.
Francis Young:They are the elves, the hidden people. So again, it's all rooted in in Christian ideas. So I don't think we can say that fairies are truly pagan. There are there are elements there that might come from the pagan past. But the thing about pagan societies, pre Christian religions, they also had beings that we might describe as godlings.
Francis Young:That is to say these kind of small gods, these minor spirits of nature, minor domestic spirits, they existed in those societies too. So my theory about fairies is not that they are, you know, degraded, decayed gods, but that they are effectively the successors to the pre Christian godlings who went below the radar. So in other words, what I said earlier about Christianity didn't come in as this giant wrecking ball and destroy everything that people believed. It destroyed the upper echelons of that belief, belief in celestial deities and public sacrifice and things like that. But it leaves intact these kind of domestic deities, agricultural deities that are minor beings, so insignificant that the church barely pays attention to them until the late Middle Ages.
Francis Young:In the late Middle Ages we finally have churchmen saying oh you know people out there talking about fairies that's a bit pagan isn't it? We should probably put a stop to that. But even then it's not not taken all that seriously there's only really one or two cases in the English ecclesiastical courts from the late Middle Ages where people are hauled up for believing in fairies you know it's only with the Reformation that you start to get the association between fairies and potentially witchcraft, and of course that could have deadly consequences if you're accused of witchcraft in the sixteenth century. But, yeah, I I I don't think we can say in any uncomplicated way that this is pagan.
John Dickson:In the early twentieth century, the German sociologist Max Weber blamed the disenchantment of the world on the Protestant Reformation. He drew a stark line, between the Protestant rationalism and Catholic superstition. More recent scholars doubt whether Protestants alone were responsible, but the thesis persists. Lutheran, Calvin, and the other reformers eliminate magic and supernatural forces. In the book, The Sacred Canopy 1967, Peter Berger, the other famous sociologist, summarized the reformation's cultural impact like this.
Voice Actor:The Protestant believer no longer lives in a world ongoingly penetrated by sacred beings and forces. Reality is polarized between a radically transcendent divinity and a radically fallen humanity. Between them lies an altogether natural universe bereft of numinosity.
John Dickson:I spoke to professor Michael Horton about this last season in the spiritual but not religious episode number one seven nine, Kaylee tells me. Here's what he had to say.
BBC Clip:So the way the story goes, and Max Weber tells it like this, the Hebrew prophets in say... Making god the only god, there is no other, chased the other gods out of the world and chased superstition and magic out of the world, idol... Everything was idolatry, and then the Christians just followed in that train, and the Protestant Reformation took it to a new a new level, and that's why we live in a disenchanted world. That's basically Charles Taylor's take in a secular age. Mhmm.
BBC Clip:Well, disenchantment, the the word, Max Weber uses it the way the Romantics did. He gives that same genealogy from the Hebrew prophets to the Christians to, the Reformation, this disenchanting of the world, if we want to go back to enchantment, for Weber and company, that means going back to the superstitions and myths and magic of the pre Christian world. So we don't want that. But, you know, here's something real. God be...
BBC Clip:The word became flesh. I don't know how, you know, more magical you get than that, but it's not a natural kind of magic. It is God actually entering into our world and caring for us and suffering with us and then rising again on the third day, bearing our sins. And this this is, again, this is not something that is vague or abstract, it's historical, and it it brings us into it rather than having us as the stars of the show creating it. I think that that's...
BBC Clip:At the end of the day, whatever criticisms can be made of how Christians have talked about this story sometimes, the story itself is amazing.
John Dickson:Let's press pause. I've got a five minute Jesus for you. How does Christianity view pagan deities, spirits, fairies, and so on? It's not exactly straightforward. Speaking philosophically, the gods and deities of pagan culture aren't even in the same category as the god of ancient Judaism and Christianity.
John Dickson:The gods of Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Celts, the Vikings, and so on were all beings within creation. They're more like Marvel's superheroes than the god we think of in the Judeo Christian sense. They certainly have powers that could be described as supernatural, but in all of the stories, they are clearly created super beings. But the god we've come to think of as god is nothing like that. God is not a super being found hiding with the fairies at the bottom of the garden.
John Dickson:God is being itself, to use nerdy language. He's the cause of everything that has being, that comes into being. By definition, God is not a god. He's not an object in the house of creation. He's more like the architect of the house or the composer of the song, or the director of the film.
John Dickson:But do those other gods exist? On this question, the bible has a sort of mixed approach. On the one hand, the apostle Paul in one Corinthians chapter eight says that other gods have no existence. They're nothing at all in the world. They're just objects of the pagan imagination.
John Dickson:But just a couple of chapters later in one Corinthians chapter 10, Paul says that when humans participate in the worship of these pagan idols, we actually become sharers in what he calls demons, dark powers, real dark powers. Now that doesn't contradict what he said just two chapters later. He's got something pretty nuanced going on. What it means is that sharing in that kind of worship binds you in some way to genuine dark forces. There isn't necessarily a being that corresponds to Baldr or Loki or Thor or the fairies, but devotion to these things rather than to the god who is the source of all things can entangle human beings in the dark schemes of spiritual powers.
John Dickson:And this is exactly how the first public intellectuals in the ancient world approached the ubiquitous spirituality of the Greco Roman, the pagan world. They didn't simply dismiss the spiritual realm as nonexistent. They weren't proto reformers trying to dispense with Catholic mysticism. People like Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Menichaeus Felix, Origen, Lactantius, or Augustine, woo hoo, actually acknowledged the spiritual realm. They took it seriously.
John Dickson:But what they added was that much of that stuff can trap you in darkness because behind the idols are real malevolent forces that can trick you into fixating on the powers within created things instead of the power that is God, the one who stands behind created things. This God, they said, is not a God. He's not an object in the house of creation, as I said a moment ago. He's more like the architect of the house, and this god has stepped across the threshold of eternity into history in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus wasn't a Marvel superhero showing himself and dazzling people.
John Dickson:This was the architect himself, knocking on our door and inviting himself in for a cup of tea. This doesn't dis pel wonder or enchantment. I reckon it reframes it and amplifies it. Everything becomes sacred, not in the sense that this river and that grove are haunted by spirits that we have to placate, but in the greater sense that everything that exists does so because it's a gift from the source of all things, God. And this God has graced his creation by taking on flesh and breathing our air and then inviting us to know his love.
John Dickson:You can press play now.
BBC Clip:The reality, the truth about Halloween. Halloween is the highest day on the satanic calendar. It is the most probably important day on the satanic calendar. It's considered a high day. It is also the night of the year where there is the most human sacrifice on the whole planet.
BBC Clip:So if we look at it in a, let's call it, the popular culture aspect first. So many people think Halloween is about candy and it's about dress up and... But they don't question the meaning behind it. So let's say, for instance, in a neighborhood or a area, there's houses, there's homes that celebrate Halloween where they put up the decorations and they do the pumpkins and they do the candles and the candy, those things. Right?
BBC Clip:And it's fun. Let's say in a neighbourhood there is houses that do that. So that whole perimeter becomes one big satanic ritual for that whole neighborhood.
John Dickson:That's a bit of an interview with Ryan Swigler, a former satanic church leader, warning Christians against celebrating Halloween. The clip went viral just last year when uber popular Christian muso, Forrest Frank, shared it on socials. So I asked Francis about Halloween. Okay. This brings us to Halloween.
John Dickson:I wanna get the truth about Halloween because there will be some Christian listeners who know that it's a pagan festival, and it should be shunned. What's the true history of Halloween in a nutshell?
Francis Young:Well, I think it can be a little bit unfortunate that when people who have a a vested interest in sort of exaggerating the pagan antecedents of a festival such as neo Pagans are sort of allowed to set the agenda and allowed to effectively make Christians believe certain, you know, mistaken things about a festival as well. So it's sad really that we've... As a result of the, you know, the suspicion that's grown up around Halloween, we've sort of lost what was once a great Christian festival, was the eve, the vigil of all saints, the vigil of all hallows, Halloween, Hallow even, which was one of the great vigil nights of the year. Throughout the year in medieval Christianity you would have wake nights or vigil nights which would happen before all the great Christian festivals. The only one that's really survived I think within Anglo culture is Christmas Eve.
Francis Young:If anything Christmas Eve has got bigger I don't know whether you have in Australia things like you know Christmas Eve boxes and elf on the shelf and all the sort of nonsense has grown up about Christmas Eve but that's still that's a time of excitement especially for kids but all the other wake nights you know so for example the eve of St Agnes, the eve of St Mark, Halloween is just one of those wake nights they've all passed out of existence with the exception of Halloween which has also lost all of its Christian associations. So Halloween in the form that it is currently celebrated in Great Britain, and I can't speak to Australia because I've not experienced how it's celebrated Down Under, but in Britain the modern form of Halloween has only existed since roughly around the nineteen twenties is when it starts to filter in, but really the nineteen sixties is when it starts to grow up a bit. I mean, I was born in the nineteen eighties, and I remember in the eighties, Halloween wasn't very big. You know, you could maybe go to a news agent and get yourself a pair in a set of plastic, vampire teeth or you get yourself a funny nose.
Francis Young:You got, you know, the old plastic skeleton hanging up in shops, but it wasn't big. And it's only really in the last twenty five years, really, since the millennium that it's gone massive. And our Halloween as we celebrate it in England today is completely novel. There is no English tradition of celebrating all hallow's eve by putting on costumes, by, you know, doing slightly spooky things or even telling spooky stories. In fact, in English tradition, it's Christmas Eve when you're supposed to tell spooky stories, or New Year's Eve, or Twelfth Night, so around about Christmas Christmas time and epiphany.
Francis Young:However, in Celtic culture, it very much is a thing. In Ireland, in Wales, Halloween is a much bigger celebration and does have these kind of spooky associations. Ireland famously is the origin of the jack o lantern, the the pumpkin, although originally it was a turnip that you would carve, and that's... That happens in in Ireland from an early period. In England, All Hallows' Eve was associated with a wake night, and there were certain customs like playing games like apple bobbing.
Francis Young:Apple bobbing is genuinely an English custom, But there was nothing spooky about Halloween in England until this new form of Halloween arrived. Now the new form of Halloween is from America via Ireland. So you've got to imagine Halloween goes with the American, sorry, with the Irish emigres to America. There it takes on a slightly more commercialized form than it had in Ireland, and then it gradually comes back over The Atlantic, bit like Saint Patrick's Day. You know, nobody celebrated Saint Patrick's Day until the Americans started doing it, and then everybody started copying the Americans and, you know, drinking Guinness on Saint Patrick's Day or whatever.
Francis Young:So it's a similar kind of thing. It's an Irish American custom in in the form that it takes in in America and and in in Britain. And yeah I mean in terms of the the way that Christians have reacted to it I think they see it as a pagan festival because it appears to have nothing to do with Christianity and I sympathize with that because you know, it doesn't really have anything to do with Christianity in the way that it is celebrated. But at the same time, I'm not sure we should allow Halloween to be completely dominated and taken over by people who are portraying it as, for example, the Celtic festival of Samhain, which did exist. You know, that was a genuine Celtic festival.
Francis Young:We don't really know how it was celebrated, and we don't really know what its pre Christian significance was. Whereas the idea of dressing up and wearing costumes on Halloween, that's the old tradition of guising, which goes back in part to the idea of scaring off evil spirits on a vigil night. So I... You know, is is Halloween recoverable for Christianity? I don't know.
Francis Young:I mean, it's an interesting debate to have whether, you know, whether it's beyond recovery or whether it can be reclaimed.
John Dickson:Halloween is, it seems, getting more and more popular in Australia. In fact, an almost viable industry has sprung up selling oversized pumpkins for the October 31 celebrations. Apparently, they make up in size what they lack in flavor. Equally, you can be assured that thousands of religious folk around the world and in Oz are right now recalling the devilish connotations of the day. Still less plausible is the criticism that says we shouldn't do Halloween because it's American, heaven forbid.
John Dickson:We shouldn't do anything American. I've been asked many times, is Halloween evil, or should Christians oppose it? My general feeling is that Halloween in its secular incarnation is no more evil than Christmas in its secular form. I mean, is dressing up in a spooky costume more demonic than the materialism of Christmas? The overeating, the overdrinking?
John Dickson:I don't know. Originally, the November 1 marked the end of the summer months. Right? And the pre Christian Celts believed that the spirits of the departed returned to their homes and visited loved ones on the night before that. Masks and other disguises were used to frighten off the evil spirits who were trying to cut in on the action because there was now a slip between the spiritual world and the material world or something like that.
John Dickson:Around AD six ten, Pope Boniface the fourth decided to claim this festival for Jesus. He moved All Hallows Day, that's All Saints Day, a feast celebrating the departed Christians, from May 13 to November 1. The evening before All Saints Day, All Hallows Day, was also sanctified and called All Hallows Eve, Halloween for short. It's a Christian term. This was meant to be a time to remember the faithful believers of past ages and to pray that we, the living, might learn from their good example.
John Dickson:The Protestants of the sixteenth century, though, mostly banned the celebration of All Hallows' Eve and even All Saints' Day because of its associations with the Catholic church. It wasn't anything to do with ghouls and goblins. So is Halloween evil? Well, sure it is if it glorifies things satanic. Perhaps even worse, if it trivializes the devil.
John Dickson:And of course, there's nothing good in a festival that goes around playing nasty pranks on neighbors who don't give you enough lollies. Beyond that, though, community dress up involving opening our doors to each other and giving kids treats for dressing up and all that. It's a lovely idea. It might even build community in a context where we really need community. For my part, I'm sad that Halloween no longer has much to do with honoring the faithful departed and learning from their example, but that shouldn't stop believers from making it so.
John Dickson:In fact, you know, the Anglican Book of Common Prayer from 1662 has the perfect All Hallows Eve prayer. It goes like this. And we also bless thy holy name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear, beseeching thee to give us grace so to follow their good examples that with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom. One last thing though, I meant what I said a moment ago about Christmas maybe not being any more pleasing to the almighty than Halloween. I mean, if there are grades of sin, I reckon our worship at the shopping mall in the buildup to Christmas and the consequent neglect of the poor until we've paid off that credit card are way more satanic than allowing our kids to dress up as a character from Harry Potter.
John Dickson:Sometimes you sound like a naturalist, a materialist. You you you... You've you've destroyed all my fairies and goblins and sacred groves and... But I know you're not.
Francis Young:So No. Absolutely not.
John Dickson:Tell me, how your studies have influenced, if they have, your, I don't know, spiritual outlook.
Francis Young:I I do believe profoundly that we can't understand the history of belief without recognizing the spiritual dimension of human life. And I think that what I find frustrating about so much scholarship in this area, so much preceding scholarship, is that it is reductive. It tries to find explanations for why human beings do religious and supernatural things that are anything but the religious and the supernatural.
John Dickson:Yeah.
Francis Young:So, you know, classic example would be, you know, Marxist interpretations, where everything is somehow down to economics, or it's down to, you know some desire by the you know elites to deceive people and to manipulate them into doing certain things and and I reject all that I reject all that because I think that
John Dickson:The Odyssey gives us a great example of the film The Odyssey because the gods aren't there they're really just
Francis Young:I know
John Dickson:the hallucinations of someone with PTSD
Francis Young:yeah I know I know I hate that and I think that yeah if there's one thing that is true of the pre modern world is that people really believed, and supernatural forces really acted and operated in people's lives. And I think if we're not prepared to take that seriously, you cannot understand world that people lived in. There's brilliant book on this subject by by Carlos Eyre called They Flew, which is about miracle stories of, counter reformations of Baroque Catholic saints who who who did these extraordinary things like flying through the air, and how disturbingly for historians it seems that these events are as well evidenced as any other testimony you might get about behavior of historical figures. And what do we do with that? And I'm you know, I'm done really with this idea that we just have to pass everything through this materialistic lens and accept that everything was, you know, everything is somehow culturally constructed or subjectively experienced or whatever.
Francis Young:But having said all that, I think we also have to be critical and I'm very critical of the claims that earlier scholarship has made, the claims that people make about pagan survivals and all this kind of stuff. And I think that my guiding principle is really something which, MR James, the great, antiquarian scholar but also noted for writing ghost stories, said to one of his friends when his friend asked him, you know, these really creepy ghost stories that you've written, do you believe that stuff? And James' answer was, some of these things are so, but we do not know the rules. So it's that sense of clearly strange supernatural things go on. There is a realm, you know, beyond, but we do not know the rules.
Francis Young:That is to say we don't know the rules of that sort of lower realm of how things operate or that intermediate realm. I mean, clearly, we've got the creeds and we've got Christian doctrine to tell us about the divine realm. So I'm not talking here about the divine realm. I'm not talking about theology. I'm talking about those areas that theology tends to sort of leave well alone and that sort of aren't really explored.
Francis Young:Yet, there is something going on there. Now whether the folklore always reflects what really is going on, I don't think we should take folklore literally. I think we have to always take folklore with a pinch of salt. But at the same time, I am convinced that there are supernatural realities behind that. We just don't know the rules.
Francis Young:We don't we don't know, you know, how this stuff operates.
John Dickson:I love it. I love it. Some of my listeners who don't believe in anything would just place the the Jesus story in exactly the same basket as stories about fairies and, you know, Stonehenge and druids and sacred groves. How do you parse that as someone who's quite a fan of Jesus, but but also an expert in in folklore?
Francis Young:Well, my Christian faith comes first for me. And, you know, for me, when we talk about God, with a capital g, we're in a realm that is so far removed, really, from these, you know, these entities of of folklore that we're, you know, we're in a different ontological sphere. I mean, for me, god is the reason why there is something rather than nothing. He is the ground of being. He is the reason why all things exist.
Francis Young:He is the the ultimate creator. And I think that gets in a way to the power of Christianity when it comes into a pre Christian society, the way in which you've got missionaries who are preaching God as the ground of all being, as the creator, as the reason where everything is, to societies which often have a cyclical concept of reality. They don't necessarily believe that there was a creation. They don't believe that there was a time when there was nothing. And therefore, don't have an idea of God as a being who is above everything, who is the the supreme creator.
Francis Young:They just have the idea of God as higher beings, you know, exalted beings, but they are not in any way, you know, theologically significant in the way that God the father can be said to be. And, you know, in the same way, the incarnation, you know, God made flesh, the the the the word of God coming into this world, this is a story that is unparalleled anywhere else. It's a unique Christian claim grounded in historical reality as far as I'm concerned. And so, you know, again, we're in a totally different realm from mythology or folklore or or whatever. So, you know, my faith is very secure.
Francis Young:You know, I'm very clear where I stand on that. But I think having that security of faith actually enables me then to engage in a respectful way with the folklore, the mythology, the perspectives of all these different cultures. I don't feel threatened by it. It's not gonna undo my faith because it's it's not on a level playing field. It doesn't compete in any way with, with the claims of Christianity.
Francis Young:So, yeah, I I I see them as sort of separate spheres. But at the same time, I think the one thing which ties these... You know, a Christian worldview together with these kind of premodern folkloric worldviews is a kind of general commitment and an unquestioned commitment to the existence of spiritual reality. And I think what really gets to me about the modern world is that you will have this kind of knee jerk reaction in so many people to just deny, deny, deny. It doesn't exist.
Francis Young:I can't see it with my own eyes. It it doesn't exist. And to me that, you know, I have in in that sense I have more sympathy with the pre Christian pagan worldview than I have with the atheist materialist worldview because I cannot get my head round this kind of endless denial of spiritual reality. And I think, you know, we can see in pre Christian worldviews sometimes a reaching towards spiritual truth. That is something we can speak of, and we can speak of a, a world in which that aspect of human nature, that aspect of created and God given human nature is reaching for God in the same way that it does in believers.
Francis Young:Whereas the suppression of that I find really tragic, the kind of the the killing of that spiritual instinct altogether.
John Dickson:Francis Young, thank you so much for this, marvelous conversation.
Francis Young:Thank you very much. It's been lovely to be here.
John Dickson:Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dickson, produced by Kayleigh Payne, and directed and edited by Mark Lokey Hadley. Sophie Hawkshire is on socials and membership. Siobhan McGinnis is our online librarian. Lindy Leverson remains my wonderful assistant. Santino DeMarco is chief finance and operations consultant, and our voice actors today were Yannick Laurie and Dakota Love.
John Dickson:You can become a member of the Undeceptions Club and get access to special extras and an exclusive annual gift and much more by heading to undeceptions.com/club. Becoming a member is the best way to help undeceptions help everyone look deeper.
Newsreader:I like the Loki thing. I kinda look a little bit like Tom Hiddleston.
BBC Clip:I don't know. I think that that's not the first time you've been Loki. No. It's not the first time, and
John Dickson:it won't be the last. An Undeceptions podcast.