Our Obvious But Hidden Pagan Heritage
George Washington’s favorite play was a tragedy, Cato[1]. It was the most
popular play of the age, and
My topic today is “Our Obvious But Hidden Pagan Heritage”.
We often hear of a “Judeo-Christian” influence inherent in our government and society. We hardly ever hear of our pagan roots. I hope to demonstrate that those roots are everywhere among us and very deep. Pointing them out it might be the historically fair thing to do.
Given my title, a legitimate first question might be: “How can something be obvious but hidden?” I suspect that on one level, this might be analogous to someone telling you your shoelaces are untied: you look down, see that they are, and, of course, it is obvious. Though I hope that some of the things I shall point out this morning are not all that obvious and that they will have a deeper and more long-lasting import that simply tying laces. Being aware of them might also help us keep from tripping into an historical trap whose network of snares, I believe, is being laid surreptitiously throughout the land. But that story is a topic for another day, and perhaps another forum.
My talk relates to two UU Principles: 1) A free and responsible search for truth and meaning; 2) Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. After my talk, I trust you will perhaps feel more aware that the “Pagan part” of this web is certainly connected to us as UU’s and as Americans--to our history, and our national character; and that you will agree that it deserves our respect and indeed merits being remembered.
I have been researching this topic for a few years; I was prompted to bring it to fruition now because I have come to believe that today our pagan heritage is being generally ignored, sometimes denigrated, and often swamped by an historically revisionist viewpoint with religious motives. This revisionist trend got its big push during the Civil War; more about that later.
Let’s start with an overview. Until around the time of the Civil War, it
was generally understood, that though Christianity has an important role in our
society, we were nonetheless a secular nation with strong roots in pagan
antiquity, particularly
A definition of terms is always in order. If you Google, “paganism definition,” you will get some 630,000 hits; you are in for a long year. Today, however, I ask you to appreciate that since I’m not analyzing Paganism, or neo-Paganism per se, for the purposes of this paper I am simply using a definition you will find in a standard dictionary, namely: a person who follows (in most cases) a polytheistic or pre-Christian religion (not a Christian, Muslim, or Jew).[5] In short, the items I want to share with you are said to be pagan because they pre-date Christianity and Islam and they are not Jewish or Hebrew.
My plan, with your kind indulgence, is first to examine briefly just a few of an enormous number of these vibrant pagan gifts integrated into our everyday lives. Then, for a change of pace, in part II, move to more overt, officially recognized concrete symbols. Now, I realize that very few, if any, of these gifts and symbols will be new to you, but I hope to suggest to you that they deserve a more pronounced prominence in our collective thinking, as they reflect our interconnectedness.
To begin, I would like to ask: How many of us recall and are conscious of the name of the alphabet we use; are children who are learning it today being taught where it came from? Well, I haven’t done a survey on this, but if my own experience and my own connections with students are any guide, the fact that this is a gift from the Pagans is not really stressed, and is often essentially ignored. What I usually here is: the English Alphabet.
Would it hurt to be reminded that our alphabet is the Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, evolved from the Etruscan Alphabet some time before
600 BCE; it can be traced through
Etruscan, Greek, and Phoenician scripts to the North Semitic alphabet used in
What I am
suggesting is that if that simple history were presented and highlighted, it
might alert our children to an interdependence with their Pagan heritage that
would broaden their horizons and enhance their appreciation for an important
gift from the ancient past. As they got older,
they might look for more and perhaps find other “connections” that are now
totally ignored.
Another gift is the
sexagesimal (sexagesimal) system. [No, it’s got nothing to do with sex.] Indeed, some, perhaps all, of you may be
familiar with it, but I venture to say that for most people it, or its origin, is
not actively in their consciousness, even though they use it every day. We might want to recall that the Sexagesimal
is a numeral system with sixty
as the base. It
originated around 2000 BCE, and we still
use it for measuring angles, geographic coordinates, and time itself.
Did you ever
wonder why a circle is said to have 360 degrees; there are 60 minutes
of arc in a degree, etc.; likewise, why does an hour have 60 minutes, and a
minute 60 seconds? Well, you can thank the ancient Sumerians.[6]
These mere conventions
seem to us almost part of “nature.”[7]
Until I was an
adult, maybe I’m the exception, I never heard of the sexagesimal system; I
certainly didn’t realize that I was using it every time I looked at my
watch. Who were these Sumerians, anyway.
Well, they were from Sumer, probably the earliest know civilization in the
world, located in Mesopotamia, now Irac.[8]
Iraq has been in
the news regularly for almost this entire century, but has any commentator ever
mentioned that we use a mathematical gift that came from Iraq even when we
calculate our co-ordinatates to fly there? If they did, wouldn’t that help spread
the idea of respect for the interdependent web of which we are a part? Mightn’t
that help us feel just a little more “connected” to that sad land than we do?
With respect to time measurement, as you know, the sexagesimal
system stops at seconds, which are sub-divided using the decimal system, based
on ten. Now, where did that come from, I
wonder?
Before
proceeding, I want to pause to say that during my research on this project, I
was suprised regularly at finding so many things from pagan antiquity, that I
was reminded of the Saturday Night Live bit, that you may remember, where a
group of guys are sitting around a table in a Chicago bar, in Chicago, drinking
beer. And anytime someone asks a
question like, “Who’s the greatest team?” or “Who’s going to win the
championship?” they would all respond in unison: “Da Bears!” Only in my case it became: “Da Greeks” ” or “Da
Pagans,” or in the case of the decimal numerical system: “Da Romans”.
The ancient pagan
world also gave us a duodecimal numbering system (base 12). There are twelve
signs of the Zodiac, twelve months in a year, and twelve European hours in a
day or night. [Speaking of the Zodiac, it is certainly a fact that in this
“non-pagan” society, if a newspaper stops printing the daily horscope, the
letters come pouring in.]
If you ever
wondered why we call a grocer a grocer, the root goes back to the duodecimal
system--even though it’s spelled with a “c,” it goes back to gross with double “s”.
12 is a great number when you’re selling
items in small quantities as a grocer does.
It has 1,2,3,4, 6 and 12 as factors.
Being
a versatile denominator in fractions may explain why we have 12 inches in an
imperial foot, 12 ounces in a troy pound, 12 old British pence in a shilling,
12 items in a dozen, 12 dozens in a gross, 24 (12 x 2) hours in a day, etc. The
Romans also used a fraction system based on 12, including the unica, which
became both the English words ounce and inch. So the next time you buy a dozen donuts, maybe
you’ll be reminded about our continuing interdependence with the old pagan
world.
Then
we have the binary numeral system, or base-2 number system,which is used internally by virtually all modern
computers. I trust you find it of
interest that the ancient Indian mathematician, Pingala, presented the first
known description of a binary numeral system around the 6th century BCE[9].
Now, I’d
like now to say a few words about words.
They are, of course, one way we
can try to connect to each other, but are they in any way a Pagan part of the
interdependent web? Well, let’s take a
peek.
When I was teaching French, and the students would see that a French word like, say, télévision, looked just like the English word, they would sometimes say something like, wow, they use “our word.” Well, as a linguist I always found this pleasantly amusing, for two reasons, really. First, it’s only our word because we borrowed it (out of the interdependent web of existence?). As typically happens with something totally new, when the television was invented, there was no word for it. So, in such cases, we might ask: “Who ya gonna call?” The answer often was, and still sometimes is: “Da Greeks,” or “Da Romans”. In this case, it was both: Tele is Greek for far; vision is Latin for sight. We see a similar combo in words like telephone, telegraph, etc.; and various pagan roots are found in many thousands of other common words we use every day.
In the case of the word, television, there is also a certain
irony. The word was first introduced at the 1900 World’s Fair, in
Graduating quickly now from words
to discourse itself, I would like to share just one example of a pagan heritage
in how we communicate--especially when we communicate well.
As you will recall, an important part of education in medieval universities and for many centuries thereafter was the Trivium. That is: Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic. The main sources for the rules of rhetoric were Greek and Roman.
Then Pagan influence got renewed and reinforced by the Renaissance. Quoting Will Durant, [The Renaissance was a time when]:
“. . . the Humanists captivated the mind of
Writers of the Baroque Period, the 17th and 18th centuries, were also deeply schooled in Greco-Latin turns of phrase. Our Founding Fathers read these authors, and became imbued with those ideas and rhetorical devices.
A favorite was the tricolon. This is an arrangement of words or phrases in a group of three. The three are related, usually expressing a different aspect of the same thought.[12]
You may be ahead of me on this one, but we can ultimately thank
“Da Greeks” and “Da Romans” for “Life,
[Though, I might suggest that the idea of “pursuing happiness” here on Earth was certainly a pagan idea, resurrected by the Renaissance; a positive idea, implying that humans are not born prone to evil; and it is in sharp contrast to the “veil-of-tears-to-be-endured-until-the-afterlife” point of view that predominated for so many centuries before our Founding.]
I’m sure you can think of many more, e.g.: “We cannot dedicate--we
cannot consecrate--we cannot hallow--this ground”; “Government of the people, by the people,
for the people.”
We mentioned measuring time earlier, which was really “relative” chronology, having to do with hours and minutes in relation to each other. As the last item of this section, I would like to move now to the measurement of what is usually called “absolute” or historical chronology, that is, dates in relation to some fixed point in history. In short: the calendar.
The Julian Calendar, created in 45 BCE, became the calendar in General use in
Lots more could be said about Calendar history, but for our purposes today what is significant is that the Pope essentially accepted the Pagan gift intact. He made no particular effort to Christianize it. Thus all the names are still clearly Pagan, some are even Pagan gods or goddesses. In English usage, even the Christian Sabbath, the Lord’s day, is still
named after a pagan god or symbol[16]. As you are no doubt familiar with theses, I will only make a couple of comments:
(Read all this passim)
Sunday - Named after the Sun [The Cath. Encyclopedia: “derived from
Egyptian astrology”.]
Monday - Named after the Moon
Tuesday- Named after Tiu, the Norse god of war
Wednesday - Named after Woden, the Anglo-Saxon
chief of the gods
Thursday - Named after Thor, Norse god of thunder
Friday - Named after Frigg, a Norse goddess
Saturday -Named after Saturn, Roman god of harvests
As to why the week has seven days, a Pagan convention accepted world-wide, nobody really knows for sure. There are lots of conjectures[17]. But no one disputes that it’s a Pagan idea.
Months (Read this passim)
January - Named after Janus,
Roman god of doors and gates
February -Named after Februa, Roman period of purification
March -Named after Mars, Roman god of war
April -from the Latin apeire, 'to open'
May - Named after Maia, Roman goddess of spring and growth
June -Named after Juno, Roman goddess of marriage--[still lots of marriages in
June, many by people who do not consider themselves pagan in any way.]
July - Named after Julias Caesar
August -Named after Augustus, first emperor of
The rest don’t even make sense chronologically; but they do if you know history and our interdependence: That is, September, October, November and December come from Latin words that mean seven, eight, nine and ten. So, we have a twelve-month year, whose last month means “ten”. Wow! [Can you imagine explaining all this to some space alien if we ever have a “Close Encounter”?][18]
I should point out that
Because it shows
just how deep these Pagan concepts are imbedded in our psyche, and our perception
of nature and reality, I can’t resist relating to you something that should
really be a footnote: In 1752, when
workers in England went to work on what they thought was September 3, only to
be told that it was now September 14, serious riots broke out all over the
place. The workers, believe it or not, wanted
to get paid their wages for the eleven days the government had cheated them out
of[21].
It is sometimes suggested that since Gregory XIII was a pope, the calendar is “Christian.” Others still maintain that the Calendar is Christian because its “absolute” date is the birth of Christ, giving us BC and AD[22]. Yet, no one denies that the Gregorian Calendar is a revision of the Julian Calendar, which goes back to: “Da Romans”[23]. Actually, it’s about as “Christian” as our alphabet is “English.” Nevertheless, this is a “hot” topic in certain circles these days. Judging by letters-to-the editor of various local papers I read, and other non scholarly sources on TV and so forth, it seems that many people believe that BC and AD came about with the creation of the Julian Calendar and continued on into the Gregorian. Well, I have read the history of this usage at length in various serious reference works, and, surprisingly there is no real dispute among scholars about when BC and AD came into common usage.
An excellent presentation, among the best I have found on this topic, is in
the Catholic Encyclopedia, under “General Chronology.” The Article is on the board in the back. If you read it, you will discover that the
terms BC (actually AC at first) and AD were first created by a monk named
Dionysius in the year 527. The Encyclopedia¸
goes on to explain that Dionysius made up some dates “rightly or wrongly”
about when Christ was born. In spite of usage by the Venerable Bede in the 9th
Century, “[Dionysius’s] system was adopted but gradually, and its use did not
become general in
[Indeed, the title of Gregory’s Encyclical creating the new calendar is: Inter
Gravissimas. He dates it at the end: “Datum Tusculi, anno Incarnationis
dominicae MCLXXXI, sexto Kalendas Martii, pontificatus nostri anno x”;
which translates as : “Given at
By the way, I believe, Pope Gregory was wise for not having tried to Christianize
the Pagan calendar further than it had been. The
Our Founding Fathers, like Pope Gregory, wisely left the calendar intact. Let’s turn our attention now to just a few of the other Pagan traditions they bequeathed to us.
In 1782 Congress approved the design of the Great Seal of the
Another point: The Great Seal was adopted by Congress in
1782.
I’m not sure if the following points are hidden or obvious. I believe that there are conceptual Pagan influences in the Declaration and in the Constitution as well: especially, three among many: the idea of democracy, a republic, a tri-partite government[29].
If we ask for instance, who invented Democracy, the answer is clearly: “Da Greeks”. Whereas, the Romans, back in 509 BC, had overthrown a monarchy, just like we did, and formed a Republic that lasted for 450 years. The Founders and Framers knew and used these Pagan examples as models for the political structure of our nation. Clearly, had they used post-Pagan examples, they would more likely have created a monarchy or an empire. On the other hand, if someone wants to argue that these three civic concepts are part of a Judeo-Christian heritage, I wish them Godspeed in there search for proofs.
Earlier, in mentioning the Civil War, I contended that the essentially Pagan nature of our institutions was generally recognized until then. I would like to offer just one text from that period that supports that point of view in no uncertain terms, and which, to my knowledge has never been directly contested: namely, a famous letter, written in 1861--and which I’m sure you’ve heard of--from the Reverend W.R. Watkinson, to Salmon Chase, Secretary of the Treasury. (A copy of this very short letter is on the board in the back.) I’ll just hit the high points.
Allow me to set the stage first by
saying that the Civil War had already started, and many thoughtful people, like
the Reverend, were very frightened that the War could spell the total collapse
of our Republic.
“
Dear Sir: You are
about to submit your annual report to the Congress respecting the affairs of
the national finances. One fact touching our
currency has hitherto been seriously overlooked. I mean the recognition of the
Almighty God in some form on our coins.
You are probably a Christian. What if our Republic were (not) shattered
beyond reconstruction? Would not the antiquaries of succeeding centuries
rightly reason from our past that we were a heathen nation?. . .”
So,
ladies and gentlemen, there you have it.
The good Reverend recognized our Pagan heritage, and he is not happy about its
heathen nature, which will be clearly evident to any future anthropologists and
so forth. He continues:
What I propose is that instead
of the goddess of liberty. . .
Again,
forgive my interruption, but clearly, only pagans have goddesses, so my thesis
about our pagan heritage is being supported by the good Revered. He continues
describing what he wants in place of our goddess of freedom--basically the
words God,
[we shall have next
inside the 13 stars a ring inscribed with the words PERPETUAL UNION; within the
ring the all seeing eye, crowned with a halo; beneath this eye the American
flag, bearing in its field stars equal to the number of the States united; in
the folds of the bars the words GOD, LIBERTY, LAW.]
He
then continues:
This would make a
beautiful coin, to which no possible citizen could object. This would
relieve us from the ignominy of heathenism. This would place us openly
under the Divine protection we have personally claimed. . .
[ From my hearth I have felt our national shame in disowning God as not the least of our present national disasters. To you first I address a subject that must be agitated.]
Well, The Reverend Watkinson admits that our history shows we are a “heathen” (Pagan) nation, but—by putting the name of God on our currency—we will be placed openly under Divine protection—which many of us have “personally claimed.” So he wants to meld his and Chase’s personal religious conviction with official government symbols. The Reverend, then, it seems to me, is clearly at odds with the Founders[30].
For, as is evident from their letters and their lives, that just like the Reverend Watkinson, many were Christians, though some were Deists, some even Unitarians, but they had all carefully kept their personal religion out of the instruments of government and its symbols, particularly (as we saw above) the Constitution[31]. This was a first in history. In the back of the Church I have provided a few samples: the Magna Carta, Mayflower Compact and others from the American Colonies, where, you will see, the personal, Christian, religion of the writers is everywhere in evidence. Not so, with our Constitution.
At the time of the Civil War, it must be said that Reverend Watkinson was not alone in being afraid; his fear was not unreasonable. But his fear spurred him, along with many others, to turn heavenward for sustenance and to invite the power of the government to add its weight to their pleas.
This letter, as you are certainly aware, was a major catalyst for causing the words, In God We Trust, to be first minted on the 1864 two-cent coin. Eventually, in 1955, in another period of great fear-- nuclear holocaust with communists--the Government decreed that “In God We Trust” become our new Motto and be placed on the paper currency as well. They kept the earlier pagan symbols of the Founders, but the new Motto no longer has a connection with Virgil or Horace like that of the Founders.
The 1861 letter is in keeping with a powerful movement of the time, which attempted on three separate occasions to introduce a Bill to revise the very Preamble to the Constitution and change it to include references to Jesus and the Christian faith.[32] That movement continues to this day.
A descendent of those efforts, completely disregarding our Pagan heritage, might well be the pending House Resolution # 888, ostensibly an attempt to designate the first week of May, 2008, as “American Religious History Week.” Introduced in December, 2007, it has over seventy “Whereases,” but the word, Pagan, does not appear in any. I believe there are other serious omissions as well as distortions of our history as well. A copy is in the back for those interested.
In returning to my theme, I would like to finish up by having us examine in some detail one concrete pagan artifact that was in the news quite a bit around the time the Reverend wrote his letter. Namely: The STATUE OF FREEDOM:
This bronze Statue of Freedom, by Thomas Crawford, is the crowning feature
of the dome of the United States Capitol. The statue is a classical,
allegorical female figure of Freedom wearing flowing draperies. Her right hand
rests upon the hilt of a sheathed sword; her left holds a laurel wreath of
victory (Roman symbol) and the shield of the
A brooch inscribed "
The bronze statue stands 19 feet 6 inches tall and weighs approximately 15,000 pounds. Her crest rises 288 feet above the east front plaza.
This might well personify the “Goddess of Freedom” that the
Reverend Watkinson decried. Yet, this
statue received universal support and acclaim. Interestingly, the only real objection made
during the designing of this statue was by Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of
War, (1754). The original had the figure
wearing a Phrygian Cap, (liberty cap) a symbol of freedom, usually red, worn by
freed Roman slaves.
So, instead of a Freedom Cap, the stature wears a Roman
Helmet, eagle, etc. However, we should
recall that the Liberty Cap had actually been carried by the Sons of Liberty,
and other patriots, and it was often flown aloft on Liberty Poles, even in
Southern States, during our Revolutionary War. By the way, the liberty cap came
back to the Capitol: It’s a prominent part of the US Senate Seal, along with
the Roman fasces. (copy in back of Church). Here is a picture of the Seal of
the US Senate, and along side it I have placed a seated
Just as the Founders chose to call one legislative body The
Senate, following the Roman example, the Dome stands on what the Founders chose
to call the Capitol, the very word is from L. capitlium
The final section of the statue of Freedom--in the middle of
the Civil War--was raised on
Imagine,
in 1864, just a few months after this magnificent symbol of our national spirit
of freedom was erected, people were walking around
Surely,
this magnificent artwork, and all the Pagan heritage I have outlined today (only
scratching the surface, of course) reflect, in a special way, the UU belief in
the our interdependence and our interconnectedness with all the lives, no
matter their religion, that contributed to our character and our worthiness as
a nation and a people. I think our Pagan Heritage deserves to be recognized as
part of that--part of us.
So, now, one-hundred and fourteen years later, we still have our “pagan goddess” of freedom in the sky over the Capitol.
It was raised in a time of great fear. Now, as we wend our way through this new time of “fear,” I entreat you to be deeply conscious of the roots you are standing on and: Keep looking up.
Thank you.
Presented to the NCUU,
by Joe Wetzel