Martin Henry
On Easter Sunday, the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox, the bacchanal competes with the festival of the resurrection of Jesus the Christ in the public square, and for the hearts and minds of men.
The bacchanal, in fact, has prior rights to the space which christian-ity has appropriated in honour of the resurrection of the Christ.
Where Christianity - of some sort - has triumphed in the contest of faiths, the ubiquitous spring festival of the pagan world, never eliminated, has traditionally been confined to the pre-Lenten period.
Now, there is a remarkable resurgence of paganism in the very citadels of Christianity. And carnival, the spring festival of Bacchus, the god of wine and revelry, clashing with Easter, while highly visible and spectacular, may be one of the lesser manifestations of that resurgence.
Religion, more than anything else, determines the cultural ethos and the laws of the land. We are face to face with a sea-change clash of faiths.
From tattoos to witchcraft, from the arts and entertainment to fashion, and the conscious resurrection of old religions [check the Internet], resurgent paganism is on the march.
The spirit of the age, the zeitgeist, is decidedly post-Christian. We are back to the first century. Like Judaism, its parent, Christianity was born into a thoroughly pagan world hostile to it. These monotheistic faiths of high moral order could only survive in a world of pagan decadence by assiduously protecting the faith from pagan incursions.
That was the central role of the Hebrew prophets and the Christian apostles whose written works, predominantly a reaction to pagan incursions, have produced the Bible.
In the Graeco-Roman world, the cult of Dionysus [Bacchus] flourished. A cultural and historical note in the 2005 NIV Archaeological Study Bible states: "Dionysus worship was notorious for its unrestrained orgiastic character, involving wine, music, dance and sex ... In the frenzied and ecstatic dionysiac rituals, intoxication with wine was equated with being filled with the spirit of Dionysus."
Spirit possession is very much part of our revered Kumina and is a hallmark of some elements of Christianity.
Although even the pagans at times sought to suppress Dionysus worship with its depraved excesses, it survived to become an official religion of the Roman Empire. The cult lives on and, indeed, is flourishing in the carnival bacchanal and, indeed, to some extent in dancehall.
Impotence of law
The impotence of law against the will of the people is evident in our own experience with the pagan practice of Obiah. I have chosen this spelling, after coming across an article by the Reverend John Radcliffe, 'Obi-ism', in the 1887-88 edition of the Handbook of Jamaica.
Radcliffe claimed that Obiah derives from the worship of Obi, the African-Egyptian serpent god. Moses confronted the Egyptian-African priests of the serpent god prior to the exodus in the time of the black pharaohs. Serpent worship has been widespread across the pagan world and has been sanitised and preserved in the medical symbol of healing, the serpent wrapping around a staff, and in the art of elements of Christianity.
"[Obiah]," Radcliffe inveighed, "has its priests and votaries, nay, what is so unaccountable, priests and votaries who profess the Christian religion."
That would not have been so "unaccountable" if Rev Radcliffe had taken an honest look at his own British culture and Christianity with their intertwinings with paganism, the secret lodges of freemasonry being just one example.
Both law and culture in the Graeco-Roman world endorsed homosexuality. Plato, in his Dialogues, spoke approvingly of homosexual behaviour.
The post-Christian world of the 21st century, despite Jamaican resistance, is heading back to these pagan roots.
Discussing 'Homosexuality in the Ancient World', the NIV Archaeo-logical Study Bible says: "In Romans 1: 24-32, Paul described the depravity of the Gentiles. He cited homosexuality as the prime example and proof of their reprobation. In this behaviour, they demonstrated the reality that rejecting God leads to perversion of everything that is good and right. Indeed, widespread homosexuality remains irrefutable proof that a culture stands under divine judgment."
Collision
Judaeo-Christianity was in collision with this pagan world. It was Christianity which was peculiar [I Peter 2:9, KJV], not paganism. In this world of normative paganism, Christianity, with its focus on another world, and non-accommodation of pagan creed and practice, faced persecution.
But the political triumph of the faith, marked by the 'conversion' of Emperor Constantine in 312 A.D., turned Christianity itself into a persecuting power with the 'right' to impose its will upon the unwilling. Christianity infiltrated paganism and paganism infiltrated Christianity.
The principal Christian holy days were aligned to the times of pagan festivals and were made public holidays, which we are all required to observe. The myth of the 'Christian society' has been perpetuated ever since Constantine.
Generally speaking, Christians have taken two broad polar approaches to life in the world: Either "in the world but not of the world"; or, creating a Christian world in alliance with state power.
The resurgence of paganism, no longer confined as a private fringe element of 'Christian society' but reasserting its old political and cultural powers, is eliciting both polar responses and others between these two.
The pagan challenge to the Christian 'right to rule', on the one hand, is being met by a calling upon state authorities to enforce Christian morality. Various pagan legal codes have sanctioned homosexuality, prostitution, bestiality, child sacrifice, widow sacrifice, and ritual cannibalism.
The legal code of the West has been deeply influenced by Christianity. The doctrine of rights on which elements of paganism are riding back to power have deeper roots in the Judaeo-Christian vision of God and man than in anything from the pagan world contrary to the powerful distortionists of the history of political philosophy.
Major battle lines are being redrawn. "Perilous times" [II Tim 3:1, KJV] have come. The stakes are the culture and the laws, but above all, the hearts and minds of men.
Martin Henry is a communications consultant.
