[While, this is one of the more coherent accounts of pagan history
that I have encountered, it should be taken with as large a grain of
salt as any of the others]

(This message was written for USENET's talk.religion.misc in early
December 1986, in response to a request for information on paganism.
It fit my absolute criterion of quality - that is, a huge number of
compliments, even from people who usually think I'm an asshole - so I
thought some people here might enjoy reading it.)

Paganism is a loose word for the large variety of polytheistic,
shamanistic, and mystical non-monotheistic religions.  Paganism exists
in all cultures, from paleolithic to technological, but has
historically waxed and waned.  The ancient Egyptians are an example of
a highly pagan society; so are the ancient Romans; and all paleolithic
cultures from the Old Stone Age to the present have strong pagan
elements.  An example of a less pagan culture would be the West for
the last thousand years or so, since the centuries following the Fall
of Rome.  The domination of the Middle East by Christians and Moslems
has also largely shut out paganism.
 
Characteristic of paganism is a tolerance for other pagnistic ideas,
even those that literally contradict one's own.  Such persecutions as
have been directed against paganistic religions by each other are
by-products of political struggles and mass population movements
rather than ideologically motivated.  The same is to some extent true
of early Judaism, which was the direct inheritor to the traditions of
a strongly pagan society.  A slave revolt apparently led to a few
hundred thousand slaves with no place to live; to get them, they
butchered the inhabitants of pagan cities and took up residence in the
cities themselves.  They invoked their war god to justify this action.
Similarly, when the beginnings of the modern Greek mythology were laid
down, it was as a result of invading Northern barbarians supplanting
the earlier (and somewhat gynocentric) Titan mythology with their
imported religion, which grew more refined and less aggressive later
on, as happened with Judaism.
 
Before it came under the thumb of monotheism, the West was dominated
by the highly civilized Roman culture.  The Roman Republic and Empire
were characterized by an unusually large number of religions together
in a single social whole, frequently sharing the same geography and
even the same temples.  This explicitly eclectic (or "syncretistic",
as it is more usually known in studies of the Romans) synthesis is
more similar to modern neo-paganism than any other form of historical
paganism I know of.  However, it ended after the Christian emperors
took over and Rome fell.
 
The post-pagan West experienced frequent resurgences of paganism in
various forms.  If we date this at 1000 CE for convenience, we see
first the Inquisitorial period, where paganism was punished with death
and torture.  Then there comes the Renaissance, in which pagan
symbolism and ideas in art and philosophy were somewhat more common
than explicitly Christian ones.  The Renaissance lasted until the 16th
century.  Note that the Inquisitions lasted effectively until the
Enlightenment period, and were bad during the Renaissance, but ceased
to be mostly ideologically motivated after the first three centuries.
The Inquisition had become a political arm of the Vatican, a force
useful in many ways other than suppressing heresy.  It spent much of
its time accomplishing political, antifeminist, and covert goals of
the Church.  We see in the trial of the Templars in the fourteenth
century that uncommonly faithful people were caught in a secular
political struggle between the King of France and the Pope.  They were
routinely tortured, the usual prompted confessions were given, and
they were executed, for reasons having nothing to do with ideology or
heresy except as excuses.
 
It is also during the Renaissance that we begin to have evidence of
what we may consider explicitly religious paganism again.  Most of the
grimoires we have date from this era; alchemists, often overtly
Christian but employing pagan symbolism and texts, were most common
during the Renaissance; the Kabbalah and Tarot originate in the
Renaissance, forming the backbone of modern pagan symbolism.  The
Renaissance also saw the obscure origins of a rebirth, in improved
form, of Greek humanism, technically pagan because of its suppression
by Christian Rome and its use of theistic symbols.
 
The Reformation was again a less pagan period; Protestant rulers like
Elizabeth and James carried out their own anti-heresy pogroms,
annihilating most evidence of witchcraft.  Of particular interest in
the Reformation is Scot's "The Discoverie of Witchcraft", which
presents the humanist and rationalist perspective on witches which has
generally triumphed today: that witch accusations were more often
driven by factors such as ugliness, personal enmity, poverty, and so
forth than on ideological grounds, and that in fact there were no
witches.  This is probably true only of the later Inquisitorial
period.  Earlier on, the Inquisition certainly did help in the
temporary stamping out of paganism; so if pagans are witches, there
were witches.
 
We need not bother much with Murray's supposedly anthropological study
of English witchcraft in the Inquisitorial period, except to note that
it has been devoutly accepted by many modern pagans, and to point out
some of its flaws.  Based on late Inquisitorial evidence and the
consistency of the confessions obtained by the Inquistors, and tossing
in some disjointed scraps of English folk history and legend, Murray
asks us to believe that a paleolithic subculture lasted in England,
living semi-naked in the bushes, until nearly the beginning of the
Reformation at least, and possibly until the current day.  Of course
late Inquistorial confessions were consistent; they were practically
dictated to the torture victim.  A much better account of the
relationship of paganism to Christianity before and during England's
post-pagan period is Jessi Weston's classic "From Ritual to Romance".
Its conclusions were derived from decades of intense study of the
Grail mythology and its anthropological, mythological, and social
context.
 
As a parting note on the Reformation, we may note the peculiar
phenomenon of court astrologers and alchemists and their ilk, the most
notable examples being the sorcerer John Dee and the seer Edward
Kelley under Elizabeth.  These were the inheritors of Paracelsus and
the other alchemists and Christian medicine doctors, using pagan
symbols and methods with a veil of Christian symbolism.  Kelley
stopped the work of Dee and Kelley under unknown circumstances; he is
said to have been told by the angels to form a group sex arrangement
with Dee and his wife, which they supposedly did for a while; in
another version, Kelley was driven from the work by a prophecy of a
new age dawning, which was heresy.
 
So, on to the Enlightenment of the seventeenth century.  This was more
humanistic than religious, though humanism is a religion on alternate
Tuesdays; it all depends which of the many reasonable definitions you
use.  In any case, the seventeenth centuries saw the first
applications of the renewed Greek humanism that originated in the
Renaissance.  The counter-Christian current was running stronger; more
and more, people were beginning to demand equal treatment for all, and
freedom from the rigid boundaries of thought and expression imposed on
them by governments and churches alike.  This humanism has colored
most "opposition" religious movements in America since this time, much
for the better in my opinion.  This is because principles of respect
for the individual were put into the American system of government (as
an afterthought - the humanistic heyday had ended in the 1780's in
America, and the new would-be ruling class had to be forcibly
reminded), and the governmental structure was such that it was able to
make progress in its understanding of freedom.
 
Things did not work out quite so well in France's humanistic
revolution, largely due to Robespierre, the atheistic moral
grandfather of Stalin and Pol Pot.  He interpreted opposition to
monarchy as punishing high birth with low death, and then set out
ruthlessly to purge opposition and deviation.  Soon monarchy was
re-established in France.
 
The nineteenth century was a period of resurgence of paganism.  The
neo-classical movement was explicitly devoted to rediscovering the
virtues of the highly pagan societies Rome and Greece.  This movement
was to be by far the dominant force of the century.  Humanism was
further applied to the institution of slavery, resulting in war and
social upheaval.  The Prometheans such as Blake, Shelley, Byron, and
so forth were widely considered to be among the greatest luminaries of
the period.
 
The method of science and its results made available much more
information on religions of the East and of less civilized cultures.
Contact between religiously different but politically equal forces
invariably leads to mutual excuses for the other, largely to help keep
trade going, but also as a result of time spent in foreign climes
observing the practice of religion.  This creates, although not in
great numbers at first, a different attitude toward religions than the
dogmatic denial of all other religions possible only under a large and
self-sufficient monolithic theocracy.  Other religions are seen as not
neccessarily conflicting with one's own any more than another art
movement does with one's own favorite.
 
There was a more open resurgence of sorcery in less overtly Christian
forms, particularly in the last half of the century.  This attracted
many notable adherents, and from the publication of "The Magus" by
Barrett in 1801, created a magical library in modern English which is
still widely read and used.  It used the work of Renaissance
magicians, court sorcerors, Kabalists, and so forth, and attempted to
apply the psychological principles of the day in various original
fudgings.  There was also the Theosophical movement, largely
discredited by Blavatsky's proven cheating on tests of psychic powers,
and rather more like spiritualism with Eastern allusions than any
Eastern religion.
 
The psychical movement, which changed its name to parapsychology, grew
out of spiritualism, which grew out of mesmerism, which was apparently
fairly original and totally ludicrous, but did yield the secret of
hypnotism.  This led legitimate investigators to examining the claims
of other groups usually brushed off as mystical.  The early Society
for Psychical Research, founded in 1882 and led by prominent
scientists such as the American psychologist William James, was formed
"first, to carry on systematic experimentation with hypnotic subjects,
mediums, clairvoyants, and others; and, secondly, to collect evidence
concerning apparitions, haunted houses, and similar phenomena which
are incidentally reported, but which, from their fugitive nature,
admit of no deliberate control."
 
It is to be noted that there is still, a century later, no replicable
experiment to demonstrate the existence of anything but hypnotic
subjects in this list.  It is also worth noting that while general
models of the layout of the psyche continue to be employed in
psychotherapy, there is still no generally agreed upon experimental
methodology to falsify features of these models.  Finally, it should
be noted that the ritual magic methods employed by many pagans, in
other times as well as today, still have not been placed under real
scientific scrutiny to determine whether or not they produce any
physically measurable effects.  (My feeling is that such effects are
limited in scope to participants in the rituals and people who have
knowledge of their occurrence, whether such knowledge is true or
false.)
 
Various factions of magicians struggled to survive in the early half
of the twentieth century, against an increasingly Christian atheist
culture; that is, a materialistic populace considered almost
exclusively with day-to-day life and easy entertainment, but still
paying occassional lip service to Christianity and suspicious of all
other religions.  Most of the inheritors of nineteenth-century magical
paganism were hopelessly fragmented and dogmatized, incapable of
working together and resolving their differences.
 
In the late forties, Gerald Gardner began publishing books on
witchcraft.  Gardner was a known associate of Crowley's and his
rituals use a lot of symbolism drawn from Crowley, but only a few
actual references to Crowley.  He is also reported to have associated
with Theosophist groups.  Crowley was one of the chief inheritors of
the jumble left at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as a
traveller and student in Eastern lands.  In any case, Gardner (after
Crowley) called for yet another neo-classicism, following the pattern
of all the other resurgences of Graeco-Roman paganism, but more
explicitly religious.
 
The laudable looseness of Gardner's system was more attractive to
magically inclined people than the Golden Dawn and Theosophy splinters
remaining.  It freed them to create on their own, and they went at it
with a vengeance.  One reason for the greater effective freedom was
that Gardner was not as hard an act to follow as many of the Golden
Dawn leaders.  He was soon gone beyond by his students, many of whom
went off to form their own Gardnerian splinters and mythological
histories of their origin.
 
Another reason was the less formidable Gardnerian system of
initiation.  Most magical groups had complex multi-layered spiritual
hierarchies.  These were supposed to represent psychological fact, but
little in the way of acceptable empirical observation was used to
correct these schemes, mostly drawn from loose interpretations of the
Kaballa, and they can't be said to have really compelling
inter-individual force.  These were replaced by a simple hierarchy of
three grades.  This was the high-level structure of the Golden Dawn,
and of a number of Masonic groups, which divided their degrees into
categories.  The third grade was no longer reserved for secret chiefs
who almost certainly never existed or for mythological prophets, and
the initiations had a more joyful and celebratory character, rather
than a system of awful psychological ordeals.  (I feel that the
emphasis on ordeals and spiritual hierarchy was a product of Christian
influence, with the triumph of martyrdom as a supreme spiritual
experience and the hierarchic nature of the Church, and that a simpler
formula based on Thelemic growth, like the dominant neo-pagan formula,
rather than Christian death/rebirth is more appropriate.)
 
A common claim among neo-pagans is that paganism was suddenly revealed
to the world in the fifties after centuries of hiding.  This is
demonstrably false; all that is needed is a bit of history, textual
analysis, and symbolic comparison to see how close neo-paganism (as
the movement came to be known in the sixties) is to its known
historical antecedents.  But mythological histories are themselves
traditional in world religions.  While it is important to know the
real history of a religion, this does not invalidate the possible
value of mythological tales of the origin, because these serve as
fictional statements of intent, often incorporating powerful
symbolism.  They have literary value in this respect; and literary or
other artistic value is a type of spiritual value.
 
Modern religious paganism has made a unique contribution.  No
eclectic/pagan movement of the historical past has brought the
contributions of paleolithic shamanism into the fold as well as has
neo-paganism.  In large part this is due to a rise in knowledge of
such religions at the same time as the rise of neo-paganism.  This is
an extremely valuable contribution; in shamanism lies the roots of all
human religion.  A coven meeting still resembles a GD lodge
considerably more than it does a shamanistic lodge, despite the
valuable addition of techniques originating in shamanism.
 
This has been a neccessarily brief and incomplete account.  I have not
mentioned Rabelais, the Rosicrucians, the decadent poets, Nietzsche,
de Sade, Levi, Gurdjieff, James, Augustine, Shakespeare, Masonry,
Paine, American utopian communities, Jung, Merlin, art and spirit, or
Gnosticism, all of which are vital elements of the story; I have given
short shrift to the psychical movement and its influence on nineteenth
and twentieth century paganism; and I have neglected many other
relevant topics.  But I hope this will suffice as a brief overview of
the pagan history preceding neo-paganism.