RE: Theological Attack On Public Schools/Pagan

["Dena Marchant" <denam@wsu.edu>]

More on the meaning of "Pagan"  from
http://www.notelrac.com/whuups.dir/pagan.dir/what_paganism.html

Pagan has a much more colorful and instructive derivation, for with it, the
etymologist can trace a tragic history of Europe's indigenous peoples at the
hands of Empire builders, unearthing new meanings as the word evolves in an
imperial context. Ultimately, the word derives from the pre-Latin pagus 'to
fix' which meant 'something stuck in the ground as a landmark' and from
which we get the English words page, pale, and pole which refer to fixing
sticks into the ground. Other words come from this root: pact and peace,
both of which come from agreements made at such a marker, or about the
positioning of such markers, as in a boundary. Also, peasant derives
directly from Pagan through the French and holds many similar connotations
to this day.

Many scholars construe the fixed marker as the central meeting stone of a
settlement since the Latin word pagi emerged to mean 'rural area' and
'village,' and since the Latin paganus came to mean 'country dweller' or
'one who lived where they meet around standing sticks' -- 'from the sticks?'

Other scholars point to the word cult, which descends from the Indo-European
quel, quol which means to 'move around or turn around [a fixed place]' from
which we the English cycle and wheel. The word later took two semantic
paths: 'inhabiting a place' and 'making a wild place suitable for crops.'

Drawing from the etymology of cult and pagan, we can see how the words might
refer to the ancient practice of gathering in circles around fixed poles:
the May Pole ritual, Arthur's Round Table, and the cosmos revolving around
central Tree of Life motifs from Celtic, Nordic, Jewish and African cultures
serving as only a sampling of the many notable survivals.

The original 'circle around the marker' ritual has critical and obvious
festal, ludic, and ritual prominence for any nomadic, paleolithic peoples --
something of an Ur TAZ, if you will. Consider how nomadic peoples knew where
to trade, share, and celebrate with other nomadic peoples. And let's not
swallow that old shibboleth about paleolithic nomadic peoples living in such
fear of each other that they welcomed the specialized warrior caste who
lived off the oldest con in the book, the protection racket. Any intelligent
reading of what little ancient history survived the Christian book burnings
delivers a vivid picture of nearly universal hospitality and cooperation
which disintegrated under the pressures of imperial expansion and the
conversion of wilderness into agricultural lands -- a conversion as much
religious as functionalist -- usually as a result of brutally enforced
labor. (See Kropotkin, or even Calvin Luther Martin's study the pre- and
post-Columbian Native Americans. Both, highly recommended.)

When the agricultural revolution occurred in the neolithic and early metal
ages, evolving its specialized priest/warrior/worker castes and
forest-hating urbanization -- a viral culture which must expand at the peril
of other cultures or perish, and which necessarily relies on the forced
labor of captives and the forced impregnation of women -- it quite
necessarily denigrated the remaining nomadic peoples and their wisdom as
provincial or bumpkinish, a notion which exists today in much of the
syphilized world.

~Dena