Contents Updated: Thursday, March 02, 2000
Many North-Europeans are unaware that they are still practising ancient Pagan traditions. Even more people are ignorant about the Church's cruelty towards Pagans. Pagans like the Vikings are depicted as brutal monsters but schoolbooks are silent about the enormity of Christianity.
Christianity was welcomed in northern Europe by kings seeking security from their own subjects. Christianity adopted the policy as early as Paul of accepting the secular power and law and, although it would not accept the deification of kings, it readily accepted their divine right to rule. In practice, the king was God's representative on earth, the very basis for Cyrus and his successors setting up temples to the universal god.
The Norwegian king Olav, the "holy one", joined with the Roman Church to christianise the people of Norway. Parties consisting of soldiers promised the possessions of those who refused to convert and Roman priests, went out to the villages. They destroyed the symbols of the old religions, and plundered and burnt their temples.
Tthe people were forced to kneel before a cross held aloft bearing the image of a hanging man. Many refused and were driven from their farms, which immediately were commandeered by the mercenaries, or were killed or blinded by having their eyes poked out. These are effective ways of conversion.
The Church demonised old gods and goddesses, sacred symbols and sacred animals. The new patriarchal faith was particularly bad for women who had been influential in Pagan religions. Now, there was no place for wise women. No ritual not part of church ritual was permitted, so all folk medicines and ritual cures, nowadays seen as having genuine value in the power of plants or psychology, were forbidden. The wooden steam-bath houses of the Scandinavians were also banned. Mixed bathing was sinful and keeping clean was vanity—another misinterpretation of Essene humility. Filth was considered holy and the world was blasted with plague and disease.
After a district was christianised, a priest was left behind in all villages to watch the people, so that they would not practise the old traditions, bathe together or contact a wise woman for advice. Singing the old tunes and dancing Pagan dances was also forbidden. The people had to come to holy mass on their leisure day, a day formerly of sports, bathing and enjoyment. Exercise was work and work only. Major festivals and important customs, hard to erase because they were deeply entrenched, were themselves given a Christian spin.
Believers found they had to buy salvation from priests and monks. It was not long before churches and monasteries were extremely wealthy. Why would Viking raiders want to plunder monasteries if the monks were, like the original Essenes, devoted to poverty? The clergy were paid by peasants to save their souls in the best protection racket ever conceived. They also received the patronage of the nobility, just as concerned about their immortal souls, for perpetual prayers and intercessions for their noble houses.
The crusaders were not on a mission to save the Holy Land of God from the Saracens but on a mission to plunder the east for their own pockets. Many returned extremely rich men, having slaughtered and plundered entire Muslim villages and plenty of Christian ones for good measure.
Nobody can deny the gruesome crimes of the "holy inquisition," though it has become fashionable to play them down as propaganda. Even children and animals were tried and tortured, and even if it is true that it was not as extensive as the propagndists make out, remember, this is the church of God we are speaking about. Christians with their "missionary" acivities continue to this day to rob simpler people of their cultural birthright.