Paganism : promising promises and resentful results

We situate our inquiry in the context of work by Eric Gans, and in particular his essay on body piercing ("The Body Sacrificial"). Then we provide a non-encyclopaedic overview of paganism’s principal tendencies. We then address the relationship of paganism to the Judaeo-Christian pattern of autocritique, and propose a view of paganism as a variety of autocritique and cultural counter-practice. This is best done within the context of Girard’s work on the dismantling of the violent sacred, principally Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (165-306). This, in turn, leads us to the issue of late twentieth century anthropology and its own searing selfcritique. From here, we develop our major claim that it is less the religious practices that reveal the nature of paganism than it is the relations posited both to paganism’s array of objects, and to Christianity itself (which make sense of it). To stage this claim, we offer a novel comparative analysis of participant relations to objects in paganism on the one hand, and in the field of kitsch on the other. By so doing, we hope to contribute something both to the analysis of late modern culture in general and to the understanding of the nature of paganism specifically.