Pagan roots denied

I was pleased to read Therese Taylor’s excellent “Lords of Misrule” [ FT400:48-51], but was disheartened to read: “In my view, the pagan element cannot be entirely dismissed. The role of the young male as a figure of dynamic fun, but also of poignant loss, is a continuation of the agenda of the fertility cults.” The author is arguing against what almost all contemporary scholars take as a truism: that the vast majority of folk traditions are not repurposed pagan holidays but rather explicitly Christian practices and traditions. I find her statement disheartening because it suggests an ahistorical understanding of the expressivity of mediæval and early modern minds and implies that these practices must be seen entirely as the product of their quasi-religious context. A much broader view is to assume that the various practices are devised in response to universal impulses in the human psyche that emerge regardless of social context. Too much writing has been wasted trying to scry the origins of individual traditions and too little dedicated to the question of why these traditions arise and their expression of universal impulses in the human mind.

Jarett Kobek

Los Angeles