On arriving at the epoch when this early form of religion was first subjected to pressure, direct attack and sub-total obliteration, one ponders why this did not occur at any other time or times over the millennia of its evolution and why this was achieved over a relatively short space of some 1100 years at the most - from 600 AD to 1700 AD.

It should be remembered that in every primitive society, be it ancient Keltic, North American Indian or Polynesian and in the later somewhat more advanced (at least in material terms) civilisations of Imperial Rome, Ancient Egypt or Greece, all religions were based upon the worship of Deities which were the personifications of natural cosmic forces, irrespective of how lofty or lowly a level on which they operate.  So there was no great antagonism between old-world religions.

On the contrary, voyagers respected the local gods of foreign lands, recognising them as the parochial equivalents of like strata of the same cosmic power, with the result that religious concepts were discussed and compared freely, especially on trade routes.  Thus Aphrodite of Greece and the Roman Venus were synonymous with Brigit of the Gaels and the Keltic Rhiannon.

With this in mind, therefore, we understand how the Gods could remain relatively unchanged in nature, if not in name, following the Roman invasion of Britain.  Again, in the light of this line of thought, we should not be mistaken in the reappraisal of Suetonius Paulinus' motive in his massacre of the Druidic priests in 61 AD.  As the Druids held high rank in the local non-Roman structure of the time, the heads which rolled were the fountainheads of Keltic socio-political power not those of a religious hierarchy.

It is with some trepidation that I have made several references to Druidism, for its place in ancient Keltic society is a reputedly controversial issue.  Many suggestions and hypotheses have been made, endeavouring to classify this order of ancients as either sun-worshippers or refugee priests of Atlantis or a blood-sacrifice oriented patriarchal priesthood at a sub-terminal phase of the Keltic Mystery period.  Another potential placement in society could be to establish the Druids as philosophers and, as such, they would have been constantly researching and developing concepts of not only religion, but metaphysics, astronomy and the social, economical and general artistic ramifications of life as they knew it.  This has been put forth by modern Druids and is a suggestion which appears most favourable.

Assuming this to be the case, they would have been broadly analogous to the schools of philosophy in Mediterranean civilisations which had a definite developmental rôle in society, but which were to a great extent apart from the system of worship.  We do know that the Druids were not 100% sun oriented, as moon worship and the high honour given to Goddesses such as Kerridwen at the Druidic centre of Dinas Emrys in Eryri (Snowdon) were well established in Druidic philosophy.

I therefore simply accept that the Druids played some integral part in the pre-Christian religious picture, without attempting to assess in any depth their quantitative or qualitative contribution to it.

And so it was when Christianity came to Britain in the first few centuries AD, that it and local religion coexisted peacefully.  We find Christianity grafted on to Druidism very swiftly and easily.  Sit John Rhys says it is difficult to find a point where Druidism ceased and Christianity commenced.  The Druids at the start simply thought of the saints and even the Nazarene himself as "great Druids" and continued with their work, eventually calling themselves Cele De or Culdees - "Servants of God".

Pockets of Culdees were found to exist relatively late, officiating at Ripon in Yorkshire and Iona in the 8th century and appearing in the church of St. Regulus at St. Andrews until 1124.  A point of interest is a deed signed by Edward Burton, Prior of Armagh Cathedral in 1628 "on behalf of the vicars choral and Culdees of the same".  (Vicars choral are the adult male choristers of a cathedral.)
 

Conversion by Assimilation

Now the first conversion technique of the early Church was to assimilate aspects of local religious practice into Christianity, renaming the Old Gods and Goddesses and often canonising them, as in the case of St, Bride and many others.  Even the attributes would be retained - the phallic God Priapus was transformed into St. Guignolet and his effigy (now in churches) became the focal point for the prayers of sterile women for the blessing of fertility.  Local shrines were usually commandeered as sites for new churches, as had the ancient festival dates for significant festivals in the Church's calendar.  A new religion - especially man made and, therefore, not naturally evolved via the group soul of a race for which it is not commensurate, has no practical bench marks on which to draw, hence the plagiarism of Christianity et al..

The event of a virgin birth is common to nearly all the pagan Gods.  The execution, descent to the place of departed spirits, appearance to the weeping female devotee, etc. was an essential scene in the legends of many Gods which predate Christianity - Gods such as the Babylonian Bel, the Egyptian Osiris, the Scandinavian Odin, the Keltic Lleu, the middle eastern Tamuz and many more who are reputed to have died for the sake of their people.  One can easily research the 16 crucified Gods with a little effort.  The "do as you would be done by" and "good for evil" philosophies were issued by Buddha, Confucius, Zoroaster, Socrates, Cicero, Aristotle, Ovid, Seneca, Epictetus, Plato and others long before the Nazarene had seen the light of day.  The Holy Spirit is reputed to have descended upon Osiris in the form of a dove in the far earlier Egyptian legends.  So much, then, for the "good news" which was simply a repeat prescription, even in the days of the gospel writers!

In utilising this nature of technique, therefore, the Church's public relations were indeed sound, the local people retaining a habitual regime which mattered to them.  Nothing was lost except perhaps religious autonomy, and the Britons' strong displeasure at the eventual loss of autonomous religious licence must have been a thorn in the flesh of the Church during the subsequent development of the Christian Faith in Britain.

Perhaps the best approach would be to follow the history of the suppression of such a religious system by examining events chronologically, commencing by remembering that Britain had actually been incorporated by treaty into the Roman Empire in 120 AD.  Whatever was considered good for Rome, therefore, was good for the rest of the Empire, including Britain.

In 324 AD the Emperor Constantine decreed Christianity to be the official religion of the Roman Empire, thus more or less overnight the known civilised world became Christian - thanks to the widespread net of previous Roman conquest, not to the evangelism of the early faithful.

Thereafter, the temples of the Roman Gods were destroyed or reconsecrated as churches.  The Emperor Justinian even closed the school of philosophy at Athens - a school founded by Plato.  Eventually, because of the drastic home situation, the legions were recalled in a desperate attempt to stem the attacking hordes harassing Rome itself.  As the Empire started to disintegrate, the Church attempted to institute an alternative to Roman traditions and, as a religious power block, it succeeded only too well.  As a reasonably powerful machine it could, by organised councils, effect changes throughout its entire structure at will.
 

Conversion by Dissatisfaction

And it was with this powerful tool that the second conversion technique was attempted when, in 553 AD, the Council of Constantinople declared the concept of Reincarnation to be heresy.  So wherever this belief was prevalent, being indeed widespread and, as we have seen, accepted by the Kelts themselves, the call went out: "Why worship local Gods and have to return again and again to a similarly sorry earthly existence when belief in our God grants immediate entry to the heaven beyond as soon as you die in this life?"  (And, of course, provided you have paid the Church for the Last Rites!)  In the terminology of 'sales' psychology, the aim was to cause "dissatisfaction with the existing product".

There is no doubt whatever that the early Church had itself been more than familiar with Reincarnation and had accepted it, for previously the Bishop of Nyssa had written: "It is absolutely necessary that the soul shall be healed and purified, and if this does not take place during one life, it must be accomplished in future earthly lives ".

Within some 44 years, however, the pressures were to be increased as, in 597 AD, St. Augustine brought the Papal brand of Christianity to Britain.  Now here was a hard-liner - ruthless and with a strong patriarchal fervour in his ideology.  It was Augustine who caused to be murdered at his own command the Archbishop of St. David's, six bishops and the Abbot of Bangor for refusing to accept the supremacy of Rome and had the library at Bangor burned to the ground with what treasures of early Keltic manuscripts we shall never know.

Why do we consider him patriarchal?  The same Augustine called attention to the close proximity of sexual and excretory organs in women, writing with disgust: "Inter faeces et urinam nascimur ".  (Twixt filth and urine are we born.)  He was not alone in this prejudice as we remember that, some 400 years before, Tertullian had defined womankind as "a temple built over a sewer ", and even in the same century as Augustine the Church Council at Macon had deliberated over two days whether or not a woman was really a human being!
 

Conversion by Psychological Attack

It was now time, on finding the second conversion technique to be a failure, to implement a third - fear, to bring the masses under the sway of the Church.  St. Gregory the Great, Pope from 590 - 604, was the first to allot to the Christian Devil the physical attributes of older Deities - and so he dressed Satan in the horns and hooves of the rustic Pan, the limp of Wotan, the black complexion of Saturn and the beard of Thor.

So now the call resounded: "Lo our evil adversary has the horns of your local god - therefore the object of your worship must be similarly evil!"  Added to this, of course, were the fires of Gehenna or Hell with which the followers of such creatures would be tormented.  The bestial aspects which were to follow simply represented what was abhorrent to the Christian hierarchy of those times - enjoyable sexual love.  And the repression of this natural instinct was to form complexes which would be the trigger for innumerable fantasies and pseudo-possessions in later centuries, especially within the hotbeds of celibacy - monasteries and convents.

Let us make no mistake about this ill advised turn of events - NOWHERE in Hebrew or Greek Scriptures (i.e. the Old and New Testaments) is Satan described as having any of these physical attributes just mentioned.  In the Old Testament the term 'sheitan' had not even been a proper name.  It simply meant "one who stood against" - an adversary or accuser.  On close examination of the books of Zachariah and Job, the sheitan was merely a Public Prosecutor in nature - an angel whose office and remit it was to accuse, test and demand punishment of the wicked.  In the earlier Sumerian Raz Kathab Mashal the same meaning is obvious, in addition to his being the Son of El or God.  (His name in this instance was 'Benel'.)

What the Church at that time succeeded in creating, by linking the minds of all the faithful in common concentrative preoccupation (charged with the powerful emotion of fear), was an immense, evil and fearful thought form of group manufacture which naturally continued to feed off its creators, much to the detriment of their mental health.

Unfortunately, the Church must have known little of such dangerous practices or indeed cared little for the disservice it rendered its then present and potential flock.

St. Cyprian added to the ideology in his writing: "The wretched bodies of the condemned shall simmer and blaze in living fires ".  St. Augustine elaborates: "The fire is more deadly than any which man can suffer in this life ".  But Minucius Felix is unsurpassed in his following description: "Nor to these torments will there be any measure of termination, there the sentient fire burns limbs and renews them, feeds on them and nourishes them ".  With this promulgation of doctrine, heaven help those of a bad conscience!

It is time to introduce a new word into the scene of suppression, the word 'pagan', meaning a follower of a faith other than Christianity.  The derivation of the word is quite clear and simple.  On the one hand there is the Church, its priests and such nobles as found it expedient to follow the new faith and, on the other, the simple folk and peasant class who gleaned their living from the fields and who followed the old ways - the Latin pagani who dwelt in the pagus or village.  Another term was the 'heathen', the 'people of the heath'.

Now the worship of the Elder Gods was still to the fore in the 7th century.  In 620 the Venerable Bede records with rebuke that Redwald, King of the East Saxons, had in the same temple an "altar to sacrifice to Christ and another small one to offer to pagan devils ".  Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, in his Liber Poenitentialis prohibited people from dressing in animal masks (especially horned ones) for secret rites, from worship of trees and from lighting ritual fires.  Many circles of standing stones were thrown down at this time as he had described them as the work of Satan, stating that each stone was a petrified body of a man or woman who dared break the sanctity of a church festival by dancing.

Up to now, situations and circumstances had been very skilfully manipulated by the early Church fathers and truth distorted beyond all recognition.

The Saxon nobles who accepted Christianity eventually began to formulate laws against the parochial mysteries which they feared.  They had no special name for the so-called 'pagans', so one was constructed - a neologism formed from their word 'wig' meaning 'idol', and 'laer' denoting 'learning'.  The composite term was 'wiglaer' or 'wicca' as a shortened form.

The Saxon laws were well formulated.  Thus: "If any wicca or wiglaer or false swearer or any foul contaminated horcwenan (whore) be anywhere in the land, man shall drive them out.  We teach that every priest shall extinguish all heathendom and forbid wilwcorthunga (fountain worship) and licwiglunga (invocations), hwata (soothsayings) and the abomination men use in the various crafts of wicca."

Penalties are laid down for wiglian (divining) by the moon, for worshipping sun, moon, wells, stones or trees, or for loving wicca crafte.  And from this newly invented expression came the term 'witchcraft' with all the spurious embellishments and concocted idiocy surrounding the concept which was handed down and which is still retained through the blind acceptance of these lies by the average person today.

I include in this latter category the self-styled 'witches' of the present century who sometimes function according to medieval Saxon misconceptions, even adopting the foreign Saxon pseudonyms 'witch', 'wicca' and 'witchcraft' for some strange reason.  Why they do so is a mystery, as these terms were derogatory Saxon names for those who worshipped nature, which is clear from the previous paragraph.  No follower of the religion of nature worship would have called themselves by these names - no more than would the German peoples of today call themselves 'krauts'.  No one builds an insult into their persona - let that be understood right now and up front!

By 900, King Edgar is reported to have regretted that the Old Gods were worshipped in his dominions to a far greater extent that Christ.  In 906, Regino in his 'De Ecclesiastica Disciplinis' gives the Canon Episcopi, denouncing the "worship of Pagan Deities and wicked women who ride at night with Diana the Goddess of the pagans, being summoned to her service on certain nights."

In 1209 occurred the first trial on charges of 'witchcraft', pagan practices or beliefs in Britain.  The wife of a merchant named Odo accused a man of bewitching her.  The accused, one Gideon, was tried by ordeal (in this case the red-hot iron) and fortunately acquitted.

When the 13th century closed, the purge was evidently intended for all of non-Christian beliefs as, in 1290, Edward I expelled the Jews from the shores of Britain.