Romantic Paganism:

“…Classical Paganism underwent a new phase in Northern Europe. It was through Thomas Taylor’s translation of the Orphic Hymn to Pan (1787) that the romantic poets rediscovered the soul of all things. The Romantic poets developed nostalgia for lost ages, as in Schiller’s Gotter Griechenlands. In England, they had a mutually shared esteem for Paganism. After the death and destruction of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars came the ‘year without a summer’ (1816), when famine swept Europe, accompanied by food riots. After the disintegration of the Old Order, the Romantic poets saw Paganism as the only remedy for the ‘wrong turnings’ of Christianity and industrialization. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg (22 January, 1818), Leigh Hunt wrote:

I hope you paid your devotions as usual to the Religio Loci, and hung up an evergreen. If you all go on so, there will be a hope some day…a voice will be heard along the water saying ‘The Great God Pan is alive again’, -upon which the villagers will leave off starving, and singing profane hymns, and fall to dancing again.

In his letters Thomas Love Peacock signed himself ‘In the name of Pan, yours most sincerely’. In October 1821, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote to Thomas J. Hogg:

I am glad that you do not neglect the rites of the true religion. Your letter awoke my sleeping devotions, and the same evening I ascended alone the high mountain behind my house, and suspended a garland, and raised a small turf-altar to the mountain-walking Pan.

Later in the nineteenth century, Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) was influential in the Pagan movement. He was a member of several socialist groups, including William Morris’ Socialist League and the Fellowship of the New Life, from which came the Fabian Society. Giving up his Anglican ministry in 1874, he promoted neo-Pagan as a return to the essentials of life. In 1883, he set up a self-sufficient community at Millthrope between Sheffield and Chesterfield. In Civilization: Its Cause and Cure he wrote:

The meanings of the old religions will come back…On high tops once more gathering he will celebrate with naked dances the glory of the human form and the great processions of the stars, or greet the bright horn of the young moon which now after a hundred centuries comes back laden with such wondrous associations – all the yearnings and the dreams and the wonderment of the generations of mankind- the worship of Astarte and Diana, of Isis and the Virgin Mary; once more in sacred groves will he reunite the passion and the delight of human love with his deepest feelings of the sanctity and beauty of Nature; or in the open, standing uncovered to the Sun, will adore the emblem of the everlasting splendour which shines within.

Oscar Wilde echoed the sentiments of Carpenter, when he wrote:

O goat foot god of Arcady!
The modern world hath need of thee!

At this time in this intellectual milieu, there was a feeling that a new religion was about to be created: ‘A religion so splendid and all embracing that the hierarchy to which it will give birth, uniting within itself the artist and the priest, will supplant and utterly destroy our present commercial age’. This was none other than ‘the creative Pagan acceptance of life’ promoted by playwright Eugene O’ Neill.

During the nineteenth century, the Germanic legends were collected by the Grimm brothers, and crafted into a powerful mythos by Richard Wagner. As Wagner himself wrote in his essay, ‘What is German?’: ‘In rugged forests, in the long winter…he transmutes his home-bred myths of the gods in legends manifold and inexhaustible.’ …another constant theme in his art was the tension between the Christian asceticism which he inherited and the Pagan affirmation of life to which as an artist he was committed. Wagner’s commitment to recreating the spiritual-emotional catharsis of Greek tragedy in his temple of music drama at Bayreuth was encouraged and partly shaped by his friend, the classicist Friedrich Nietzsche.’ (A History of Pagan Europe by Prudence Jones & Nigel Pennick)