All current Pagan religious movements are concerned in rebuilding religious traditions from the past in diverse ways and to varying degrees.
However, one can wonder how ancient these pre-Christian root traditions are and how far back in time they should be dated.
- The basic explanation is that Christianization began and ended at different periods in different parts of Europe before Christianity, or at least before Christianity became so powerful in a specific area that it caused the fall and repression of native European religious traditions.
- In the first centuries CE, the Roman Empire became Christianized, followed by England and Ireland in the middle of the first millennium CE, Russia and other Slavic nations of Eastern Europe at the end of the first millennium, and Scandinavia in the late first and early second millennia CE (Latourette 1938; Fedotov 1960; Finnestad 1990; Pennick and Jones 1995; Fletcher 1997; Cusack 1998).
- The Lithuanian royalty did not accept Christianization until 1386, while the rural population did not accept the new faith for generations (Gimbutas 1963; Rowell 1994; Christiansen 1997).
- Accordingly, the period designated as the "golden era" of ancient Paganism differs from one Pagan movement to the next, based on their understanding and interpretation of their specific Pagan tradition's historical history.
- However, there is a deeper historical question that has piqued the curiosity of many modern Pagans: if there was an ancient civilization or cultural complex that was the original source of their European forebears, and hence their Pagan religious beliefs.
Many Pagans have taken a positive interest in the theories of scholars such as Max Muller, Émile Benveniste, Georges Dumézil, Jaan Puhvel, and Marija Gimbutas concerning the possible existence of a "Indo-European homeland," a common, ProtoIndo-European civilization, hypothetically dated as early as 4500 BCE and usually located in the steppe region of southern Rus by most theorists and researchers.
- The location of the mythical homeland has been a source of contention since the eighteenth century. No one has yet been able to create a perfect match between linguistic evidence of language origins and expansion and archaeological evidence of ancient cultures and civilizations' material relics.
- In Search of the Indo-Europeans (1989), J. P. Mallory examines a variety of conflicting ideas and concludes that the homeland is somewhere in Central Asia. This viewpoint may be interpreted to represent the consensus opinion of a significant number of researchers—but not all—at this time.
- This common culture is thought to have splintered into smaller culture groups associated with various Indo-European languages, which were then carried by migrants or invaders to various lands across Asia and Europe, from India and Iran in the east to Ireland and Iceland in the west, over the course of many centuries.
- Even though many of the texts, folkloric traditions, and other such source materials used by modern Pagan movements date only from the medieval period of European history or later, not from the much more distant time, the theory of Indo-European origins provides contemporary Pagans with a respectable academic basis for claiming an extremely ancient pedigree for their religious traditions.
Pagans nowadays argue that their traditions are considerably older than the medieval sources, which are just late crystallizations of the original Pagan religious traditions during their final era of life before or after Christianization.
- The parallels between myths recorded in medieval European texts and myths recorded in far older Greek, Roman, Iranian, and Indian mythological texts do indeed suggest a common body of myths and beliefs from which the various regional mythologies and religious traditions appear to have been derived (Littleton 1982; Puhvel 1987).
- These variant forms, like the Indo-European language families, are thought to have evolved over millennia of separation, migration, and adaptation to a variety of cultural environments, including interaction with non-Indo-European peoples, cultures, and religions, while retaining discernible common elements.
- As a result, how one views current proponents of Pagan religions' claims of vast antiquity is substantially dependent on how one views the notion of a very old, Proto-Indo-European, common source of all these connected religious traditions.
It's worth noting that one large element of current Pagan religion holds a totally different perspective on European Paganism's Indo-European roots.
- Reclaiming Tradition, Goddess Spirituality, and other feminist Pagan traditions do not consider pre-Christian European Pagan religion or a possible earlier time of Proto-IndoEuropean religion to be golden periods.
- They see the invasion of Indo-European peoples from Central Asia's steppe region as a Holocaust-like disaster, in which an original matriarchal civilization of goddess-worshipping peoples, which they idealize as completely peace-loving, egalitarian, artistic, and prosperous, was disrupted and polluted by the Indo-European ancestors' warworshipping, patriarchal social and religious system (Neitz 1993; Salomonsen 2002; Starhawk 1982, 1989).
Most modern Pagan movements, with the exception of feminist forms of Paganism such as Goddess Spirituality and Reclaiming, do not share this pessimistic view of ancient Indo-European religion, but rather see its hypothetical ProtoIndo-European origins or final expressions among the various nations of pre-Christian Europe as their foundation and inspiration.
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