Although, quiet often the rhetoric used in the past were racially focused versions of contemporary Paganism that embodied a xenophobic and racist reaction to academic study into historical Indo-European similarities, some contemporary Pagans have been motivated in a very different way.
Because of the connections that historians have discovered between pre-Christian Pagan Europeans and ancient Hindu Indians, some contemporary Pagans have come to consider contemporary Indians as long-lost relatives and Hinduism as their oldest spiritual kin.
Most academics date the oldest Hindu writings, the Vedas, to anywhere between 1500 and 1200 BCE, which supports this theory.
- The Vedas were written in a language called Vedic, which is a type of Sanskrit having linguistic similarities to Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, and other European languages.
- Many Vedic historians think the writings were written by migrants or invaders who arrived in India from their Indo-European origins between 2000 and 1500 BCE, after the fall of the local Harappan/Indus Valley civilization in what is now northwest India and eastern Pakistan.
- Hinduism is of particular interest to European and North American Pagans since it has never been replaced by any other religion in India, despite the attempts of Muslim conquerors and Christian colonists, and has thus maintained the religious tradition of more than 800 million Indians.
- Despite the physical and cultural barrier that separates India from Europe and North America, they see Hinduism as the only Indo-European, Pagan religion to survive into contemporary times as the dominant faith of an entire country.
A number of contemporary Pagan groups pay close attention to the similarities between Hindu stories, rituals, and beliefs and those of their own regional traditions.
- For instance, The Pagan Path, a 1995 book that provides an overview of Pagan religious movements in the United States and beyond, includes a section comparing healing practices in various Pagan traditions; the authors compare the Hindu chakra system of a hierarchical series of energy centers in the human body to the Norse concept of a nine-level World Tree.
- “There is a frequent adage among occultists that you should not combine traditions, especially the Western and Eastern mystery traditions,” the authors said, anticipating that some would object to the connection of Hindu and Norse religious ideas.
- We'd want to point out to those who believe this system has no place in Western Pagan practice that if they look carefully, they'll see that most of our traditions have Indo-European roots” (Farrar, Farrar, and Bone 1995, 78).
- To provide another example, the World Congress of Ethnic Religions, one of the major organizations devoted to contemporary Paganism, has had growing interaction with leaders of Hindu groups in India.
- Members of the Lithuanian organization Romuva and other WCER-affiliated groups attended the First International Conference and Gathering of the Elders in Mumbai (Bombay), India, in February 2003, which was followed by a “Indo-Romuva” conference in New Jersey in the autumn of 2003, solidifying the links established between Romuva and Hindu organizations during previous meetings.
Such connections suggest that contemporary Hindus and Pagans will continue to cooperate and assist one another, moving Indo-European religion out of the sphere of academic inquiry and into the sphere of contemporary experience and practice.
You may also want to read more about Paganism here.
Be sure to check out my writings on Religion here.
You may also want to read more about Hinduism here.
