Customer Reviews

A History of Pagan Europe

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3 star:		(1)
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this is a factual history of the roots, battles and civilizations of pagan europe... a must read for anyone wanting to learn about Paganism before it's modern rebirth. It is well written and easy to read. It is one of my history refrence books for Pagan Homeschooling.

This is a great overview of Pagan faiths in European cultures. The format is different in that each chapter covers a specific Indo European culture from it's earliest historical recordings to modern times. It took me a couple chapters to get used to going back to the beginning of history with each chapter, but it was great to have the entire Indo-European (IE) culture covered in one chapter rather than jumping around the continent within a time period.

I won't go into in depth review, I'll leave that up to those with more time and scholarly output, but will say it is a great place to start with learning about spiritual practices of Indo Europeans outside of Christian ones.

It is interesting to learn how similar the IE cultures developed and overlapped before they influenced each other as well as how late it took before Christianity conquered some areas.

Christianity in its early years did not send out loving missionaries with the "love of Jesus" message. It was convert or die. Those who didn't convert were murdered and their lands and posessions stolen by the Church.

It's a beginning place to get a good overview. The authors have a good bibliography of scholarly and archeological references. For those who wish to go more in depth have a wealth of places to start.

With chapters on Greek, Roman, Germanic, Celtic, Baltic and Russian pre-Christian religious cultures, this is a very comprehensive book. Ronald Hutton, the well respected scholar, historian and author, reviewed this manuscript before publication and apparently gave advice on the facts and figures presented. The bibliography is huge and varied, providing excellent supplementary resources for those inclined to do further research. An extensive index makes finding information relatively easy.

There is quite a bit of interpretation of anthropological and archeological theories that may or may not be influenced by a certain amount of neo-Pagan bias on the part of the authors.

I may be biased myself, as I am Pagan and know that an accurate history of the pre-Christian past has been hard to come by. Overall, the book covers a wide variety of cultures and geographical areas and contains more detailed information than many other 'pagan' histories that I have read. I almost gave this book 4 stars but my scepticism, deserved or not, just wouldn't let me go that far.