Hexennacht

“There is a mountain very high and bare… whereon it is given out that witches hold their dance on Walpurgis night.” - Jacob Grimm, 1883

April 30th marks the annual festival of Walpurgisnacht or Walpurgis Night. Walpurgisnacht has its roots in an ancient continental European pagan festival celebrating the goddess Walburg, which was the old Teutonic name for the Earth Mother. It was later corrupted by the Christian Church into a festival dedicated to the mythical Saint Walburga. 

Walpurgisnacht is also known as Hexennacht, which translates as Witches’ Night. It’s a night of magic and witchcraft. In the tale of Faust, on April 30th, the protagonist travels to a gathering of witches and demons on Brocken Mountain. The classic view of Hexennacht as a night of dark magick is beautifully animated in Disney’s Fantasia.

 

In the past, I’ve referred to the April 30th festival as Walpurgisnacht. However, I’ve decided to start calling it by its alternative name, Hexennacht. The name Walpurgisnacht has been co-opted by Christians with an anti-pagan/ anti-magic bias. Whereas the name Hexennacht is fitting for a festival celebrating magick and witches.

Happy Hexennacht!

Local Habitation

This is the final installment of a series of posts on how modern Neopaganism is truly the ‘Old Religion’ because it contains similar tropes and beliefs as the oldest recorded Indo-European religion, in this case, Mesopotamian, which far predates Abrahamic monotheism.

For the Mesopotamians, the characteristics that I’ve written about (Immanence, Name and Form, Intransitiveness, Festivals, Polytheism, and Magick) come together in what Thorkild Jacobson, author of The Treasures of Darkness, terms ‘local habitation.’

For the Mesopotamians, local habitation took on several forms. It included cult drama rituals such as the New Year’s Akitu festival and the Sacred Marriage rite. Magico-religious art such as the Ishtar Vase illustrates the goddess Ishtar surrounded by animals. The Mesopotamians believed in the creative power of words, including poetry, hymns of praise, lamentations, and incantations. Finally, temples provided literal habitation for deities in Mesopotamia. The most dramatic being the giant ziggurats at the heart of each city-state meant to provide a home for the gods.

Ishtar Vase

Neopagans share the practice of local habitation, even though the details are reimagined. We use rituals, magico-religious art, the creative power of words in poetry, praise, and incantations. While we lack temple structures, we build altars for both magick and to bring down the gods to dwell among us.  

I hope this series of blog posts has shown the crucial similarities between Neopaganism and the beliefs of the world’s oldest recorded civilization. The phrase ‘Old Religion’ does not mean a direct and unbroken line of continuation between the Paganism of the ancient world and the Neopaganism of today, as some claim. Neopaganism is the old religion because it shares the tropes and characteristics of humanity’s earliest recorded faith.

Magick

This is another installment of a series of posts on how modern Neopaganism is the ‘Old Religion’ because it contains similar tropes and beliefs as the oldest recorded Indo-European religion, in this case, Mesopotamian, which far predates Abrahamic monotheism.

The belief that humans can influence fate or probability through the force of will (i.e., magick) is found in most Neopagan traditions. The practice of magick may be Neopaganism’s second most distinctive feature after polytheism. Mountains of Neopagan books exist on how to perform magick.

 

The Mesopotamians didn’t believe in a separation between the natural and the supernatural. They believed that gods, demons, ghosts, and monsters lived among us, even if they could not be seen. Not only were supernatural beings everywhere, but they were also constantly interacting with people and the rest of the world in good and bad ways. Whether it was a good or bad occurrence, there was most likely a spirit at work behind it. 

To Mesopotamians, the spirit world was complicated. Unlike how we in the contemporary West view gods and demons, they didn’t see gods as always good and demons as always bad. A god could be benevolent or evil. The same was true for demons because there were both good and evil. There were even demonic gods. Because of this, if something terrible happened, it often wasn’t easy to determine the source.

With this belief system, magick was seen by Mesopotamians as essential for survival. A magick user, known in Akkadian as an āšipu or mašmaššu, would first try to determine the source of suffering. Was it due to a god, demon, ghost, or something else? Once determined, the magick user had numerous tools in their toolbox. Divination, incense, talismans, purification, sacrifice, magick circles, and more would have been used as deemed by the magick user.  

Most Neopagans don’t share the Mesopotamian belief that everything, good or bad, is the product of supernatural beings. However, our practice of magick is similar to the Mesopotamian in many ways. We even use modern variants of the same tools in our magick practices. 

Neopaganism is truly the old religion.  

Polytheism

This is another installment of a series of posts on how modern Neopaganism is truly the ‘Old Religion’ because it contains similar tropes and beliefs as the oldest recorded Indo-European religion, in this case, Mesopotamian, which far predates Abrahamic monotheism.

Polytheism, a belief in multiple gods, is a definitive feature of Neopaganism. This is true whether it’s soft polytheism in which there are two deities (a God and a Goddess who manifest as numerous avatars) or hard polytheism in which there are many gods, each with their own agency. Both forms of polytheism are found in Neopaganism.

 

The Mesopotamians were also polytheists. According to Thorkild Jacobson, author of The Treasures of Darkness, Mesopotamian polytheism was closely tied to their belief in ‘intransitiveness.’ As mentioned in a previous post, intransitiveness means that a deity is located within a phenomenon and only within that phenomenon. Intransitiveness would require that each phenomenon must have its own deity. Numerous phenomena require numerous gods. For example, if there is a god or goddess of rain and only rain, one would need a different god or goddess for something else, such as sunshine. Here’s an excellent list of Mesopotamian gods and goddesses. 

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Neopaganism is the Old Religion.