What we call paganism or “neopaganism” is not what was celebrated in ancient times.
Paganism involved animal human sacrifices, especially child sacrifices — and not for wanton cruelty but deeply embedded into their theological systems.
Aztecs and Mayan are the most recent and well known, but even the old Norse rituals were horrendous, see the Uppsala Temple Sacrifices, or Blot, or the funerary rituals involving rape, torture and execution of a sex slave, or the infamous“blood eagle” executions.
These kind of human and animal sacrifices (often mixed together, and often with an element of perverse sexuality, such as rape before execution) are surprisingly common in pre-Christian “pagan” traditions.
It was often labeled “satanic” because “satan” just means “adversary” or sometimes “accuser” depending on the context.
And while most ancient religions were folk or indigenous to a specific place and people (a local deity), the big pagan religions we know of (Greek, Norse, Roman, etc) were universal and had syncretic means to incorporate other religions/deities.
Most famously the Romans would put every god of every conquered city in their pantheon and give them Latin names. They would sacrifice to these deities of conquered people. The Hebrews and their “one God” being the most famous exception (which proved intolerable to the Romans).
The early Christians were actually called “atheists” by the pagans for refusing to acknowledge the pagan gods as gods, and the early Christians (mostly Jewish Christians) saw these “gods” as created spirits, usually fallen, unclean spirits, demons.
“Demon” didn’t have a negative connotation amongst the pagans (see Socrates’ daemon), the negative connotation came later, most likely as a direct consequence of the bloody pagan rituals themselves, which were adversarial to Christianity in those days.
Remember the Romans fed Christians to lions as entertainment, and made it a point to persecute them, executing them in humiliating ways (e.g., Peter was crucified upside down).
Much later, in our modern age, the secular view saw ALL of these religions as “spiritual” expressions where things like rationality and logic and truth are claimed to be supreme. Hence all religions are treated as a list of mythologies rather than worldviews people lived by.
Turns out, those concepts (logic, truth, and even beauty) are the fruits of Christendom. No ancient pagan culture understood “truth” as an attribute, e.g., “Veritas” (Latin for “truth”) was a pagan goddess, same with Aletheia (Greek for “truth”).
Truth in the ancient world was not an attribute, not a what, but a who — truth was a person, a deity. The Christians understood that Truth was Christ (the way, the life, and the truth).
And nowadays, as the fruits of secularism die off, as people question whether truth even exists, maybe it’s all subjective, maybe it’s all “will to power”, maybe we’re in a simulation — you’re witnessing a return to the ancient worldviews, including the barbarism and ugliness that became associated with “Satan” in the first place.
Think about this as you’re plugging in to the chaos of modern life. The pagans used to say that we are the playthings of the gods. Christians simply claimed those “gods” were demons, and they offered a way to truth, and not to be a plaything of demons.
And now in a world removed from Christianity (in the Nietzschean sense) we get to rediscover what it’s like to be a plaything of arbitrary “gods” (principalities and powers).
All of this, to a large extent, is why people are looking at ancient religions in the first place, including ancient Christianity (which has answers to these questions of truth and meaning) and rejecting modern secular Christianity or the lifeless new-atheism in favor of some kind of spiritually that can explain actual life experiences. It’s why neopaganism is a thing or why occult practices are popular, people are seeking, and those seeking *truth* inevitably find their way to Christ (not the antichrist of secular Christianity).
