I can't predict every angle that someone would be coming at paganism from but one that commonly arises is borne from an identity crisis. For whatever reason the monotheistic religion is unrelatable and there's a void. Christianity feels like a foreign religion and when you stop to think about where it comes from, it is indeed from a strange land that makes no sense.
I remember when I used to imagine what Europe would have been like if paganism had not been erased. I used to loathe all Abrahamic religions, thinking they were all each as bacteriological and virulent as each other. I was bitter about how they have histories and holy books we will never have; their churches are built on pagan holy sites we will never see, where ancients practiced some religion the details of which we will never know. A part of who we are is replaced by a desert parasite; this is how I felt as well.
This is especially irksome if you're more fond of the traditions of northern Europe which are more lost than the Greek and Roman ways. And if you're English, you have even more room to be jealous, because almost everything you know about your ancestors is inferred from what Catholic monks wrote hundreds of years after the pagans were all replaced. Not only that but the best details we have come from relatively nearby countries like Iceland. In England, it's as if we intentionally went out of our way to bury who we used to be.
We turn to authors like Tolkien to read fantastic mythologies in place of being able to study the actual ones our people might have had. This leads many to normalize using their imaginations to fill up the empty space. And some decide to go a step further with it, pretending that they honor their ancestors by engaging in made up traditions that never existed.
The trouble I always had with neopagans is that they prefer to obscure the truth with fantasy. Because, though there are many things we can't know, there are yet things we still can. But it's more difficult to celebrate and love the history when the majority of people would prefer to pretend that Dungeons and Dragons is real than to be honest with themselves.
Neopagans have nothing in common with their ancestors whatsoever. Their ancestors were a superstitious lot just trying to get through the seasons; they had kings who were sometimes practical people. Meanwhile, neopagans are bored live action roleplayers. It is impossible to truly give the ancients respect until we admit this. We can't correctly reconstruct their traditions and even if we could, we wouldn't be able to relate to them at all. They would not relate at all with us.
It is sad to think how many things were lost to time. But conversion to Christianity in Europe was not a single event or a uniform decision. It unfolded over centuries through a combination of political leadership, social change, missionary activity, and, at times, coercion. But the peoples of Europe did not simply disappear under Christianity. They changed within it. Practices, customs, and social structures were carried forward, adapted, and reinterpreted.
For many hundreds of years, pagans and Christians lived along side each other and influenced each other. Catholicism did not erase our ancestors. Our ancestors became Catholic.
"Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land..."
To know the ancients, one must study them, not imitate them.
Let us be scholars then and not mystics. There is no need to throw out our mythology books and topple our statues due to their pagan origins. Let's look at some Catholic scholars and manuscripts that were probably maintained by Catholic monks who helped us preserve our history.
- Codex Regius: "Icelandic codex in which many Old Norse poems from the Poetic Edda."
- Poetic Edda: "Minstrel poems, passed orally from singer to singer and from poet to poet for centuries." We don't know who took it upon themselves to write this all down, but...
- It must have come from someone who was literate,
- Trained in manuscript production,
- And very likely part of a Christian scribal culture.
- Primary source
- Prose Edda: "written in Iceland during the early 13th century. The work is often considered to have been to some extent written, or at least compiled, by the Icelandic scholar, lawspeaker, and historian Snorri Sturluson c. 1220."
- For many years, it was considered "the fullest and most detailed source for modern knowledge of Norse mythology."
- These days it's more popular to admit it's a valuable secondary source
We must be truly grateful to the Icelandic people who were much better at preserving this kind of thing than we were. The best the English people have is Bede, which is more interesting once you're ready for a full dosage of the Catholic pill.
There are also modern creators on YouTube that study Old Norse professionally like Jackson Crawford, who isn't Christian to my knowledge but continues the tradition of enjoying and celebrating the art, literature, and history in an academic way, which is very useful and the correct way to do it. He has published translations and audiobooks for the Poetic Edda that I recommend.
Once you see how much more interesting these subjects become when you treat them respectfully and with dignity, the natural progression is to move away from listening to neopagan charlatan gurus who pull everything they have to say about ancient pagans from their asses.