Ken Dowden - European Paganism (2000)

Ken Dowden - European Paganism. The Realities of Cult from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Routledge, 2000.

• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• How to use this book
• Authors and events: a time-chart
• Part. I: Approaching paganism
• Pagans, so primitive
• Christian ending
• Roman government
• Germanic invaders
• Beyond the Roman pale
• Beyond the Byzantine pale
• Evidence
• Latin and other languages
• Greek and Roman windows on barbarian culture
• Part. II: Dividing the landscape
• Location
• Focus and area
• Physical features (absolute position)
• Relative position
• Ownership: public and private
• Power
• The god in the stone?
• Strength in numbers: tree, stone, spring
• Part. III: Focus I: spring, lake, river
• Spring and well
• What a spring is
• Prevalence
• Purity and health
• What happens at springs and wells
• Saints, the conversion of the aniconic, and heads
• Other water
• Lake
• River
• Water worship
• Part. IV: Focus II: stone and tree
• Stone
• What a stone is
• Feelings about stones
• Personalising stones
• Stones and permanence
• Stone as the object of cult
• What happens at stones
• Tree
• What trees are like
• Personalising trees
• Notable trees
• What happens at trees
• Pagan tree and Christian objectors
• Part. V: Area I: land
• Hill and mountain
• What mountains are like
• Worship on mountains: lightning and fire
• Shore and island
• Sea: shore and promontory
• Islands
• Cave
• Part. VI: Area II: growth
• Meadow
• Grove
• What a grove is like
• Grove and temple-culture
• The feel of natural groves
• Grove and garden
• Groves and barbarians
• Groves and placenames
• The power of groves
• Ancient groves
• Inviolability
• On the Dusii demons…
• Divine ownership
• Inside the grove
• Part. VII: Technology: statues, shrines and temples
• Statues
• The place of statues
• Impressive statues and Christian destruction
• Temple, fanum, ecclesia
• What a temple is
• The shape of temples
• Contents and decoration
• Shrines, vocabulary and placenames
• Temples in less developed cultures
• Continuity
• Instances
• What are Christians to do with temples or fana?
• Destroy the fana!
• Build churches!
• Part. VIII: Christian paganism
• Christian knowledge
• Textuality: coming down from Sinai
• Specificity
• What pagans do
• Eating and drinking
• Dance
• Particular customs
• New Year’s Day
• Thursday
• The moon
• Laurel
• Catechism: renouncing what?
• Part. IX: Pagan rite
• Sacrifice
• Why sacrifice?
• What to sacrifice
• The action of sacrifice
• Beyond Sacrifice
• Non-sacrificial offerings
• How to offer things that aren’t alive
• Dance and song
• Human sacrifice
• Human sacrifice is ‘only’ execution?
• Battle and hanging
• Divination and other reasons
• Manipulation of place
• Procession
• Pilgrimage
• Part. X: Pagan time
• Time-reckoning
• Lunar months
• Intercalation and periods of several years
• Weeks
• Calendar and festival
• A Gaulish calendar
• Duration of festivals
• An English calendar
• Equinoxes and other times
• The Calendar of Erchia
• Part. XI: A few aspects of Gods
• Christian contrasts
• Pagan plurality
• Do the pagan Gods exist?
• Divine functions
• Sets of gods
• Lightning
• Part. XII: Priests
• The need for priests
• What a priest is
• Priestly specialism, development of the state
• Religion in the home, without professionals
• Priests and government
• King-priests
• Kings and priests
• Oligarchy in Gaul—‘no sacrifice without a philosopher’
• Oligarchy at Rome
• Temple priests, grove priests
• Greece
• Germans
• Gauls
• Divination
• Priests and ritual: a common Indo-European inheritance?
• The role of women
• Conclusions
• Part. XIII: Cradle to grave
• Cradle
• Transitions
• Illness and crisis
• Grave
• Normal people
• Grand burial
• Mounds to marvel at
• Part. XIV: Unity is the Thing
• Gaul: centrality of the shrine
• The Germanic Thing
• Groves and assemblies
• Periodicity and leagues
• Human sacrifice and beginnings
• The beginning of the world
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Abbreviations
• Primary literature: general information and where to find a text and translation
• Secondary literature
• Indexes
• Index locorum—passages cited or reported
• Index nominum I—Gods, mythic entities and festivals
• Index nominum II—(real) persons, peoples and places
• Index rerum—topics and themes
• Index auctorum—modern authors

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