While hanging out in the Riverside District, Lilavati and Iimi came across some Neo-pagans from Babylon in the process of handing out flyers for one of their festivals and hoping to form alliances among the non-Christians of the town. Will they succeed? Or will Iimi wind up … Throwing a Lugh-Wrench into the Works
Pre-Comic Notes:
Apparently,
some neo-pagans do see animist and polytheist religions as “like them.” These
religions do not reciprocate that view. Lilavati’s hostile attitudes towards
neo-paganism and coolness towards Christianity have been expressed by real
Hindus.
Post-Comic Notes:
Credits: The old book cover overlay on the title page by Figu-Design.
The
name “Lugh” in the title pun
is a Celtic deity combined with “Lug wrench” (used to change a tire). Okay, it’s
a stupid pun meant to show Iimi has thrown a wrench into the neo-pagan
worldview.
While “Lughnasadh” is an official Irish holiday, it’s also been repurposed as one of the neo-pagan festivals that practitioners celebrate in their attempts to reenact historic druidic beliefs.
In fact, very little is known about historic paganism’s actual beliefs and practices (Celtic, Norse Hellenic, etc.). For example, the historical druids passed down their rites and knowledge orally. So, when the Celts abandoned Druidism for Christianity, the converts who held that knowledge stopped passing it on, and converts who might have otherwise sought to become bards, ollaves, and druids stopped seeking to learn it.
The movement to recreate these religions began with the Enlightenment and the 19th-century Romantic movement. Much of it was born in the 1960s, though followers claim they are "ancient." Claims to be passing on "ancient wisdom" are risible as it is based on imagination reinterpreting old legends, folk practices, and the Catholic monks who wrote histories and copied the ancient written works… while labeling anything in those works that contradict them as "corruption."
Some argue Insular Christianity did turn pagan myths and festivals into legends about the saints. But this is disputed, and the Catholic Church did seek to remove the actual cases of syncretism. Yes, there are legends associated with the saints. But the saints are not celebrated on account of these myths, but for the holy lives, they led.
The agathodaimon (sometimes spelled agathodæmon) invoked by Coach Ally comes from the Greek ἀγαθοδαίμων: the word means “noble spirit”) that was believed to bring about material success. Coach Ally invoking it is a misattribution (a common phenomenon among practitioners of these reinvented religions). It sounds more “mysterious” than “daimon.”
The daimon (δαίμων), in general, was seen as a “companion spirit” or supernatural instinct that guided the individual to good or to evil. In the reinvention of “Hellenism,” this became distorted into a sort of “spirit guide.” (There’s a lot of appropriation of the Native American “spirit animals.")
Of course, Christians should NOT dabble in any of this, even for “fun.” As Iimi pointed out, people seeking to be guided by “daimons” may wind up under the influence of actual demons.
