18/03/2014
not about Astarte, but this quote deals with some issues among Neopagans and historical paganism
"Modern ‘pagans’ are naturally convinced that there is a continuity between ancient pagans and themselves, something which I doubt but am not particularly concerned to dispute. Nor am I qualified to analyse spiritual conditions in late twentieth/early twenty-first-century liberal Europe. One cannot fail, however, to notice a problem of deracination and of disgust with certain aspects of the development of material culture and with established institutions that find it so hard to recognise sea-changes. Thus ‘ecology’, ‘environment’ and ‘green’ have become first buzzwords, then commonplace; and above all urban dwellers have increasingly felt a deep sympathy with the unpolluted landscape and its ‘endangered’ creatures. A special place is held in this recovery of a Golden Age by the term ‘Celtic’, a vector to the quasi-primeval inhabitants of the land (so very ‘old’), their ancient songs and strange myths, and their mysterious magical powers in a revered landscape. This is a modern mythology, and like all myths works so well because it is not true."
EUROPEAN PAGANISM
The realities of cult from antiquity to the Middle Ages
Ken Dowden
published 2000 by Routledge
