Avatar - Pagan, Neo-Pagan or Something Else?
Recently, criticisms of the film Avatar (2010) have claimed it is a pagan film and therefore a threat to Christianity. I liked this film, so I looked up the word ‘pagan’ to find out what makes it so terrible.
From what I read the word pagan comes from the Latin word Pagus which some sources say was a part of the town where non-Romans lived, i.e. outside the vicus. Other sources say it was a Roman administrative area e.g. in France the town of Vichy was in a vicus. Both meanings are probably correct, denoting the areas of a Roman state where non-Romans lived. So the word pagan generally meant ‘non-Roman’.
Under Emperor Constantine the Romans became Christians around 320 AD, and laws were passed against most Pagan worship. So Pagans became non-Christians rather than non-Romans. Ironically, Christianity came to Britain long before the Romans were converted under Constantine, so British pagans were once Christians and their Roman masters were pagans!
In England it was the people of the pagus who were left behind when the Romans withdrew finally in 410 AD, leaving them without armies to protect them from invaders like the Picts. When the Angles, Saxons and Jutes invaded in the fifth century they were pushed back to Wales and Cornall, massacred or used as slaves. So the pagans in England were the non-Anglo-Saxons, and initially they were Christians and the Anglo-Saxons were barbarians.
As the aggressive Christian religion made progress across Europe pagan gods and goddesses, holy places and holidays were absorbed into the Christian Church giving us Christmas and Easter and saints like St. Brigid. But there were some good reasons for the Church to dislike paganism. Germanic religions in particular practiced human sacrifice, and there is evidence that Celtic pagans also did.
What else did Pagans Believe?
Pagans generally worshipped gods and goddesses who represented the natural world. Gods and goddesses often represented the sun and moon, there were female fertility goddesses representing various grains, and there were also spirits of trees, rocks and water. Life forces were externalised into recognisable characters who would help bring Spring after Winter and make the crops grow.
People also believed in underworlds and afterlives of different types where spirits lived on. The way to get to the afterlife was usually being a good warrior rather than being a good person.
Celts had priests known as Druids and worshipped in tree groves as well as in larger Temples. There are stone circles in Britain and France about which little is known but which were built on an astronomical basis, focussing on various stars.
Most of these beliefs are similar to Christianity where deities (God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit) are external figures who can help us, if we believe in them. There is a Heaven and a Hell where the dead live on, depending on how they lived their lives. Saints aren’t as encouraged as they used to be, with Mary McKillop the latest exception. Worship is conducted in purpose built places, Churches, Cathedrals, auditoriums etc.
Is Avatar pagan?
Avatar presents a planet where everything is connected, although humanoid connections can be made and broken by interconnecting humanoid strands of hair with plants or with animal hair.
There are sacred places where spiritual life is intense and meetings take place. All life on the planet flows from one central place which is kept sacred (apart) and huge trees that sustain life are also sacred , (although the fact that they could grow old and die is not examined). Life is the most precious thing on the planet. When humanoids need to kill to live, they kill cleanly, with respect, and thank the dead. Nothing is killed for killings sake.
There is goddess called Eywa who equates to our concept of Gaia. She is not seen in the form of a floating, diaphanous goddess, or anything else. Some people may have become confused by a few similarities to Fern Gully where fairies were protecting the forest. But that was meant as a children’s story, even though it had an environmental message.
After death everything is re-absorbed by the planet to be recycled. Some people think this is reincarnation, which involves the soul of a dead person moving into a new person to try again. Avatar has more the idea shown in Dune where you return your water to the tribe after you die. It’s not the same concept as reincarnation.
This isn’t really paganism, if you accept Eywa as the energy of the planet Pandora.
I’ve heard people say Avatar is neo-pagan.
This modern religion follows the writings of Carl Jung and Robert Graves. It focuses on reviving ancient pagan rituals and is related to witch-craft and ritual magic. It differs from paganism by being contemplative and celebratory instead of being worried about farming and warriors being brave. It’s not related to Avatar.
What about Occultism?
Occult traditions are about witches and warlocks summoning satan at meetings which often involve nasty sexual practices. If anyone sees the transfer of consciousness from a human to an avatar as summoning satan, they’ve got a problem.
So where do Avatar’s ideas come from?
In 1979 a scientist called James Lovelock published a book called Gaia: A new Look at Life on Earth. He believed everything on Earth is interconnected and human activity needed to be looked at on a Global basis, not a local one. He also believed that the planet is a living entity that can control itself i.e. is self-regulating. Lovelock is still writing, and there have been Gaia conferences in 1988 and 200. The Gaia hypothesis is accepted in ecology as a simplified version of the biosphere and biodiversity. It seems it took a long time for Gaia to be taken seriously because the language Lovelock used wasn’t technical enough for scientists.
There are other philosophical movements focussed on the environment, such as Deep Ecology which was begun in 1973 by Arne Naess. This philosophy places equal value on human and non-human life, and relies on the science of Ecology as well as philosophy. The idea that everything is connected to everything else was ‘rediscovered’ in the book Deep Ecology in 1985 by Bill Devall and George Sessions. Deep Ecology forms the basis of environmentalism, with the belief that we have to act to save ourselves and the planet.
Deep Ecology and Lovelock’s ideas were taken up by science fiction writers like Ursula LeGuin in The Word for World is Forest; David Brin (Earth); Orson Scott Card and Kathryn H Kidd (Lovelock) and Frank Herbert (Dune). Dune has captured film-makers imagination twice so far, possibly because it doesn’t flog the idea that the planet is a whole system, but focuses on the water problem. Later books by Herbert where the greening of Dune fails, have not been filmed. In animation, the makers of Final Fantasy have incorporated ideas about Gaia into the film and the game Final Fantasy VII and SimEarth was inspired by Lovelock. You could also say that Tolkien’s work predates but represents Deep Ecology. The Lord of the Rings is pro-Hobbiton, a rural area where the hobbits live in balance with their environment, and anti-Mordor with its mine pits and fires destroying the landscape. There have been no problems with anyone embracing Tolkien, Dune or Final Fantasy .
It looks like Avatar is promoting Deep Ecology. Some people have written that it promotes New Age philosophy, but I didn’t see any crystals or hear the Universe mentioned.
So why the hostility to this film?
The complaints about Avatar are often based on the fact that it is not Christian. People have picked up the word ‘pagan’ and attached it to the film, including all the trappings of paganism such as witch-craft and magic. Christians insist it insults them. If Avatar is really promoting Deep Ecology there may be reasons for their feelings:
Deep Ecology relies on science which many Christians dislike, as seen in the unreasoning hatred of Evolution.
There is no ‘God’ as such in this film. The nearest thing is the goddess Eywa, the spirit of the planet. Christians believe in a male god who made everything and looks after it. The old male/female conflict in religion is back.
The Old Testament gave humans custody of the planet. It must be disturbing to see what a bad job we’ve made of looking after the place and its animals. Avatar relentlessly shows humans as rapacious, non-spiritual beings who think nothing of destroying a whole living ecology for their own profit. We’re not pretty in this film, or good. The film brings to mind what has happened to the North American Indians, the Australian Aboriginals, the New Zealand Maori etc even though it doesn’t ask for guilt, it demands we don’t do these things again. Recently we bombed the Moon, just to check if it had ice at the south pole. There must have been another way to find out, but the simplest way was to bomb it. Someone should have played The Time Machine sequences of the Moon crashing to Earth to those scientists.
Christians probably should be insulted by this film, it should make them sit down and look at their behaviour, and how it affects our planet. Avatar is a wake-up call to a religion that says you don’t have to do anything except believe, to be saved. If God gave humans control of the planet then humans have a God- given duty to protect it, not destroy it in the name of ‘Progress’. We have to act to keep the Earth alive and beautiful and fertile, and that’s not pagan, it’s common sense.
