Paganism is alive and well – but you won’t find it at a Goddess Temple

The first pagan temple to be built in Iceland for a thousand years has just been granted planning permission, a wonderful bureaucratic detail that shows up just how much this revival is polite make-believe. Ragnar Hairybreeks or Harald Bluetooth would not seek planning permission before building a place of sacrifice. At Gamla Uppsala, the Viking temple site in Sweden, horses were hanged to please the gods in groups of nine from trees, along with cattle, sheep, and human beings. In Reykjavik today’s pagans still eat sacred horsemeat at their feasts, but they buy it in from caterers.

Respectable modern paganism is not only made up, as its leading ideologues cheerfully admit, but made up within a very limited compass of the modern Anglo-American imagination. The most obvious example is Wicca, invented almost entirely by a civil servant, Gerald Gardner, in the 1940s and 1950s, when he lived in Hampshire, although he claimed to have rediscovered a hidden tradition.