Christianisation as Trauma 87 I Overshadowed by crisis – Slavic religion and national identity in the 19th century The ethnographer, historian and archaeologist Adam Czarnocki, who wrote under the pseudonym “Zorian Dołęga-Chodakowski”, is regarded as the first person to advocate for a return to a pre-Christian Slavic religion in Poland. Influenced by Herder’s concept of the Volksgeist, or “spirit of the people”, and weighed down by the destruction of Poland’s aristocratic republic by the major powers of Russia, Prussia and Austria, he came to the conclusion that Christianity was to blame for his country’s downfall.12 In texts such as O Sławiańszczyźnie przed chrześcijaństwem (“On the Slavs Before Christianity”), he expressed the hope of being able to find remnants of the old religion in peasant traditions and lore. Chodakowski is said to have described himself as a Pagan.13 The messages proclaimed by Herder and Chodakowski were received loud and clear by Bronisław Ferdynand Trentowski, who set about forging a national philosophy for the Polish people.14 He advocated a pantheistic concept that saw nature as the divine being at the moment of its material existence or, put another way, God in His eternal and time-bound corporeality.15 In his work Wiara Słowiańska, czyli etyka piastująca wszechświat (“The Slavic Faith, or the Ethics That Govern the Universe”), he argued for the reconstruction of the Slavic religion based on philosophy.16 He believed that faith was the most important spiritual foundation for a community,17 that abandoning the old religion had led Poland effectively to dissolve itself and that Christianisation had resulted in Asia triumphing over Poland and spreading the spirit of slavery.18 The historian Joachim Lelewel, an active supporter of Congress Poland on the left wing of the Sejm, was likewise influenced by Chodakowski and developed the idea of gminowładztwo, an early Slavic form of democracy.19 Robbed of a country of their own, artists and intellectuals hunting for symbols, motifs and narratives that would create meaning and identity turned instead to the traces of the region’s pre-Christian past, which was transformed into a kind of Slavic Arcadia during the Romantic era.20 Anti-Catholic nationalism in the 20th century – the Zadruga ideology After Poland was re-established in the wake of the First World War, the first groups formed that were actively seeking to resurrect pre-Christian religious beliefs and systems of values. One of the key figures in these groups was the aforementioned Jan Stachniuk, who turned away from Catholic nationalism in the 1920s. With the Zadruga ideology,21 he developed a worldview that combined a radical belief in progress with a vitalist and heroic philosophy.22 He married the ideas propounded by Chodakowski, Trentowski and Lelewel with Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch. However, he was also influenced by Max Weber’s theories of Protestantism and capitalism. He denounced Catholicism as an “unculture” (wspakultura in Polish), which he said had made the Slavs passive, lazy and too focused on the life of the world to come. He wanted a new Polish human being who would re-embrace the warrior ethic of their preChristian ancestors. Religion and rituals held no interest for him. Instead, he called for Poland to modernise rapidly with centralist measures driven by a planned economy.23 He may not have made any explicitly antisemitic remarks himself, but some of his followers did. Although he did not believe that the world’s peoples were created unequal, he did not want them to mix. He called for eugenic measures to preserve the purity of the people, saying that “biology is the stem on which the flower of culture is to be grown.”24 He referred to himself as a nationalist.25 Stachniuk’s legacy – Rodzima Wiara and the Fundacja na rzecz Kultury Słowiańskiej “Watra” The fall of communism in the early 1990s enabled Slavic Neopagan movements to grow freely in Eastern Europe.26 One such group, Rodzima Wiara (“Native Faith”), was formed in 1996 under the name “Zrzeszenie Rodzimej Wiary” before being renamed four years later. The group places itself firmly in the tradition of the teachings espoused by Chodakowski, Trentowski and, in par-
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTMyNjA1