Hindus and Pagans: Is There Common Ground?

Hindus and Pagans: Is There Common Ground?

How should Hindus respond to the West's burgeoning Pagan movement? A Belgian scholar preaches caution.

Pagan literature of the Celts and also of the Germanic peoples shows a lot of celebration of life, of courage and passion, and some insightful meditations on the mysteries of life and death, but nothing like a Yogic tradition.

Neopagans who understand that something is missing make up for it by borrowing heavily from the living traditions of Asia. Thus, neo-Druids such as the "Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids" have imported a lot of Hindu-Buddhist lore into their curriculum as a substitute for the unknown and irretrievable doctrines which the ancient Druids must have taught. To some extent, this is historically justified because European and Asian Pagan traditions did have certain doctrines in common. For example, the belief in reincarnation is well-attested by Greco-Roman observers of the Druidic tradition, in Virgil's Aeneid and other European Pagan sources.

So, either way, neo-Pagans trying to supply the innermost teachings to a tradition of which folklore and scanty surviving texts have only preserved a skeleton, have no choice but to look to surviving traditions like Hinduism.

Hindus should welcome the revival of the pre-Christian religions of the West, often cognate religions through the common Indo-European origins, otherwise at least typologically related religions which are not based on a monopolistic prophet or scripture. At the same time, they should be watchful for impure motives and degenerative trends, or for phenomena which may be acceptable in a multicultural framework but with which they need not involve themselves. The ancestral religions of Europe are at present in a formative stage, a stage of groping in the dark, of gradual rediscovery or self-reconstitution. At this stage they attract people with a variety of motives and divergent levels of knowledge and understanding. Still immature, these religions often look to Hinduism for guidance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neopaganism
http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Hinduism/2002/02/Hindus-And-Pagans-Is-There-Common-Ground.aspx?p=2