The pagan muse: Its influence in Western culture. Embodying and transmitting ancient wisdom from the Middle Ages through the early twentieth century.

摘要

This dissertation focuses on the arts and philosophy and, to a much lesser extent, political activism as vessels and agents of culture, embodying and transmitting ancient, pagan wisdom to inhabitants of an increasingly Christianized West.;It stresses the great debt the West owes to its non-Christian spiritual origins and demonstrates that Christianized Western culture has never depended solely upon the personae, narratives, or symbols of Christianity for its arts or philosophies; that, in the absence of the West's pagan influence, works including folk tales and ballads, many of the paintings of Botticelli and other Renaissance artists, the philosophies of Ficino, Bruno, and Nietzsche, the poetry of Shelley and Yeats, the dance of Isadora Duncan, and many other works would cease to exist, would never have manifested.;By demonstrating numerous incidences of in-depth knowledge of pagan traditions and even of pagan belief among alleged Christians and others living in Christianized Europe (and to a much lesser extent, in Christianized America), it also questions the supposition that most works deploying pagan figures, narratives, symbols, and so on do so mainly from a notion of ornamentation and/or a nod to the imaginative (as opposed to the "truthful") dimension of human experience. Further, it suggests that pagan imagery, rites, etc., may have served as a kind of counterdiscourse to that of the Church.;Certain common themes emerging from the pagan worldview are repeatedly expressed in Western arts and philosophy, including: the reverence of deities and spirits; the veneration of Nature; the multidimensionality of reality; and diverse forms of sacred communication including divination, magic, and the creation of sacred arts.;More broadly speaking, this dissertation suggests that the hegemonic narrative of Western cultural history, which basically leads from Plato to Christianity to the evolution of scientific thought and the Industrial Revolution, is only one way of viewing or reading the cultural history of the West.