It's eternally baffling to me that people will accept 'Christians purposefully adapted pagan customs in order to convert pagans more easily' over 'converted peoples adapted their own customs into their new religious framework themselves, so that they could keep on doing them'.
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I mean, which is more likely? Priests going through an exhaustive checklist and trying again and again to make it stick, or a voluntary, people-driven organic process with clear benefits for the practitioners?
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*casts a wary eye at the calendar* soooon
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Out of an incoming priestly caste and an entrenched local formerly pagan caste, which is in a better position to actually KNOW the customs and entities in all their regional colour and complexity, and thus to adapt them?
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Just look at the frigging Aecerbot. It's a hasty, not entirely convincing Anglo-Saxon find-and-replace job. Converted to Christianity, but still need to bless your fields? Just swap out the names of the old Gods for the new and you're good to go, mate.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86cerbot …
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Not claiming that local deities and customs were never co-opted from the top down, of course. But... if 'adapt their local customs and practices to a Christian framework' really was the general overarching directive people think, you might expect more documentary evidence for it.
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We've got Gregory's letter to Mellitus, recommending that pagan places of worship be repurposed - and that's interesting on two counts. One, it's just the *buildings* he proposes reusing. And two - the fact that he had to recommend it means it couldn't have been general practice.
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The policy of repurposing pagan temples was what Gregory had 'upon mature deliberation of the affair of the English, determined upon'. IoW, it was a carefully thought-out approach for this particular case, not standard operational procedure (as it has since been taken to be).
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Honestly it was probably both, to varying degrees.
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