The Pagan–Christian Divide in Modern Occultism: Bias, Syncretism, and the Myth of Tolerance
“Christ, Hecate, Helios…..”
Abstract
This essay examines the pervasive bias in modern occultism that frames magick in terms of a dichotomy between “pagan” and “Christian” elements, and the frequent misuse of sources that sustains this divide. While influential figures such as Jake Stratton Kent have advocated removing Christian and Jewish material to restore a supposedly purer pagan current, the historical record does not support this reconstruction. The earliest large-scale magical texts are profoundly syncretic, blending Egyptian, Greek, Jewish, and early Christian influences.¹ Likewise, the medieval grimoires, including the Grimorium Verum and Key of Solomon, are deeply shaped by biblical psalms, divine names, and liturgical structures, with recent scholarship highlighting their Jewish and rabbinic origins.²
This bias is sustained not only by flawed methods but by unexamined attitudes: the romantic whitewashing of pagan history and the tendency to cast the Christian God as cruel while valorizing pagan deities as nurturing, even though both traditions demand ordeals of their followers.³ These perspectives encourage practitioners to see Christian elements as corruptions to be peeled away, rather than as integral features of magick’s historical development.
Ultimately, the essay argues that magick has always been evolving, syncretic, and adaptive. We cannot really know what existed before the grimoires, and to discard everything post-grimoire (i.e. energy models, psychological models, Golden Dawn, Thelema, etc.) as compromised is to misunderstand both history and practice. Wicca and Chaos Magick, for example, are effective precisely because magick adapts to its time.⁴ By examining the misuse of sources, the role of bias, and the reality of magick’s continual evolution, this essay calls for embracing its full heritage rather than erasing its Christian and Jewish dimensions.
Introduction: Naming the Bias
In recent years, a trend has emerged within the Western occult revival: the rejection of Christian and Jewish elements in favor of a reconstructed “pagan” current that supposedly represents the true lineage of magick. Figures such as Jake Stratton Kent have become emblematic of this movement, arguing for the removal of Christianized forms from grimoires in order to restore an imagined continuity with ancient pagan sorcery.¹ Yet this effort reveals less about the past and more about present attitudes. It is a product of modern bias, shaped not only by the wounds many practitioners carry from Christian upbringings but also by the romantic whitewashing of pagan antiquity and the tendency to depict the Christian God as cruel or unloving in contrast to supposedly benevolent pagan gods.²
The problem with this framing is threefold. First, it is historically unsustainable. The earliest sources we possess—the Greek Magical Papyri and the medieval grimoires—are already profoundly syncretic, saturated with Jewish and Christian elements as well as pagan.³ Second, it rests on an assumption of purity: that beneath the Christianized manuscripts lies a pagan ur-text waiting to be reconstructed. This reflects what philologists once called a Lachmannian approach—the belief that a single, original version can be restored from later, “corrupted” witnesses.⁴ Third, it misunderstands the very nature of magick. Magick has never been static; it has always adapted to its cultural contexts, incorporating new languages, symbols, and cosmologies.
We cannot know what pre-grimoire systems looked like, and we do not need to. To discard Christian or Jewish elements as inauthentic is to misunderstand magick’s living, adaptive nature. It does not serve us to erase layers of tradition but to embrace them, recognizing that the workability of a system comes not from its antiquity but from magick’s continual power to evolve.
Syncretism at the Roots of Magick
Magick has never been purely pagan. The assumption that Christianized grimoires obscure a pagan ur-tradition is a bias, not supported by evidence. The textual record shows syncretism from the very beginning.
The earliest large-scale collection of ritual and magical texts to survive is the Greek Magical Papyri (PGM), dating from roughly the second century BCE to the fifth century CE. These papyri do not mark the beginning of magical practice—for Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Jewish sources attest spells, incantations, and apotropaic rites long before this—but they do provide the first systematic body of ritual instructions that resembles the later grimoire tradition.⁵ The PGM are replete with invocations of Helios alongside Hebrew divine names such as Iao and Sabaoth.⁶ In one spell, the magician invokes Hermes, Osiris, and Abraham in the same breath.⁷ Elsewhere, the practitioner calls upon the “Headless One,” a composite figure scholars link to Egyptian deities and Jewish angelology.
This pattern continued into the medieval period. The Key of Solomon, Ars Goetia, Heptameron, and Grimorium Verum all rely heavily on biblical psalms, angelic names, and liturgical invocations. The Key of Solomon in particular has long been claimed by some modern occultists as a neutral or “paganized” manual of ritual technology. In that reading, the Christian elements are seen as mere “window dressing,” while the underlying structure is imagined as a kind of pagan or universal magical technology. Jake Stratton Kent and others sympathetic to a “pagan revival” strand have leaned toward this interpretation: Christian or Jewish names are treated as later accretions obscuring an older, non-Christian core. Yet recent scholarship complicates this narrative. Gal Sofer’s Solomonic Magic: Methodology, Texts, and Histories (2025) demonstrates that the Clavicula Salomonis is profoundly shaped by Jewish textual culture, drawing on elements of the Babylonian Talmud and Ashkenazi traditions.⁸ Its ritual instructions parallel rabbinic models of purity, prayer, and angelic invocation, showing that the Key was not a pagan survival later glossed by Jews, but a Jewish ritual system transmitted into Christian Europe.⁹
The Grimorium Verum provides another telling example. Despite its reputation among modern occultists as a “diabolical” or even “anti-Christian” text, it too is thoroughly Christianized. Some interpreters within the pagan-revival strand have treated it as a kind of rebellious counter-grimoire, imagining that the invocations of God, Christ, and the Trinity were later intrusions onto what was originally a darker, more “pagan” or infernal magical current. Yet the text itself resists this reading. Its conjurations open with appeals to the Holy Trinity, its adjurations cite divine names such as Elohim, Adonai, Jesus, and AGLA, and the operator is required to prepare through fasting, confession, and prayer.¹⁰ Even when commanding infernal spirits, the authority invoked is explicitly derived from God and Christ. The scholarly consensus confirms this: David Rankine, Stephen Skinner, and Owen Davies all describe the Grimorium Verum as a Christian grimoire, despite its diabolical reputation.¹¹ Its “satanic” notoriety is more a matter of later occult branding than of manuscript content. No evidence exists in any textual witness that a non-Christian “core” underlies the work. The idea that such a core once existed is speculative and not supported by the surviving texts. It reflects a projection: the desire to recover a hidden, pre-Christian current that the manuscripts themselves simply do not reveal.
To suggest, therefore, that magicians could simply peel away Christian or Jewish elements and restore a pagan original is to deny the textual evidence. These traditions were never pure. Their strength lies precisely in their syncretic complexity and their capacity to adapt. No amount of “academic” gymnastics can make this so. Now let’s move beyond the textual evidence to explore how erroneous attitudes contribute to biased assumptions regarding text analysis and how texts are treated and used.
The Romantic Myth of Pagan Tolerance
The romanticized myth of pagan tolerance distorts how individuals evaluate both history and texts. It encourages readers to see sources that are predominantly Christian as obscured or tainted by their Christian elements, and therefore in need of reconstruction. This rests on the assumption that beneath the surviving texts lies an uncorrupted pagan original. Most practitioners would not consciously affirm such a claim, yet the very act of peeling back Christian layers presumes a lost archetype hidden underneath. This selective approach is not historical criticism but a projection of bias. It reflects unexamined attitudes more than evidence: the whitewashing of pagan history and the tendency to view the Christian God as uniquely cruel while casting pagan gods as nurturing.
History itself undermines this romanticized narrative. Pagan antiquity was far from a utopia of tolerance:
The Bacchanalian Affair (186 BCE): The Roman Senate violently suppressed the cult of Bacchus after accusations of immorality and sedition. Thousands were executed or imprisoned.¹²
Suppression of Foreign Rites: Augustus banned certain Egyptian rituals and limited access to astrologers. Other emperors periodically expelled magicians, oracles, and philosophers from Rome.¹³
Pagans vs. Pagans: Competing philosophical and religious schools often attacked one another. Neoplatonists criticized Epicureans as atheists; rival philosophers condemned theurgy as superstition.¹⁴
Magicians vs. Magicians: Practitioners themselves distinguished between licit ritual and illicit sorcery. Those accused of harmful pharmakeia were often punished with exile or death.¹⁵
Imperial Persecutions: Long before Christianity became dominant, Diocletian ordered the destruction of Manichaean scriptures and punished its practitioners as enemies of the state. Greek city-states likewise regulated mystery cults, sometimes banning or restricting access to foreigners.¹⁶
Far from tolerant, pagan antiquity was marked by suppression, rivalry, and persecution. The Roman state often treated new or “foreign” religions with suspicion, labeling them superstitio—a term that denoted dangerous excess rather than pious devotion. To modern eyes, this looks strikingly similar to later Christian accusations of heresy.
It is fine to prefer a pagan approach to magick—but it remains reconstructionist, not historical. We simply do not know what a system without Jewish and Christian elements would have looked like, and to suggest otherwise is to misuse the sources.
Workability vs. Historicity
Magick is an evolving art. Its workability does not prove historical pedigree.
Wicca, for example, is a twentietwh-century invention pioneered by Gerald Gardner, who combined elements of ceremonial magick, folk customs, Masonic ritual, and modern esotericism. Ronald Hutton has demonstrated convincingly that Wicca is not a survival of ancient paganism, but a modern construction.¹⁷ Yet it works for many practitioners, offering both mystical depth and practical efficacy.
Chaos Magick, even more radically, builds on the premise that belief itself is a tool. Peter Carroll’s Liber Null and Psychonaut made explicit that the efficacy of ritual depends not on historical continuity but on psychological and symbolic engagement.¹⁸ Chaos Magicians can invoke Mickey Mouse with results—though no one mistakes this for historical tradition.
Pragmatic success demonstrates that magick operates across frameworks based on technology. But it does not demonstrate that one framework is historically “truer” than another. It only demonstrates that the same techniques will work. When modern occultists insist that reconstructed pagan systems are superior because they “recover” a pre-Christian authenticity, they confuse effectiveness with history. Workability and adaptation are the very signs of magick’s vitality—not proof of hidden ancient origins.
Trials, Ordeals, and the Double Standard
Another bias lies in the interpretation of ordeal. Christian trials are often viewed as cruelty, while pagan trials are celebrated as initiation.
The story of Job is often cited: how could a loving God allow the Satan—an angelic adversary within the divine court—to inflict such loss?¹⁹ Yet the same practitioners will gladly accept hardship when it comes from Hecate, Saturn, or Dionysus. Pagan deities who demand ordeals are seen as strengthening their devotees; the Christian God who does the same is condemned as harsh.
The historical and experiential record shows that ordeal is universal. Mystery cult initiations involved symbolic death and rebirth.²⁰ Mithraic initiations subjected candidates to physical and psychological trials. Shamans across cultures undergo illness, dismemberment visions, or madness before assuming their role.²¹ Christian mystics spoke of the “dark night of the soul.”²² Across traditions, ordeal is not cruelty but pedagogy.
As a therapist, I observe the same pattern in human development. People gravitate toward comfort, but real growth generally requires struggle. Transformation demands leaving behind old patterns, often through hardship. Religion and magick encode this psychological fact in mythic form. To call ordeal from YHWH “abuse” while celebrating ordeal from Hecate as “initiation” is not consistency—it is bias. Again, the mythological framework does not matter. Ascension or descension models both involve trials. I think a look a Neoplatonic philosophy can offer some reflection to articulate the irrelevance of mythological application.
Philosophical Reflection: The Unity Behind the Masks
Philosophy helps dismantle the false pagan–Christian binary. From a Neoplatonic perspective, the gods are not competing factions but diverse expressions of a single reality. Plotinus described all existence as emanating from the ineffable One, while Proclus later insisted that “the gods are united in their multiplicity and multiplied in their unity.”²³ In this view, Zeus, Hecate, Helios, and YHWH are not contradictory but complementary faces of the divine fullness.
This perspective resonates with the modern language of “deific masks.” Whether one conceives of the gods as archetypes or as autonomous beings, the underlying experience remains the same: the divine tests, challenges, and transforms its followers. Recognizing this unity guards against textual bias by reminding us that ordeal is universal, and that history itself reflects interwoven traditions.
Equally important, this reflection underscores the evolutionary nature of magick. If the gods are many masks of one source, then their diverse appearances across history are not corruptions but adaptations. To erase Christian or Jewish dimensions is to deny magick’s syncretic genius.
Conclusion: Beyond the Pagan–Christian Divide
The modern bias against Christianity in occult circles arises less from history than from personal wounds. For many, Christianity represents oppression, guilt, or abuse, and magick becomes a way of reclaiming power or resisting structures that once harmed them. This is real, and it should not be minimized. Yet it is also worth remembering that people tend to carry wounds from the religion into which they are born, whatever that tradition may be. If we had grown up in an Islamic society, many would likely be processing pain from that context. Had we lived in the Roman world described above, our disillusionment would have been with its gods and priests. The heart of the matter is not that Christianity is uniquely cruel, but that human beings, when given power, often misuse it. As a therapist, I see this dynamic again and again: people are wounded less by abstract systems than by how those systems are handled in practice.
We could even argue that the rise and spread of Christianity was fueled in part by dissatisfaction with the pagan status quo. Long before Christianity, philosophers already lamented religious decline. Plato complained of impiety among the Hellenes of his generation, observing how many dismissed the gods or treated religion as empty custom.¹ Iamblichus, centuries later, likewise decried the lukewarm piety of his age and sought to restore seriousness in worship through theurgy.² In such a context, Christianity’s passionate communities, its moral rigor, and its sense of immediacy with the divine offered a striking contrast to traditions that even their own defenders admitted had grown slack.
Recognizing this helps clarify the real issue. The textual record of magick is irreducibly syncretic. History shows that no age was more “pure” or more tolerant than another, only different in its power struggles and expressions of devotion. And spiritual ordeals are not unique to one faith but part of the human path toward transformation. What matters is not whether a system is ancient or modern, but that magick has always shown its vitality by adapting, reinventing, and continuing to work in the lives of those who practice it.
What fuels the confusion are attitudes as much as methods: the romantic whitewashing of pagan history, the assumption that Christianized sources must hide an older original, and the double standard that treats ordeals from the Christian God as cruelty while those from pagan deities are celebrated as initiation. These biases encourage practitioners to dismiss Christian and Jewish elements as corruptions when, in fact, they are integral to the very fabric of Western magick.
Rather than chasing an imagined purity, we should lean into magick’s true strength: its ability to weave traditions, languages, and symbols into a living art. To walk its path faithfully is to accept both the diversity of its sources and the ordeals the gods—in whatever mask—lay before us, trusting that through them, the soul may grow.
Footnotes
Jake Stratton Kent, Geosophia: The Argo of Magic, vol. 1 (London: Scarlet Imprint, 2010), 18–20.
Stephen Skinner and David Rankine, The Keys to the Gateway of Magic: Summoning Spirits from the Grimoirium Verum, Heptameron, & Other Grimoires of the 17th Century (London: Golden Hoard Press, 2005), 33–39.
Hans Dieter Betz, ed., The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation: Including the Demotic Spells, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), xlvii–lxii.
Fritz Graf, Magic in the Ancient World, trans. Franklin Philip (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 203–6.
Betz, Greek Magical Papyri, xlvii–lxii.
Betz, Greek Magical Papyri, PGM IV.1230–1320.
Ibid., PGM XIII.1–343.
Gal Sofer, Solomonic Magic: Methodology, Texts, and Histories (2025).
Sofer, Solomonic Magic.
David Rankine, The Grimoire Encyclopaedia, vol. 1 (London: Hadean Press, 2023), 252–59.
Rankine, Grimoire Encyclopaedia, 252; Stephen Skinner, Techniques of Graeco-Egyptian Magic (Singapore: Golden Hoard Press, 2014), 18–20; Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 126–31.
Livy, History of Rome, 39.8–18; Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price, Religions of Rome, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 91–96.
Georg Luck, Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 419–25.
Graf, Magic in the Ancient World, 41–45.
Ibid., 205–10.
Luck, Arcana Mundi, 430–33.
Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 219–25.
Peter Carroll, Liber Null and Psychonaut (York Beach, ME: Weiser Books, 1987), 12–19.
Job 1–2 (NRSV).
Graf, Magic in the Ancient World, 139–44.
Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 34–41.
John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul, trans. E. Allison Peers (New York: Image Books, 1959), 66–72.
Plato, Laws, Book X, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 10, trans. R. G. Bury (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 885b–907d.
Iamblichus, On the Mysteries, trans. Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon, and Jackson P. Hershbell (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), I.11.
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