A caricature of Paganisms

If you want to overcome a powerful adversary, one possible tactic is first to make a caricature of your enemy into a bogey to frighten your children, and then reduce that bogey to an absurd oversimplification of your enemy.

This is exactly what the Christian church did to ancient paganism.

In his magnum opus, The Triumph of the Moon, Ronald Hutton identified four languages or discourses about Paganism which were prevalent in earlier centuries.

The first is that of evangelists and mi...