The inevitability of paganism

Warburg was pretty unpopular in art history for a number of years, because his arguments about the unconscious survival of semantically-potent forms strike a lot of people as a little bit woo, but he's been making a bit of a come back in the last few decades. There's something sort of fascinating about the idea that ancient forms can have a longer shelf life than the culture that created them, yet still retain a modicum of their original meaning.

The roots of paganism lie in man's spiritual response to his environment, that those responses should remain the same, even after 1000 years shrouded in the language of a rationalised religion, is no surprise.

Man has not changed, and millennium of attempting to impose upon him what is alien to him falls away so, so easily.