Nagualism, Voodooism, and other Forms of Crypto Paganism in the United States [pp. 1-11]

THE
C ATHOLIC WORLD.
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VOL. XXV., No. 145.-APRIL, I877.
NAGUALISM, VOODOOISM, AND OTHER FORMS OF CRYPTO PAGANISM IN THE UNITED ST'ATES.
WIIEN the Almighty introduced
the children of Israel into the
Promised Land he enjoined the
utter extirpation of the heathen
races, and the destruction of all belonging, to tliem. But the tribes
grew weary of war; they spared,
and their subsequent history shows
us the result. T'he Chanaanites became in time the conquerors and
made the Hebrews their subjects
politically and in religion. The
paganism learned on the banks of
the Nile had become but a faint
reminiscence in the minds of the
descendants of those who marched
out under Moses and Aaron; but
the worship of Baal and of Moloch
and of Astarothl overran the land.
A long series of disasters ending
with the overthrow of their national
existence, and a seventy years' captivity, were required to purge the
Hebrew mind of the poison imI)ibed from the heathlen remnant.
Theni all the power of the Alexandrian sovereigns failed to compel
them to worship the gods of Greece.
Omiles dii genltium daimonia is a
statement, clear, plain, and definite,
that we Catholics cannot refuseto accept. Modern indifferentism,
may regard all the pagan worships.
as expressions of truth, and the
worship of their deities as something merely symbolical of the operations of nature, not the actual
rendering of divine honors. But to
us there can be no such theory. T'he
worship was real and the objects
were demons, blinding and misleading men through their passions and
ignorance. The very vitality of paganism in regaining lost ground,.
and in rising against the truth,
shows its satanic character.
The experience of the Jewish
people is reproduced elsewhere.
When Christianity, beginning the
conquest of Euro)pe with Greece
and Italy, closed its victorious career by reducing to the cross the
Scandinavians and the German,
tribes of Prussia, later even than the
conversion of the Tartaric Russians, there was left in all lands a
pagan element, on which the archenemy based his new schemes of revolt and war upon the truth. WVe
of the Gentiles, whether from the,
Copyright: Rev. I, T. HECKER. 1877.