“The Green Gospel” by B.I. Antonych in the Context of the Neopagan Movement

The article analyzes B.I. Antonych's poem “The Green Gospel”, usually perceived in the vein of Lemko mythology as a direct emotional experience of the spring Carpathian landscape, interpreted within the aesthetics of symbolism or avant-garde. Critics point out the parallelism of Christian and pagan motives, but do not focus on the poet's spiritual position. The purpose of our study is to consider this poem in the context of the growing global neo-paganism. In particular, it concerns the growing authority of Indo-Iranian mythology, which was thought as a more significant counterweight to the Bible than the folklore heritage of pagan Europe (except for Antiquity). The authors emphasize the consistent neo-pagan position of Antonych, whose work is implicitly built on the system of Indo-Iranian mythological motifs and polemically directed against the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist. The poet consistently replaces the symbol of the Holy Communion Cup with the Slavic Dzban; Heavenly Father is opposed to Mother Nature, etc. The comparative-historical methodology allows to see Antonych's poem as a kind of manifesto of European neo-paganism, the denial of the spiritualist aesthetics of the Christian tradition and the assertion of the absolute value of changing physical existence. Recognizing the poet's right to this position, the authors argue that even in the paradigm of pagan wisdom, inseparability from the physical body of the Mother-Gaia can be deadly (Anthea's plot); for, according to Jung, Initiation (maturation) consists in going beyond the world of the Mother and comprehending the world of the Father.

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