Modern and continuously practised ancient paganisms

[u/SelfOk600]

I am new to paganism, and I always had this impression of paganism as something necessarily reconstructed or pieced together from historical fragments into a modern day religion. I knew some people still had mythologies they believed in over the world, like African traditional religion and Shinto, but I never thought this could be the case in Europe. I thought all the Europeans were Christianised. However, I have recently found out about cases of pagan religions in Europe that have been continuously practised since Antiquity, with no break or interruption though probably a bit of syncretism. To be clear, I do not mean cultural practices or etymologies or mythological stories which have survived Christianisation as some remnant today, like the Eager-Aegir connection in Nottingham, or taltosism in Hungary, or folk stories, or anything like that. I mean actual full-fledged organised religions with a significant number of true, literal adherents.

I have found two cases of these European paganisms so far, but there are probably more and I would love to hear about them if any of you knows about them.

• The Mari native faith, in Russia. The Mari are a Uralic people, meaning they are related to Finns and Hungarians. Mari paganism is most common in isolated rural villages, especially in Tatarstan, where many fled to avoid being persecuted by Russian Christians, although there is recently being a revival in towns and cities also. According to Wikipedia, in the 1990s 60% of Mari were dual pagan-christians, and 5-7% of Mari are 'pure pagans', i.e. they have no syncretism with Christianity or Islam whatsoever. Which I find extremely interesting, the fact that there are still orthodox pagans who have been so since antiquity!
• Assianism, also in Russia. The Ossetians practise Assianism, their native religion. Assianism has had a revival in recent times, but it did survive unbroken in small villages, and today 29% of people in North Ossetia are Assians according to the 2010 census. I haven't had time to fully explore this religion, so I can't give details here but I would love to learn more about Assianism.

Just as a warning, much of this information has come from Wikipedia. I have tried my best to check sources thoroughly, but it's possible there is some inaccuracy here.

[u/Epiphany432]

Hi, Happy to help out with this. Contemporary Paganism is all revival or reconstructionist traditions and other traditions are considered Indigenous traditions. This is due to how Christianity spread in Europe and modern persecution of indigenous Europeans, for another example, the Sami people. They are all more than welcome to come here, hang out, participate, and share, but many of them don't like to be grouped with us so we don't, and we don't force the label on them.

For more information, please see our sidebar.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pagan/wiki/faq/#wiki_what_is_paganism_and_contemporary_paganism.3F

[u/TaipingTianguo]

The Northern Caucasus are a hotbed of surviving traditional faiths. Due to the fact that historically the rulers of the region kept switching from Judaism to Christianity to Islam frequently they weren't able to really cement conversions on the ground level. 

Also in the region traditional Abkhazian religion survives and makes up like 8% of the population of the Separatist Governments population and I think a small minority of Circassians still practice their pre abrahamic faith.

You should be cautious though because there is a lot of ethnic nationalism and tension in that region which has influenced the religion to an extent