The erasure of indigenous and ancestral spiritual frameworks has always been central to colonialism. Cosmology is deeply ingrained with identity. To take one is to take the other. Replacing a people's relationship with the sacred replaces the relationship they have with themselves, their land, and their own history.
The most cunning way to do this is not through abrupt violence and destruction, but through absorption and assimilation. What was once its own ancient tradition gets translated into an established framework of the colonizing power. For example, in Ireland, Brigid becomes Saint Brigid; Solstice becomes Christmas; Samhain becomes Halloween and the night before All Saints' Day; and Ostara becomes Easter. The reason this was so effective was because the original practice is still faintly visible beneath the new "tradition."
This is rhetorical colonialism, the takeover of meaning itself.
Does this distinction between folk and Catholic, goddess and saint matter when the original meaning and framework of pagan belief has been destroyed? Colonialism is bigger than just taking a people's land, it's a commandeering of all they are.
Rhetorical colonialism extended far beyond Ireland, into traditions even less recognizable to modern eyes. Celtic folk tradition is widely known in the Western world (for a folk tradition that is), but since I grew up Irish and Polish Catholic, I decided to dive into the other side of my ancestry. The lesser-known side.
I met her as Saint Brigid, but many once knew her as goddess Brigid. Before becoming a Catholic saint, Brigid was the Celtic deity of fire, poetry, and healing. When the Catholic Church moved into Ireland, they assimilated indigenous culture into their own. Instead of erasing the goddess Brigid, they used missionary rhetoric to honor her as their own. Saint Brigid fits the institutional framework of the church much more than telling a whole island of people, "Your goddess is fake and always has been."
The Goddess Brigid was not the only deity renamed and given a holy facelift. Multiple Slavic saints' feast days were strategically planned to match up with days of worship to corresponding Slavic gods and goddesses; the god Perun became Saint Elijah, Veles became Saint Blaise, Yarilo became Saint George.
Saint Blaise, Saint George, and Saint Paraskevi follow the same pattern. Saint Blaise took Veles's role as protector of cattle-herders, their flocks, and their agricultural lands. Saint George absorbed Yarilo's role as Herald of the Spring. His feast day marks the traditional time for bringing cattle out to pasture and performing fertility rites, completely merging Christian hagiography with pre-Christian vegetation cycles. And the most interesting in my opinion is Saint Paraskevi. She became the protector of women's labor, spinning, and harvests. These associations directly mirrored Mokosh, the supreme Slavic Mother Earth and goddess of spinning, women's work, and fertility. The Polish people didn't have to give up their beloved, they just renamed them.
Have you ever blown out birthday candles? Told someone to bless you when they sneezed? Worn a wedding ring or promise ring? Decorated an evergreen tree for Christmas?
If you have, you've participated in pagan ritual. But how can those common Western Christian actions be pagan? The Christmas tree is related to Christmas, Jesus's birthday. Blessing someone has to be a polite Christian belief, I mean, it's a blessing. And the exchanging of wedding rings is part of the holy sacrament of marriage.
But let’s get real. The Easter basket blessing is fashioned after Święconka, and All Saints Day was matched with Dziady on the calendar.
The reason these are believed to be Christian practices is because Catholic missionaries adopted them as their own as a conversion strategy when moving into new lands.
When they arrived in Poland in 966, Catholic missionaries did exactly that.
Święconka and Dziady are only the start of Polish pre-Christian adoption. When our mothers blessed the house with holy water in specific patterns, it had very little to do with Catholic liturgy and everything to do with ancient seasonal protection magic. When our grandmothers left bread out on All Souls Day, you can rest in knowing that the reason for doing so predates the Catholic Church by a thousand years. Wigilia, once a celebration before the winter solstice, is now a Christmas Eve meal. Kupała Night, once only a midsummer celebration, has become St. John's Eve.
The Catholic missionaries knew that if they tried to pull people from their beloved traditions, they would fight against conversion much more than if the Church adopted the practices and taught that they were actually Christian all along. Slavic paganism didn't disappear when the Church arrived in 966, it went underground, put on a Papal robe, and got a holy facelift before resurfacing.
It's honestly surprising just how much of Slavic folklore can be found in modern-day Christian practice. In some ways, that ancient and cultural cosmology hasn't been lost. It's still right there, under Polish steeples, haunted by the domovoi.
If you’re not Polish, you may be thinking, what the heck is the domovoi?
The domovoi is the protective spirit that has never abandoned the Polish people. This entity was believed to inhabit and guard the home. It was appeased with small offerings, like bread and milk. Sometimes, those who lived in the home would speak directly to the domovoi living with them. To be protected was to respect the spirit living in your home.
This practice persisted for centuries after the conversion of Poland, and these modern practices coexist alongside official Catholic household blessing rituals. However, this was a practice that had some pushback from the Church, with priests condemning leaving offerings to a spirit, but the Polish people were not willing to give their protector up, and a household blessing took its place.
You may have heard that the Polish like to party, and it goes way back to the time of festivals and ancient celebrations. So it makes sense to me why they weren't willing to give up Kupała Night or Dożynki. Now associated with the Catholic celebration of the harvest, Dożynki was once the Polish harvest festival which fell on the autumn equinox, fraught with harvest rituals and the old woman in the wheat. They gave reverence to the final sheaf of wheat, sometimes personified and treated with ritual significance (thus the old woman in question). Now, said woman in question has merged with the Blessed Mother Mary, and the festival is held on the first Sunday following the yearly harvest.
While the autumn equinox changed to the first Sunday, Noc Kupały changed to the nearest Sunday to the midsummer solstice. The solstice involved fire jumping, flower wreaths set on rivers, and rituals tied to fertility and the height of summer power. It was and is a beloved practice among the Polish people. Instead of getting rid of it, you guessed it, it was absorbed into the feast of Saint John, tied to almost the exact time of the original celebration.
Halloween and All Souls' Day are probably one of the wider-known associations between pagan practice and Catholic adoption in Europe. Seeing as many pagan traditions across Europe had a similar day of connecting with the spirits of the dead, Poland had Dziady, or Forefather's Eve. It was a tradition of ritual communication with and honoring of the dead. It was an easy connection from Forefathers' Eve to honoring Saints and saints (big and little S) who have passed. The practice even persisted long enough to become the subject of Adam Mickiewicz's Romantic-era drama and was eventually folded into Catholic All Souls observance.
This pattern of Catholic feast days and celebrations falling suspiciously close to pre-existing pagan observances and practices is quite the pattern and can't be ignored. It was a strategic choice, and the choice to associate the new saints and feast days was a rhetorical one. The method was successful, which can be seen across the entire conversion calendar. This is an example of the missionary's strategy of conversion, but it's also an example of belief surviving by attaching itself to whatever institutional structure offered it cover. Though it may have a new name or slightly altered look, the pre-Christian Slavic beliefs survived through assimilation.
It may seem odd that an institution such as the Church would allow so many pagan practices to survive and be willing to absorb them. But this wasn't an act of tolerance; it was a pure rhetorical strategy to adopt as many individual Polish people into the faith as possible.
This isn't just some theory that I’m suggesting. It’s a documented method that can be traced as far back as Pope Gregory's instructions regarding pagan England in 601 CE, where he explicitly recommended repurposing existing temples, festivals, and practices rather than eliminating them outright. The idea was that conversion would be easier if people didn't feel like they were losing everything at once. Folk Catholicism isn't imperfect conversion or a mistake of assimilation but a result of a deliberate and remarkably effective rhetorical strategy.
Replace the name, keep the shape, and everyone’s happy. These folk-to-Catholicism examples mirror a bigger issue. Catholic missionaries did this across much of Europe, but Poland itself gives us an extreme example, as it had to cling to Catholicism in order to survive. Poland's relationship with Catholicism didn't stop at folk absorption. Centuries later, when its borders disappeared entirely, the Church became something Poland needed even more.
Poland is the chameleon of Europe. It lost its sovereignty, then got it back. It lost its identity, then got it back. It lost its language, then got it back. Lost its borders, then got them back. No matter what political and cultural landscape was in the background of Poland's history, Poland adapted, blended in, and reinvented itself in the end. And naturally, the Catholic Church, when it gained a foothold, came back stronger than ever. Go figure.
If so much of Polish identity and autonomy returned, what didn't? What was allowed to return as it was, what had to be rhetorically reconstructed, and what wasn't allowed back at all?
Poland underwent so many changes and power shifts throughout its history that the original identity can seem a bit jumbled. Multiple occupying powers had their time ruling Poland: Russian, Prussian, Austrian, Nazis and then Soviet rule. Each and every one of those occupying powers used language and political rhetoric as a tool of control.
During the Partition Era, where Russia, Prussia, and Austria each had a piece of Poland from 1772-1795, Russification and Germanization were central to their occupation efforts. The Polish language was banned in schools and children caught speaking their mother tongue would be punished. Business owners were forced to abandon their language as well and adopt the occupier's language to keep their businesses operating. Russia, Prussia, and Austria already had control of the land, but the occupation went deeper than that. It was also about identity.
To really solidify this erasure of Polish identity, the three occupying countries swallowed up their bits of Polish land, and the nation of Poland was stateless for 123 years. Despite generations of nonexistence on the geopolitical scale, the Polish people preserved their identity as a whole. In multiple parts of which were then three different countries, language preservation within families and secret communities was kept alive. This was done by the creation of secret schools and the writing of Polish literature.
From this era arose one of Poland's greatest poets, Adam Mickiewicz (mentioned above). He was one of the leading writers of Polish Romanticism. His writings kept Slavic folklore alive. His writings helped keep Poland alive. He was involved in more physical revolutionary acts than his writings, but I would argue that his poems were the most important contribution to reinstating Poland as a nation later on. He preserved the Polish language when it was illegal to do so. He combatted political rhetoric with the rhetoric of resistance, and transposed that across nations, leading to the reinstatement of Polish borders and the preservation of his people's identity.
Language returned in full thanks to the Polish people. Each Polish individual actively contributed to this preservation through underground rhetorical resistance, literature, secret education, persistent use in private even when banned publicly, and even in the face of punishment.
Polish borders returned, but not without struggle. After Poland was reinstated, it had to fight to secure its borders, battle through the First and Second World Wars, survive the post-WWII communist era, and dismantle communism in Eastern Europe. After all that hardship and attempted erasure, they persevered and are now widely considered a thriving democracy and a member of both the European Union and NATO.
The Catholic Church returned with the return of the borders because it had successfully ingrained itself with Polish identity. It had become inseparable from Polish survival in the sense that defending the Church became indistinguishable from defending Poland. The language, the Church, and the borders returned because the Polish people and the Catholic Church were actively making the rhetorical case for them throughout the period of suppression.
As a result, pre-Christian cosmology didn't return in full the way the Polish language and borders did. It had already been so absorbed into the Church that there was no one to fight for it. But even thousands of years later, it never fully left. It stays preserved in renamed traditions, in my mother's holy water practices and my grandmother's left-out bread.
Rodzimowierstwo, the Polish ancestral practices and deities that were slowly and systematically replaced by Catholicism, still exists in the shadows of modern Polish Catholic practices. Rodzimowierstwo is so rich in history and so diverse across Slavic ancient cosmology that it deserves its own essay. We know significantly more about pre-Christian Celtic tradition than we do about pre-Christian Slavic tradition, but both communities have preserved fragments of what was taken. The persistence of folk tradition, herbal knowledge, seasonal celebrations, and stories passed down can be witnessed today. In fact, herbalism is one of the most persistent forms of pre-Christian ancestral knowledge across cultures, including both Ireland and Poland. Maybe that's why I was so drawn to it, a haunting by my very own ancestors.
I do believe there is both a conscious and subconscious grieving seen in religiously colonized places today. I grieve that I'll never fully know my pre-Christian Slavic ancestry the way I am able to learn about my pre-Christian Celtic ancestry. Even though these events took place hundreds and hundreds of years ago, that lost identity lingers and gets passed down through generations.
That which survived during such a sustained crisis was that which people argued to keep. Poland's history is a perfect example that erasure is rhetorical as well as militant and political. Their recovery was rhetorical too. By studying Poland, we can see that what returns is what someone kept making a case for, in poems, in sermons, in secret classrooms, in underground newspapers. What stays gone is what lost its advocates before the crisis even began.
Perhaps cultural loss and the preservation of identity aren't as much about how violently it was taken, but whether or not anyone was still arguing for it to exist when the violence started.
