If you’re interested in “pagan survivals” - pre-Abrahamic religions, or scraps thereof, still being practiced today - I highly recommend Gerard Russell’s Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms. It’d be a fascinating book on its own - there is more religious diversity in the Middle East than most of us probably realize - but of particular interest to Pagans are the ideas and practices that appear to have survived from the very ancient past. The Druze are modern-day Pythagoreans; the Mandaeans still use Babylonian astrology, still venerate the same planets, and some of their liturgy may date back to Babylon as well; the Kalasha of Pakistan are likely practicing a religion that shares ancestry with Hinduism and the Pagan religions of Europe; The Yazidis may have been religious cousins to the Mithraists (and if you’re familiar with the Feri tradition, you are probably already familiar with the Yazidis’ principal deity, the peacock angel Melek Taoos); the Zoroastrians, well, if you’re not already familiar with the ways Zoroastrianism influenced both Hellenic and Abrahamic theology (yes, including Judaism) and the ceremonial magick of medieval Europe, I highly recommend learning about them ASAP. The book is written as a travelogue; the author is not an academic, but a British diplomat who has spent his career in the Arabic-speaking world, and was lucky enough (and respectful enough) to be granted direct access to the communities he’s discussing - some of which have not been visited by European scholars for a couple hundred years. Definitely would recommend.

Legends indicate that on Samhain, all the hearth fires in Ireland were doused and then lit again from a central fire maintained by the Druids at Tlachtga, twelve miles from the royal hill of Tara. A central fire of this nature is called a need-fire. The Celts believed Samhain and Beltainne represented mystical fissures in time that allowed the living access to the land of the dead, called Tir na n’Og. To the Celtic peoples, there was death in life, and life in death—a concept no religion has shaken in the past 3,000 years. We must remember that the ancient view of time was cyclical, not linear, and in this framework New Year’s Eve as Samhain represents a point outside of time, when the natural order of the universe dissolves back into primordial chaos, preparatory to reestablishing itself in a new order. Thus, Samhain is a night that exists outside of time, and hence it may be used to view any other point in time. ~Silver RavenWolf