Europe’s First Holocaust: The Slaughter of Its Own Gods

There was a time when Europe worshiped the wind and the fire, the oak and the thunder, the sea and the stars. Its gods were carved into mountains, whispered into rivers, sung in the voices of mothers, and painted on the skins of warriors. Then came a foreign god—imported from the deserts of the Middle East—bearing the promise of salvation and the appetite of empire. He did not arrive as a teacher but as a conqueror. His priests came with decrees, his kings with swords, his followers with fire. In the name of love, they burned temples; in the name of peace, they massacred those who prayed differently. The native gods of Europe were not argued out of existence—they were executed. This was not conversion. It was a continental holocaust of the spirit.

When Constantine welded Christianity to the Roman state, faith became a weapon. To worship the old gods became treason; to sacrifice became a crime. The temples of Greece and Rome, once centers of philosophy and art, were stripped and defiled. Statues were decapitated, their eyes gouged, their limbs hacked off in orgies of righteousness. The Serapeum of Alexandria, that grand house of learning and beauty, was stormed and destroyed by mobs led by Christian monks. Its scrolls were burned, its priests slaughtered. Hypatia, the philosopher who symbolized the last light of Greek reason, was dragged through the streets and butchered by zealots chanting hymns. That was not holiness. That was murder in liturgical rhythm. When the flames devoured her body, they also devoured the mind of classical civilization.

Rome once conquered others by the sword; now, under the cross, it learned to conquer itself. The empire that had tolerated a thousand gods could no longer tolerate even one beside its own. The so-called “conversion of Europe” was bureaucratic genocide—a campaign waged by bishops, emperors, and mobs acting in unison. Edicts outlawed sacrifice; imperial inspectors looted temples; priests of the old faith were humiliated in public squares. Libraries that had preserved centuries of wisdom were left to rot or were scraped clean for Christian manuscripts. What was once the heart of civilization became the stage of a theocratic purge. Christianity claimed to have defeated paganism by truth, but it won by terror.

The Celtic world fared no better. The missionaries came smiling, but their gospel was imperial. They denounced the groves, the wells, and the stones that had sheltered Europe’s oldest spiritual memories. Druidic rites were declared Satanic; sacred festivals were renamed and absorbed. Beltane became Easter. Samhain became All Saints. The goddess Brigid was baptized into a saint so the people might forget she was divine. Every act of syncretism was a theft disguised as compassion. The Celts were not converted—they were colonized. Christianity rewrote their songs, stole their holy places, and replaced their gods with guilt. Europe’s first colonization happened within Europe itself.

The Germanic tribes met the cross on the battlefield. Boniface, the “Apostle of the Germans,” felled the sacred oak of Thor and mocked the gods of an entire people as the tree crashed to the ground. Charlemagne followed with armies, preaching baptism at sword point. When the Saxons resisted, he butchered them—thousands in a single day at Verden. To refuse baptism was to die; to accept it was to live in chains. That is not faith—it is extortion sanctified by theology. Christianity did not persuade; it conquered. It entered villages as fire and left behind silence. The Massacre of Verden was Europe’s first crusade—Christ’s first bloodbath on European soil.

The Norse held out longer, but even the gods of the north could not withstand the machinery of empire. Olaf Tryggvason and Olaf Haraldsson converted Norway not by miracles but by murder. They burned temples, drowned idols, and mutilated the defiant. The sagas, those granite memories of the north, record the humiliation: men forced to trample their gods, women tortured for refusing baptism, chieftains slaughtered for holding a blót. The new religion called itself love but behaved like tyranny. The hammer of Thor was no match for the bureaucracy of Christ. The Norse gods did not fade—they were strangled.

To the east, the Slavs resisted as long as they could. Their temples stood like fortresses of memory against the encroaching tide. The great shrine at Arkona was besieged and burned, its priests dragged through the mud, its god Svantevit decapitated and paraded through the ruins. In Kiev, Vladimir the Great baptized his people by decree and drowned their gods in the Dnieper River. Those who wept were labeled traitors; those who refused were executed. The conversion of the Slavs was not a sermon—it was a sentence. Christianity arrived not as light but as flood, washing away languages, rites, and entire cosmologies. The gods of the Slavs did not die—they were murdered and buried in holy water.

But even as most of Europe knelt, the Baltic lands stood upright, defiant, and unbaptized. Lithuania, Latvia, and Prussia became the last pagans of the continent, the final redoubt of Europe’s native divinity. For centuries they resisted both sword and sermon. The Teutonic Knights, fanatics in armor, called their massacres “holy crusades” and marched north to exterminate them. Villages were torched, sacred groves cut down, children enslaved, and entire tribes erased from the map. The Prussians were annihilated so completely that their language vanished from history. Yet Lithuania held on—the last free, unconverted kingdom of Europe—honoring its gods in forests and fields long after the rest of the continent had surrendered. It took centuries of war and exhaustion to finally force its baptism in the late fourteenth century. That was not the triumph of Christ; it was the exhaustion of Europe’s last free spirit. When Lithuania fell, the last pagan flame of Europe flickered out.

Even Greece and Rome, the mothers of philosophy and art, were not spared. The faith that claimed to bring light cast a darkness deeper than any before. The theater was banned as immoral, the gymnasium condemned as obscene, and the statue as idolatry. The human body—once the measure of divine proportion—was declared a vessel of sin. Philosophy, once the pride of the Mediterranean, was treated as heresy unless rewritten through Christian filters. The spirit of Socrates was placed under ecclesiastical supervision. Reason, once sovereign, was forced to serve revelation. The Renaissance centuries later was not a gift of Christianity but a rebellion against it—a resurrection of what the cross had buried.

Christianity’s victory over Europe’s gods was not a moral achievement but a moral catastrophe. The continent that had birthed Zeus, Freya, Cernunnos, and Perkūnas—the continent of light, laughter, and plurality—was remade into a theater of guilt and submission. The free man became a penitent; the lover of life became a confessor of sin. Europe learned to fear what it once worshiped, to apologize for its own joy. The gods of the old world stood for vitality, diversity, and courage. The god of the new world demanded obedience and despair. It was the death of the European mind masquerading as its salvation.

By the time the cross had finished its work, Europe had lost not just its gods but its memory. The sacred forests were gone, the songs silenced, the stones repurposed. Every cathedral stood on a desecrated shrine. Every sermon was a victory speech delivered over the bones of Europe’s murdered divinity. Before Christianity colonized the world, it colonized Europe itself. Before it enslaved others, it enslaved its own soul. The continent’s first holocaust was not measured in bodies but in silences—the silences of forgotten gods, forbidden songs, and vanished words.

When the Teutonic Knights rode north beneath their black-and-white crosses, they were not spreading faith; they were spreading fire. They called it “Christ’s work,” but their work looked like extermination. The Baltic tribes—Lithuanians, Latvians, and Old Prussians—were hunted as if they were beasts, not believers. Their gods were mocked, their shrines torched, their priests slaughtered. The forests that once echoed with hymns to Perkūnas and Laima burned for years. Christian chroniclers recorded it proudly, calling the killing of pagans “a harvest of souls.” The Prussians were erased so completely that only their name survived—stolen later by their conquerors. This was not conversion; this was cultural genocide dressed in clerical robes.

Yet Lithuania refused to die. For more than two hundred years after the rest of Europe had submitted, this small nation remained unbaptized, unbroken, unashamed. Its kings ruled by the old gods; its warriors fought under the thunder sign; its farmers still offered the first grain to Zemyna, goddess of the earth. To the popes, this defiance was an outrage; to the knights, a pretext for endless war. But to the Lithuanians, it was life itself—a refusal to surrender the dignity of their ancestors. They held their independence with the same stubborn pride that Rome once admired in its enemies. When the last Grand Duke, Jogaila, finally accepted baptism in 1387, it was not a victory of Christ over the gods—it was the exhaustion of a nation that had fought alone against centuries of crusade. Lithuania was the last free pagan kingdom in Europe, and its fall marked the end of Europe’s own soul.

Imagine what it meant: the last unbroken thread to the continent’s pre-Christian self snapped. The forests that had hidden the rituals of a thousand years fell silent. The women who had kept the fires of the hearth gods were forced into confessionals. The old songs—songs of storm, earth, and harvest—were replaced with hymns imported from Rome. Europe did not merely lose a religion; it lost its memory of what it once was. The murder of the Baltic gods completed the amnesia of a continent. From that moment, Europe forgot that it had ever been anything else.

What followed was centuries of triumphal arrogance. The church that had annihilated its own roots now preached “civilization” to the rest of the world. It told Africa and Asia that their gods were false and their customs savage. But the real savagery had already happened—at home. Before Christianity destroyed the idols of India or the temples of the Americas, it had destroyed its own. The crusader who burned a Baltic village was the ancestor of the conquistador who burned a Mayan codex. The missionary who erased Lithuanian hymns rehearsed for the missionary who would erase African ones. Europe learned empire by practicing it on itself.

The irony is unbearable. The continent that prides itself on reason and liberty built its identity on an act of spiritual totalitarianism. It erased its own plurality, outlawed its own imagination, and called that unity. Every heretic burned, every philosopher silenced, every witch hanged—all of it descended from the same original sin: the destruction of the old gods. The cross was not only a symbol of redemption; it was an imperial brand seared into the flesh of an entire civilization. The Holocaust of Europe’s gods was the rehearsal for every later persecution committed in its name.

If Europe ever wonders why its soul feels hollow, it should remember what it buried. Before Christianity, the continent was alive with multiplicity. The gods of Greece debated; the gods of the north thundered; the spirits of the forests whispered. No one demanded exclusive worship. There was conflict, yes, but not monopoly. Christianity turned the sacred into a monopoly and the mind into a battlefield. It replaced wonder with obedience, the festival with guilt, the hymn with confession. What it called “faith” was in truth the fear of remembering what had been lost.

Even today, the traces survive like fossils in the landscape. Churches built atop sacred springs. Cathedrals standing where temples once stood. Christmas trees that are disguised Yule offerings. Easter eggs that still whisper of fertility rites older than Christ. Europe cannot escape its pagan shadow; it can only pretend not to see it. The bells that ring on Sunday morning toll over murdered gods, but they toll just the same. The continent has learned to sanctify its own forgetting.

And yet, history has a cruel sense of humor. The same Europe that destroyed its own gods now travels to India and Japan to seek “spirituality.” It buys back what it once burned, markets what it once called blasphemy, and brands it as enlightenment. Europeans slaughtered their own gods, then went shopping for replacements. The crime has turned full circle. What was once faith by force has become faith for sale. The hypocrisy is breathtaking, but it is also tragic. You cannot murder your gods and then complain that your heaven feels empty.

If truth matters, the record must be read plainly. Europe’s Christianization was not a triumph of love; it was a continental purge. The temples of Greece, the groves of the Celts, the oaks of the Germans, the shrines of the Slavs, and the forests of Lithuania—all were victims of the same empire in clerical disguise. This was not a war between gods; it was a war between imagination and obedience, between memory and dogma, between the living earth and a dead book. And the dead book won.

History likes to speak of progress, but the birth of Christian Europe was the funeral of its freedom. The continent that once danced now genuflects. The land that once celebrated life now worships suffering. The civilization that once believed divinity was everywhere came to believe it was only in one place—and that everyone else was damned. From that original self-betrayal sprang centuries of conquest, inquisitions, and empire. The first colonized people of Christianity were Europeans themselves. Every colony after that was simply a repetition.

To speak this truth is not to romanticize the old gods or deny their cruelty. It is to refuse the lie that the cross civilized Europe. It did not. It sterilized it. It replaced vitality with hierarchy, ritual with guilt, plurality with uniformity. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the rise of science—all these were not fruits of Christianity but rebellions against it. Europe’s greatness was born when it began to remember the gods it had murdered: reason, beauty, courage, curiosity. Those were its true divinities, and it had to resurrect them from the ashes of its own forgetting.Europe today walks on consecrated ruins. Beneath every cathedral is a temple. Beneath every altar, a stone circle. Beneath every priestly blessing, the echo of a silenced hymn. The soil remembers even when the sermons do not. The gods of Europe are dead, but the crime scene is eternal. To look honestly at that history is to face the fact that Europe’s first Holocaust was self-inflicted. The killers wore crosses, spoke Latin, and called it salvation. The victims were Europe’s own gods—and they never received a proper burial.

CitationsCatherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017).
Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (A.D. 100–400) (Yale University Press, 1984).
Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
Royal Frankish Annals, entries for 772–804, documenting the forced baptisms and Massacre of Verden (782).
Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, on Olaf Tryggvason and Olaf Haraldsson’s violent conversions.
Primary Chronicle of Rus’, on the destruction of Slavic idols and Vladimir’s forced baptisms (988).
Chronicles of Henry of Livonia, Heinrici Cronicon Lyvoniae, on the Baltic Crusades and the forced Christianization of Lithuania and Prussia.
Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, on the destruction of the Serapeum and the murder of Hypatia.
Peter von Dusburg, Chronicon Terrae Prussiae, on the Teutonic Order’s massacres in Prussia and Lithuania.