We seem to have a discussion maypole dancing around a folk horror or folk fantasy approach.
The local folk convert, but many keep up some pagan practice, and some lean more pagan than Christian. The local sites are converted, partly converted, some destroyed, some not. Generations later, the folk keep up their pagan or hybrid ways.
To a mage, this is background matter, albeit a serious one; they have a deeper reality to deal with. To companions and grogs, it may* be a real shock to discover that there are still pagans operating nearby or in their own village.
How this is flavored, Machen, Lovecraft, King, Eggers, or Dunsany, is a local group and SG issue.
Incidentally, ars has 2 types of paganism. First is worship paganism, which is typically associated with the faerie realm, not the magic realm. Faerie auras move quite quickly, and looking at the tether rule is irrelevant. The second type is more related to actual magic rites, and in such cases worship should be more or less irrelevant to the aura. Very often, for cases like a church built on a mercurian âtempleâ, regios tend to be a good answer if you want something to remain. And things like lacunae and regio entrances are very much storyteller tools, not pure mechanics.
Simply speaking âthis is reasonableâ is not the same as âthis is RAWâ. That is what is reasonable to you, and may work in your game, but it is not what is in the book. Certainly in Lands of the Nile there are magic tethers which have persisted for what is described as longer than the world exists after the physical manifestations of those tethers were gone. So no, your assumptions are not the rules the game centers around.
As to paganism, that is really, really messy, because by the 13th century there are a lot of practicing Christians who still follow pagan rites without knowing they are pagan rites.
As to sites being re-used I could point to some of the obvious ones like stonehenge (and less popularized stone circles and even wood circles which echo itâs design) the hypogum of Malta, the Virtak Cliffs in Latvia, and on and on. The problem is that y definition where there is archeological evidence you can point and say âha, that ties to an object that can be destroyed!â, but the RAW states that the tether is created by the rituals and does not say that it attaches to an item, but to the location. And there were in fact many pagan cultures which did gather at sacred places, springs, trees, etc, as well as at temples they built, and that is not a feature that is anywhere close to being exclusive to Christians. Archeologists today are still finding sites that were dining halls for the rites of Mithras, and the Vatican is built on top of a Roman pagan temple and the crypt (which Roman law at the time did not allow to be destroyed).
crucially the, hypogeum in malta (i assuming you are referring to Hal sflieni), the virtak cliffs, stonecircle dont have churches on them and so are out of scope of the thread.
if there are so many sites where pagans have performed rituals for at least 5 centuries in the amount necessary to justify an aura score of +5 then surely you can mention any. So far you have not provided evidence for the existence of any of these supposed sites of half a milleniums worth of pagan rituals covering most churces.
If there are so many then surely you can name them?
You are asking for factual real world reference for a fantasy construct? Or are you asking for perfect knowledge of everything that ever happened in the past, even things which have been lost to archeology?
There are places where pre-christian people gathered to worship, but the fact that âpeople were sometimes here for a few hoursâ do not leave a multitude of indelible or indisputable traces. Gobleki Tepi went undiscovered until very recently, and is a site which might pre-date agriculture â did people there worship? For how long? We do not have any way to know; nor do we know if that actually generated a fictional âMagic Aura +5â.
It is entirely reasonable to suppose that there are other ancient sites which we know nothing about; and it is entirely reasonable to suppose that pre-christian people worshiped.
Lets get simple- Athens existed for multiple millennia of conducting pagan rituals. The Parthenon was converted into a church afterwards. Similarly the Vatican. In fact Greece and Rome are littered with such sites. If you sign up for certain academic feeds on paganism and Christianity in the medieval world the conversion of both Latvia and Scandinavia are highly noted for Christian takeover of pagan temple sites or worship sites- though often in the latter case there was an even simpler reason- it was where there was room for a church that as convenient to civilization, and there was a bonus of getting to displace pagan worship, because it was going to be difficult to conduct rituals to Thor in the yard of a church. In fact if you read pretty much any academic work on the topic the tendency of Churches to occupy previously pagan sites is a pretty well noted feature. Most of those pagan religions had been going on for multiple millennia, though in some case the site would be used by different cultures as they moved into the area.
NB wikipedia has an article on Christianized Sites. Most of the examples are earlier than would have involved Thor and similar pagan worship (aside from Charlemagne), or are later where itâs mostly during the Reconquest which would not have been what Ars Magica defines as âpaganâ.
For me, the Parthenon is a great example of what is likely to be a former Faerie site, and many of the former churches in the Vatican are also likely suspects, although I suppose, even if some of them were magical, their auras would have long been overwhelmed by the Holy site or pushed into regios.
The centuries of active use is a rule of thumb in Magic Monuments for Preternatural Tethers, and it doesnât refer to centuries of worship or pagan rituals, even if some examples listed temples and stone circles. Pagan worship doesnât generate, per se, magic auras. The ars cosmology is clear that the pagan deities that cared about worship tend to be on the Faerie side (or the Infernal side) while the Magic entities that are considered pagan deities donât really care about mundanes. If mundane pagan worship generated Magic auras⌠Magic beings would care, since Magic auras is what sustains them.
So asking yourself how long pagan worship was made in a site is the wrong question to ask yourself (if you want to follow the text, you canât skip the first sentence of Magic Monuments - those buildings need to be strongly associated with magic, not with worship) - you need to decide whether magic rites were performed regularly there for a significant length of time, and in most public & urban ancient temples, while it remains a storyteller decision, the decision should probably lean towards no. With the social side effects of the Gift, most sites strongly associated with Magic are not likely to be sites of day-to-day public pagan worship in dense urban areas, but sites of secluded pagan rites, with some exceptions perhaps for traditions that strongly relied on non-Gifted practicioners. Although a building in an urban area, but which is functionally secluded, might make sense - A shrine dedicated to a daimon in an urban area that was used for private rituals might justify the lacunae, and underground sites make good places for magic sites. Even a temple dedicated to magic beings like the Great Mother shouldnât default to a Magic aura - Mythic Locations with Bear Island shows how apt Faeries are to assume roles in a magic beingâs story to tap the vitality of worship.
That assumes that worship is all that goes on at the temples, where other sources make it pretty clear they are used for magic as well- for example the Mercurian wizards are always looking for temples as a source of magical knowledge and power.
Simply speaking any faerie temple will provide a bonus to magic rituals, and after the faeries leave the magic rituals may be all that are left. Where a temple has been around for centuries or in some cases millennia it seems far more likely that people continued magical rituals than that a faerie didnât get bored and move on.