St. George, a Pagan Saint

St. George's feast day is April 23rd. This is especially associated with turning out the cows in northern countries, so his major festival includes walking the cows up to their summer pastures. He is also associated with the flowering of apple trees. However, there is not a shred of evidence that such a person ever existed. Although many efforts have been made to find evidence of his existence, "these endeavors are more remarkable for their ingenuity than for their cogency" as Attwater puts it. Actually, they aren't ingenious at all, and his hagiography is just another set of boring, degrading saint's tales for people who like to feel sorry for themselves and obsess on torture.

St. George is not, strictly speaking, a pagan saint, rather he is an archaeological saint, since he is based on archaeological relics. The name George is actually Greek, and means 'farmer' though it was borrowed into Latin in the time of Caesar Augustus and appears as the title of a collection of poetry by Virgil which was meant to idealize the life of Roman farmers.

The saint, however is especially popular in Slavic areas, where the actual form is Serge or Jurgen and the like. The reason St. George is so popular in eastern Europe is because the Roman armies had a penchant for putting up sculptures all around the farthest reaches of the Roman empire, which served as propaganda and a warning to barbarians not to rebell or attack them. These statues usually showed a Roman soldier on horseback running down either a naked man with a long beard or a dog-headed dragon. The naked man on his back under the horse's hooves was intended to represent a barbarian, literally a bearded person since it was the fashion among Roman men to shave their beards. The dog-headed dragons probably represented the Dacians, a group of people who lived in what is now Romania. They used a war banner in the shape of a dog with a long tail as can be seen on Trajan's column. The Roman army made a point of annihilating the Dacians, and also destroyed their main temple much as they did to the Jews in Jerusalem, which is why you have probably never heard of Dacians. Such statues of a horsemen trampling and humiliating the natives are especially widespread around the Black Sea and while they now reside in museums, they must have presented a conspicous and awe-inspiring warning to the local people. The statutes of the rider trampling the dragon image were especially common around the Danube, the homeland of the Dacian-speaking people.

In the fine Christian tradition of "worship what you fear", these statues came to represent the power of the "Georgoi." Personified and Christianized, the statue became St. George, and the Dacian flag came to represent the devil in the form of a dragon. These statues were not based on Christian iconography rather they created it. Eventually the image of St. George and the dragon came to be seen by paranoid Christains as representing Christian power over fearful elements.

St. George was brought back to England during the crusades and became the patron saint of England. He was dropped from the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church after Vatican II, but is still accepted among the eastern churches. He remains fairly popular everywhere, probably because people like pictures of dragons.

Here is an explanation about Pagan Saints.

The Penguin Dictionary of Saints, by Donald Attwater, Penguin Books, NY, 1983.