The Walpurgis Night was already heavily invested with potential for artistic commentary on cultural, political, religious, and social issues by the late eighteenth century, and it became even more so in the wake of Goethe's powerful treatments. In the German-speaking countries particularly, the ideological glorification of a pre-Christian Germanic heritage was attractive in many sectors because it effectively emancipated Christianity from its indebtedness to the “pagan” monotheism of Judaism. This movement, termed “philo-heathenism” by Jeffrey Sposato, had attained a significant following by the beginning of the century and one of its most noted exponents was Friedrich Schleiermacher, among whose followers Mendelssohn counted himself in 1830 (see ch. 2, pp. 34–35). Against this backdrop, the pagan sympathies of Goethe's 1799 ballad (and, by extension, of musical settings thereof) were neither confrontational to Christian values nor provocative in their portrayal of Christian evangelizing in the Carolingian era. They simply submitted, in poetic guise, a historically based celebration of the ancestors of those latter-day Christians who were troubled by the notion that their religious pedigree resided in Judaic monotheism (or, to put it bluntly, that they were themselves essentially converted Jews).