What is a pagan?

The history of a difficult term

Hundreds of thousands of people today in historically Christian countries call themselves pagans. The number, indeed, may be over a million. Why is this?

I have a book out next week - it’s called Paganism Persisting, and I co-wrote it with Francis Young, another historian of religions. The book deals with the repeated revivals of paganism that have been a feature of Western history. We argue that the cultural inheritance from the pre-Christian world - in particular, ancient Greece and Rome - has provided a constant source of inspiration for pagan revivals. The material to revive pagan religion has always been there. It is no surprise that numerous people through the centuries have made use of it.

This article is not about pagan revivalism - for that, you’ll have to read the book - but rather about what a pagan is. After all, if we’re going to talk about something called paganism, we need to know what that something is.

The origins of the word ‘pagan’ are not mysterious. It is one of a group of terms in modern European languages - like French païen and Italian pagano - which come from the Latin word paganus. Christians began to use the latter term in the 300s CE to refer to people who adhered to traditional polytheistic religious observances and had not yet been converted to Christianity. The connotations of the word were somewhat pejorative, but not strongly so.

Nobody knows why the word paganus was chosen to refer to polytheists. Scholars have looked at the other, non-religious meanings of paganus in Latin for clues, and several theories have been put forward. Paganus was sometimes used in reference to rural dwellers, so it might have meant something like ‘redneck’. On this view, Christianity would have been the rising urban religion which only gradually penetrated the Roman countryside. Paganus could also mean a civilian, as opposed to a soldier, so it might have referred to those who were not enrolled in the army of Christ. A third theory is based on the fact that pagus meant a local district, so a paganus would have been someone who still followed their indigenous local cults. A final theory maintains that the word simply meant something like ‘outsider’.

You can take your pick from these explanations, because nobody knows which of them (if any) is correct. The main point is that ‘pagan’ became an othering term. Whether or not it originally meant ‘outsider’, it took on that dismissive force. It came to mean ‘bad and not Christian’ - or, more simply, ‘not us’. It was a way of labelling someone as not belonging to the tribe; to the community of the saved. It was used in roughly the same way that ‘fascist’ is used today.

Of course, ancient paganism was ultimately replaced by Christianity - first in the Roman Empire and then in other parts of Europe. One might think that the term was no longer needed. But this was not so. It was retained in the Christian vocabulary as a general term for referring to people who were not Christians. It never lost the general sense of ‘people who have the wrong religion’, although it was sometimes used a little more specifically. Christians often hesitated to apply the term to Jews and Muslims; it tended to have connotations of polytheism.

When European explorers and imperialists encountered the native peoples of other parts of the world, they needed a word to describe their religions, and ‘pagan’ was one such word that lay to hand (along with ‘heathen’, ‘gentile’ and their equivalents in other languages). When in 1452 Pope Nicholas V saw fit to grant the Portuguese monarchy the right to enslave African people from traditional religious cultures, he used the Latin term ‘paganos’ in this connection (he referred to ‘Sarracenos’, or Muslims, separately). This decision to define non-European polytheists as pagans positioned the empires of Christendom in the same role as the ancient church. It fitted with the self-understanding that European imperialists had of their mission as being to convert non-European peoples to Christ, just as their forebears had converted Europe.

The next major shift in the meaning of ‘pagan’ came with the Reformation. One of the critiques that the early Protestants made of Catholicism was that it was contaminated by elements of Roman polytheism. From the veneration of divine beings like the saints and Mary to the use of incense and holy water, Catholicism had a number of suspicious features that led many Reformers to conclude that it was not really a Christian movement at all. On this view, paganism was not something that existed at a safe distance, in the history books or in remote colonies: it was continuing to fester at the heart of nominally Christian nations.

This brand of Protestant polemic came to be exemplified by publications such as Conyers Middleton’s Letter from Rome, which appeared in 1729 and was republished several times into the nineteenth century, and Alexander Hislop’s The Two Babylons, which was first published in 1853 and still pops us from time to time among American fundamentalists. Nevertheless, by the end of the nineteenth century, the idea that Catholicism was pagan was mostly defunct. Polite ecumenical dialogue has now largely replaced this kind of intra-Christian sectarianism.

It should be clear by now that ‘pagan’ is an exonym - something which Christians call other people rather than something which people call themselves. But something strange happened from the eighteenth century onwards. A few people began to self-define as pagans. They looked into the Latin and Greek texts that had been beaten into them at school and saw a worldview that they found attractive, in which deity was plural rather than singular and there was freedom from the moral strictures of the Abrahamic commandments. This was a truly radical step. Consciously taking on an othering term and identity was a slap in the face for the hegemonic majority culture. The closest modern parallel is perhaps people of nonstandard sexualities and genders calling themselves ‘queer’. (Funnily enough, a pagan identity was associated in Victorian Britain with homosexuality - as indeed was Catholicism. Paganism and gay sexuality are linked in the works of writers like Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds.)

By this time, ‘pagan’ had acquired another meaning again. The new ways of freethinking and rationalism that had become prevalent since the Enlightenment also came to be described as ‘pagan’. This was the most colourless usage of the term: instead of referring to the wrong religion, it meant those who had no religion at all. Yet this meaning has proved to be enduring. ‘Pagan’ is still often used to mean something like ‘godless’. One reason why pagans are so difficult to count today is that jolly funsters insist on writing ‘pagan’ on the census form to indicate that they aren’t religious.

The last major change in the meaning of ‘pagan’ came with the rise of the post-Christian totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century. Fascism and Communism were not religions, but they tended to behave like them. Perhaps inevitably, they came to be labelled by unsympathetic Christian observers as ‘pagan’. There was a sense that Europe was regressing from the Christian era to pre-Christian times, and that the churches were facing their first serious quasi-religious competitors since the old polytheistic cults had been extinguished.

‘Pagan’ today continues to be a term that some people - quite a lot of people, in fact - embrace to define their own beliefs and practices. Interestingly, however, some followers of modern pagan traditions don’t accept the word. In a society in which Christianity is no longer hegemonic, there is limited incentive to adopt a term whose main purpose has been to demarcate the borders of Christian identity. Some modern polytheists feel that the term gets in the way of what they see as a more meaningful positive commonality with systems like Hinduism and Shinto.

Nevertheless, the term remains well established and widely used. The traditions that it describes tend to have some or all of the following characteristics in common:

• A conception of the divine which is plural rather than singular. Divinity resides not in one God - to whom no rivals are tolerated - but in many gods and goddesses, ancestors, and animistic spirits of homes, animals, rivers and plants. This is in turn linked with…

• A reverence for the natural world. This can be framed in philosophical terms deriving from Platonist philosophy: the material world is an emanation of the divine, not the lifeless product of a creator God who is wholly separate from it. Alternatively, it can express a poetic intuition: nature itself is sacred.

• A libertarian ethic. The pagan revival began as a reaction to the authoritarianism and moral strictures of Christianity. Much (but not all) of the modern pagan movement still retains this anti-establishment ethos. (Ancient pagan cultures could be hierarchical and morally repressive, but - unlike in Abrahamic cultures - their enforcement mechanisms tended not to be religious.)

• The use of practical supernatural techniques, such as clairvoyance, divination and magic. It is worth noting that the specific forms of ancient paganism which pagan revivalists have sought to reanimate have tended to be forms that lend themselves to this approach - influenced by ancient magic and mystical varieties of Platonist philosophy - rather than forms based on popular mainstream observances.

The term ‘pagan’ has survived not because it has a stable definition but because its meaning is broad and flexible. Christians need a word of this sort - a fluid term that can be used to other whoever the current adversary is - and it has proven too useful to dispense with. Those who seek to replace Christianity with revived varieties of ancient religion have likewise found it useful, as its othering force can be borrowed and converted into something positive for the purpose of challenging the dominant religious culture. One wonders what meaning the term will take on next. It has lasted for the best part of 2,000 years, and it is not going anywhere any time soon.