Pagan (n.)

1: a person who worships many gods or goddesses or the earth or nature; a person whose religion is paganism

2 (old-fashioned + often offensive): a person who is not religious or whose religion is not Christianity, Judaism, or Islam

(Merriam-Webster)

pagan (n.)

c. 1400, perhaps mid-14c., “person of non-Christian or non-Jewish faith,” from Late Latin paganus “pagan,” in classical Latin “villager, rustic; civilian, non-combatant” noun use of adjective meaning “of the country, of a village,” from pagus “country people; province, rural district,” originally “district limited by markers,” thus related to pangere “to fix, fasten” (from PIE root *pag- “to fasten”). As an adjective from early 15c.

(www.etymonline.com)

I’ve been working on a family history lately.  It’s actually the continuation of a project I began in 2001, when I had to write a religious family history for a class on American religion.  I became fascinated with genealogy and have spent the last 25 years slowly building my family tree while I was simultaneously continuing my own spiritual studies.

Then came my awakening in 2018, and I became almost obsessed with finding out more about my origins.  I knew that if I could learn more about myself, that I would gain greater understanding for what had happened to me, as well as a greater ability to utilize and control what seemed to be some newfound mental skills.

To make a long story short, over those last 25 years, I have learned a great deal about my family.  The information I learned from the tree as well as from my genetic profile that revealed my ethnicities gave me a foundation that I had never had.  I grew up in a family of three that was completely disconnected from any extended family.  It was weird.

I also had no spiritual life to speak of until I got interested in Tarot cards at the age of 17, and then later got interested in general paganism and occult studies in my early 20s.  I had no idea pagans gathered together anywhere until I began that research, at which point I became a regular attendee to twice-yearly campouts held at Beltane (5/1) and Samhain (10/31).

Still, because I grew up in a Christian culture, I was steeped in Christian values and ideas that were not my own.  Much of what I’ve done since ‘waking up’ eight years ago has been removing all of that conditioning so that I can see who I really am without it.  In the process, I became curious about what the people I descended from were like before Christianity came along.

I was also trying to help my husband answer the question “what is paganism?”, because it was a word without a solid definition.  In fact, it is about as useless as the words ‘shaman’ and ‘animism’ in that all three are words that the actual people did not use to describe themselves.  It is also a religious slur created by the Christians in antiquity to describe anyone practicing their Indigenous faiths, an umbrella term about as insulting as the ’n’ word is for Black people.

Unfortunately, due to the extirpating fires of Christian dogma, modern neopagans no longer have Indigenous words to describe themselves for the most part.  Fragments of the ethnic faiths that are the spiritual underpinning of modern neopaganism do remain, along with some of the languages, but what we have to work with today are basically the tattered remnants of what has remained after the Burning Times, which in my view began long before the Crusades.

Upon exploring my family tree and the 15 ethnicities that make up my genetic profile, I discovered that I truly do fit the saying “I am the daughter of the witches [and Jews] you could not burn.”  The spiritual Path I walk is not just one that I chose myself, it chose me, because it is the Path my ancestors walked, and I can hear their Voices in my blood and feel them in my bones.

In the course doing my research, I found one culture after another virtually erased by colonialism and Christian missionaries, not to mention the occasional wave of Muslim invaders.  Almost all of my ancestors existed on a tribal level until Christianity came along, only banding together for things like festivals and war.

However, I was able to answer a question I had about what constituted the common elements between most, if not all, Indigenous faiths.  As I read about what is still known about each culture I come from, a pattern emerged of people living out the same themes across the areas where they lived and still live.  I was able to create the following list of common elements to Indigenous cultures:

• ancestor worship & veneration
• belief in an afterlife, spirit world, spiritual & mystical communion
• belief in animated polytheistic, panentheistic, and/or pantheistic world
• emphasis on oral tradition
• trance, meditation, music, dance
• creation myth
• emphasis on living in harmony with Earth
• magic and medicine

The details of each of these areas vary between cultures, of course, but these are the tools in the spiritual toolbox of every one of my Indigenous ancestral peoples.  I also note that this list is almost identical to the kinds of activities I pursued when I went to the pagan campouts, as though we all just instinctively knew how to worship harmoniously.

The original ‘pagans’ were comprised of what was likely hundreds if not thousands of smaller tribal communities, each with their own unique way of living and worshiping, who functioned beneath larger umbrellas of broader cultural definitions that had their own ways of living and worshiping that informed the tribal groups and vice versa.  Generally speaking, it was a way of life in harmony with the Earth, and necessarily so since they understood that their very existence was dependent upon the Earth.

The same is true today of neopagans, of which there are hundreds of variants who all generally refer to themselves as ‘pagan’, despite the fact that it’s technically a Christian slur equivalent to the ’n’ word.  However, in much the same way that elements of the Black community have reclaimed that word, but only within the confines of their own internal culture, many female pagans are reclaiming the word witch, of which I am one, while other practitioners continue to either use pagan or words more appropriate to the particular culture they are emulating with their faith.

What is a pagan?  At heart, a pagan is someone who refuses to walk the religious path laid out before us in our society and chooses instead to walk a path that is harmonious with the world around us, from the people to the land, sea, and sky and everything that dwells within them.  We understand that we are not separate from the world we live in.  We don’t just believe in the spirit realm, we know it exists because we can commune with it via our ancestors and the environment.  We believe that everything that exists is imbued with living energy that binds the Cosmos together, an energy that has many names from many cultures.

Oral traditions of stories and songs are crucial, as are music, dancing, and drumming.  The stories, dances, and music transmit important information people need to know about the origin of our people (creation myth) as well as the spirit world and how to get there when we die.  The holy people of the tribe are typically skilled in trance and journey work as well as magic and medicine.

It was difficult conducting my research, because while I was learning really interesting things about my heritage and therefore myself, I was also learning about multiple atrocities  conducted against all of my people in the name of religion.  However, by far the worst offender was the Catholic Church, with its barbaric policies during the Crusades and later the Inquisition.

Now that there are Christofascists in my government, I once again live under the threat of religious discrimination.  I believe the rise of Fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity is the direct result of massive waves of people leaving the Church in recent times because they have come to realize how oppressive and unloving it is, despite what it preaches.  We are witnessing the narcissistic death throes of a way of life that has been a victim of its own oppression.

I’ve witnessed this shift in used bookstores.  Whereas there used to be large numbers of occult and pagan books available for sale and a normal number of Christian books for sale, now there are very few pagan books available while the shelves of the Christian section are stuffed full, and the bargain section in the back is also dominated by Christian titles.  My conclusion: people both want and are not selling pagan books, and are selling and do NOT want books about Christianity anymore.  People are literally not buying what the Christians are selling.

Unfortunately, there are so few avenues for group ritual and worship for pagans of almost any flavor that most of us practice in private, or perhaps in a small group.  Large gatherings of neopagans have almost disappeared from America, rightful victims of the #metoo movement.  Groups of neopagans are almost entirely populated with refugees from Christian denominations, which means they sometimes bring less than savory behaviors with them as well.  The claws of Christian dogma grip tightly, even after someone leaves the church.

This also means that pagan groups suffer disproportionately from a lack of organization and a lot of infighting, which has also killed the larger organizations and their gatherings.  This is not to cast dispersion upon neopagans in any way, but rather upon the cultural and religious environments in which they were raised and later abandoned.  The fires of Christian dogma continue to burn centuries after they were set.

My husband and I have found a home at the Unitarian Universalist Church, which holds many of the same values that we do as neopagans.  Adjunct to the church there is an organization called CUUPS, the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans, and there is a small band of us that try to hold rituals at the eight major neopagan festivals.  It’s difficult because we have to piece our rituals together each time we do something, as we do not have a corpus of work to refer to anymore as more organized religions do.  Nearly all of that was destroyed, and what we do have largely comes from archaeological evidence.  You can’t burn stone or bone.  

The small size of our group also makes things difficult.  In antiquity, pagans had a large number of people as well as the body of generationally transmitted knowledge to inform their rites.  We do not.  We do, however, have a large number of books to refer to in the wake of a resurgence of neopaganism over the last 20-30 years.  I worked at a bookstore in the mid-90s, and there are far more books available today than there were then.  300 years after the Burning Times, witches and neopagans finally felt safe enough to semi-publicly proclaim their faiths by writing about them.  We also have the collective knowledge of our members, which is fairly extensive despite our small size.

From one perspective, modern neopagans represent something of a ‘pagan diaspora’, or more appropriately, an Indigenous diaspora comprised of dozens if not hundreds of different attempts to resurrect what was lost.  However, Christian destruction of Indigenous ways of life was so broad and brutal in its scope that there is no longer a clear chain of spiritual connection to the past.  We must simply take the broken shards of what remains and reconstruct our faiths to the best of our abilities, filling in the gaps in the best ways we can without engaging in cultural appropriation.

That is yet another answer to the question of “what is a pagan?”  

A pagan is a victim of cultural erasure at the hands of the world’s largest organized religion.  

A pagan is the spiritual and sometimes physical ancestor of multiple cultures that were wiped out in the name of the Divine, often in the diabolical glow of ‘holy’ fire.  

A pagan walks in the footsteps of some of the oldest victims of religious oppression on the planet.  

A pagan carries some of the heaviest spiritual baggage anywhere.  

A pagan dreams of the day when the universal unity we Know exists is felt by everyone and hatred becomes a thing of the past.