Home › The Craft › The Wider Pagan Family

The Wider Pagan Family

Wicca is the cousin who talks loudest at the family gathering. This page is about the rest of the family: who they are, what they honour, how they keep the year, and how to be a good guest at their fires.

Three ways of looking back

Almost every pagan path draws on the past. Where they differ is in how. It helps to picture a line with three marks on it.

Reconstruction

Begin with the evidence: archaeology, inscriptions, the surviving literature, the work of historians and philologists. Ask what the people of one particular place and time actually believed and did, and rebuild it as faithfully as a modern life allows. Where the sources are silent, say so. Reconstructionists are not re-enactors; their religions are alive and they argue about how to adapt them. But the sources have the last word.

Revival

Take the old names, festivals and images and build a new religion in their spirit, without claiming to reproduce exactly what was done. Wicca sits here, with most modern Druidry and a great deal of Goddess spirituality.

Eclecticism

Draw from many places, and build a practice from what works and what moves you. This is the largest group of all, and the one most at risk of picking up what was never offered. See borrowing well.

Most people and most groups sit somewhere between the marks. The Hearth is a revival with a reconstructionist's bookshelf, and we hope it shows.

Druidry

"Druid" means at least three different things, and confusing them causes a good deal of trouble at dinner parties.

The ancient druids were the priests, judges, poets and teachers of Iron Age Gaul and Britain. Nearly everything we know about them comes from their enemies, Julius Caesar first among them, and from Irish tales written down by Christian monks centuries later. They left no writing of their own. Anyone who tells you exactly what they believed is selling something.

The revival druids were made in the eighteenth century, when antiquarians fell in love with the idea of a native British priesthood. The Ancient Order of Druids was founded in a London tavern in 1781 and was more a friendly society than a religion. The Welsh poet and forger of genius Iolo Morganwg held the first Gorsedd of Bards on Primrose Hill in 1792, and gave Wales a ceremony it still uses at the National Eisteddfod. Many of these orders were and are Christian, or simply cultural. Not every Druid is a pagan.

The pagan druids came later. The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids was founded in 1964 by Ross Nichols, a poet and historian who was a friend of Gerald Gardner. It teaches in three grades: the bard who keeps the stories and songs, the ovate who keeps healing and seeing, and the druid who keeps wisdom and counsel. It is generous, poetic, and open to people of any faith. In America, Isaac Bonewits founded Ár nDraíocht Féin, Irish for "our own druidry," in 1983, to build a public pagan Druidry grounded in scholarship and open to the gods of the wider Indo-European world. Between them, Nichols and Gardner may have given us the eightfold year itself; we tell that story on Other Wheels.

What Druids tend to love: the oak and the grove, poetry and music, the stations of the sun, and the land as a living and sacred presence. Many Druid rites open by declaring peace to each of the quarters, which tells you a great deal. If you are a witch who finds the Wiccan circle a little too much like a laboratory and wants more singing in it, go to a Druid gathering.

Heathenry

Heathens honour the gods of the Norse and wider Germanic world, Odin, Thor, Frigg, Freyja, Freyr, Tyr and many more, together with the spirits of the land and the ancestors. "Heathen" is the northern cousin of "pagan": another word for country people, flung as an insult for a thousand years and picked up again with pride. Some Heathens prefer the name of a particular path. Ásatrú, "faith in the Æsir," is the best known; in Iceland the Ásatrúarfélagið was founded in 1972 and recognised by the state as a religion the following year. Others honour the Vanir in particular, or keep a specifically Anglo-Saxon practice.

Heathen religion is less about magic and more about relationship, and relationship is held together by gifts. A gift always looks for a gift, says the Hávamál, and the gods are honoured as you would honour a powerful friend: with generosity, truthfulness and loyalty. The two great rites are the blót, an offering, usually of mead or food, shared between gods and people, and the sumbel, a formal round of toasts in which each person in turn drinks to the gods, to the ancestors, and to their own deeds and oaths, which are binding once spoken over the horn. The virtues most often named are honour, hospitality and frith, the peace and good faith that hold a household and a community together. Many Heathens work with the runes; the old sources do describe the casting of lots, though most of the rune meanings in modern books are modern.

Heathens keep their own year. The great festivals are Winter Nights in mid-October, at the start of winter; Yule at midwinter, often kept over twelve nights; and Sigrblót, the victory offering at the start of summer in April. They do not, as a rule, keep the Wiccan wheel, and some of them find it faintly wearing to be wished a happy Mabon.

Reconstructionist paths

Reconstructionists use history, archaeology, philology and anthropology to understand as fully as possible what a particular people believed and did, and then they practise it. These are living religions, not museum pieces, and they are often thoroughly modern in their values. Among them:

Hellenism

Also called Hellenismos or Hellenic polytheism: the honouring of the gods of ancient Greece by prayer, libation, hymn and festival, following the old Athenian calendar or a local adaptation of it. Hellenists put great weight on xenia, the sacred duty of hospitality between host and guest, which makes them excellent company at a feast.

Religio Romana

The religion of Rome: the household gods, the Lares and Penates, honoured daily at the family shrine, alongside the great public deities and the festivals of the Roman year. Its emphasis on the household, and on keeping your side of a bargain with the gods exactly, appeals to people who like things done properly.

Kemetism

The modern honouring of the gods of ancient Egypt, from carefully reconstructed temple practice to quiet personal devotion. Its central ethic is ma'at: truth, balance and the right order of things.

Gaelic polytheism

Sometimes called Celtic Reconstructionism: the gods and customs of Ireland, Scotland and Man, approached through the early Irish and Scottish texts and the living folk practice of the Gaelic-speaking world. Gaelic polytheists will point out, kindly, that there was never a single "Celtic religion" and that much of what is sold under that name is Victorian. Brighid is honoured here with great seriousness, and we read their work gratefully.

Slavic and Baltic paths

Rodnovery, the native faith of the Slavic peoples, and Baltic revivals such as Lithuanian Romuva honour thunder gods like Perun and Perkūnas and keep festivals that, in parts of eastern Europe, never quite died out. Some of these movements are warmly inclusive and some are tangled up with nationalism. As with Heathenry, look at the people before you join them.

Goddess and God traditions

Some paths put the divine feminine at the centre. Goddess spirituality grew up in the 1970s alongside the women's movement, and it overlaps with paganism without being quite the same thing: plenty of people who honour the Goddess would not call themselves pagans at all. The Dianic tradition, described on Traditions and Paths, is its best-known witchcraft. Goddess spirituality gave countless women a face of the divine that looked like their own, and the whole pagan world is richer for it.

Smaller and quieter, and running alongside it, are paths that put the gods at the centre: men's mysteries, the honouring of the Horned God, the Green Man and the sacrificed king, undertaken not to push the Goddess aside but to find a sacred masculine that is neither domineering nor ashamed of itself. When it is done well, everybody benefits.

How pagans understand the divine

Paganism has no creed, but it has a vocabulary, and newcomers meet these words in every book. Most pagans hold more than one of them at once and do not lose sleep over it.

Polytheism

There are many gods, each a real and distinct being. Most reconstructionists and Heathens, and many witches.

Duotheism

The divine is known as two, the Goddess and the God. Classic Wicca.

Pantheism

The divine is everything: nature itself is holy, and there is nothing outside it.

Panentheism

The divine is in everything, and is also more than everything.

Henotheism

Devotion to one god in particular, without denying the others. Many witches have a patron in this way, and the Hearth's love for Brighid has something of it.

Animism

Everything has a spirit: the river, the hill, the oak, the hearth. Perhaps the oldest religious idea there is, and the one most pagans share, whatever else they believe.

Archetypalism

The gods are great patterns in the human mind, real in the way that stories and symbols are real. Common among Jungian witches and secular pagans.

Queer paganism

For most of its modern life, paganism has been unusually good at making room. Covens and circles welcomed gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans people at a time when few religions would, and some traditions were founded specifically for queer people: the Minoan Brotherhood, a witchcraft tradition for gay and bisexual men begun in New York in 1977; the Radical Faeries, a loose and joyful movement whose first gathering was held in the Arizona desert in 1979; and many women's circles in the Dianic and Reclaiming streams. Older Wiccan teaching, with its weight on the polarity of woman and man, has had to stretch, and it is stretching. Our own view is on Beliefs and Ethics: the Goddess and God are poles of a field, not a rulebook for bodies.

Animism and shamanism

The word "shaman" comes from the Evenki people of Siberia, where it named one particular kind of spirit-worker in one particular culture. Anthropologists stretched it to cover healers and visionaries the world over, and in 1980 the anthropologist Michael Harner set out what he called "core shamanism": a set of techniques, chiefly drumming and the journey into the spirit worlds, taught to Westerners without any particular culture attached. A great many witches and pagans now journey, and the hedge witch's crossing of the hedge has a great deal in common with it.

We would ask two things of anyone drawn here. First, be careful with the title. In the cultures the word comes from, nobody becomes a shaman by taking a weekend course, and many Indigenous people find the casual use of it painful. "I journey" is honest; "I am a shaman" is a very large claim. Second, journeying is a powerful way of altering consciousness, and it is not for anyone whose mind is in a fragile place. Learn it from an experienced teacher, and ground thoroughly afterwards.

Ceremonial magic

Ceremonial magic is not a pagan religion, and its practitioners are as likely to be Christian, Jewish or nothing in particular as pagan. But you cannot understand Wicca without it. It is the learned, bookish magical tradition of Europe: Hermetic philosophy, astrology and alchemy, the Qabalah adapted from Jewish mysticism, the angel magic of John Dee and Edward Kelley, the old grimoires, and above all the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888, which gathered all of it into a system and taught it in grades. Aleister Crowley trained there before founding his own religion, Thelema. Dion Fortune came out of the same stream and wrote novels about sea priestesses and moon magic that a whole generation of witches read under the bedclothes.

Gardner borrowed heavily from this tradition: the cast circle, the quarters, the pentagrams drawn in the air, the elemental tools, and in his first drafts a good deal of Crowley's actual wording, which Doreen Valiente took out and replaced with her own. Many witches still study ceremonial magic to understand where our forms came from, and some practise both. It tends to be more precise, more scripted and more scholarly than witchcraft, and its practitioners will tell you, quite rightly, that we are standing on their shoulders.

Next: Witches of Every Faith and None