What is Paganism?

Paganism is the family name. Wicca, Druidry, Heathenry, Hellenism and the rest are the children, each with its own gods, calendar and temperament, and the family resemblance is a reverence for the natural world and a sense that the sacred is plural.

The word

"Pagan" began as a Roman sneer. A paganus was a country person, a villager, someone who had not caught up with the new religion from the cities. The word did its work for sixteen centuries as an insult, and then in the twentieth century people began to pick it up and dust it off, much as "witch" was reclaimed. Today it is a word people choose, and it carries the old sense proudly: we are the people of the countryside, of the land, of the local gods who were here before the cathedrals.

What pagans have in common

Nature is sacred. Not a backdrop to the human story but the body of the divine, or the dwelling of the gods, or simply holy in itself.
The divine is many. Pagans are polytheists, pantheists, animists, duotheists, or some combination, and most of us are comfortable not settling the question.
The year is a cycle. We keep the seasons. The particular festivals differ, but the wheel is everywhere.
The ancestors matter. The dead are not gone; they are part of the household.
Experience over doctrine. There is no pagan pope. What you have seen, felt and done in ritual counts for more than what you have been told.
Ethics of responsibility. We do not have sin in the Christian sense, but we have consequence, honour, hospitality, and the duty to leave a place better than we found it.

The paths

Wicca and modern witchcraft: The most numerous pagan path and the one this Hearth is rooted in. Goddess and God, eight Sabbats, the cast circle. See What is Wicca?
Druidry: Draws on the Celtic past and on the eighteenth-century revival. Emphasises poetry, the oak grove, the sanctity of the land, and the three streams of bard, ovate and druid. Orders such as OBOD and ADF offer structured training.
Heathenry: The modern honouring of the Norse and Germanic gods: Odin, Thor, Freyja, Frigg and the rest. Emphasises hospitality, oath, kinship and the blót, a ritual offering. Most Heathens are at pains to distance themselves from those who misuse Norse symbols for racist ends, and so are we.
Hellenism, Religio Romana, Kemeticism: Reconstructionist paths that return to the gods of Greece, Rome and Egypt with careful attention to historical sources, while adapting them for people who live now.
Celtic and Brythonic polytheism: The honouring of the gods of Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Brittany: the Dagda, Brighid, Lugh, the Morrígan, Rhiannon, Cernunnos. Our own patron sits here as well as in Wicca.
Eclectic and solitary paganism: Many pagans belong to no tradition and build a practice from what moves them. This is valid, common, and often deep.

How many of us are there?

More than you would think and fewer than the newspapers claim. Censuses in Britain, Ireland, Australia and Canada now count pagans in the tens of thousands per country; the United States has no religious census but surveys suggest well over a million. We are small, we are growing, and we are mostly quiet about it.

Paganism and other faiths

Many of us were raised in other religions and carry pieces of them still. A pagan may light a candle for a Catholic grandmother, join a Buddhist sitting group, or celebrate Christmas with the family without contradiction. We hold our gods lightly and our neighbours kindly. What we ask in return is to be taken as seriously as any other faith, and to be left alone to keep our festivals in peace.

Next: Beliefs and Ethics