modern Paganism

modern Paganism, family of new religions that all take their inspiration from the extinct pre-Christian religions of Europe, North Africa, and West Asia. Modern Pagan approaches to these past religions vary, from those that try to imitate particular pre-Christian traditions with a high degree of precision to those that are more openly eclectic in their use of historical and archaeological source material. These modern Pagan religions largely emerged in Europe and North America during the 20th century and collectively have at least hundreds of thousands of followers, possibly extending into the low millions.

History of modern Paganism

In the 4th century ce the leadership of the Roman Empire converted to Christianity and introduced measures to penalize the pre-Christian and largely polytheistic religions existing within its boundaries. Although the empire collapsed in the West in the 5th century, Christianity remained dominant inside its former borders and soon spread into northern Europe. Meanwhile, Judaism and, later, Islam also spread in and around the old empire. Collectively, the three Abrahamic “religions of the Book” largely succeeded in eradicating existing pre-Christian religions from an area covering Europe and adjacent parts of North Africa and West Asia. This region thus differed from other parts of the world, such as sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where Abrahamic religions failed to completely replace existing traditional religions.

Christians had referred to the followers of non-Abrahamic religions with the Latin term pagani (“pagans”) since at least the 4th century. They generally regarded these peoples’ religious traditions as being based on fundamental error and often thought that the gods and goddesses featured in them were actually demons. A more positive reassessment of these pre-Christian religions gained traction amid the rise of Renaissance humanism in the 14th century. In much of Christian Europe it became increasingly acceptable to depict scenes from the classical mythologies of the pre-Christian Greeks and Romans in art. The 18th century saw a similar embrace of the deities found in the pre-Christian mythologies of the linguistically Germanic peoples, while the Romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries further encouraged positive views of Europe’s pre-Christian religions.

This artistic and cultural celebration of pre-Christian mythologies laid the bedrock for modern Paganism. Several esoteric groups of the 19th century, such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Theosophical Society, adopted imagery from the pre-Christian past, and it was from this esoteric milieu that the earliest modern Pagan groups emerged early in the 20th century. Ancient Egyptian deities appeared in Thelema, the religion established by English occultist Aleister Crowley in 1904, while völkisch (“folkish”) groups claiming to revive the pre-Christian religion of the Germanic peoples appeared in Germany and Austria during the 1910s. German esotericist Franz Sättler venerated various pre-Christian deities through his Adonistic Society, formed in the 1920s, while one of the earliest modern Pagan groups in the United States was the Church of Aphrodite, formed by Russian migrant Gleb Botkin in 1939. These groups typically remained small and were often highly eclectic in their influences.

The religion that played the most significant role in promoting modern Paganism was Wicca. Coming to public attention in 1950s England, Wicca’s early practitioners believed that their religion was the survival of a pre-Christian witches’ religion, an idea later rejected by historians. Wicca soon spread abroad, and in the United States in particular it spawned a wide selection of variants, often informed by the identity-based political movements of the 1960s and ’70s. Dianic Wicca, for instance, merged Wicca with second-wave feminism, while the Minoan Brotherhood offered a form of Wicca for gay and bisexual men. Further popularization through books explaining how the reader could become a Wiccan without joining a preexisting group helped establish Wicca as the world’s largest modern Pagan religion.

Growing interest in alternative spiritualities amid the counterculture of the late 1960s and the ’70s provided fertile ground for the proliferation of modern Pagan religions. New groups that emerged in the U.S. included the Church of All Worlds, Feraferia, and the Goddess Movement. In both Britain and the U.S., modern Pagan groups formed whose members called themselves Druids after the Iron Age ritual specialists of western Europe, while there was also growth in Heathenry, whose followers venerated the pre-Christian deities of Europe’s linguistically Germanic societies. Despite some overlap, modern Paganism was generally distinct from the New Age milieu, which also became prominent at the time.

In the 1990s the collapse of Marxist-Leninist governments across the Eastern bloc allowed for the rapid emergence of modern Pagan groups in this region. While Wicca and other modern Paganisms of the West established some presence there, more common was the formation of homegrown traditions emphasizing national identity. In the Baltic states, for example, Romuva and Dievturība emerged as religions venerating the pre-Christian deities of the Lithuanian and Latvian peoples, respectively. In linguistically Slavic countries, such as Poland, Russia, and Ukraine, forms of a Slavic-oriented religion called Rodnovery appeared. Elsewhere small groups also formed that worshipped pre-Christian deities from areas like Ireland, Finland, Italy, Greece, Egypt, and the Levant. Sometimes calling themselves “reconstructionists,” many of these groups defined themselves against the eclecticism that they saw in traditions like Wicca and Druidry, instead emphasizing fidelity to historical and archaeological source material in building their new religions.

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To combat discrimination, from the 1960s onward modern Pagan groups often collaborated to form organizations such as the Pagan Federation and the European Congress of Ethnic Religions. This contributed to the sense of a collective modern Pagan identity, and toward the close of the 20th century growing numbers of individuals chose to identify simply as “Pagans” rather than as members of a specific modern Pagan religion. Despite this united front, there were always modern Pagan groups excluded from these communal efforts, particularly those deemed to hold extreme political views.

Beliefs and practices

There is huge variation among modern Pagan religions, making it impossible to identify any single unifying feature beyond the fact that they all draw on the pre-Christian religions of Europe, North Africa, and West Asia. Many modern Pagans see themselves as directly continuing these extinct religions—sometimes refusing to believe that said traditions ever died out and maintaining that they were preserved in secret right through to the present. Other practitioners regard their modern practices as a revival of extinct religions or, in a perspective more amenable to historians, as new religions that are nevertheless inspired by the past.

Modern Pagan beliefs vary considerably. Theologically, they display a whole gamut of perspectives, from pantheism and monotheism to polytheism and atheism. Even within the same group, there can be differences of opinion on theological issues: some modern Pagans may believe that the deities invoked literally exist, whereas others regard them as symbolic or archetypal images. Some modern Pagans do not believe in a soul, while others do, thinking that it proceeds to an afterlife or is reincarnated following bodily death.

As in the pre-Christian religions that inspire them, modern Pagan movements often place greater emphasis on ritual practice than on belief. Although group ceremonies may take place in specially constructed buildings, they are more likely to be conducted outdoors or in practitioners’ homes. However, the geographically dispersed nature of modern Pagans in many countries means that it is very common for individuals to practice their religion alone. Many modern Pagan rituals involve giving offerings, often of food and drink but sometimes of poetry or performance, to deities, spirits, or ancestors. Festivals are often held at points in the calendar that pertain to seasonal changes or astronomical events like the solstices, and these contribute to many modern Pagans’ view that their traditions are “nature religions” or “Earth religions,” in tune with the rhythms of the planet.

Modern Pagan groups differ considerably on sociocultural and political issues. Many groups welcome members of any gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation and sometimes intertwine their religion with an activist commitment to progressive causes, such as feminism. Other modern Pagan groups are ethnic nationalist, emphasizing a connection between their religion and a particular ethnic or national identity. These groups tend to be more socially conservative on issues of gender and sexuality. While these divergent positions coexist in many countries, as a general rule, the more progressive modern Paganisms predominate in North America and Britain, while their more ethnic nationalist counterparts predominate in central and eastern Europe. Among the only issues that find broad acceptance across this divide are concern for the natural environment and skepticism toward Christian missionary efforts.