Paganism, part 1: what is modern paganism?

[icymist]

According to the recent census, there are around 80,000 people who call themselves pagans in England and Wales today. Although they are insignificant numerically, they haunt the imagination, earn public fascination and derision in equal measure, and have featured heavily in the recent press – an article on Hellenic paganism at the BBC, one on Anglican attempts to recruit pagans in the Telegraph, and on the future of Stonehenge everywhere. As I write this, the Association of Catholic Priests is bemoaning the apparent fact that Ireland is now a "pagan" country, which might come as a bit of a shock to their parishioners. To quote the Princess Bride: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

So what does "pagan" mean now? Who are we? What do we believe? And how can we possibly believe it?

I need to emphasise straight away that modern paganism – at least in the UK – has no direct links with whatever it was that ancient pagans, whoever they were, believed in. The term comes from the late Latin "paganus", which simply means "country dweller" or, less flatteringly to the modern mind, "peasant". Most country dwellers today obviously are not worshippers of Hera or Horus, and the name has emerged over the last 100 years or so as an umbrella term to cover a multitude of practices and beliefs – plus many believers who are waking up to the fact that they have very little in common with one another – and certainly not with any ancient practice. We don't know what the original druids did, except through Roman writing of questionable accuracy, and although the presence of cunning men and women is by contrast relatively well documented from medieval times onwards, the set of folk magic practices, and more sophisticated grimoire-based magic, remains firmly rooted within the Christian tradition and is unlikely to reflect any earlier worship except in a very tenuous form.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/15/what-is-modern-paganism