Paganism

• 1. Introduction

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  Paganism is a word that carries the weight of centuries of argument, misuse, and reinvention. Before the 20th century, no one actually called themselves a pagan to describe their own religion. The label was invented by the early Christian Church, applied to outsiders as one of the central contrasts through which Christians defined themselves. It was, from the start, a word meant to diminish.

  Where did it come from? The Latin paganus, revived during the Renaissance, traced back to classical Latin pagus, meaning a region marked by boundaries, and from there it drifted toward words meaning country dweller, villager, and finally in Roman military slang, civilian or non-combatant. It was a word of low status, not of religion. Yet this slang term would survive for two millennia, shaping how billions of people understood the world's religious landscape.

  How did one borrowed slur come to encompass the ancient Greeks, the Albanian tribes, the Sabian scholars of Harran, and the Wiccan gatherings of 1980s America? And how did people once condemned by that label come to claim it proudly for themselves? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. A Word With No Religion

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  Tertullian, one of the early Church's most forceful writers, used paganus in a telling way in his De Corona Militis. He wrote of the Christian as a paganus, a civilian, set against the soldier of Christ. The word had not yet become a religious insult; it was still military jargon for someone outside the army.

  That shift arrived by the mid-4th century. Augustine of Hippo accelerated it when he wrote De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos, The City of God against the Pagans, in response to the sack of Rome by the Visigoths. That sack came just over fifteen years after the Christian persecution of paganism under Theodosius I, and whispers spread that the old gods had protected Rome better than the Christian God. Augustine turned the geography of paganus against its critics: those who sacked Rome were, in his framing, "not of the city" or simply rural, outside the community of the faithful.

  Scholars note that this evolution happened only in the Latin west, within the Latin Church. Elsewhere, the words Hellene and gentile did the same work, while paganus remained a purely secular term carrying overtones of the inferior and the commonplace. The adoption of paganus as a blanket religious insult has been called an unforeseen and singularly long-lasting victory for a word of Latin slang that was originally devoid of religious meaning.

  Medieval writers tried to explain the rural association by pointing to Christianization patterns, where cities converted faster than remote regions. But this explanation has multiple problems: the word's religious use pre-dates that period, paganism within the Roman Empire was actually centered on cities, and paganus had not yet fully acquired the meanings of uncultured backwardness that would have made the label logical to apply. The simpler answer is the military one. The term pagan was not even attested in the English language until the 17th century, centuries after the process it supposedly described.

• 3. What Pagans Actually Believed

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  One scholar quoted in the source put the challenge starkly: it might be less confusing to say that pagans, before their competition with Christianity, had no religion at all in the sense in which that word is normally used today. They had no tradition of discourse about ritual or religious matters, no organized system of beliefs, no authority structure specific to religion, and no commitment to a particular group of people or set of ideas beyond family and political context.

  This is a provocative claim, but it reflects a genuine complexity. Early Christians lumped diverse cults together for convenience and rhetoric. While paganism generally implies polytheism, the primary distinction between classical pagans and Christians was not simply monotheism versus polytheism. Many historical pagans believed in a supreme deity. Most, however, also believed in subordinate gods or daimons, a position scholars call henotheism.

  To Christians, the decisive question was whether someone worshipped the one true God. Those who did not, whether polytheist, monotheist, or atheist, were outsiders. Classical pagans would have found this framing peculiar. They considered priestly colleges, such as the College of Pontiffs or the Epulones, and specific cult practices the more meaningful distinctions among religious groups.

  Ludwig Feuerbach characterized the paganism of classical antiquity as the unity of religion and politics, of spirit and nature, of god and man, with every pagan tradition also being a national tradition. Modern historians shifted that framing, defining paganism instead as an aggregate of cult acts set within a civic rather than a national context, without a written creed or any sense of orthodoxy. A widely regarded test of whether someone was pagan or Christian in the early period was simpler: ritual sacrifice, an integral part of Greco-Roman religion, was the dividing line that outsiders could observe.

• 4. Hidden in Plain Sight

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  Proclus, who headed the Athenian School from 412 to 485, was an open practitioner of Hellenic paganism and the ritual tradition known as Theurgy. His systematic method in works like the Elements of Theology was so rigorous that later Christian theologians found him indispensable as a conceptual framework, ensuring his content's survival under the guise of intellectual utility.

  Damascius, the last head of the Athenian School before its closure in 529, is linked by scholars to a more radical strategy: the pseudepigraphy of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a text dated to around the year 500. Scholars including Tuomo Lankila have interpreted this as a conscious attempt to resurrect polytheistic religion through concealment by placing advanced Proclean philosophy under apostolic authority.

  In Alexandria, Ammonius Hermiae, active from roughly 440 to 520, took a more pragmatic path. Although a pagan, he negotiated directly with the Christian patriarch Proterius to keep his school open, enabling the continuous teaching of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic material through public compliance. His student John Philoponus, active from around 490 to 570, used an inverted strategy: he preserved the detailed philosophical arguments of pagan doctrine by writing formal refutations of them, keeping the ideas alive under the guise of neutralization.

  When the Athenian School closed, Simplicius of Cilicia moved to Persia. His vast commentaries on Aristotle avoided overt endorsement of pagan positions while providing what became the essential vehicle for transmitting Greek philosophy into both the Byzantine and Islamic worlds. Michael Psellos, writing between 1017 and 1078, refined this into explicit dissimulation: he openly studied Proclus, Plotinus, and the Chaldaean Oracles while publicly disavowing belief in astrology to distance himself from heretical doctrines, a necessary facade for institutional survival. The cost of failing was demonstrated by John Italos, born in 1025, whose reliance on rational proof over patristic authority was deemed an inadequate disclaimer; he was condemned in 1082 under ten anathemas recorded in the Synodikon of Orthodoxy.

• 5. The Sabians of Harran

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  Harran negotiated a peaceful surrender to the Rashidun Caliphate in 639-640. The city had already survived long enough to blend Mesopotamian paganism with Neoplatonism into a syncretic tradition that would outlast empires. Under the Umayyad Caliph Marwan II, who ruled from 744 to 750, Harran served as his capital. Its schools and university remained active into the Abbasid period, participating in the Translation Movement during the reign of Harun al-Rashid from 786 to 809.

  The community's decisive survival move came after a decree by Caliph Al-Ma'mun in 830. By adopting the legal status of Sabians, a protected group mentioned in the Quran, the Harranians secured the continuation of their distinct religious and intellectual identity. Their devotion to an astral cult in the Chaldean tradition and their claim that Hermes Trismegistus was their primary prophet made them the natural keepers of the esoteric Greek and Babylonian scientific lineages.

  The most influential scholarly line from Harran was founded by Thabit ibn Qurra, born in 836 and died in 901. His funeral inscription describes him explicitly as a Sabian, son of a Sabian. He was a mathematician, astronomer, and translator whose work introduced the theoretical framework for celestial mechanics into Arabic scholarship. His descendants carried the tradition forward: his son Sinan ibn Thabit ibn Qurra, born around 880, and his grandson Ibrahim ibn Sinan ibn Thabit, born around 908, served as elite court physicians and mathematicians.

  The foundational corpus of Arabic alchemy is associated with Jabir ibn Hayyan, known as Geber, who lived from around 721 to 815. Scholars trace his esoteric knowledge to the Harranian scholarly network through the Sabian tradition of viewing Hermes as the prophet of alchemy. This Hermetic and Chaldean-influenced cosmology was embedded in early Islamic chemical arts, and was later codified by scholars such as Ibn Wahshiyya, who died in the 930s, ensuring the literary survival of magical and alchemical lore for subsequent generations. The path from Harran to Europe ran through one more pair of hands: Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor from 1194 to 1250, who explicitly sought Arabic esoteric knowledge during the Sixth Crusade, and his chief court scholar Michael Scot, born around 1175, whose writings show clear signs of working within the Arabic Hermetic tradition that incorporated material preserved by the Sabians.

• 6. The Pagan Label Reclaimed

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  The Brothers Grimm, and particularly Jacob Grimm in his Teutonic Mythology, were among the 19th century scholars who attempted to reconstruct pagan mythology from folklore and fairy tales. Their work influenced Alexander Afanasyev in Russia, Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe in Norway, and the Englishman Joseph Jacobs, all of whom collected tales under the belief that the fairy tales of a country were especially representative of it.

  The poets of the era reached for pagan themes in sharper terms. Algernon Charles Swinburne addressed Christianity directly: Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath; We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death. G. K. Chesterton answered from the other direction, describing the pagan figure as one who set out with admirable sense to enjoy himself, only to discover by the end of his civilization that a man cannot enjoy himself and continue to enjoy anything else.

  This Romantic fascination with Celtic, Slavic, and Viking traditions portrayed historical polytheists as noble savages, coinciding with Romantic nationalism and the revolutions of 1848 and the creation of national epics for newly formed states. The same period saw Elias Lönnrot compile the Kalevala from Finnish oral tradition.

  In 1979, Margot Adler's Drawing Down the Moon and Starhawk's The Spiral Dance opened a new chapter in public awareness of paganism. The 1970s had already seen Wicca influenced by feminism, producing the Goddess-worshipping movement known as Dianic Wicca. By the 1980s, large pagan gatherings and festivals proliferated, and Wicca diversified into eclectic sub-denominations shaped by New Age and counter-culture movements. In 1717, John Toland had become the first Chosen Chief of the Ancient Druid Order, which became known as the British Circle of the Universal Bond. The organization Isaac Bonewits later gave the modern pagan revival a vocabulary for distinguishing between reconstructed ancient faiths, revivalist neopaganism, and traditions significantly influenced by monotheistic frameworks. In Iceland, the members of Asatruarfelagid now account for nearly 2% of the total population, close to six thousand people. Nova Roma, the most prominent international organization for Roman Polytheistic Reconstructionism, was founded in 1998, with active groups across Europe and the Americas.