Heathen/Pagan

Within a European Christian context, paganism is a catch-all term which has come to connote a broad set of not necessarily compatible religious beliefs and practices of a natural religion (as opposed to a revealed religion of a text), which are usually, but not necessarily, characterized by polytheism and, less commonly, animism. There is little organized "-ism" in paganism.

Many current Pagans in industrial societies base their beliefs and practices on a connection to Nature, and a divinity within all living things, but this may not hold true for all forms of Paganism, past or present. Some believe that there are many deities, while some believe that the combined subconcious spirit of all living things forms the universal deity. Paganism predates modern monotheism, although its origins are lost in prehistory. Ancient paganism tended in many cases to be a deification of the political process, with "state divinities" assigned to various localities (Athena in Athens, for example). Many ancient regimes would claim to be the representative on earth of these gods, and would depend on more or less elaborate bureaucracies of state-supported priests and scribes to lend public support to their claims. This is something it shares with more 'mainstream' religions, as can be seen in the history of the Catholic church, the Church of England and the ancient and current trends in Islam. In one well-established sense, paganism is the belief in any non-monotheistic religion, which would mean that the Pythagoreans of ancient Greece would not be considered pagan in that sense, since they were monotheist, but not in the Abrahamic tradition. In an extreme sense, and like the pejorative sense below, any belief, ritual or pastime not sanctioned by a religion accepted as orthodox by those doing the describing, such as Burning Man, Halloween, or even Christmas, can be described as pagan by the person or people who object to them.

Heathen, in English and Scots originally meaning someone who lived in the wild, uncultivated heath that was outside the village system and not covered by the parish boundary nor blessed by the protective presence of a local priest, was often used as a synonym of "pagan". Like the word pagan, it came to mean a person holding onto non-Christian customs and beliefs, often used in a pejorative sense of an unbaptized savage (as opposed to a heretic). Viking raiders were "heathens".

A general term, sometimes still referring to (often in a pejorative sense) non-adherents to a certain religion, it may have originally applied only to those who lived "on the heath," (though this etymology is disputed) or in the underpopulated areas of Europe which were slow to convert to Christianity during its period of expansion. Regardless, plausible etymological origins for the word, and more modern variants, are found within the corpus of texts comprising what is considered to be the original Norse polytheist faith system.

In more modern, neopagan circles, it often refers specifically to the ancient religion of the Germanic peoples, which in its modern form is in the US more widely known by the term Ásatrú. In Britain "Heathenry" is the most widely used term for those who are recreating and reinterpreting old Germanic/Scandinavian religious practices and worldviews from the literary and archaeological sources and who describe themselves as "Heathen" in part to distinguish themselves from other pagans whose rituals come from other sources. In America, "Odinist" seems to have just as much currency in this context as "Heathen", though ideologically variant groups within the same overal religious group have been known to use "Heithinn" or even simply "Folk / Volk".

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Paganism".