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What Is a Pagan?

From an address given at the Unitarian Church of Underwood, Minnesota

November 17, 2024

Good morning. My name is Steven Posch.

Along with nearly 2 million of my fellow Americans, and perhaps 200 million others worldwide, I identify as a pagan.

Like tribal people everywhere, we think of ourselves as the Original People.

“Pagan,” of course, is a name-from-outside. Like Indigenous Americans, who thought of themselves as Lakota or Anishinabe or Hochunk, and had no idea that they were Indigenous Americans until someone else came and told them so—the encounter with the other invariably leads to a change in how we perceive ourselves—we Indigenous Europeans, who thought of ourselves as Dobunni or Cornovii or Iceni, had no idea that we were pagans until the Church came along and told us so.

(The same is true, of course, of Indigenous Africans, Asians, and Australians.)

So the name “pagan” lumps together what, in essence, are ten thousand very-different-from-one-another tribal religions. Like “Nature,” “pagan” is a conceptually problematic term.

Like “Nature,” “pagan” is a term of convenience, no more. Nonetheless, some of that 220,000,001 have today come to embrace that term, because those ten thousand very-different-from-one-another tribal religions all share two profoundly important family resemblances.

All are deeply rooted in the thews—ways—of the ancestors.

All engage in conversation with the non-human world.

(That's my colorless-but-less-conceptually-problematic way of saying “Nature.”)

That's my definition of “pagan”. A pagan is someone in conversation with the non-human world.

This week in my Women as Witches, Saints & Healers course, we read the Corrector of Buchard of Worms. This early 11th century handbook guided priests with questions they ought to ask their confessing parishioners in order to root out bad behaviour -- and a lot of the bad behaviour was pre-Christian practices that persisted. The insight these questions offer is rather magical, but the style of his rhetoric makes this much more fun to read than the usual sort of penitential.

Here are a few snippets to entertain you:

When I first become a Pagan many years ago, I tried to find theological studies of What It All Meant within our literature.  I found many discussions of rituals, magick, and how Witches were correctives to patriarchy. But beyond some brief (and good) discussions in Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon and the Farrars' The Meaning of Witchcraft,  there was almost nothing on the underlying meaning of a Pagan reality.  As I learned more about the broad Pagan tradition I began exploring literature discussing African Diasporic and Native American Pagan religions. Here to, by monotheistic standards the pickings were remarkably thin.

In Brazil I learned most Pagan literature consisted of spell books and details about rituals.  Among the traditional Crow people in Montana, individuals had different interpretations of their practices’ deeper meaning and of the status of figures like Coyote, but no developed theology.  Within my own coven I learned my coven-mates had different beliefs about who the Gods were. Classical Pagan religious writing was rarely sectarian and the major one that could be so described, The Golden Ass, was more an adventure story than a treatise on the Gods.  Pagan cultures were not particularly peaceful, but I know of no adherents to a Pagan religion waging war on those of another for not worshiping the right Gods. Unlike the monotheisms, unity of belief didn’t seem very important in the Pagan world.

What makes a religion pagan?

I'm going to contend that paganisms are preeminently religions of land, lede, and lore.

Land. Paganism is local, intimately related to specific places. Pagans are by definition the People of the Place; when peoples change their place, they bring their mythologies with them, and those mythologies naturalize to the new place. While the term “nature religion” is problematic on numerous levels, the paganisms direct themselves largely to this-worldly concerns, and engage the environment and the non-human beings with whom we share that environment as a matter of primary spiritual course. There are no universal paganisms; or, rather, the paganisms are at their most universal insofar they are most specifically local.

How do you say “pagan” in Pagan?

“Pagan”, of course, is how one says “pagan” in Cowan; it’s a name bestowed on us by outsiders. We're certainly not the first people in history to take a name bestowed in scorn and to wear it with pride, nor, we may be sure, will we be the last. But ultimately it’s an outside-looking-in (or etic) name, rooted in someone else’s perspective and thought.

The question then arises: what is our inside-looking-out (or emic) name for ourselves? What is our term of self-description rooted in the internal logic of our own worldview?