Until recently, there would have been no equivalent difficulty in defining the original meaning of the term ‘pagan.’ For over a hundred years writers had commonly asserted that the Latin word paganus, from which it was derived, signified ‘rustic’; a result of the triumph of Christianity as the dominant, metropolitan, and urban faith, which left the old religions to make a last stand among the more backward populations of the countryside. In 1986, however, the Oxford-based historian Robin Lane Fox reminded colleagues that this usage had never actually been proved and that the term had more probably been employed in a different sense in which it was attested in the Roman world, of a civilian; in this case a person not enrolled in the Christian army of God. A few years later a French academic, Pierre Chuvin, challenged both derivations, arguing that the word pagani was applied to followers of the older religious traditions at a time when the latter still made up the majority of town-dwellers and when its earlier sense, of non-military, had died out. He proposed instead that it simply denoted those who preferred the faith of the pagus, the local unit of government; that is, the rooted or old religion. His suggestion has so far met with apparent wide acceptance.
A similar problem attends the equivalent northern European term ‘heathen’. The frequent linkage of ‘pagan’ to rusticity has produced a similar popular connection of this other word with ‘heath’, as if it originally indicated people driven to worship the forbidden old divinities in wastelands and wild places. As the Oxford English Dictionary makes clear, however, ‘heathen’ is the English version of the term used throughout the Germanic language group in the early Middle Ages to signify a follower of a non-Christian religion. It was coined originally by the Goths, the first speakers of a Germanic tongue to undergo a mass conversion to Christianity. Unhappily, the similarity to ‘heath,’ so apparent in modern English and German, does not occur in Gothic. Experts have failed to discover any other likely linguistic origin for ‘heathen,’ and the matter will probably remain a mystery (p.4).
As with most of the actual practices of pre-Christian religions in northern Europe, even the etymology of these general terms is debated by scholars. The scarcity of evidence, either literary or archaeological, has long frustrated efforts to reconstruct these traditions in an authentic way. Fortunately, my conception of Scientific Paganism is not particularly concerned with such matters. Where we’ve come from is less important than where we’re going.
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