March 23, 2024 • 15 mins
Embark on a journey into the rich tapestry of paganism with me, Matt, as your guide on Old Gods and New Pagans. Discover the word 'pagan' in a new light, tracing its origins from ancient Latin to the myriad of modern interpretations that have often been misunderstood. We'll navigate the fascinating landscape of belief systems, ranging from the oldest, Hinduism, to Norse, Celtic, and even lesser-known paths like Druidry and Hellenism. Unearth the links that unite pagan gods across different cultures, and witness the revival of indigenous practices that continue to thrive globally.
Venture deeper into the spiritual essence of paganism as we explore animism, a belief central to many pagan traditions. Learn about the profound respect for all aspects of nature, where mountains and rivers are as enlivened as any creature, and even inanimate objects command reverence for their spirit. This episode isn't just about gods and rituals; it's an invitation to perceive the world through a lens where divine energy connects us all, shaping a foundation for the veneration of the natural world that pagans hold dear. Join us for this thought-provoking discussion, where ancient wisdom meets contemporary curiosity.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello everyone, my name is Matt and you're
listening to Old Gods and NewPagans, A show that takes a jump
into topics for New Pagans,animists or anyone that just
wants to build a strongerconnection to nature and the Old
Gods.
This is Episode 1, and thisweek we're talking about
(00:34):
paganism, what it is, what's aheathen, who are the pagans,
where they come from anddifferent pagan belief systems.
Let's go ahead and dive rightin.
What does pagan mean?
Well, the definition of paganhas changed over the years.
(00:55):
As of now, the kind of oftenoffensive, old-fashioned term
for pagan is a person who is notreligious or is whose religion
is not Judaism, islam or evenChristianity, so basically the
Abrahamic belief systems.
Pagan is also defined assomeone who has a follower of a
(01:16):
polytheistic religion.
But if you want to dive a littledeeper, the word pagan is
derived from the Latin paganusPaganus I'm not sure of the
pronunciation which was used atthe end of the Roman Empire to
name those who practice areligion other than Christianity
, judaism or Islam.
Early Christians often use theterm to refer to non-Christians
(01:39):
who worship multiple deities orpolytheists.
In Latin, paganus originallymeant country-dweller or like
civilian.
It could have been used as faras civilian in the
non-militaristic sense, not partof the Roman Empire, or it
could have just been, like youknow, just country-dweller and a
(02:01):
lot of the same manner thatmodern-day Americans use the
term hillbilly, redneck,something like that.
So it was kind of a derogatoryterm for those that lived in the
country who weren't part of,like, the city life that
practiced Christianity or otherAbrahamic beliefs.
Also the people who lived farfrom those cities, because in
(02:25):
the cities Christianity was morequickly adopted than it was
farther away and so those peoplewere referred to as pagans or
those country folk who havetheir other strange beliefs.
And kind of going back to thecivilian topic, because early
Christians, especially likeduring the whole crusade age, a
(02:47):
lot of early Christians considerthemselves soldiers for Christ,
making the non-believers or thepagans more civilians.
This definition kind of goesinto heathen as well, because
the etymology of that kind ofoverlaps that as well, meaning
to an unconverted member of apeople or nation that does not
(03:11):
acknowledge the God of the Bible.
But it's also believed to comefrom the term for a country
inhabitant, in this case, youknow, heathedweller, somebody
from the heath, heathen.
Both words have developedbroader and more pejorative
meanings over time, with pagantypically used to mean just a
(03:33):
non-religious or hedonisticperson or uncivilized strange
there's a lot of words that canbe thrown in there.
The original meanings are stillin use.
Again, you know kind of thinkredneck or hillbilly that those
terms were used to denigrate acertain population.
All right, let's kind of lookinto the different types of
(03:58):
paganism, all the different likebranches, so to speak.
I'm just going to kind of runthrough these, this list, really
quickly and give just a basicbump into what they mean.
The oldest religion that'sstill considered pagan-ish would
be Hinduism.
Just because it is kind of likea polytheistic face, all of one
(04:18):
, one of many kind of thing.
They refer to it as many facesof one, so all the different
gods or different aspects of thesame, but it is considered the
oldest surviving pagan faith.
Then you have one of the mostpopular one.
You got the Norse pagans andeven that is kind of branched
off into slightly differentbranches.
(04:39):
So you have Odinist, asatru,hethens, you have Rakatru and a
few others in there.
I'm just not going to dive intotoo much in this episode.
But then when you startbranching from the Norse area,
you have the Germanic pagans,which are very similar in a lot
of the beliefs, so the Norsekind of came from them, as well
as the Celtic pagans.
(05:00):
Then you have terms likeDruidry, shamanism.
That kind of goes around now,shamanism being more from the
Mongolian part of the world, iswhere the term Shaman came from,
but it's been widely adapted tobasically mean a spiritual
(05:21):
person in a village, in a way.
You have Hellenism, which islike the ancient Greek gods.
You have Slavic and Balticregions of Europe and Asia that
have their own little set ofbelief systems.
Now, a really neat thingbetween all these different
pagan faiths is a lot of thegods and the aspects of the gods
(05:42):
do have quite a bit of overlapOdin, woden, going from the
Germanic to the Norse.
They have different gods that,like the Slavic, have a god
that's basically Thor, but justhas a different name and
slightly different personality,but it essentially represents
the same forces.
(06:04):
A lot of these pagan faiths,even if they may be separated by
miles or if they're separatedby a culture, they have some
similarities in there.
Then you have the SemiticNeopaganism.
It's a reconstruction ofancient Jewish religion,
focusing the gods and goddessesof the ancient Israelites, kind
(06:27):
of Wurbal, yahweh El Asherah andall the other gods of the
Canaanite and Israelite area.
So you have a reconstruction,people going back to that.
This is the paganism thatChristianity, judaism, islam all
came from.
(06:48):
That they took these pagan godsand essentially combined a few,
stripped a few out and createdwhat is now Judaism,
christianity, etc.
There's also a Godeanism.
That's a rebirth of atraditional African paganism
(07:08):
that began in then, I believe,nigeria.
So that's a really cool thing.
There we talk about a lot ofindigenous cultures and
different belief systems fromaround the world.
It's nice to you know, we tendto focus a lot more on Europe
and Asian belief systems, butthen you also have, you know,
(07:30):
indigenous people from theAmericas, asia, pacific, islands
, all over the world, africa,and they have their own branches
of paganism that was kind ofwiped out with early Christian
missionaries going in and wipingoff their religions and
converting them in mass.
So this is nice to see some ofthese ancient religions and
(07:53):
ancient beliefs and stuff comingback out.
That's not an all-encompassinglist of paganism.
We also have the neo-pagan kindof wicker movement.
It's got its own rules andfollowing that go along with
that.
But let's kind of branch backout into what does it mean to be
(08:14):
a pagan?
Now I'm going to take this froma perspective of for lack of a
better term atheism was what youknow.
Paganism means without gods ingeneral, and then we'll kind of
add on the gods and expand as wego along with these episodes.
(08:36):
So what does it mean to be apagan?
Most, all pagans believe thatnature is sacred.
It is worthy of honor and needsto be protected and adored.
Also, some of the other thingsthat nature is a cycle of birth,
growth, death.
(08:56):
It's observed in the world allaround us, no merit or what
continent you're from.
There's always the changing ofthe times, the year, the seasons
, whether it's summer to winteror dry to rainy season,
depending on if you're more inthe tropics, and most pagans
kind of take these differenttimes of the year, these cycles
(09:18):
of nature birth and death andthey attach spiritual meanings
to these.
In most pagans, human beings areseen as a part of nature, not
something to conquer nature orsomething above it.
That we're seen as a part of it, along with other animals,
trees, even stones, plants,everything that is of this earth
(09:40):
.
Pagans in general work toward apeaceful harmony with the
environment, and that tends toinclude other people as well.
Other things about what itmeans to be a pagan would be not
so much worship we don't, youknow, it's not worshiping the
earth, worshiping nature it'smore along the lines of regard,
(10:05):
respect, honoring it, not blindworship.
So kind of going into some ofthe things that pagans believe.
Not so much what it means, butyou know what we believe.
One big thing is it depends onthe type of pagan.
There's so many differentbranches of paganism, pagan
(10:27):
being a very generalized term ofjust essentially someone who
doesn't follow a major worldreligion.
So there are other branches andother types, as I mentioned
earlier underneath it.
But the general practice isthat nature is sacred, that
there are various deities, gods,beings in the world around us,
(10:48):
whether they be, you know, allpowerful, or all seeing, all
knowing gods, or whether they besprites, elves, spirits, other
supernatural entities out there.
And you know, as I mentioned,there are different, many
(11:08):
different pagan belief systems,but really it all comes down
just to primal respect for lifein general.
Some other things about whatpagans believe most pagans are
polytheistic.
Different pagan belief systemshave anywhere from one to even
thousands of gods and othermetaphysical beings.
(11:33):
There it ranges from a faith orbelief in actual physical,
living gods that either liveamong us or living in like a
metaphysical realm, like Asgard,mount Olympus, your heaven and
hell, so to speak.
Pagans also believe that thegods could simply just be
(11:56):
personifications of both natureand human experience.
Both belief systems are okay.
Whether you believe in actualphysical, living gods, you know
immortal gods living in ametaphysical realm or roaming
the earth, living among us, oryou just believe that they're
personifications of natural andhuman processes, you know it's
(12:17):
okay.
Those are both consideredaccepted pagan beliefs and not
something that really should beargued, because it all comes
down to your personalspirituality and your personal
faith.
One other core belief systemwithin paganism in general is
the belief in animism.
(12:38):
At the core of most, if not all, pagan belief system is that
idea of animism.
This, which is the belief thatall natural phenomenon,
including human beings, animals,plants, but also rocks, lakes,
mountain, weather and so on,share one vital quality, a
spirit or just a type of divineenergy.
(13:01):
There are many nuances toanimism that vary from region to
region, but it in short, thereare many different pagan paths
and different nuances to animismthat vary from region to region
, but and I'm going to touch onthis in a future episode but the
(13:28):
basics of animism would be thatyou know each individual life,
so like human beings, being atthe top of that, well below the
gods or other metaphysicalbeings that we have.
You know thought, we have a soul, we have a body, we have a
spirit, we have that energy inus.
And you kind of go down thatladder into animals.
(13:51):
You know they have most ofthose things, but maybe not
quite all they don't have.
You know the intelligence thatwe do at the same level.
And then you have, you know,plants, that they are alive,
they have a body, but they don'thave thought, but they do have
a vital spirit and energy.
And then going down to say ananemone object like a mountain,
that mountain itself has aenergy, a spirit of its own, but
(14:15):
it may not have thought.
But that's kind of the corebelief of animism, that no, we
don't believe that everything isalive, but we do believe that
everything has a spirit andenergy to it and it should be
respected.
So just kind of touchingthrough on what I've talked
about, paganism is a beliefsystem that holds the natural
(14:38):
world to be sacred.
It is often polytheistic.
It could either believe inactual gods and goddesses or
simply personifications of thenatural world most pagan belief
systems hold animism as a corefoundational belief within
itself.
I'll take a deeper dive intoanimism in the next episode.
(15:01):
So that concludes episode one.
Hello everyone, my name is Matt and you're
listening to Old Gods and NewPagans, A show that takes a jump
into topics for New Pagans,animists or anyone that just
wants to build a strongerconnection to nature and the Old
Gods.
This is Episode 1, and thisweek we're talking about
(00:34):
paganism, what it is, what's aheathen, who are the pagans,
where they come from anddifferent pagan belief systems.
Let's go ahead and dive rightin.
What does pagan mean?
Well, the definition of paganhas changed over the years.
(00:55):
As of now, the kind of oftenoffensive, old-fashioned term
for pagan is a person who is notreligious or is whose religion
is not Judaism, islam or evenChristianity, so basically the
Abrahamic belief systems.
Pagan is also defined assomeone who has a follower of a
(01:16):
polytheistic religion.
But if you want to dive a littledeeper, the word pagan is
derived from the Latin paganusPaganus I'm not sure of the
pronunciation which was used atthe end of the Roman Empire to
name those who practice areligion other than Christianity
, judaism or Islam.
Early Christians often use theterm to refer to non-Christians
(01:39):
who worship multiple deities orpolytheists.
In Latin, paganus originallymeant country-dweller or like
civilian.
It could have been used as faras civilian in the
non-militaristic sense, not partof the Roman Empire, or it
could have just been, like youknow, just country-dweller and a
(02:01):
lot of the same manner thatmodern-day Americans use the
term hillbilly, redneck,something like that.
So it was kind of a derogatoryterm for those that lived in the
country who weren't part of,like, the city life that
practiced Christianity or otherAbrahamic beliefs.
Also the people who lived farfrom those cities, because in
(02:25):
the cities Christianity was morequickly adopted than it was
farther away and so those peoplewere referred to as pagans or
those country folk who havetheir other strange beliefs.
And kind of going back to thecivilian topic, because early
Christians, especially likeduring the whole crusade age, a
(02:47):
lot of early Christians considerthemselves soldiers for Christ,
making the non-believers or thepagans more civilians.
This definition kind of goesinto heathen as well, because
the etymology of that kind ofoverlaps that as well, meaning
to an unconverted member of apeople or nation that does not
(03:11):
acknowledge the God of the Bible.
But it's also believed to comefrom the term for a country
inhabitant, in this case, youknow, heathedweller, somebody
from the heath, heathen.
Both words have developedbroader and more pejorative
meanings over time, with pagantypically used to mean just a
(03:33):
non-religious or hedonisticperson or uncivilized strange
there's a lot of words that canbe thrown in there.
The original meanings are stillin use.
Again, you know kind of thinkredneck or hillbilly that those
terms were used to denigrate acertain population.
All right, let's kind of lookinto the different types of
(03:58):
paganism, all the different likebranches, so to speak.
I'm just going to kind of runthrough these, this list, really
quickly and give just a basicbump into what they mean.
The oldest religion that'sstill considered pagan-ish would
be Hinduism.
Just because it is kind of likea polytheistic face, all of one
(04:18):
, one of many kind of thing.
They refer to it as many facesof one, so all the different
gods or different aspects of thesame, but it is considered the
oldest surviving pagan faith.
Then you have one of the mostpopular one.
You got the Norse pagans andeven that is kind of branched
off into slightly differentbranches.
(04:39):
So you have Odinist, asatru,hethens, you have Rakatru and a
few others in there.
I'm just not going to dive intotoo much in this episode.
But then when you startbranching from the Norse area,
you have the Germanic pagans,which are very similar in a lot
of the beliefs, so the Norsekind of came from them, as well
as the Celtic pagans.
(05:00):
Then you have terms likeDruidry, shamanism.
That kind of goes around now,shamanism being more from the
Mongolian part of the world, iswhere the term Shaman came from,
but it's been widely adapted tobasically mean a spiritual
(05:21):
person in a village, in a way.
You have Hellenism, which islike the ancient Greek gods.
You have Slavic and Balticregions of Europe and Asia that
have their own little set ofbelief systems.
Now, a really neat thingbetween all these different
pagan faiths is a lot of thegods and the aspects of the gods
(05:42):
do have quite a bit of overlapOdin, woden, going from the
Germanic to the Norse.
They have different gods that,like the Slavic, have a god
that's basically Thor, but justhas a different name and
slightly different personality,but it essentially represents
the same forces.
(06:04):
A lot of these pagan faiths,even if they may be separated by
miles or if they're separatedby a culture, they have some
similarities in there.
Then you have the SemiticNeopaganism.
It's a reconstruction ofancient Jewish religion,
focusing the gods and goddessesof the ancient Israelites, kind
(06:27):
of Wurbal, yahweh El Asherah andall the other gods of the
Canaanite and Israelite area.
So you have a reconstruction,people going back to that.
This is the paganism thatChristianity, judaism, islam all
came from.
(06:48):
That they took these pagan godsand essentially combined a few,
stripped a few out and createdwhat is now Judaism,
christianity, etc.
There's also a Godeanism.
That's a rebirth of atraditional African paganism
(07:08):
that began in then, I believe,nigeria.
So that's a really cool thing.
There we talk about a lot ofindigenous cultures and
different belief systems fromaround the world.
It's nice to you know, we tendto focus a lot more on Europe
and Asian belief systems, butthen you also have, you know,
(07:30):
indigenous people from theAmericas, asia, pacific, islands
, all over the world, africa,and they have their own branches
of paganism that was kind ofwiped out with early Christian
missionaries going in and wipingoff their religions and
converting them in mass.
So this is nice to see some ofthese ancient religions and
(07:53):
ancient beliefs and stuff comingback out.
That's not an all-encompassinglist of paganism.
We also have the neo-pagan kindof wicker movement.
It's got its own rules andfollowing that go along with
that.
But let's kind of branch backout into what does it mean to be
(08:14):
a pagan?
Now I'm going to take this froma perspective of for lack of a
better term atheism was what youknow.
Paganism means without gods ingeneral, and then we'll kind of
add on the gods and expand as wego along with these episodes.
(08:36):
So what does it mean to be apagan?
Most, all pagans believe thatnature is sacred.
It is worthy of honor and needsto be protected and adored.
Also, some of the other thingsthat nature is a cycle of birth,
growth, death.
(08:56):
It's observed in the world allaround us, no merit or what
continent you're from.
There's always the changing ofthe times, the year, the seasons
, whether it's summer to winteror dry to rainy season,
depending on if you're more inthe tropics, and most pagans
kind of take these differenttimes of the year, these cycles
(09:18):
of nature birth and death andthey attach spiritual meanings
to these.
In most pagans, human beings areseen as a part of nature, not
something to conquer nature orsomething above it.
That we're seen as a part of it, along with other animals,
trees, even stones, plants,everything that is of this earth
(09:40):
.
Pagans in general work toward apeaceful harmony with the
environment, and that tends toinclude other people as well.
Other things about what itmeans to be a pagan would be not
so much worship we don't, youknow, it's not worshiping the
earth, worshiping nature it'smore along the lines of regard,
(10:05):
respect, honoring it, not blindworship.
So kind of going into some ofthe things that pagans believe.
Not so much what it means, butyou know what we believe.
One big thing is it depends onthe type of pagan.
There's so many differentbranches of paganism, pagan
(10:27):
being a very generalized term ofjust essentially someone who
doesn't follow a major worldreligion.
So there are other branches andother types, as I mentioned
earlier underneath it.
But the general practice isthat nature is sacred, that
there are various deities, gods,beings in the world around us,
(10:48):
whether they be, you know, allpowerful, or all seeing, all
knowing gods, or whether they besprites, elves, spirits, other
supernatural entities out there.
And you know, as I mentioned,there are different, many
(11:08):
different pagan belief systems,but really it all comes down
just to primal respect for lifein general.
Some other things about whatpagans believe most pagans are
polytheistic.
Different pagan belief systemshave anywhere from one to even
thousands of gods and othermetaphysical beings.
(11:33):
There it ranges from a faith orbelief in actual physical,
living gods that either liveamong us or living in like a
metaphysical realm, like Asgard,mount Olympus, your heaven and
hell, so to speak.
Pagans also believe that thegods could simply just be
(11:56):
personifications of both natureand human experience.
Both belief systems are okay.
Whether you believe in actualphysical, living gods, you know
immortal gods living in ametaphysical realm or roaming
the earth, living among us, oryou just believe that they're
personifications of natural andhuman processes, you know it's
(12:17):
okay.
Those are both consideredaccepted pagan beliefs and not
something that really should beargued, because it all comes
down to your personalspirituality and your personal
faith.
One other core belief systemwithin paganism in general is
the belief in animism.
(12:38):
At the core of most, if not all, pagan belief system is that
idea of animism.
This, which is the belief thatall natural phenomenon,
including human beings, animals,plants, but also rocks, lakes,
mountain, weather and so on,share one vital quality, a
spirit or just a type of divineenergy.
(13:01):
There are many nuances toanimism that vary from region to
region, but it in short, thereare many different pagan paths
and different nuances to animismthat vary from region to region
, but and I'm going to touch onthis in a future episode but the
(13:28):
basics of animism would be thatyou know each individual life,
so like human beings, being atthe top of that, well below the
gods or other metaphysicalbeings that we have.
You know thought, we have a soul, we have a body, we have a
spirit, we have that energy inus.
And you kind of go down thatladder into animals.
(13:51):
You know they have most ofthose things, but maybe not
quite all they don't have.
You know the intelligence thatwe do at the same level.
And then you have, you know,plants, that they are alive,
they have a body, but they don'thave thought, but they do have
a vital spirit and energy.
And then going down to say ananemone object like a mountain,
that mountain itself has aenergy, a spirit of its own, but
(14:15):
it may not have thought.
But that's kind of the corebelief of animism, that no, we
don't believe that everything isalive, but we do believe that
everything has a spirit andenergy to it and it should be
respected.
So just kind of touchingthrough on what I've talked
about, paganism is a beliefsystem that holds the natural
(14:38):
world to be sacred.
It is often polytheistic.
It could either believe inactual gods and goddesses or
simply personifications of thenatural world most pagan belief
systems hold animism as a corefoundational belief within
itself.
I'll take a deeper dive intoanimism in the next episode.
(15:01):
So that concludes episode one.
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