Neopaganism, also called modern or contemporary paganism, is a broad umbrella term for new religious movements inspired by pre-Christian, indigenous, and nature-based belief systems.
Rather than a single, organized faith with a central authority, it encompasses a diverse collection of independent traditions, paths, and denominations.
Key Characteristics & Beliefs
While practices vary widely across different traditions, most Neopagan movements share several common themes:
- Earth-Centered Spirituality: Deep reverence for nature, the environment, and the cycles of the seasons.
- Polytheism & Pantheism: Belief in and worship of multiple deities. Many adherents view the divine as both personal beings (such as ancient gods and goddesses) and an immanent force within the universe.
- Focus on the Feminine Divine: A distinct emphasis on goddess worship and the sacred feminine, which sets it apart from many traditional, male-dominated religions.
- Ritual & Magic: The use of ritual, spellcraft, meditation, and divination (such as tarot or astrology) to interact with the spiritual world and manifest personal change.
- Individualism: A decentralized, individualistic approach to spirituality that favors personal gnosis (direct spiritual experience) over rigid, dogmatic texts.
Popular Neopagan Traditions
Neopaganism includes several distinct paths or “denominations,” each with its own focus:
- Wicca: The most well-known Neopagan tradition, popularized in the mid-20th century. It is a form of modern witchcraft focusing heavily on the worship of a Goddess and a Horned God, reverence for nature, and the adherence to the Wiccan Rede (a moral code based on “an it harm none, do what ye will”).
- Heathenism (or Asatru): A reconstructionist movement that revives the pre-Christian mythologies and practices of the Germanic and Nordic peoples. It involves the worship of gods like Odin and Thor.
- Neo-Druidry: A path that draws inspiration from the ancient Celtic priests, focusing heavily on nature worship, animism, and ecological activism.
- Hellenic Paganism: A modern revival of ancient Greek religious practices and pantheons.
Historical Context
The term “pagan” was originally a derogatory term used by Christians to describe rural polytheists in the Roman Empire. Modern Neopaganism emerged in the 20th century as a conscious revival of these extinct or marginalized traditions, fueled by the counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s and a growing desire for earth-centered spirituality.
Resources to explore Neopagan paths include communities like Wicca.com for foundational witchcraft or The Troth for Heathenry.
Neopaganism – New Encyclopedia of the Occult
(Taken From: The New Encyclopedia of the Occult, John Michael Greer)
Neopaganism: A general term for the Pagan and, quasiPagan movements that became public in much of the Western world in the second half of the twentieth century. Many of these movements claim connections, historical or spiritual, with earlier Pagan traditions in Europe, although the existence of these connections has been forcefully challenged by scholars. For information on traditional Western polytheistic religion.
It has sometimes been claimed that the term “Neopagan” was invented by a particular Pagan religious group in California in the 1970s, but it actually dates back nearly a century before that time. The term was already in u e by the 1890s, when literary critics such as F W Br ry used it as a label for writers who rejected Puritan morality and Christian religion in favor of imagery and ideas drawn from ancient Greek and Celtic sources. By 1908 a group of artists and poets at Cambridge was using the term for itself, and the Cambridge Neo-Pagans continued as a minor force in British cultural circles into the 1920s.
Barry’s devoutly Christian condemnation of the “Neo-pagan” writers and poets of his, time may have been more on target than he realized, for some figures on that end of the cultural spectrum had long since moved from Pagan art to Pagan spirituality. Earlier in the nineteenth century, the poe~’ Thomas, Jefferson Hogg was widely known among h9 friends for performing rituals to worship the Greek gods, while the painter Edward Calvert, whose scenes from ancient Greek legend and history were popular all through the late nineteenth century, erected an altar to Pan in his back yard and offered libations of wine to the goat-footed god. SEE PAN. They were by no means the first European intellectuals to pass from an admiration of classical culture to the worship of classical gods.
The first known examples actually date back to the Renaissance, and the emergence of a revived Druidry in England and Wales in the eighteenth century was a significant sign. Freemasonry, with its claims of a connection to the ancient Mysteries, also helped lay the groundwork for the later revival. It was` the great English Platonisr Thomas Taylor (17581835), however, whose open rejection of Christianity in favor of a revival of Pagan spirituality and- Platonist theurgy seems to have launched the nineteenth-century Neopagan movement in Britain; SEE TAYLOR, THOMAS. By the middle of the nineteenth century, following in his footsteps and that of several others, a small but noticeable Neopagan subculture existed in most of the countries of Western Europe.
This subculture was intellectual, largely urban, college-educated, and familiar with recent trends in scholarship on mythology and religion. Many of its members were involved in other aspects of alternative thought and lifestyle, with interests ranging from vegetarianism through occultism to various schemes of Utopian social reform. In short, it was very much like the present-day Neopagan scene, and utterly unlike the peasant cunning folk who came to play such a large part in the mythologies of the later Neopagan revival.
The Victorian revival of Paganism drew heavily on the vast nineteenth-century surge of interest in folklore and mythology, which brought about the rediscovery of Germanic and Celtic myth and legend, as well as the first great collections of folklore relating to magic and popular religious practices. It also drew on the growing interest in Asian religions, an interest that became a major cultural phenomenon with the foundation of the osophical Society in 1875 and the arrival oft first Buddhist missionaries in England and America a few decades
later.
A final factor, and a crucial one, was the spread of occult philosophy and practice in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Here again, the Theosophical Society played an important role, and two other organizationsthe Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn-also had much to do with the development of the nineteenth-century occult revival, which had been launched in France by the magician and scholar Eliphas Levi in 1845.
While the occultism of that period was rarely Pagan in any explicit sense, it challenged Christian doctrine at almost every point. Under Blavatsky’s leadership, the Theosophical Society was intensely hostile to Christian teachings and did nothing to disguise the fact: The Golden Dawn went further, invoking Pagan deities from Egyptian sources in its rituals and equating Osiris and Jesus in its instructional papers.
Thus, at the end of the nineteenth century, Christianity was no longer the only game in town, and a variety of people and small groups-most of them closely connected with occult traditions of one sort or anotherbegan to take up more vocal and more explicitly Pagan stances in the early years of the twentieth century. Edward Carpenter (1844-1929), who abandoned a career as an Anglican minister to preach socialism and Pagan religion, was one of many examples; his brash masterpiece Civilization: Its Cause and Cure (1906) called for the renewal of Pagan worship in sacred groves and on mountaintops. Similarly, British author Kenneth Grahame, whose children’s book The Wind in the Willows contains one of the best-loved evocations of the presence of Pan in all of literature, described himself in his 1904 Pagan Papers as a faithful Pagan following “the old religion.”
The Pagan revival had its largest impact in the English-speaking and German-speaking countries. As a result, Britain and Germany both had openly Pagan groups worshipping in public between the two world wars. The British groups still mostly drew on ancient Greek traditions, while the German groups were devoted to a revived Teutonic Paganism that too often shaded over into Ariosophy and racism.
Youth groups associated with Woodcraft, a quasiPagan movement founded in America in 1902, also played an important part in the rising interest in Paganism. In its original form, Woodcraft drew on Native American symbolism and traditions, but the European branches of the movement replaced much of this with local Pagan traditions.
A major shift in the Neopagan scene came with the repeal of Britain’s antiquated Witchcraft Act in 1951. Shortly afterwards, British newspaper readers were startled and titillated to read of covens of witches worshipping in the nude (“skyclad”) in their own country. A retired colonial official, Gerald Gardner, presented himself as the inheritor of an ancient tradition called Wicca; his two books on the subject and his frequent appearances in the media gave his claims enormous publicity.
Within a short time several other witches were claiming, in the newspapers and elsewhere, to have inherited their own independent traditions of witchcraft. SEE COCHRANE, ROBERT; SANDERS, ALEC. The origins of these traditions have been hotly disputed, but there is little reason to doubt that they grew out of the earlier Neopagan underground, inspired by Margaret Murray’s hypothesis that medieval witchcraft had been a survival of an ancient Pagan fertility religion.
The great cultural convulsions of the Sixties took Wicca from a relatively small, presence on the cultural fringe to a religious movement on an international scale, and opened the door to a proliferation of other Pagan revivals. While Pagan spirituality was never one of the central themes of the Sixties counterculture,there were enough points of contact between the two ~’that Wicca surged in popularity. The emergence of feminism as a major cultural force in the 1970s also helped foster the spread of a religious movement that gave reverence to female images of the divine and offered positions of honor to women.
The last three decades of the twentieth century saw the unfolding of four major trends in the Neopagan movement. First of all was the sheer growth in the number of people identifying themselves as Pagan in western Europe, North America, and Australasia. While estimates vary wildly, a rough guess based on the average of various surveys suggests that by 2000, there were between half a million and one million people i the Western world who considered themselves to be aga sn_. This by itself raised Neopaganism to the level of a significant social force. –
The second trend was the emergence of a pletho of new Pagan traditions and approaches. Starting in the 1970s, Wicca and its close equivalents were joined in the Neopagan community by groups and individuals worshipping Celtic, Norse, Greek, Egyptian, Hawaiian, and Slavic gods and goddesses-to name only a few of the more popular sides of the Pagan revival.
A less impressive side to this trend was the emergence of quasi-Pagan systems that drew their inspiration from fantasy fiction and the media.
The third trend, an even more powerful force for diversity was a shift from a group-centered, initiatory model of Pagan practice to a more individual approach based on self-initiation and solitary practice. The publication of Scott Cunningharr s Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner (1988) marked an important phase in this shift. Although the book was attacked by many important figures in the Wiccan community when it first appeared, this first major guide to solitary Wiccan practice ran through more than twenty-five printings in the twelve years following, and was widely imitated by other writers in the field. The impact of this and other books of the same kind has been measured in the growth of “solitaries” as a widely recognized class of Pagan worshippers.
The fourth trend was the emergence of the Pagan festival as a major nexus for the growing Neopagan subculture. Modeled partly on science-fiction conventions and partly on medieval reenactment events-both products of subcultures that overlapped significantly with the Pagan scene-Pagan festivals sprang up in the 1980s and 1990s, partly as an opportunity for Pagans to socialize, worship, and learn together, and partly as a substitute for more permanent forms of organization within the Pagan community-a project which had been attempted various times with very limited success.
With the coming of the twenty-first century, the Neopagan movement stands at a crossroads. The spread of Neopagan religion, and the emergence of a certain number of mature and capable spokespersons within the movement, have brought it a level of social acceptance it has never before had. J. K. Rowling’s astonishingly popular Harry Potter novels represent only the most visible part of a flood of positive images of witches, magicians, and Pagans in popular media.
At the same time, other religious alternatives such as Spiritualism and Theosophy have made similar gains in the past, and then faded out again with shifts in cultural fashions. It remains to be seen if the modern Pagan revival can consolidate its gains and establish itself as a viable spiritual movement over the long term
(Taken From: The New Encyclopedia of the Occult, John Michael Greer)
