The word "pagan" is derived from the Latin paganus, which was used to refer to someone from the countryside, someone rustic, unsophisticated, unlearned; something of a bumpkin, I suppose. As Christianity came to take hold in the Roman Empire, it began to be used, by Christians, as a term of disapproval or contempt, referring to those who were not Christians. This may make a certain kind of sense, as those who recognized the old gods came to avoid urban areas which Christians came to control or where Christian intolerance was prevalent (except, perhaps, Rome itself, where the aristocratic old families remained stubbornly attached to the older religion). The old beliefs and rituals survived in the countryside, it's said, for centuries after the advent of Christianity. They may survive even now, in modified, Christianized form.
Halloween may be considered a particularly pagan time of year. By Christians, that is. I'm not sure, myself, just how pagan it may be. I suppose Christians think it pagan because they associate it with Satan and his minions, and Christians have long thought pagan gods to be demons of one sort or another. But Satan himself isn't much of a figure in traditional paganism. There is no Satan among the Greco-Roman pantheon, for example; no Satanic figure at all, really, except physically in the form of Pan. Pan, though, is otherwise not very Satan-like. The Devil seems to be a peculiar fixture of the Abrahamic religions.
What's referred to as Modern Paganism, or Neo-Paganism, seems to be groups of people who for various reasons practice what they think to be ancient pagan rituals and hold what they think to be ancient pagan beliefs. It's claimed that it's growing. Some modern pagans are adherents of Wicca, a kind of witchcraft revival hatched in the mind of a retired British civil servant in 1954. Some follow the Norse gods, or certain of them. Some think of themselves as Druids. Some are followers of a goddess or the goddess, and are convinced that such worship is in effect the original religion, when society was, it's claimed, matriarchal long before the advent of the sky gods.
Some hold various beliefs which involve nature-worship, theistic, polytheistic or pantheistic. Some may be considered Deists. Modern Paganism has been around for some time, I believe, and is in some respects a phenomenon of the late 19th-early 20th century when many became interested in occultism or spiritualism, or became enthralled with ancient Egyptian religion after the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen, when Madame Blavatsky and others sought to resurrect Hermeticism or something else which could be said to have a pagan pedigree.
It would seem that Christianity, though otherwise remarkably successful in quashing paganism for centuries, hasn't managed to destroy it utterly. Nor has its efforts to assimilate it been entirely successful. It retains its magic. This shouldn't be unexpected, as it existed and flourished for thousands of years.
I doubt, though, that the pagans of our times live, or think, or believe as did the pagans of the ancient past. It simply isn't likely that they could after all that's happened. The picture at the beginning of this post is of a relief showing Marcus Aurelius making sacrifice. Animal sacrifice was essential in Greco-Roman paganism, performed in complicated rituals. Livers of animals were perused by haruspices in ancient Rome, a form of divination the Romans learned from the Etruscans. Who today could honestly ascribe to such ceremonies the significance they were accorded by the ancients? Who, indeed, could perform them?
Who knows what the Druids did, really, or what they believed? Our sources of information about them are Roman and so unlikely to be sympathetic or entirely accurate. How many moderns believe, sincerely, in witchcraft? How many while joining hands and chanting at Stonehenge or some other ancient site can really claim to be believers of the kind who did the same, if indeed they did the same, so long ago? None of them knew or had experienced what we know and experience now. Given that knowledge and experience, would they believe now as they did then? How could they?
There's no reason (unless we accept the view that they were deceived by demons) to think ancient pagans were not sincerely pious, and it must be assumed the beliefs of many of them were fervent. But that piety can no longer be shared, or even imagined.
I suspect there's a great deal of Romanticism involved in the efforts to recreate paganism, as well as what may be a longing which cannot be satisfied now by Christianity as an institutional religion. But we fool ourselves if we believe we can be what pagans were. They were different from us in matters of faith, in mystic belief, in ways too profound for them to live again in us, or for their beliefs to be shared by those living now.
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