The Meaning of the Word “Pagan” Through History

For many people today, the word pagan carries a sense of mystery, otherness, and even pride. For others, it still lingers as a term of insult, echoing centuries of religious polemics. To trace the history of this single word is to walk through the story of cultural struggle, religious transformation, and identity itself. What began as a simple word describing rural life has traveled across millennia to become the banner of modern spiritual movements. Its journey is one of transformation—from neutrality, to insult, to reclamation.

The term itself originates in ancient Rome. The Latin paganus simply meant “villager” or “country dweller,” someone who lived outside the cities in the countryside. In Roman society, where urban life represented culture, politics, and progress, being labeled a paganus marked a person as rustic, provincial, and perhaps unsophisticated, but not necessarily immoral or impure. It was geography, not theology. But in those villages, the ancestral gods were honored, and old traditions held firm, even as new beliefs took root in Rome’s cities.

When Christianity began to spread through the empire in the third and fourth centuries, its center of growth was the city. Converts multiplied in urban centers where bishops organized communities, where intellectual debates were written down, and where imperial politics came into play. The countryside, by contrast, was slower to adopt Christianity. Villagers clung to the rites of their ancestors, honoring Jupiter, Venus, Mars, or the spirits of their local springs and fields. As the Christian population grew, the old rural faiths increasingly stood apart. Gradually, paganus ceased to mean simply “villager” and became shorthand for anyone who was “not Christian.” It was an accident of geography that shifted into a marker of faith.

This shift was more than linguistic; it was ideological. By labeling all non-Christians “pagans,” the early church created a stark binary. Christianity was not just another sect in the empire but the one true faith, and everyone else was collapsed into a single category of otherness. It did not matter if someone worshiped the Olympian gods, followed a mystery cult, or adhered to local folk traditions. They were all simply pagans. This rhetorical move gave Christians a sense of unity while simultaneously discrediting their opponents as old-fashioned, backward, and spiritually lost.

As Christianity became the official religion of the empire, the term hardened. “Pagan” became an insult, a weapon of language that implied ignorance, error, and idolatry. The same shift appeared in northern Europe with the word heathen, from the Old English hǣðen, linked to “heath” or wilderness. Like “pagan,” it marked people who lived outside the towns and outside salvation. Both terms carried the idea of being beyond the Christian fold, beyond the city of God, left behind in error.

During the Middle Ages, this dismissive meaning deepened. Missionaries traveling into northern and eastern Europe used “pagan” freely to describe Indigenous religions, no matter how complex or sophisticated. Folk customs tied to the land, ancestral rituals, and polytheistic pantheons were all flattened under the word. In the eyes of the medieval church, there were Christians and there were pagans—one was saved, the other damned. To be called a pagan was to be placed in the category of the ignorant, superstitious, and dangerous.

And yet, paganism never fully disappeared. Beneath the surface of Christendom, countless traditions carried forward the memory of the old ways. Festivals like Beltane, Yule, and harvest feasts survived in disguised or adapted forms. Maypoles still stood in spring; fires were still lit at midsummer; offerings were still quietly made to the spirits of the land. Even when rebranded as Christian celebrations, these customs bore unmistakable traces of their pagan origins. Christmas trees, Easter eggs, Halloween bonfires—all of these once belonged to pre-Christian rites. Paganism endured not in temples or official rituals but in the cycles of everyday life, whispered from parent to child, hidden in folklore, and celebrated in rural festivals.

By the Renaissance, the word pagan acquired a second, more romantic meaning. While Christian authorities continued to use it as a term of scorn, poets, artists, and scholars began to look back at the “pagan” world of Greece and Rome with admiration. The rediscovery of classical mythology and philosophy painted a picture of a civilization filled with beauty, poetry, and wisdom. Pagan gods inspired Renaissance art; pagan stories shaped theater and literature. Though still framed as “other,” the pagan past became an object of longing for a world filled with imagination and grandeur.

The Enlightenment and the Romantic era carried this transformation further. Intellectuals, frustrated with the rigidity of the church, sometimes invoked “paganism” as a symbol of natural freedom, a way of life unchained by dogma. Romantic poets in particular embraced pagan imagery, evoking fauns, nymphs, and gods of the forest as symbols of creativity and the raw power of nature. While “pagan” remained a derogatory term in popular religious discourse, it also began to shine as a poetic emblem of a lost harmony with the Earth.

This ambivalence laid the foundation for its modern revival. In the 19th century, folklorists collected the stories and songs of rural people, preserving fragments of old pagan traditions. Mythologists studied Norse, Celtic, and Greek legends with new seriousness. Occult movements like Theosophy and ceremonial magic drew from pagan themes. And by the mid-20th century, Gerald Gardner and others openly embraced the label in founding Wicca, presenting it as a continuation of the ancient pre-Christian faiths of Europe. For the first time in over a thousand years, “pagan” became not just a label used by outsiders but a name adopted by practitioners themselves.

Today, the word has been fully reclaimed by many. Modern pagans identify as Wiccans, druids, heathens, Hellenic polytheists, or eclectic practitioners, but all find a home under the wider umbrella of paganism. For them, being pagan is not about being a villager or an outsider, but about affirming a worldview rooted in nature, plurality, and reverence for the divine in many forms. Paganism today celebrates diversity, honors the cycles of the seasons, and reclaims what was once condemned: the right to find the sacred in Earth, sky, and self.

The journey of the word pagan is thus a microcosm of history itself. It began as a neutral word, became a weapon of exclusion, survived as a whisper in folklore, transformed into a poetic ideal, and was finally reclaimed as a proud spiritual identity. To call oneself pagan now is to embrace that entire history—acknowledging the insult while transcending it, carrying forward the ancestral memory, and boldly affirming a way of life in harmony with the living world.