Paganism

WIP especially around organization

But here’s an older writeup I had on this.

There are many pre-Christian religions called “Pagan”¹. For our purposes this label is for a broad collection of traditions familiar to the Britons. These include ancient deities and stories of Celtic origin as well as the Roman pantheons and rituals that long spread through the island, though plenty of traditions are also heavily localized to specific regional deities, heroes and myths.

Pagans generally believe in local or personal gods or spirits who watch over and interact with places, houses, and communities - often together with larger beings, immortal and sometimes deific. What separates and distinguishes the two varies based on traditional distinctions.

These spirits or gods inhabit the landscape, the sky, the waters, and every aspect of life. In fact, they imbue the world with meaning, and provide a way to live in harmony with the wider world (the best rituals and practices for which are the focus of pagan priests and teachers, who guide folk in understanding these forces and working with them).

It is less important to the pagan to know the exacts of how the world began, or where men came from - and even a single tradition may have many stories which dwell on these matters as a sidethought without a need to pull out one clear narrative.

Tutelary Deities

Practices and Rituals

The practices of the pagans are as varied as their beliefs. In most traditions (the Roman tradition being the outlier here), pagans depend on an oral tradition, which their holy men learn and teach to the next generation.

While the Romans have built temples and crypts for their worship, most pagans meet in places locally recognized as sacred or close to the spirits. Some are marked (or consecrated) with standing stones, marked groves of trees, and the like - others are known only by word of mouth.

Festivals & Holy Days

Pagans tend to hold festivals at the solstices, equinoxes & other important astrological and agricultural days. Some major ones, by their common names in Britain, are:

• Imbolc, celebrating the end of winter, and a time for augury for the coming year.
• Beltaine, at the start of the summer, a festival most well known for its celebration of desire and fecundity.
• Lughasadh, ushering in the harvest. This festival is often used to determine ceremonial responsibilities and reaffirm commitments and pledges.
• Samhain, marking the beginning of winter and the new year - a time to clean out the troubles of a year and pass on to the next.

Clergy

The priests, wise-men or -women, or teachers of the pagans go by many names and often have less of a strict hierarchy than in other religions.

In the Isles, the most familiar pagan holy figures are the druids. These teachers oversee pagan rituals and ceremonies (which are typically carried out by local rulers or family leaders) and record the wisdom and secrets of communities and peoples. They wander from place to place looking for where they are needed (and where they will be sponsored).

Typically druids wear white robes and tonsure themselves (shaving the front of their heads bare and leaving the rest long) or wear their hair in elaborate braids. While some are more eccentric in their styles, it’s important to their lifestyle to be clearly identifiable as a druid in one way or another.

There is no formal process for determining who becomes a druid, but druids know their own and frauds find themselves quickly ridiculed and ostracized. Druids will also seek after the knowledge of other druids, and the wisest they find is considered the Archdruid of Britain. While this figure rarely has the control that a Christian bishop or pope would wield, they often can speak authoritatively on matters of ceremony and law.

Footnotes

1. Many religious traditions just don’t have a clear name the way the big world religions these days do, or those internal terms for each other were lost. Generally beyond just being replaced by a world religion (usually Christianity/Islam), “pagan” usually lightly implies a sort of polytheistic religion with a lot of concepts of animism. For our use it’s very much an exonym, applied after the fact by Christian writers… but that includes the writers of Arthurian legends. ↩