ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasizes the synergies between Catholicism and Paganism, both contemporary and ancient. It explains why many Maltese Wiccans find it relatively easy to move between Catholicism and Wicca. In view of the synergies between Wicca and Catholicism, and the often fraught historical relationship between Protestantism and Catholicism. It would venture again that Paganism and Catholicism have more in common than evangelical Protestantism and Catholicism, at least in Malta. To claim there are synergies between Catholicism and Wicca is not to deny some obviously fundamental differences between these religions, particularly at the level of belief. Wicca and Paganism embrace, rather than shun, the body and the material world. Many Maltese Pagans are religiously bi-cultural and make the kinds of accommodation bi-cultural people commonly make in relation to their societies. Men were more likely to manage a path which straddled Catholicism and Paganism, and were less likely to identify explicitly as Wiccan or Pagan.
