Pagan

Like ‘heathen’, ‘pagan’ often appeared in discussions about idolatry, superstition, and polytheism. ‘Pagans’, like ‘heathens’, worshipped various deities, and unlike Christians, Muslims, and Jews, were not considered to be ‘people of the book’. Protestants and Catholics equated superstitious beliefs to the ‘unbelieving’ other, but they also used ‘pagan’ to criticise perceived corruption in their own religious communities. In every age, Thomas Adams preached in 1615, churchmen have found cause to reprove their congregations: ‘[The Church Father] Chrysostome speaketh of his times: Christians now are become like Pagans or worse: Yet who will say that the Religion of Pagans was better th[a]n the Christians?’ ¹ While ‘heathen’ appeared nearly 150 times in the King James Bible of 1611, however, ‘pagan’ did not appear at all. Although the terms overlapped and converged, this made ‘heathen’ more closely associated with scriptural culture, particularly the Old Testament. By contrast, ‘pagan’ often referred either to classical antiquity, or to the pre-Roman Anglo-Saxon English past. Paganus was a post-classical Latin term which carried resonance with pagus, denoting ‘rustic’ or ‘the country’, yoking its associations with landscapes and sites beyond the control of cities. ² Pagans were related to pantheistic, often nature-worshipping, expressions of faith. ³