Why I Call Myself Pagan

Sam traces the word "Pagan" back to its Roman roots, where it originally marked a rural outsider rather than a religious identity, and shows how Christianity later repurposed it as a label for everyone outside the Church. He argues that this messy inheritance is exactly why the word is usable today: it was never owned by a single tradition, so it can now hold a new, self-chosen movement without borrowing false authority from the past.

The essay sits Pagans within a longer Western pattern of turning east and then back again — the same impulse that produced the Transcendentalists, the Theosophical Society, and, a century earlier, the ceremonial revival of the Golden Dawn. Sam reads modern Paganism as the latest generation of that reclamation project, built from fragments the appropriators and the rejecters both left behind.

He closes by insisting that a slur, once claimed on purpose and capitalized on purpose, becomes something else entirely: a name a community gives itself. For Sam, calling himself Pagan is less a statement about ancient history than a description of a living, still-forming religion he is actively helping build.

Originally published at samwebstermage.com →