Pagans were the Latin "country dwellers." Heathens were the Northern European "heath dwellers." Pagans generally were pre-Christain peoples. Spirituality: a personal theological belief system Religion: an organized group theological belief system Thus, worshippers of Apollo or Odin are described "pagans," but traditionally spiritual Iroquois or Baka are not, nor the adherents of Shintoism or Zoroastrianism.Īdherents of neo-pagan movements may describe themselves as pagan or heathen those who choose one may consider the other to be improper, but there does not seem to be consensus. Outside of some impolite circles, pagan is not applied to the modern major religions, and rarely to folk religion/animism/shamanism. Pagan remains in the common term for the state cults, polytheistic worship, and/or idolatry of the classical Greco-Roman, Egyptian, Norse, and Celtic worlds (as remembered and mis-remembered in the Christian tradition). Pagan and heathen are at once imprecise and exonymic, and not employed by modern anthropologists. Pagan is now more properly applied to rude and uncivilized idolaters, while heathen embraces all idolaters.īut by the mid-20th century, heathen seems to have fallen out of favor as a synonym for pagan see for example an Ngram of heathen gods vs pagan gods. Interestingly, the 1898 Webster's Collegiate Dictionary suggests a reverse trend from the modern usage: In the broadest sense includes all religions other than the true one revealed by God, and, in a narrower sense, all except Christianity, Judaism, and Mohammedanism. Pagan, too, was more broadly applied: as the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia has it In older days, not a few older dictionaries listed them as interchangeable, even assigning circular definitions (i.e. As descriptive terms, both pagan and heathen are out of date, but whereas pagan remains in common use to contrast Abrahamic religion from various pre-modern and revived polytheistic competitors, heathen is usually an aspersion, akin to idolator, infidel or heretic.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |