The Old Gods Return: The Strange Story of Pagan Revivals
12th October 2024
“Does anyone still believe in the Roman gods?” asked my classmate in our school Latin lesson. It was an odd thing to ask. He was probably just bored of pluperfect verbs and thought that it was worth trying for a digression. Our teacher clearly didn’t know the answer, and ducked the question by asking one of his own: “Did the Romans believe in their gods?” (Answer: Probably, in most cases, although belief wasn’t as big a deal for them as it is for Christians.)
I didn’t know it at the time, but the right answer to the question that my classmate asked in that suburban British classroom 30 years ago was “Yes”. There are large numbers of people today in formerly Christian countries who practise paganism, defined broadly as beliefs and practices that seek to revive the deities, rituals, symbols and religious philosophies of ancient pre-Christian Europe. In England, for example, around 90,000 pagans showed up in the 2021 census, which is generally regarded as an undercount. The total number of modern pagans across the Western world must be in the hundreds of thousands, if not over a million. Most people would regard this as somewhat surprising. How we got to this point is a puzzle which scholars in the small but fascinating field of Pagan Studies have spent the past 20-30 years trying to solve.