Why I am a Pagan… and Why I’m Not

13 min readSep 11, 2023

This essay is part of a series where I look at various faiths and explore where they have inspired me and where I have issues. Although I am a Christian, I believe that God wants us to explore and learn from other traditions as part of our spiritual journey. This is my journey, no one else’s, and the articles merely record how I see things. They are not intended to offend or convert, nor do I expect you to agree with me. I do however, appreciate feedback, friendship and further learning.

Other essays in the series:

Why I Am A Sikh… and Why I’m Not

Why I Am A Sufi… and Why I’m Not

Why I Am A Catholic… and Why I’m Not

Why I Am An Orthodox Christian… and Why I’m Not

Why I Am A Hindu… and Why I’m Not

Why I Am A Buddhist… and Why I’m Not

Why I Am A Jew… and Why I’m Not

Why I Am an Atheist… and Why I’m Not

Why I Am an Anglican… and Why I’m Not

In Conclusion

The Cat Goddess

“The Britons, according to primitive custom, dedicated their settlements to their pagan gods in the same trinity (tri-unity). Draycott was dedicated to the presiding deity of Staffordshire, the cat-goddess Aester… [the parish church] stands on rising ground which was probably a grove of venerable yews — a typical site of heathen worship.”[1]

Thus was my introduction to Paganism. Presented to me at a young and impressionable age when exploring the history of the village where I’d grown up. According to the venerable Goronwy Haranman FJI, my settlement’s name — Draycott — derived from an unknown goddess, a cat, Aester (from whom we also get ‘Easter’), who was once the “presiding deity” of the whole area. Where now we worship Christ, once they gathered in groves to pay homage to the sacred feline. And not just in general terms, but actually. Yes, the ancient church where we gathered to pray, the holy fulcrum of the village, was in fact built upon the sacred site of the heathens, those mysterious ancestors who gathered on hills where yew trees grew. Yes, that still existed, for surrounding the parish church even to this day are several yews of unimaginable age, some saying beyond a millennium. Christian I may be, but the Pagans lurked in the shadows.

All a load of rubbish too. Well, mostly. More romance than actual history. And that’s the problem when talking about Paganism: what are we actually talking about? They left no writings and the only ones who recorded their practices are their enemies, the Romans, who talk about an awful cult supervised by the druids, who sacrificed babies to their myriad of evil gods. It’s like asking the white settlers of Tasmania to accurately depict the belief system of the aborigines whom they hunted to extinction. At best it will be biased; at worst just plain wrong.

Perhaps the yew trees surrounding my village church were part of a Pagan grove, perhaps not. Perhaps the cat goddess, Aester, was honoured there, perhaps not (less romantic writers than Haranman state that the name means “three cottages”). But it doesn’t matter. From my earliest years, the Pagans were there in my mind, shadowy, romantic, mysterious, and perhaps a little dangerous.

The Moot

My first adult encounters with Paganism came in 2006 when I was attending a course at Edge Hill University on world religions. We watched a video in which a man, a convert from Christianity to Paganism explained his journey. He said (and I’m paraphrasing), that when he’d read the Bible as a kid it was all full of fig or palm trees. “But I’d never seen a palm or fig tree, though I did know many an oak, hawthorne and willow.” What he sought was a faith in tune with the land he knew and loved, not some alien imposition. As someone who had always related to God best when walking along an English country lane, that struck a powerful chord.

Several months later, whilst writing a series of articles on different faiths for a local newspaper, I arranged a visit to the local Pagan moot (meeting) and, for the first time in my life, came across some real-life, contemporary followers of this shadowy creed supposedly obliterated by the Romans:

“I was surprised when I was told that the venue for this week’s Our Faiths was to be a bar, but I soon learnt that the Pagans are full of surprises. I’d expected an other-worldly collection of witches and warlocks at the Keele Moot, but when I got to the Keele University Post-Grads’ Clubhouse, I found that they were, on the whole, quite normal, and indeed, not one spell was cast all evening.
‘People accuse us of devil worship and black magic,” said Sheena, one member of the Moot, “but that is quite wrong. For starters, pagans do not even believe in the devil so how can we worship him? A Pagan understands that both good and evil are within you, not outside.’”[2]

I was both surprised and impressed. Here was a normal, functioning faith that did not judge, did not lay guilt on its followers and, crucially, was rooted in the land I loved. For the only time in my life, save for village Anglicanism, I had come across a faith that could speak to me, directly, as an Englishman.

There was more of interest too.

“So, if Paganism is not about magic or the devil, what is it about? ‘A reverence for nature which provides us with all that we need to live,’ explained Shelley, the Moot Leader. All agreed with that but anything further provoked debate. ‘Paganism is a religion without a creed or doctrine,’ explained Shelley, ‘so we have a wide variety of opinions here.’”[3]

A religion that allows debate and disagreement. A religion that is all has no hierarchy[4] and doctrine. A live and let live religion that reveres the natural world. What’s not to like.

Indeed, it hardly seemed like a religion at all.

“Indeed, one member of the Moot questioned as to whether Paganism can even be called a religion since that word has its roots in the Etruscan for ‘binding together’ whereas the Pagan tradition is based on neither fellowship or binding rules and doctrine. Indeed, the word ‘pagan’ itself simply means ‘local person’.”[5]

The local people. Was I not a local person? Did I not feel closest to the Divine when ambling through the lanes and fields of my village? And as for binding together, had I not always struggled with conforming to other people’s expectations?

I wanted to learn more.

The Thin Places

So, I explored. I read books and visited sites. I was introduced to the concept of goddess worship which was strange and alien yet somehow resonated (at the same time, I was also struggling with Marian devotions in Christianity) and the idea of many gods. Growing up, we’d been taught to believe that this was somehow wrong, yet no one ever adequately explained why.

And then I came across the concept of thin places. These are spots where the mist between the earthly and the Divine realms thins and we can see the other side more readily.

“Ancient pagan Celtics believed the eternal and the earthly were three feet apart, they thought the eternal was always within arm’s reach, but they thought there were certain places where the boundary between the eternal and the earthly were especially thin, they called these spots, thin places. A thin place is a place where we can sense the divine more readily. A thin place is a border between the earthly and the holy.”[6]

Again, something resonated. Was the special feeling that I’d always had at a back of Draycott Church by one of the ancient yews because that was a thin place? After all, it was supposed to have been a sacred grove once upon a time. Did the ancient gods still exert a pull on my soul?

Did this also explain why I was attracted to pilgrimage? The feeling that I had had whilst crossing over the causeway to Lindisfarne, or whilst walking barefoot along a country lane to Walsingham to pay homage to Our Lady?

According to the book, the thin places of thin places was Avalon. That mystical isle of Arthurian legend where Excalibur was forged, hidden in mist by Morgan’s sorcery, the placer where Arthur himself went to heal.

Popular opinion states that Avalon is a real place, Glastonbury Tor, a hill above the town of Glastonbury once topped by a church dedicated to the Archangel Michael (today only the tower remains). Not an island now, it once was, when that whole part of Somerset was an inland sea, the hills once being islands that would have risen out of the mist that hung over the swampy waters.

And it was known to be sacred in both Pre-Christian times and the early years of the faith. Accounts dating back to 166AD declare that Jesus himself visited and prayed there as a boy. And so, in 2010 I made my way there, walking from Wells Cathedral some eight miles distant towards the holy land of the Pagans.

It was a powerful and challenging pilgrimage. There was an energy about the entire town. Today it is a centre for New Age and Pagan beliefs. Where once the Cross conquered, now the Christian legacy has been pushed aside, confined to the ruins of the abbey, whilst in its place spiritual bookshops, tarot readers, Buddhist meditators, white witches and past life regressionists have filled the high street. If Glastonbury is the Jerusalem where “those feet in ancient times” did tread, it is the Jerusalem of a wholly different faith.

In an attempt to understand more I called in at the Glastonbury Goddess Temple, the only temple dedicated to the Goddess in the British Isles and one of the few specifically Pagan houses of worship in Europe. Inside it was quiet and dark and, after removing my shoes, I was led through a curtain to the main sanctuary where devotees sat in silence on cushions whilst candles flickered on the altar and ambient devotional music played. I sat with them awhile and meditated, trying to make sense of it all and recording my thoughts at the time:

“Inside it was quiet and dark and, after removing my shoes, I was led through a curtain to the main sanctuary where devotees sat in silence on cushions whilst candles flickered on the altar and ambient devotional music played. I sat with them awhile and meditated, trying to make sense of it all. Here was a religion that was radically different to my own yet, unlike all other different religions, was wholly English in character. However, whilst it was in so many ways culturally familiar in one crucial aspect it was alien: this was a feminine faith, based on women and designed for and by women. Being a man it was a well-spring that I could never fully tap into. However, encountering it, the common criticism by women that the Abrahamic religions are too male became a little more comprehensible.”[7]

That is not a position I would agree with today, but it was where I was on my path then. Today, I am much more comfortable with the female divine; then I was just starting out in my explorations.

I also called in at Labyrinth Books, an emporium of all texts spiritual, where I had a conversation with the lady behind the till. “I’m about the most un-Pagan Pagan you’ll ever meet,” she told me. “I worship in churches, temples, anywhere, taking a bit from every tradition. But if there is one place in Glastonbury that you must see it is the Tor, you must go up the Tor. Whether it really is an ancient labyrinth like they say or just a thin place where ley lines converge, I cannot say, but it is powerful, very powerful. I’ve had several experiences up there over the years; it’s impossible to describe them, put them into words, you just have to go there and experience the atmosphere and holiness of the place for yourself.”

So, I climbed the Tor, the Isle of Avalon. The walk was stiff but I arrived for sunset along with a smattering of others. Here are my reflections:

“I sat down by the tower, gazed out and prayed. The sun set slowly, and I watched the view both near and far. Far, the fields turned gold and the world gradually darkened whilst near others waited giving a feeling of spiritual solidarity. There were Pagans there for the sunset — two knew each other, they lived in the town and came every evening — and a man practising Tai-Chi, tourists simply enjoying the view and some local children play fighting. There on that holy hill I contemplated the Glastonbury legend. Had Christ once sat at this place also? … If Christ would have come to Glastonbury, why would He have come and what would He have hoped to find? And then, how can that help me — and all of us — on our journey of faith?”[8]

Whatever else it was, this mysterious, powerful, enigmatic place, was definitely a thin place and it has stayed with me ever since.

So, have I become a Pagan?

Erm… no.

In fact, it is not something I have ever seriously considered (although, when asked if I were not Christian, what faith would I be, then I always answer Pagan), but then I’m not the converting type. It’s hard to believe one religion to be right and the others wrong when you’ve looked at so many objectively. But then is Paganism even a religion with rights and wrongs. My conversations at the moot suggested otherwise, yet I did not feel part of it all. I was an observer, an outsider.

I guess one reason is to explore what do I actually mean by Pagan? Do I mean the pre-Christian faith of the British Isles? Well, as I hinted earlier, one cannot say for we know so little about what that actually was, so obliterated, denigrated and then romanticised has it been. Whatever it was, the chain is broken.

But then there is Neo-Paganism, the faith of people like those I met at the moot. Is that a modern invention or a continuation of ancient traditions? The most famous branch of Neo-Paganism is Wicca. This was formulated in the 1930s by a gentleman named Gerald Gardner, a retired civil servant, who first joined the Rosicrucian Order Crotona Fellowship, an occult coven, which he stated was a survival from an ancient order of witches. Wicca claims to be the continuation of practices continued in secret throughout the Christian centuries. Subsequent research, most notably by Ron Hutton, has rubbished these claims. Whatever Wicca is, it is not ancient. It is the invention of Gardner who had read extensively on the occult and British myth. Several years ago, I travelled to Crosby where Gardner came from and stood before where his home once stood. Although now gone, that was a handsome Victorian house in an affluent, thoroughly middle-class area. It was apt. Modern Wicca seems to me middle-class, a reverence for nature from the comfort of afar, a sanitisation and romanticism of early British history which was harsh and cruel. It was not me.

Yet for all that, is it wrong? Middle-class Britons need faith as much as anyone else, and a religion that does not hurt or control is no bad thing. So, what if it airbrushes the past? Do not Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and all the others not do the same?

What is more, as I have explored faiths, I have realised that what Paganism is, is reflected around the globe in different cultures under different names. Reverence for nature, the traditions of the land. Is that not what Shintō in Japan is, or many of the forms of Buddhism or Hinduism that can be encountered in East Asia or India? It is the religion of the place, the country people. Freed from dogma and scripture.

And so, whilst no Pagan, conversely, the Christianity and spiritual practices that I have veered towards have always been at the more, well… Pagan… end of the spectrum. I seek out the thin places, find God on long walks through nature, look for the Divine in the place, prefer the local saints rather than the superstar cults. I shy away from the rules, the exclusivity, the unbending dogma.

What is more, I am still exploring. With a friend who has trained in the tradition, I am looking at tarot and past lives. We are returning to Glastonbury. Do I believe? I am unsure. But I am curious.

Most of all, I recognise the Goddess. I may call her Mary, but is she any different to Freya, Brigantia or Hafren? She is the feminine half of the Divine. The yang to the yin.