And so I did. I surveyed the earth and the heavens. I spoke about how gods and peoples in the ancient Mediterranean constituted special family groups. I described terrestrial gods and celestial gods. I explained how battles between peoples were imagined and presented as battles between divinities. I spoke about astrology and necromancy, about purification rituals and blood sacrifices, about the sheer vibrant vital variety of the ancient, god-congested universe. With five blank minutes at the end of my lecture, I took questions. (Like all new professors, I had crammed about five hours of information into a fifty-minute time slot, terrified that otherwise I might run out of things to say.) At this point, my worse fears were realized. A woman sitting in the audience stood up, white with rage, and said in a barely-controlled shout, “I AM A PAGAN, and what you just said has absolutely NOTHING to do with WHAT I BELIEVE!!!” and she stormed out. My weak protests – my charge had been to explain ancient polytheism, not modern polytheism – died in my throat. My other students drifted away. Welcome to Berkeley.

All of which brings me to this week’s questions. Back in the Good Old Days – say, pre- 312, before Constantine had his terrific idea of mixing Christianity in with Big Government – there was not any such thing as “paganism.” There were many different kinds of Christianities. (The ones that lost the imperial patronage sweepstakes were soon to be known as “heresies.”) There were different sorts of Jewish communities, many of which prayed and read the Bible in Greek, others of which prayed and heard the Bible in Aramaic, and Hebrew floated in and out. And then there was everyone else. Christians eventually came up with a term for “everybody else,” and it was a put-down term. Christianity was a religion that dominated cities. The hold-out worshiping the old gods was clearly a country bumpkin, a paganus from the pagus. (French paysan from the paysage echoes the Latin word-play.) The term must have offended the cream of the traditionalist Roman senatorial aristocracy, who lived in the cities, collected rents from the countryside, and had the highest levels of education to be found. That, of course, was the point.

My point, on the other hand, is different, though I have given you the data for it in the two preceding paragraphs. In antiquity – and all through the Middle Ages, when different pantheons from further North flourished – there never was such a thing as paganism. The essence of traditional polytheism is its multiplicity. To think of paganism as an “-ism,” as “church” with its own sets of creeds and standardized rituals and “chaplains,” is to betray a venerable ancient religious culture by remaking it in the image and likeness of the Church. Since my ancient pagans cannot speak for themselves, I must speak for them: Whatever the pagan equivalent of goyishe would be, that’s what they would call this initiative.

Would I vote for a pagan if she were running for public office? That would depend on the positions that she took on issues that are important to me: public health, public education, care for the elderly, doing something serious about protecting the environment, coming up with something resembling a rational and feasible policy in Iraq. (Well, and I would hope that she did not sacrifice white goats at moon rise – not that I have anything against her beliefs. I’d just feel bad for the goats.)