‘Pagan’ comes from a Latin root that means ‘land’ or ‘countryside’ and it referred to the people who held on to the local, earth-based teachings and traditions the longest, even after book-based religions came in.

Modern-day Pagans embrace the word proudly, and generally use it to mean those who follow earth-based nature traditions with roots in Europe and the Middle East—although other indigenous traditions can certainly be called Pagan as well.

Some people use NeoPagan to distinguish contemporary practitioners. For Pagans, the sacred is immanent, embodied in the natural world that we humans are part of, and expressed through the cycles of birth, growth, death and regeneration around us.

‘Wicca’ or ‘Witchcraft’ or ‘The Craft’ is one branch of contemporary Paganism. “Wic’ comes from an Anglo-Saxon root meaning ‘to bend or twist’, and Witches were the shamans, medicine people, healers, and diviners who could bend or twist your fate.

In ancient and medieval Europe, they functioned much like curanderas do in contemporary Latin America—holding parts of ancient teachings and knowledge and curing traditions sometimes mixed with overlays of Christianity.

The Witch persecutions conducted by both the Catholics and Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have left a legacy of fear and misunderstanding about the word ‘Witch’—associating it with negative magic and devil worship. But Witches see Satan or the devil as a construct of Christian theology that has no place in our religion. We worship the Goddess under many names and aspects, including male Gods. Our Horned God—stag, goat or bull—is the personification of the life force energy in animals and the wild.
For Witches, nature is our sacred text and we practice our religion through ritual and ceremony, traditionally in small groups but today often in larger gatherings as well. Drums, dance, meditation, poetry, art, music, trance, storytelling, and focused energy characterize our rituals. Men as well as women can be Witches, and are called ‘Witches’.

‘Polytheism’ means the belief in many different names and approaches to the sacred. While most of us believe in a deep, spiritual unity at the heart of existence, we also believe in the value of many different names, faces, symbols, and paths to that heart. No one has a monopoly on truth, in our teachings, and every religion and spiritual tradition holds a perspective that has value and is uniquely suited to some individuals’ needs.

The Goddess is the great, creative life force, the living being whose body is the universe, the cycles of birth, growth, death and regeneration that animate all things. She is the oneness that underlies all, but different facets of her story and her power are revealed to us in the form of particular Goddesses and Gods from many different times and cultures. Each is like a gateway that leads us to a particular path of development and growth.

‘Magic’ was defined by occultist Dion Fortune as “the art of changing consciousness at will.” Magic is the ancient psychology of identifying and opening to the wide spectrum of states of awareness that we as humans are capable of. Some of these states allow us to listen more deeply to the communications of other beings around us—from the plants and animals in the natural world to spiritual forces. Some states allow us to affect change, but we are bound by strong ethical constraints when we work in those modes. “What you send out magically returns on you three times over,” we say—a kind of amplified Golden Rule.

‘Women’s spirituality’ or ‘feminist spirituality’ movements arose in the seventies and eighties as women challenged the male bias of many mainstream religions and began looking for alternatives. Many of the women in these movements identify as Pagans or Witches, but others do not want to be labeled and still others remain as strong voices within Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and other traditions.

‘Reclaiming’ is both the name of the particular Pagan tradition I practice and the extended network of people I work with. We arose in the early eighties from a small group of people in the Bay Area who wanted to link our spiritual practice with our social justice activism. We now have Reclaiming identified groups all over the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Australia. See www.reclaiming.org for a listing of groups and projects.