REAL Pagans and Witches

Often I see some comment to the effect of "A Real Pagan wouldn't say/do/behave like that" and it both baffles and annoys me.  Almost as much as "A Real Witch" does.

Pagan is an umbrella term, a genre if you like, that describes a wide variety of beliefs and specific religions.  It is vague at best and completely unhelpful when trying to narrow down anything.

Often there are pretty platitudes and memes to say that Pagans have no doctrine or dogma.  The sun, rain and wind write the words of our religion on the pages of the clouds, trees and earth.  Or Nature is my church.

So I'm sure you get the idea.  We have no rules, we're free spirits, following nature blah blah blah.

Right up until you say something that they disagree with.  If you don't follow karma or the threefold law, if you have absolutely no issues with hexing and cursing, if you don't like the outdoors except as a place that separates different indoors, if you call someone out on their stupidity, if you expect people to use logic and critical thought, if you don't follow exactly their path - then you are breaking the rules that they said we don't have.

I spent years rejecting all labels because I didn't want to be associated with people like this.  I can honestly say I have faced more harrassment because of my beliefs from other Pagans than I have from any other faith.  That might be because I discuss them more with other Pagans than I do with anyone else, although I've had some lovely chats with Jehovah's Witnesses who ended up being more interested than telling me I was wrong.  I managed to deal with some Born Again Christians who couldn't fault anything I said when they came specifically to harrass me and tell me where I was wrong.  I never lied to them, although to be fair, I didn't necessarily tell the whole truth either - but they couldn't fault it, they found nothing worthy of bugging me any further.

In something else I saw recently, someone told a Hard Polytheist who didn't identify as Pagan that they needed to learn what Pagan meant because "duh, you're Pagan".   Given that the old and out-dated (according to modern dictionaries) definition of Pagan was anyone who wasn't Christian, Jewish or Islamic, this could be vaguely true, but in a derogatory sense.  It's certainly offensive to many of those Hard Polytheists and worse when it comes from a Pagan.

This led to a discussion about defining Paganism.  I've found the only useful way to define a Pagan is "someone who identifies as Pagan".  Everything else is going to exclude some Pagans.  So who is a Real Pagan?  Someone who calls themselves Pagan.

Blessings



Debbie