As an Englishman I’m seeing a lot of effort to reclaim the word “pagan” from its Roman Catholic “you’re not Christian and so you’re evil” connotations to being more a “we’re not stuck following a mainstream religion/faith” collective term.
The first I’m aware of the term pagan would have been during the Roman Catholic churches militant attempts at converting everyone to be a catholic. Those that refused would be branded as pagans and harassed, tortured, murdered etc as evil devil worshipers.
In more recent times (last 10-15 years) or so I’ve heard it increasingly used to “wrap” all the indigenous faiths and beliefs that existed in England and Europe before Catholicism took hold. It’s nice to see the positive use growing and being adopted by people who subscribe to those faiths/beliefs.
In summary: It started out meaning “one of many religions related to natural things.” Christians repurposed it to mean “enemy of the faith”. Around 1900 AD, people attempting to revive the old religions starting using it to refer to its original meaning.
So it’s once again become a matter of context. “Pagan” can be constructively used as short for “neo-Pagan”, which includes modern religions/spiritual traditions like Wicca. “Wicca” is a word etymologically one step removed from “witch”. “Pagan” can also accurately describe a group of historical belief systems. It’s the Christian branding of all non-conforming beliefs, where “pagan”=“adversary of values of the one true religion”, that is an outdated or contentious use of the word.
p.s.: To address gendered terms in the context of paganism - pagan religions all prominently featured a Goddess figure, but some also had an important God. It’s interesting to note that sociologically, most societies who believe in things like magic have been pretty firm on which gender has the aptitude for magic/religion/spiritual intuition, though they’ve disagreed on which it was; hardly any have said that males/females/others have equal capacity for it.
Differently gendered words for magic-users are a thing that is largely unique to societies that didn’t believe in magic, or people who are seeing them from the outside/inventing them fictionally. In most of the traditions I’ve studied, if a rare person managed to succeed who was not the proscribed gender for that culture, their gender was sort of ignored and they were called by the same words as any other practitioner. Languages with gendered endings can concede to variations like brujo/bruja, which keeps the same term of respect while acknowledging the variation.
What I’m saying is that vastly different terms like witch/warlock only really came about in D&D days. There was no ancestral place where men and women had different magic, and warranted such different words. There were definitely places where “witch”, or its early equivalent, was a term of respect for both.
For non-binary equivalents, you might try “sorcerer” or “magician”. Magician is a serviceable word, if you can separate it from stage illusions.
The earliest attested written quotations of the word seem to be in the context of Jews, Muslims, and polytheistic worship rather than religions related to natural things, at least as far as my copy of the OED offers me. Those are around in the 1400s. I don’t see anything attested earlier, not that the OED always gets it right. What sources are you looking at for your meaning?
I’d have to spend a bit of time digging through my books to cite you the best and most credible source for what I just said, but for now - try Googling “pagan etymology”.
The first citation for the origin is from the Latin - "pagan, paganus - from the country, rustic.*
So you can see that at some point it meant rural folks, and not anything having to do with dangerous people or non-Christians.
p.s. - The rest of the entry - Late Middle English: from Latin paganus ‘villager, rustic,’ from pagus ‘country district.’ Latin paganus also meant ‘civilian,’ becoming, in Christian Latin, ‘heathen’ (i.e., one not enrolled in the army of Christ).
Yeah, the translation of the Latin in the OED is pretty abstruse:
Etymology: < post-classical Latin paganus (adjective and noun) heathen, as opposed to Christian or Jewish (probably 4th cent.: see below), spec. use of classical Latin pāgānus of or belonging to a country community, civilian, also as noun, inhabitant of a country community, civilian (opposed to mīlēs soldier) < pāgus country district ( < the stem of pangere to fasten, fix
It’s this interesting mix of “rural” and “civilian.” (As you noted) A better classicist than me can untangle that, perhaps! I don’t know how they get the “as opposed to Christian…” bit there.
I do, calling some movie star guys and male models “cute” is a far cry from how it used to be directed at me, even when I was an adult where “cute” meant looking “innocent and childlike”, instead of sexy. But maybe that is just a bad habit I’ve picked up from girls around the internet, or some sort of subconscious “payback” for all the times the word used to be directed at me in that far less flattering context.
Oh yeah, I totally forgot I meant to reply with the same point (aside from personal details, of course ). I’m pretty well used to “cute” being the standard term to refer to an attractive man. And yes, I’m pretty sure I picked this up from spending a lot of time with college women (I’m just about a year after college now). But that doesn’t make it any less of a valid usage… probably more of a valid usage, given that young women tend to be near the forefront of language change.
It’s also a nice way to go against people who act like it’s a negative to associate feminine qualities with men. Another good example word is “pretty.” The phrase “pretty boy” gets used as an insult. It really shouldn’t be. I’m plenty happy to talk about guys being pretty without it demeaning them in any way.
). I’m pretty well used to “cute” being the standard term to refer to an attractive man. And yes, I’m pretty sure I picked this up from spending a lot of time with college women (I’m just about a year after college now). But that doesn’t make it any less of a valid usage… probably more of a valid usage, given that young women tend to be near the forefront of language change.