Paganism is many things. In fact, Every pagan will probably have a different understanding of just what Paganism is. Pagans tend to be individualists, so there is very little agreement on the details of what Paganism means. [Someone once said that if you get 10 pagans in a room together, you will be very lucky if you get as few as 10 opinions on any given topic.] There is, however, fairly general (though by no means universal) agreement on the broad principles discussed here.
The word "pagan" comes from the Latin word paganus, which means "country dweller" or, perhaps more accurately, "hick." Because Christianity came first to the cities of Europe, the city dwellers were the first to embrace that new religion (sometimes not altogether of their own free will). Pretty soon, the old religion was followed only by the pagani, who were looked down on by the sophisticated urbanites. "Pagan" became a term of derision for a follower of the old religion. The word "heathen" means the same thing -- "dweller on the heath," or countryside. (English has many such word-pairs, one from Latin and one from Anglo-Saxon, that mean the same thing.) For us to embrace the words "pagan" and "heathen" as our own is a way of recapturing the history and the power of our religious tradition.
The dominant religion in this culture, Christianity, sees people as inherently sinful. Because Adam and Eve sinned in the garden of Eden, all of us are born with "original sin" which we carry with us our entire lives -- unless, of course, we buy their particular brand of "salvation." (This is, by the way, also the pattern of most television commercials.)
Paganism, however, sees humanity as living in a state of original blessing. In other words, we are not depraved at our core, requiring outside intervention to become good; rather, we are born, live, and die with the blessing of the Divine. People who are new to Paganism often remark how open, friendly, and loving we are with each other and with seekers. They are finding out what a vast difference it makes to live our lives out of the ground-level assumption that we are blessed, rather than cursed, by our gods.
(We should note that the phrase "original blessing" was first used by Matthey Fox, a former Catholic priest whose rationality caused him to have to resign from the priesthood. He has since married and become an Episcopal priest. You can find more about his tradition of "creation spirituality" at MatthewFox.org.)
Paganism is a polytheistic approach to whatever there is about the universe that can be called Divine. Some religions see the Divine as a single being: God, Allah, and JHVH are the most popular names for this being nowadays. (Since the Christians seem to have a trademark on the word "God" as the name for their specific divine entity, we use the more general word "Divine" to name this ultimate reality of the universe.) The next key tenet of Paganism is that the Divine cannot be pinned down to a single identity, a single concept, or a single name.
However, Paganism cannot simply be equated to polytheism. It also includes the concept of the "immanence" of the Divine - the understanding that the Divine is here with us, and in us. Religions that see the Divine as distant and removed - that is, as separate from humanity - cannot be considered true Pagan religions.
To a Pagan, divinity is everywhere: in trees, creeks, fields, in the Earth herself. Divinity is also immanent within all people, even though they (we) might not admit it or be comfortable with it. Divinity is present on other worlds and in interplanetary space, but most Pagans feel that the Earth is our home, and while we are here, this is where we meet the Divine. (It is an interesting irony, though, that modern-day Pagans are almost universally fascinated with computers, science fiction, space travel and colonization, and futurism.)
Just as the Divine cannot be limited to a single being, it also cannot be limited to a single gender. Even the Jews said, "And God created people in God’s own image: male and female God created them." All advanced forms of life on our earth have two genders, and this fundamental part of the way we see the world also affects our view of the Divine.
Paganism sees the Divine as both male and female, so that all of us are embraced by a divine love that is not limited to the attributes of one gender or the other. "God" comes to us in the nurturing love of the divine mother, as well as in the caring love of the divine father. This bipolarity also allows us to receive that divine love as passionate and erotic when we need it, reflecting and affirming that we were created as passionate and erotic beings. Pagans are fully and joyfully sexual people.
Paganism is nature-centered; that is, we hold that the earth and all creatures living on it partake of the Divine. We are not "nature worshippers;" rather, we are people who understand that human beings, far from "having dominion over" nature, are really only one of the many species that are privileged to live on this beautiful planet. Our role as intelligent, self-aware beings is to take responsibility for the care of our mother the Earth -- not to use her body for whatever purpose turns us a quick profit, without regard for our fellow creatures or our descendants.
Pagans freely admit that they do not have a direct link into the mind of the Divine, as demagogues of some other religions claim to have. We also do not rely on some god to meet all our needs, tell us what to do, grant us special favors, comfort us when we grieve, or (especially) save us from some horrible afterlife punishment that the god himself decreed for us if we are "bad". Our understanding of our relationship to the Divine tells us that although we may be, as one Pagan song puts it, "the children of the Lord and the Lady," we are their grown-up children. Just as human parents consider themselves most successful when their children grow up and take responsibility for their own lives, we feel that our divine "parents" want us to be grown up to the point that we can do the same.
Next, we discuss the Pagan approach to religion in general. How, for example, can someone who has been a believing Christian all her life "suddenly" change her philosophy and beliefs to a position so far removed from Apollonian, monotheistic Christianity as is Dionysian, polytheistic Paganism? Pagans who have done this seldom deny their former faith; they simply understand that they have grown beyond it, and need to move to another relationship with the Divine that is more meaningful to them.
Whether or not the Divine exists and is worthy of our respect and worship is a matter for each individual to decide for himself. Pagans are not atheists: a central part of our common understanding of the nature of the universe is that there is something Divine about it. We do not, however, have the gall to claim that we have any special insights into that divinity; we are simply seeking, just like people in all other religions, to understand and relate to that divinity in ways that make sense to us.
If, however, the Divine is worthy of the name and the respect we give it, then we have to admit that it is far beyond the limited powers of human beings to comprehend. We understand that all religions are merely ways of reducing this essentially incomprehensible reality into a form that is approachable by us. There are several ways of understanding this "translating" function of religion; we will consider two here.
The first way of thinking about religion is that it is like a lens, that brings something beyond our powers of detection into focus. In the physical world, the act of focusing a lens on something brings a part of that thing into clear view, but obscures our view of other parts of it. Microscopes and telescopes both work this way. In the spiritual world, we have to select a part of the Divine and focus on it, because we cannot grasp all of it at once. Each person selects to focus on the part(s) of the Divine to which she can best relate, or which she can best understand.
For many people, the decision of where to focus is made by parents or friends or someone else, other than themselves. Most people raised Muslim stay Muslim; and most people raised Methodist stay in that denomination. Why? Because it is meaningful, or maybe just comfortable, to them. Some people, however, come to the realization at some point in their lives that the view of divinity they have been using is just not adequate for them any more. The Divine itself has not changed; but the person has changed. She needs a new view of divinity, one that again makes sense to her, given where she is in her life.
The second way of thinking about religion is that it is a model that we construct of reality. The major models in use today, including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Paganism, have many similar components. The most important one is that the Divine cares for, even loves, human beings. (Jesus used many such models of God for teaching his followers: the good shepherd, the mother hen, etc.) Another nearly universal component we find in the models is that the essence of an individual -- its spirit, soul, or whatever -- survives the physical death of that individual’s body. Past that, the models diverge, sometimes widely, into the different beliefs, rules, and dogmas that separate the world’s religions.
The key element of the Pagan model is that the Divine is too complex to be encompassed by any one image. The Divine is really no more JHVH, with his long white beard and sitting on his alabaster throne, than she is Kali the destroyer, squatting on the cremation ground to couple with the dead body of the god Shiva. We think of the Divine in terms of all the god/dess images from human history. At times, we may use the Greek pantheon because it and its members are most meaningful to us regarding what we are doing or where we are in our lives. At other times, we may use the old Celtic divinities as our model, because they come closest to striking that deep chord within us that says, as JHVH of the Jews once expressed it, "Take off your shoes; you are on holy ground."
No matter which particular models we use, the important thing is that we are free to choose whatever model works best for us at the time. We are not limited to a specific model throughout our lives; we are not even limited to a specific model throughout a day. We can celebrate our relationship to the Divine whether we are feeling exuberant or depressed, pensive or horny, alone or connected. We can call upon the aspect(s) of the Divine that most fit with our needs at any given time; in this way, we can get our minds around those aspects, and use their specific energies to empower, enable, join with, or help us in our worship
For example, if a Pagan group meets to celebrate the divine fertility of Spring, then some of the aspects they might call on include Pan, the lusty satyr; Diana, the strong hunter; and Gaia, our Earth mother. If, on the other hand, the ritual is one of remembrance of a beloved one who has died, then the appropriate aspects might be Cerridwen, the old goddess who stirs the cauldron of rebirth; Hades, the Roman god of the underworld; and Brigid (pronounced "Breed"), the Celtic goddess of renewal.
Finally, we understand that none of these aspects truly mirrors the reality of the Divine, and that all of them are totally human constructs. (This, in fact, is the central difference between modern "neo-paganism" and the true paganism of our ancestors.) However, each of these aspects forms a part of the model of that Divine that we build to help us relate to it for a particular purpose or event. Each aspect of the Divine has a lesson to teach us, showing us how to live that aspect better in our own lives.