Welcome to the Street Prophets Coffee Hour cleverly hidden at the intersection of religion and politics. This is an open thread where we can share our thoughts and comments about the day. Since many of today’s fundamentalist Christians are decrying the existence of pagans and heathens in modern America, I thought it might be interesting to look at the etymologies of these words.
Pagan
Paganism is a generic term often used to refer to religious traditions which are indigenous and/or polytheistic. Thus, pagans are non-Christians.
In English, the emergence of pagan as a word that somehow indicates or implies “non-believer” comes from Christianity. As Christianity spread through the Roman Empire, it spread more rapidly in the cities than in the countryside. Thus, the people living in the country—known as pāganus in Latin, meaning “villager”—were the last to be reached by the new religion and hence most likely to be unbelievers. In English today, the Latin pāganus has become pagan.
The Latin pāganus is also the source of our English word peasant.
Looking farther back, pāganus comes from an earlier *pāg- meaning “fix,” which produced the English page” pal” (meaning “stake”), and pole. The Latin noun pāganus was based on a metaphorical extension of the concept of *pāg- to mean “country area, village.”
There is, however, an alternative but related history of the origin of pagan according to some authorities. They claim that the Roman Caesars used pagan as a way of referring to civilians as opposed to soldiers (milites in Latin). Since the Christians referred to themselves as “Soldiers of the Lord,” all others—meaning non-believers—were pagans.
Heathen
The emergence of heathen meaning “non-believer” is inspired by pagan. Etymologically, heathen refers to “someone who lives in the heather.” The heather is, of course, the wild, upcountry area which is inhabited by those who are uncivilized and savage. Thus, as pagan meaning “country person” came to mean non-believer, so did heathen.
“Heathen” seems to come from the proto-Germanic *khaithiz meaning “hearth.” Some linguists point to the etymological origins of heathen in the Old English hæðen and the Old Norse heiðinn.
Open Thread
This is an open thread—all topics, including those submitted by pagans and heathens, are welcome.