Patriarchy
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pagan revivals. The adoption of this dualist distinction by cotemporary pagan revivalists has led to numerous conflicts between western pagan revivalists, eager to integrate traditional pre-Christian religious practices with pagan revivals, and members of indigenous cultures and non-Christian religions (Mulcock, 1998, 2001).
The Origins of the Term Paganism The term Pagan etymologically derives from the Latin adjective Paganus which, typically is taken to mean of the rural countryside. It is also a term which has been used pejoratively from its inception as uncivilized, uncouth and rustic. However, this interpretation has come under criticism by historians Robin Lane Fox and Pierre Chauvin due to the term being utilized widely in Early Christian Rome when the bulk of the urban population remained Pagan in today’s terms. Like Chauvin, Ronald Hutton proposes that a more accurate meaning of the term in antiquity is that of followers of the customs and religions of locality (i.e., Pagus) rather than one of the many cosmopolitan, universalist and transcendent faiths of the early Christian period (Hutton, 1993).
Paganism and the Countryside The perceived high prevalence of localized preChristian customs, idolatry and ritual surviving in the countryside led to the association of the Paganus with the uncivilized and rural. This distinction between rural and urban religious practices also links closely with the intensely urban and cosmopolitan demography of early Christianity. In the early Christian era the term Pagan came to represent those who still practiced the predominantly rural and localized expressions of pre-Christian belief in contrast to the predominantly urban and educated Christianity of the middle ages. In this sense western thought has typically presented a universal divide between Christianity and, by association, the other Abrahamic faiths of Islam and Judaism, and that of the incredibly diverse and wide ranging other faiths of antiquity, indigenous cultures and contemporary
Paganism and the Abrahamic Faiths in Antiquity With regards to interpretations of the Paganism of antiquity, the central distinction that can be made with the Abrahamic faiths is that of locality and cultural pluralism. This distinction is pointed out by Martin Bernal in his discussion of the rise of the transcendent monotheistic and dualist cosmopolitan religions of the second and third centuries C.E., particularly in Egypt, the supposed heartland of the Temple based urban paganism of antiquity. He argues that by the third century the breakdown of traditional local structures of social and religious practice combined with rising urban cosmopolitanism placed enormous pressures on the localized basis of the traditional pagan religious institutions. These pressures were linked to long term class and social tensions that gave Christianity and other universalist faiths, such as Manichaenism, an appeal when linked with Hellenic philosophy, with which the traditional localized temple religions could not compete. This in turn led to class p
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