What is a Pagan? What is the difference between Pagan and Wicca/Witchcraft?
The word pagan originally comes from the latin word pagani meaning country dweller. Today we will often here the term Pagan to refer to a person’s spiritual beliefs, or the term Neo-Pagan (Neo meaning new). A Pagan is a person who follows an earth based religion. The Pagan path has many denominations to it. Wicca, Witchcraft and Shamanism are just a few. You can think of it the same as the Christian religion and the denominations of it, like baptist, catholic, methodist, etc. Even further within the pagan path there are ‘sub denominations. Within Wicca or Witchcraft there are many ‘traditions’, some being Gardnerian, Alexandrian, Seax, Gregorian to name a few. Again we can compare to the Christian religion. Within the Baptist denomination you will find various ‘traditions’ like American baptist and Southern baptist. I have also heard that Pagan is now being used to denote any path that is not of the ‘Big Three’ i.e. Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
