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The Triumph of Christianity over Paganism, a painting by Gustave Doré (1899). Paganism is commonly used to refer to various religions that existed during Antiquity and the Middle Ages, such as the Greco-Roman religions of the Roman Empire, including the Roman imperial cult, the various mystery religions, religious philosophies such as Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, and more localized ethnic ...
The adoption of paganus by the Latin Christians as an all-embracing, pejorative term for polytheists represents an unforeseen and singularly long-lasting victory, within a religious group, of a word of Latin slang originally devoid of religious meaning. The evolution occurred only in the Latin west, and in connection with the Latin church.
The right half of the front panel of the 7th-century Franks Casket, depicting the Anglo-Saxon (and wider Germanic) legend of Wayland the Smith. Anglo-Saxon paganism, sometimes termed Anglo-Saxon heathenism, Anglo-Saxon pre-Christian religion, Anglo-Saxon traditional religion, or Anglo-Saxon polytheism refers to the religious beliefs and practices followed by the Anglo-Saxons between the 5th ...
The 2014 Pew Research Center's Religious Landscapes Survey included a subset of the New Age Spiritual Movement called "Pagan or Wiccan," reflecting that 3/4 of individuals identifying as New Age also identified as Pagan or Wiccan and placing Wiccans and Pagans at 0.3% of the total U.S. population or approximately 956,000 people of just over ...
As Jacques Lafaye wrote in Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe, "as the Christians built their first churches with the rubble and the columns of the ancient pagan temples, so they often borrowed pagan customs for their own cult purposes". [33] Such Virgins appeared in most of the other evangelized countries, mixing Catholicism with the local customs:
Christians generally regard Easter as the most important festival of the ecclesiastical calendar. It is also the oldest feast of Christianity, and connected to the Jewish Passover. Many terms relating to Easter, such as paschal are derived from the Hebrew term for passover. In many non-English speaking countries the feast is called by some ...
Slavic neo-paganism, or Slavic nativism, is a reconstruction of the pre-Christian pagan beliefs of the ancient Slavs, a return to the worship of Perun, Veles, Makosh, etc. based on some historical information and one's own ideas, with borrowings from the teachings and rituals of polytheistic beliefs of other peoples and the occult.
Many popular customs associated with Christmas developed independently of the commemoration of Jesus's birth, with some claiming that certain elements are Christianized and have origins in pre-Christian festivals that were celebrated by pagan populations who were later converted to Christianity; other scholars reject these claims and affirm ...