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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 ...
A marble statue of Jupiter, king of the Roman gods. Paganism (from Latin pāgānus 'rural', 'rustic', later 'civilian') is a term first used in the fourth century by early Christians for people in the Roman Empire who practiced polytheism, [1] or ethnic religions other than Judaism.
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:
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Modern paganism in the United States is represented by widely different movements and organizations. The largest modern pagan (also known as neo-pagan) religious movement is Wicca, followed by Neodruidism. Both of these religions or spiritual paths were introduced during the 1950s and 1960s from Great Britain. Germanic Neopaganism (also known as Heathenry) and Kemetism appeared in the US in ...
Heathenry is a modern Pagan new religious movement that has been active in the United States since at least the early 1970s. Although the term "Heathenry" is often employed to cover the entire religious movement, different Heathen groups within the United States often prefer the term "Ásatrú" or "Odinism" as self-designations.
The various pagan religions have been academically classified as new religious movements, [15] with the anthropologist Kathryn Rountree describing paganism as a whole as a "new religious phenomenon". [16] A number of academics, particularly in North America, consider modern paganism a form of nature religion. [17]
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 ...