The world today is experiencing a great resurgence in old Pagan religions, of which Wicca, my own faith, is perhaps the largest single path. Others consist of Druidism, Norse, and a broad spectrum of other, smaller groups best characterized by their similarities than by their differences. This renewal of ancient pre-Christian philosophies has been going on since the 1950s, when the late Gerald Gardner published his seminal work, Witchcraft Today. Gardner, a retired English public servant, is generally credited with reconstructing the faith now known as Wicca, and bringing it out into public view. Paganism is the collective name for a large number of earth-oriented spiritualities paralleling the Native American system, and which can be best described as Native European Spirituality. These are based largely on the religious practices of the indigenous peoples of the area now known as northern Europe prior to the arrival of the Romans.

The predominant religion in our Western culture has used the term "Pagan" as a pejorative, when referring to anyone not of the Christian faith and sometimes even meaning someone antagonistic toward Christianity. In actuality, Pagans have never been antagonistic toward any other religion, except insofar as another might exert the claim to be the only true path to deity. The word Pagan originates in the Latin "pagani," which meant country dwellers to the conquering Romans in Europe, much the same as the Anglo-Saxon word "heathen" meant those who lived out on the heaths or meadowlands, away from the towns and population centers.

This association with non-Christian beliefs came about during the spread of the Roman conquest across the European continent. The principal conversions from the Old Religion to the new came about first in the towns, the population centers where some noble held sway and people were anxious to follow the lead of their leaders or, in some cases, were forced to follow their leaders in conversion. Naturally, those who lived remote from such scant and few villages of that era held on to their old beliefs and practices for a much, much longer time.

With the passage of time as knowledge of the Old Religion was gradually lost to the masses, through common usage the words Pagan and Heathen became synonymous with things non-Christian. In 800 c.e. the start of "The Witch Craze" took Europe by storm and the persecutions began. What remained of The Old Religion went underground as an act of self-preservation. Anthropologist Margaret Murray's important work, The Witch Cult in Western Europe, first published I believe in 1924, brought new interest and new life to The Old Religion. Many scholars began to debate her theories of the underground survival of this earth-centered spirituality. Although in many areas of influence today, Murray's theories have been discarded, her work undeniably was the spark that renewed the fire of Earth oriented indigenous European religions which revolved around the changing seasons, the lunar, solar, herding and agricultural cycles to insure survival.

I refer to Paganism as The Old Religion as though it were a single belief system, because history points out to us that the beliefs and practices of these various ancient peoples were considered by them to be a single thing called religion. The Romans had one set of names for the gods, the Greeks, another, the Norse still another, and so on. Yet unlike us today, everyone understood then, that they were all talking about the very same thing. Every highschooler is familiar with the unattributed saying, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do," but few know this was a reference to addressing the gods by Roman names when among the Romans and by Greek names when among the Greeks. The advent of different religions with markedly different deity belief systems is a relatively new idea which has given rise to many occasions of genocide, continuing even as we speak.

Earth-centered spirituality, more properly described as an orthopraxis rather than an orthodoxy, has little or no dogma, no fixed set of central beliefs. Rather it is based more on a set of ritual practices than on a body of beliefs. Its beginnings hark back to the late stone age on the European continent.

Early humans gave homage through worship and sacrifice to deity to propitiate the forces of nature which so capriciously governed their survival, their lives and their deaths. It was thought that if one engaged in certain ritualized practices, one could alter the course of the elements, guarantee the fertility of the seeds of last harvest and the stock, thereby ensuring the harvest and the growth of the herds and flocks. There was at once and the same time, no name for deity and many names. Because plant and animal fertility and reproduction was so important to their survival, in the hunter-gatherer and the later agricultural-herding cultures, the earliest known objects of veneration, their religious icons or symbols, were consistently female in form. Its no surprise then, that the female's power to create new life was wondrous enough to inspire worship of the unseen divine forces of nature in the form of a Great Mother. The Venus of Willendorf, carbon dated to somewhere between 24,000 and 30,000 b.c.e. is but one of some 1,400 such sacred icons found by archaeologists across the northern European continent. She is a small, carved limestone representation of a fecund, plump and faceless female, with exaggerated hips and breasts. Not at all our present society's idea of feminine beauty or desirability, but then, the priorities of these ancient peoples were somewhat different from ours today.

As you can see, the Earth, the plants, the animals, the environment, the forces of Nature - all of these were important to early humankind. In some areas, this nature-based spirituality continued to exist for a very long time indeed. In areas never reached by the long arm of the Inquisition and the Witch Persecutions, such as the eastern European countries of the Baltic region, nature-based Pagan religions have existed in an unbroken line right down to the present day among the Czech, Slovak and other area peoples, the Pagans among them never having felt the oppressive hand of a persecuting religion. Oddly enough, the communist regimes which formerly governed these areas, while vigorously suppressing Christianity, never felt these Pagan faiths to be a threat to their political control, leaving them unmolested, to worship in their own way.

Because we Pagans follow a spiritual path that sees all things in this world as interconnected; because we worship our Goddess and God as the Great Earth Mother and her consort, the God of the Hunt and of death and rebirth, we accept that some things must die and decay to give new life to something else, in the natural rhythm of the Earth. An understanding of this rhythm and its essentiality leads us to accept ecological responsibility and action, as a sacred religious obligation that is to be lived out in our daily lives, not just thought about in church one day a week or on major holidays. In modern society, there are so many forces working against us that we are not always successful, but we still strive every day to remember and honor the fact that this Earth is only on loan to us, and is not ours to plunder at will for personal gain. Even the biblical wisdom of Genesis 2:28 contains the injunction to "replenish the earth" as well as subdue it, a line conveniently downplayed or overlooked by our consumer-based society. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was right on the mark when he said that Americans make the mistake of looking at the Earth as though it were a mine, instead of the farm it really is.

The time for simply raising ecological consciousness of the masses is long past. It is time for action, beginning at the lowest levels - our daily lives. We have engineered, manufactured, dumped, irradiated and discarded ourselves up to the brink of total collapse of Mother Nature's natural survival systems. There is no time left to waste, no time left to debate the matter; there is barely enough time for us to reverse this terrible decline, this terrible waste of our borrowed home, the planet Earth. Nature's survival system most assuredly includes the evolutionary theory of the survival of the fittest. But we are just beginning to realize, as a society, that perhaps we are not at the "top of the food chain," not the fittest after all. In the final analysis, when we die, the plants will eat us, placing vegetation in that coveted spot at the top of the food chain. Perhaps we are devising the means of our own extinction, while taking a few snail darters, snow leopards and other species with us into the void.

Someone who opposes conservation and ecological measures and ideas once told me, "Who is to say the divine plan does not include God's placing humans on Earth for the sole purpose of bringing a few unnecessary species to extinction?" I suggested to him that it appeared as though the species Homo Sapiens was at the head of that list.

I believe that one of the reasons Pagan faiths are presently undergoing an unprecedented growth and popularity is that our sense of the necessity of balance in all things, our commitment to ecology and preservation of the Earth and all its intertwined, interrelated and interdependent component parts, is very much needed today. Pagans have been following this path since long before Ecology was politically correct, before it became a household buzzword. It is no coincidence that many traditional spiritualities are fast losing membership at the time the common man's spirituality is awakening to this.

As Pagans, we see Divinity imminent or internal, as well as transcendent or external. We see divinity within everything on Earth, animate and inanimate, as well as external, something or someone "out there." We are comforted by the natural balance inherent in viewing deity as both a female Goddess and a male God. After all, all of Nature contains this balance, as female and male, positive and negative, light and dark. We imagine deity as a multiplicity of goddesses and gods, whether as individual deities or as facets of one or a few archetypes, an attitude that promotes tolerance towards other religions.

We have an intense respect for and love of Nature as divine in Her own right, making ecological awareness and activity not just a "good idea," but a religious duty. Our dissatisfaction with monolithic religious institutions and distrust of would-be messiahs and gurus makes us hard to organize, even "for our own good," and leads to a constant growth and mutation within Paganism, something we see as beneficial. The traditional Western concepts of sin, guilt and divine retribution are seen as misunderstandings of natural growth experiences, and we hold that human beings were more likely meant to live lives balanced with joy and love, pleasure and humor.

We don't accept the notion that we are to suffer in this life to gain some vague reward after this life ends - we believe this existence is not a dress rehearsal for something else, this is it! Life can be heaven-on-earth, or the hell of your worst childhood nightmare, depending on what you are willing to make of it. It gets easier once you come to that realization.

Our simple set of ethics and morality is based on the avoidance of harming other people, all living beings, and the planet as a whole. We believe in the importance of acknowledging and celebrating the solar, lunar, and other cycles of our lives. Our faith includes a minimum of dogma and a maximum of eclecticism, and we are reluctant to accept any idea without personally investigating it. We are always willing to adopt and use any useful concept, regardless of its origins.

We have a strong faith in the ability of people to solve their own current problems on all levels, public and private, personal and global. This leads to a strong commitment to personal and universal growth, evolution and balance. We are expected to be making continuous personal progress in these directions, and believe that we can progress far towards achieving such growth, evolution and balance through the carefully planned alteration of one's consciousness using both ancient and modern methods of aiding concentration, meditation, reprogramming and ecstasy.

We know and acknowledge that human interdependence implies community cooperation, and encourage the use of our talents actively to help each other as well as the planet as a whole. We are very aware that if we are to realize our goals, we must actively and continuously practice what we preach by making our lifestyle consistent with our proclaimed beliefs. We believe that example is the most compelling teacher, and instead of attempting to make converts through proselytizing, we believe that by living our beliefs, others too will become aware of the importance, the urgency, the sanctity of living in a way that compliments the environment and respects the laws of Nature, effectively reversing our culture's suicidal race to destruction.

Pagans in ancient times knew the importance of balance in all things, knew and understood the necessity of respecting and honoring the cycles of life and the earth. Today's modern Pagans know and are concerned with the urgency of these things in the context of contemporary Western society, and have assumed a sense personal responsibility for making the necessary changes, starting with their own day-to-day lives, then carrying change forward to be effective in the larger scheme of things. We have learned from the opposition that even greatest of forests can be clear cut, taking one tree at a time. We believe that the future of this Earth, if there is to be a future to speak of, lies in the hands of each and every one of us, Pagans and non-Pagans alike, if we can but rise to and overcome the crisis that man has created, and enable the growth and change in attitudes toward the Earth, Nature and spirituality. Each and every one of us must accept that the job begins right here, with me.

The Pagans of ancient times knew the importance of a balance in all things, knew the necessity for respecting and honoring the cycles of the earth. Today's Pagans know and are concerned with the urgency of these things in the context of modern Western society, and assume a personal responsibility for making the required necessary changes, starting with their own day-to-day lives, and carrying change forward to whatever level may be appropriate to be effective on the larger scale. We have learned from the opposition that even great forests are clear cut, one tree at a time. We believe that the future of this Earth, if there is to be one, is in the hands of each and every one of us, Pagans and non-Pagans alike, if we can but rise to the crisis we have collectively created and overcome it through essential growth and change in our cultural attitudes toward Nature and the Earth. To do this, we all will have to remain focused on the idea that the job begins with me.