PAGANISM. – From *pagus*, village, i.e., a grouping of farms whose association constitutes a *vicus*. The *Paganalia* (q.v.) were the agricultural festivals that took place in the *pagi*; *paganus* was the farmer or rustic inhabitant of the *pagus*.
In its current usage, paganism does not denote a precise religious system but rather the ensemble of polytheistic currents and animistic practices of antiquity, in contrast to Christianity. In Rome, *paganus*, an inhabitant of the plain, was opposed to *montanus*, an inhabitant of the hills; it also carried the sense of civilian, bourgeois, in contrast to *miles* (Suetonius, *Oct.*, 27; Tacitus, *Hist.*, I, 53; Juvenal, XVI, 33; Tertullian, *De corona*, 11). After the victory of Christianity, *paganus* came to signify the ensemble of beliefs and practices of the ancient religion now defeated and surviving only in small rural centers: “We call *pagans* the worshippers of many false gods” (Augustine, *Retr.*, II, 43; cf. *Codex Theodosianus*, XVI, 10; Isidore, VIII, 10). To this meaning, which refers above all to cultural practices, must be added that relating to the belief in the power of the elements (ἐπὶ παλαιά): “There is no doubt that pagans are subject to the elements. Pagans are accustomed to flee to the elements, saying that they worship those by which human life is governed” (Pseudo-Augustine, *Quaest.*, 27: PL 35, 2275).
The “elements” that the ancient world venerated at its twilight were not only the four fundamental ones—water, air, earth, fire—whose various combinations produce the phenomena of the sensible world, but also the elements of the astral world: sun, moon, stars, whose action is understood as a real force that is directed or appeased through cultic practices. This legacy of old paganism extends into the practices and superstitious animistic and spiritistic beliefs of contemporary popular paganism.
In Latin liturgical usage, *paganus* is equivalent to non-Christian; in the litanic prayer of Good Friday, the Church invites prayer for pagans so that, abandoning idolatrous worship, they may turn to that of the true God. In current usage, the term refers especially to the so-called peoples of nature. In Hebrew terminology, non-Israelites are called ethnic, gentiles (ἐπὶ ἐθνῶν), insofar as they do not belong to the chosen people but to foreign nations; in the Greek Byzantine Church, pagans are called Hellenes, with Hellenism understood as the ensemble of non-Christian beliefs and practices.