This is posted in the waiting room of an Irish hospital. Interesting glimpse into their culture.
The full text of the poster
This symbol has been developed by the Hospice Friendly Hospitals Programme to respectfully identify the End of Life.
This symbol is inspired by ancient Irish history; it is not associated with any one religion or denomination.
The white spiral represents the interconnected cycle of life, birth, life and death.
The white outer circle represents continuity, infinity and completion.
Purple has been chosen as the background colour as it is associated with nobility, solemnity and spirituality.
In this hospital the symbol may be displayed on a ward to add respect and solemnity during end of life or following the death of one of our patients.
Ah yes, “pagan”, that famously singular religion.
Celtic Paganism does in fact refer to a particular pagan religion and set of beliefs/roots of those beliefs.
What’s the religion called then? It’s like a Christian being asked what their religion is and answering “monotheism”.
You can’t be serious. Have you never heard of a “pantheon” before?
Also, horribly ironic, since Christianity is actually a family of individual religions. Have you seriously never heard of Roman Catholicism, Methodism, Southern Baptist, Greek Othrodox, etc. ?
Also, various pagan gods often have a central group of worshipers usually referred to as “cults”. Examples would be the Cult of Odin or Cult of Athena. Members of cults primarily worship their chosen deity most people in a given culture wouldn’t be as selective and worship gods when appropriate, like asking Thor for a good harvest.
Granted, this doesn’t exactly apply to Celtic Paganism, but I’d be surprised if a practice common to the Greeks/Romans, Norse, Egyptians, Hindus, Zoroastrians, etc. didn’t also apply
It depends on the coven/group. Celtic pagans call themselves that or sometimes Celtic Wiccans or just pagans.
It’s the pagan beliefs that are rooted in Irish and Welsh history specifically. Then you have different pagan beliefs that are rooted in Norse theology or Greek mythology.
My mom raised me as Wiccan. There’s about as many denominations as there are in the Christian religion.
Edit: Sometimes they’ll even call themselves Druids or follow Druidism.
Wiccans and Neo-Druids are not Celtic Pagans. They are new age spiritualist nonsense.
Celtic Reconstructionism is the only “authentic” Celtic Pagan religion, based on surviving historical information rather than making up bits and using Celtic flavouring.
All of that is about as relevant to celtic paganism as Scientology is to Buddhism.
We don’t know a lot about Celtic paganism, what we do know comes through the filter of the Roman invader and is cursorary. Anyone building a halfway coherent belief system and claiming it as Celtic Paganism is a fraud.
Thank you for the informative response. It seems that in this context, “pagan” is less of a religion name and more of a category of otherwise unrelated religions characterized by a mystical connection to nature.
No problem! I think you’re missing that we are saying “Celtic Paganism” and not just pagan.
No I’m not missing that, I’m arguing that it’s the equivalent to saying “American Monotheism” when you mean “Christian”. It strikes me as strange that there’s no, like, actual Celtic word for their belief system/way of life that we could use instead of [Region][Category]
Celtic isn’t a region though, it’s an ethnic group and a language family. “Celtic paganism” typically refers to one of two things: the spiritual beliefs and practices of the historical Celtic civilizations, or the modern reconstruction based on it. It’s fairly specific in that respect.
“Pagan” alone is a large umbrella, and most modern pagans will acknowledge that, but often they’ll differentiate themselves as “Celtic pagan” or “Norse pagan” or “Greek pagan” or whathaveyou.
But historically, there wasn’t much of a point to naming one’s religion, because even if they had contact with different cultures, they were distinguished by their ethnic groups/language families, and their religion was as indistinguishable from those things as any other aspect of culture.
That was long before the modern day, when civilizations now have more heterogeneity and thus distinctions such as language, culture, ethnicity, religion, cuisine, etc., each refer to unique sets of characteristics that can blend in various ways within a multicultural society in a globalized world.
Many if not most religions historically didn’t have a word for their particular belief system; the scholarly name for Germanic paganism is “Germanic paganism” because pre-Christian Germans didn’t have a name for their shared beliefs. Sometimes you may see neologisms or names for neopagan movements applied to the now-dead religion — I’ve seen Germanic neopaganism (aka “Heathenry”)'s less commonly-used “Asatru” used for the original religion in a game. Same with others like “Kemetism”, which refers to the neopagan movement and not the ancient Egyptian religion.
Not a historical scholar but, to my understanding, for a lot of folks “what’s your religion” would have been a nonsensical question because that’s just how the world works and you wouldn’t think of it as being a belief system separate from physically evident reality. Folks are free to correct me on that.
“Celtic Paganism” would be more akin to “Catholicism”. It’s a sect or branch of Paganism.
Like how Catholicism is a branch of Christianity
To be fair, Catholicism is a famously singular religion.
Not really - that’s more like saying “European polytheism” when you mean paganism.
Though I do believe there are non-European traditions that might call themseves pagan. But then again, christianity is also not confined to America.
The term “pagan” originally meant “anything other than christian.” Maybe before that it meant something like “country bumpkin,” referring to people who lived outside the cities and major towns. The meaning changed as population centers converted faster than rural areas.
It originated in Europe though, so obviously it’s more deeply rooted in European paganism and other cultures that had close contact, like Egypt and Anatolia.
Further removed cultures probably didn’t/don’t think of themselves as pagan. For example, a Shinto priest probably doesn’t call himself pagan. There’s no cultural reason to.
But that sorta breaks down when you look at post-colonized cultures, where the cultural cross-pollination lent the word pagan to their cultural identity. For instance, some followers of Native American spirituality refer to themselves as pagan. It’s a way of reclaiming the term, which was originally used to exclude and oppress them, but now it just frightens christians. A lot of people who call themselves pagan use the term that way deliberately.
Paganism is incredibly diverse, I will give you that. “Pagan” is more of an umbrella term for many different beliefs with some common elements.
But christianity for example is also an umbrella term - you have catholicism (whis then has the many different orders and stuff under it), evanjelical christianity (with its many denominations) and orthodox church (which may or may not have different groups under it, I don’t really know). And even two different people within one denomination of the larger group of christianity may hold a slightly different set of beliefs.
Paganism is just a larger umbrella. I also went with Celtic paganism as it narrows it down a little more, that’s why I went for that rather than simply saying “paganism”.
Now I get what the hospital tried to go for. But saying it is not tied to a religion is I think a little unfortunate.
Really close, but off by one part: paganism is not an inclusive term. It’s an exclusive term. Rather than groups (originally) agreeing they are pagans, Christians decided anything not Christian is pagan. The modern meaning of pagan is euro-centric because that’s where Christianity took hold. The Norse and the Celtic and the Baltic and the Germanic “pagans” likely would not see themselves as on the same side of the argument against Christians. Grouping pagans together is like grouping barbarians together across the world. Literally, because barbarian is also a derogatory term. (bar-bar was the racist interpretation of foreign language by the Greeks and then Romans)
The meaning is shifted now because of 2000 years of Christian erasure. So sure, it might now be that Pagan is an equivalent type of term as Christian, covering many groups that identify themselves as their parent term, but that’s not the historical context. That makes a difference when talking about the actual history.
You are right about that. But I didn’t talk about history and how it effectively was deragotary term, as didn’t find it relevant in this context.
“Pagan” became to mean non-christian, but afaik originally it meant “person from the countryside” - lat. paganos I believe (also see: heathen - person from the heath) - so people living in vilages and such, who took longer to convert from the old faith.
Anyway, as other commenter said somewhere here, these religions usually didn’t have names historically that we know of. It was simply the religion to the people. Moreover, the religion was not centralized. The various tribes, even villages could have differences and their local gods that were worshipped. So yeah, christians came up with the umbrela term and yeah, it was developed as an insult basically. But it’s what we have as a name for these religions.
I didn’t find it relevant as modern day pagans mostly embraced the term and I don’t think it holds same negative conotations as it did in the past.