Ta2 JoYnT's thread 'What exactly is a ...?' has gotten me thinking about this question and I would like to open for discussion some ideas that have occurred to me.

First, his statement that 'pagan' is an uncomfortably Christian term raises some of my own issues with our common developing understanding of what constitutes alternative spirituality founded in and informed by Celtic pre-Christian culture. Both 'Celtic' and 'Pagan' have certain resonances and my experience has been that these terms are deployed more as a means of sparking a resonant connotation than citing a donotative definition.

In other words, 'Celtic Paganism' doesn't mean that those who practice this kind of alternative spirituality - whatever that may be since one of Paganism's strengths is its endless and celebratory diversity - ARE Celts according to the hostorical definition of these terms, practicing the rites observed prior to the conversion period. Instead, 'Celtic Pagan' evokes a whole package of associations that are interpreted in endless ways, some of which are not rooted in historical but literary reality. In such a complex and ever-shifting lexical arena, the term Celtic Pagan is free from the constraints of historicity - constraints the Celtic Reconstructionists are currently wrestling with - to explore all the myriad meanings and implications of the term 'Celtic'. It's very exciting!

Of course the term 'pagan' has its coinage in the Christian past, but that is precisely the point. Now the term specifies a point of view deliberately outside of the modern Judeo-Christian (even Islamic) paradigm, emerging from a period when that paradigm was seemingly ubiquitous. The term Pagan originally came to mean non-Christian by connotation, since only those living in the countryside (the very meaning of 'paganus') continued to follow the older tradition (agricultural communities always tend to be resistant to such cultural changes, and Christianity was, at first, an urban phenomenon). Now that association with ruralism ties its modern alternative spiritualities to the land through a conscious promotion of 'green religion' - as it were.

I offer these thoughts in order to see what you, our immediate community, thinks. My own Celtic Paganism is still budding and ever-changing. I would thus be very grateful for any words anyone may offer.