The term mythology can refer to either the study of myths, or to a body of myths. For example, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece. The term “myth” is often used colloquially to refer to a false story, but academic use of the term generally does not pass judgment on truth or falsity.

Typical characteristics

The main characters in myths are usually gods or supernatural heroes. As sacred stories, myths are often endorsed by rulers and priests and closely linked to religion. In the society in which it is told, a myth is usually regarded as a true account of the remote past. In fact, many societies have two categories of traditional narrative, “true stories” or myths, and “false stories” or fables. Myths generally take place in a primordial age, when the world had not yet achieved its current form, and explain how the world gained its current form and howcustoms, institutions and taboos were established

Paganism (from Latin paganus, meaning “country dweller”, “rustic”) is a blanket term, typically used to refer to polytheistic religious traditions; although from a Christian perspective, the term can encompass all non–Abrahamic religions.

It is primarily used in a historical context, referring to Greco-Roman polytheism as well as the polytheistic traditions of Europe before Christianization. In a wider sense, extended to contemporary religions, it includes most of the Eastern religions and the indigenous traditions of the Americas, Central Asia, Australia and Africa; as well as non-Abrahamic folk religion in general. More narrow definitions will not include any of the world religions and restrict the term to local or rural currents not organized as civil religions. Characteristic of pagan traditions is the absence of proselytism and the presence of a living mythology, which explains religious practice.

The term pagan is a Christian adaptation of the “gentile” of Judaism, and as such has an inherent Abrahamic bias, and pejorative connotations among monotheists, comparable to heathen andinfidel also known as kafir (كافر) and mushrik in Islam. Peter Brown observes:

“The adoption of paganus by Latin Christians as an all-embracing, pejorative term for polytheists represents an unforeseen and singularly long-lasting victory, within a religious group, of a word of Latin slang originally devoid of religious meaning. The evolution occurred only in the Latin west, and in connection with the Latin church. Elsewhere, ‘Hellene’ or ‘gentile’ (ethnikos) remained the word for ‘pagan’; and paganos continued as a purely secular term, with overtones of the inferior and the commonplace.”

For these reasons, ethnologists avoid the term “paganism,” with its uncertain and varied meanings, in referring to traditional or historic faiths, preferring more precise categories such as polytheism,shamanism, pantheism, or animism.

In the late 20th century, “Paganism”, or “Neopaganism”, became widely used in reference to adherents of various New Religious Movements including Wicca. As such, various modern scholars have begun to apply the term to three groups of separate faiths: Historical Polytheism (such as Celtic polytheism, Norse paganism, and Hellenic Polytheistic Reconstructionism also called Hellenismos), Folk/ethnic/Indigenous religions (such as Chinese folk religion and African traditional religion), and Neopaganism (such as Wicca and Germanic Neopaganism).

Heathen is from Old English hæðen ”not Christian or Jewish” (c.f. Old Norse heiðinn). Historically, the term was probably influenced by Gothic haiþi ”dwelling on the heath”, appearing as haiþno in Ulfilas’ bible as “gentile woman” (translating the “Hellene” in Mark 7:26). This translation was probably influenced by Latin paganus, “country dweller”, or it was chosen because of its similarity to the Greek ἐθνικός ethnikos, “gentile”. It has even been suggested that Gothic haiþi is not related to “heath” at all, but rather a loan from Armenian hethanos, itself loaned from Greek ἔθνος ethnos.

Religion as a Christian concept

The social constructionists

In recent years, some academic writers have described religion according to the theory of social constructionism, which considers how ideas and social phenomena develop in a social context. Among the main proponents of this theory of religion are Timothy Fitzgerald, Daniel Dubuisson and Talad Assad. The social constructionists argue that religion is a modern concept that developed from Christianity and was then applied inappropriately to non-Western cultures and European pre Christian cultures.

Similar views to social constructionism have been put forward by writers who are not social constructionists. George Lindbeck, a Lutheran and a postliberal theologian, says that religion does not refer to belief in “God” or a transcendent Absolute, but rather to “a kind of cultural and/or linguistic framework or medium that shapes the entirety of life and thought … it is similar to an idiom that makes possible the description of realities, the formulation of beliefs, and the experiencing of inner attitudes, feelings, and sentiments.” Nicholas de Lange, Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Cambridge University, says that “The comparative study of religions is an academic discipline which has been developed within Christian theology faculties, and it has a tendency to force widely differing phenomena into a kind of strait-jacket cut to a Christian pattern. The problem is not only that other ‘religions’ may have little or nothing to say about questions which are of burning importance for Christianity, but that they may not even see themselves as religions in precisely the same way in which Christianity sees itself as a religion.”