Today is publication day for Paganism Persisting: A History of European Paganisms since Antiquity, which I co-authored with Robin C. Douglas. The book is being published by University of Exeter Press in its ‘New Approaches to Legend, Folklore and Popular Belief’ series, and it is the first complete history of pagan revivals between the 4th and 20th centuries.

The idea of writing a book about the history of European paganism after antiquity was something that first occurred to me as long ago as 2012, but the sheer range of evidence and expertise needed to complete such an undertaking then seemed daunting. When my co-author raised the possibility of collaboration a few years ago, however, I realised that our collective skillset might be equal to the task that one author could hardly hope to undertake satisfactorily. For no-one has ever written a book with the scope of Paganism Persisting, which ranges from the 4th-century ‘pagan revival’ of the Emperor Julian to Eastern European ‘native faith’ movements in the 20th century. The central idea holding the book together is that of ‘pagan revival’ as a counter-cultural response to Christianity. While Robin Douglas specialises in the intellectual history of polytheism as a learned, esoteric and elite tradition, my interest is primarily in popular religion and folklore; clearly, both of these aspects of religious history are necessary for understanding the complex phenomenon of revivals of polytheism in Christian Europe.

There is a significant body of scholarship on the question of the ‘death’ of paganism in the ancient world, and likewise a rich literature on the development of modern neopaganism – but vanishingly little on the fate of polytheism as a religious choice in the intervening period, between the 4th and 19th centuries. I have been doing my best to make up for that deficit, particularly in relation to eastern and northern Europe, but Paganism Persisting allows the question of post-antique polytheism to be addressed more broadly, and examined in both its learned and unlearned manifestations.

The choice of the word persisting in the book’s title is significant, as a conscious response to the dominant hermeneutical framework of survival through which paganism was interpreted for so long. Although the more full-blooded claims of ‘pagan survival’ derived from Sir James Frazer and Margaret Murray have long since been debunked, the idea that anything ‘pagan’ is in some sense a survival or a relic of some half-buried earlier form of religiosity remains prevalent in popular culture, and even in academia. In reality, as we argue in Paganism Persisting, ever since Christianity gained ascendancy in the Roman Empire in the 4th century, expressions of polytheistic religion have been self-conscious revivals – and, in that sense, they embody a strikingly modern phenomenon, whereby elements of an ancient religion are selected and repackaged in a new form that makes sense to people imbued with a Christian worldview.

At the same time, however, the idea of paganism (the belief that a multiplicity of gods should be worshipped) has indeed persisted across the centuries, and has periodically come to be re-instantiated – whether by Byzantine intellectual rebels, Slavic and Baltic peoples resisting medieval Christian expansion, esotericists, radical Renaissance humanists, 17th-century deists, 18th-century eccentrics, or 19th-century Romantic nationalists. Paganism Persisting is the first complete history of pagan revivals, but it also puts forward a new hermeneutic for understanding the history of paganism as a religious phenomenon rooted not in the dogged survival of the ancient (which has proven difficult, if not impossible, for historians to demonstrate), but in self-conscious processes of revival that arose from dissatisfaction with hegemonic Christianity or fascination with transgressive forms of religiosity.

Nevertheless, the historian of religion should always be alert to the sometimes vague boundary between ‘paganism’ as aesthetics or intellectual affectation on the one hand, and paganism as a genuine religious choice on the other. Not every revival of pagan aesthetics or pagan ideas is a revival of paganism, and some criteria are needed to distinguish pagan religion from these other forms of revival. Acts of sacrifice and avowed statements of belief in polytheistic deities might be a starting point, but even here genuine sacrifice can shade into cosplay, as with some 18th-century landowners who enjoyed staging Bacchanals at their mock-temples. In the book we show that the word ‘pagan’ itself is a slippery one, with multiple meanings some of which are not even religious – in 19th-century newspapers the term was as likely to mean ‘irreligious’ or ‘without morals’ as it was to refer to the worship of pre-Christian deities. But this fluidity of meaning is itself part of the history of paganism.

Paganism Persisting proposes a new way of understanding the history of the ‘pagan idea’ since the Roman Empire’s adoption of Christianity. Paganism was something that emerged, always, from revivals; revival and reinvention were, in fact, central to what it was to be a pagan. Like atheism, it was an ever-present alternative to the hegemony of Christianity, even if it was an eccentric alternative that comparatively few chose to pursue.