Paganism

The Great God Pan is all things to all men

6 November 2021 9:00 am

Pan’s name is thought to derive from ‘paean’, the ancient Greek verb meaning ‘to pasture’. His half-man, half-goat form reflected…

pagan

The pagan rites of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

23 September 2020 4:33 am

When Ruth Bader Ginsburg succumbed to cancer, #RestInPower immediately trended. The ACLU, New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, actress Reese Witherspoon and the ostensibly…

Our appetite for ‘folk horror’ appears to be insatiable

26 October 2019 9:00 am

This eerie, shortish book apparently had an earlier outing this year, when it purported to be a reissue of a…

Detail from the Ghent altarpiece by Hubert Eyck, 1423

How Christianity saw off its rivals and became the universal church

31 March 2018 9:00 am

In the reign of Constantine, whose conversion to Christianity in AD 310 set the entire Roman world on a course…

A woman on a ducking-stool, accused of witchcraft. Drowning would have proved her innocence

The roots of witchcraft

19 August 2017 9:00 am

Until the mid-1960s many historians believed witchcraft was a pre-Christian pagan fertility ritual, witches worshipping the Horned God, whose consort…

About strange lands and people: ‘Midsummer Eve Bonfire’, after c.1917, by Nikolai Astrup

Nikolai Astrup - Norway’s other great painter

30 January 2016 9:00 am

The Norwegian artist Nikolai Astrup has been unjustly overshadowed by Edvard Munch. But that is about to change, says Claudia Massie

Labour’s austerity tradition

27 June 2015 9:00 am

The spirit of 1945 No one would have been more surprised at the sight of 100,000 people marching in London…

Allah, Zeus and the Church of England

21 March 2015 9:00 am

A ‘prominent liberal cleric’ in London has held an Islamic prayer service in his church, St John’s Waterloo. ‘We all…

Paganism is alive and well – but you won’t find it at a Goddess Temple

14 February 2015 9:00 am

The rise of modern paganism – and the persistence of the real thing

Grimms’ fairy tales: the hardcore version

13 December 2014 9:00 am

Child murder, domestic slavery, abusive families, cannibalism and intergenerational hatred — what could be better for the festive fireside than…