Hi, my name is Danny and welcome back to Esoteric Moment. Today I just wanted to take a few minutes to talk about something that's been going around YouTube and blogs and the internet many times. This is just a new iteration but what is paganism or who is pagan? Now I don't think this is the end of the discussion and I'll touch on why that's important later. Defining paganism is a tricky thing and I would argue almost impossible to come up with a really clear-cut definition. Now this frustrates a lot of people because it makes it harder to communicate sometimes. It creates a lot of discrepancy within the community and it's hard to feel really united behind the community if everyone can be a pagan and it's you know a word that is almost useless because nothing backs it. I would argue that this isn't really the case that our diversity and our wide expansive and welcoming community is what really gives us the diversity to thrive just like an ecosystem with a multitude of plants serving many different purposes. We as a community have many different definitions, many different flavors and types of people who consider themselves to be pagan and that allows us to really serve each other in unique ways and really strengthen the community. Having a wide definition of what paganism is does mean that activism can be difficult, it means reaching out to the wider world and explaining ourselves can be very challenging and sometimes we have people who call themselves pagan who don't represent our individual paths and that can create some tension and bad blood when the media gets a hold of it. But really these challenges are what brings us together I think and allows us to strengthen and reevaluate ourselves. Just like an individual might do shadow work, might really delve into themselves and learn more about who they are at the core. I think as a community we need to do the same thing. We need to keep spiraling around this question, we need to keep discussing it and coming up with new metaphors and examples and and reasons why we love this really diverse definition of paganism. Now I've talked a lot about defining paganism without giving a definition. I personally find John Beckett's definition of paganism to be really useful. He has a blog under the oaks over at paetheos.com. His definition is that paganism is a circus tent. There are four pillars under the tent. There is God, self, community and of course nature. Now one person might stay glued tightly to one pole their entire life. Other people might kind of float between the different poles. Some people might wander out of the tent and wander back in. Some might just float around on the edges of the tent. And this really gives us the chance to grow and develop, to become more spiritual, to become less spiritual and it still creates a sense of community. We do have things that keep us together. We won't agree with everyone, but we agree with a lot of them. I personally would consider myself to be mainly focused around the the pole of nature with a little bit of distance between God and self as well. Now there are a lot of people who see paganism as a nature-based spirituality and I get a lot really great with them. We have a lot of similar ideas and messages and we communicate in the same way. But that doesn't mean that I can't learn from and I can't grow from the person who is glued to the community post or those people who are out on the the edges of the tent. However we define paganism, I think it's really important that we come together and agree that when someone says they're pagan we accept an honor that person's perspective. I don't think we gain anything by saying Christo witches or so-and-so or who and who are not pagan if they call themselves pagan. I hope that as a community we keep circling around to this question and ever learn from it. It's important that we evaluate and grow as a community not just as an individual. Thanks for listening to my kind of random thoughts on what is paganism and I have included in the description some links to blog posts and other videos that you might find useful to kind of reference to the conversation. As always thanks for watching and have a great week!