From the very beginnings of the modern, countercultural Pagan movement, belief in literal gods, magic and such has been more nuanced, ambiguous, playful and experimental than critics, outsiders and even many insiders often assume.
Entire currents of Pagan practice began not with metaphysical certainty but with immersive theatricality, deliberate mythmaking, or even outright satire. The Discordians remain the clearest example: a movement born in part as a meta-joke about divine chaos that gradually revealed its own psychological and creative potency. One of its founders, Kerry Thornley – also known as Malaclypse the Younger – wryly admitted years later that “If I had known all this was going to come true, I would have chosen Venus.” The line is humorous, but it captures something essential: that Mythopoetic Faith – acting as if – was the engine that turned playful invention into meaningful practice.
This dynamic was well understood by early chroniclers of the neo-Pagan scene. In the first edition of Drawing Down the Moon (1979), Margot Adler observed that practitioners described their deities in strikingly varied and non-literal ways. In her words:
In my fifteen years of contact with these groups I was never asked to believe in anything. I was told a few dogmas by people who hadn’t rid themselves of the tendency to dogmatize, but I rejected those. In the next chapters you will encounter priests and priestesses who say that they are philosophical agnostics and that this has never inhibited their participation in or leadership of NeoPagan and Craft groups. Others will tell you that the gods and goddesses are “ethereal beings.” Still others have called them symbols, powers, archetypes, or “something deep and strong within the self to be contacted,” or even “something akin to the force of poetry and art.”.
Religious scholar Robert Ellwood offered one of the earliest and most perceptive outsider interpretations of the movement. Writing in 1973, he noted that what neo-Pagans sought was a religion attuned to nature and psyche rather than supernatural command:
(…) they suggest a romantic, living, and changing world continuous with human fancy and feeling instead of one dead and subdued; a religion of atmosphere instead of faith; a cosmos, in a word, constructed by the imagination (considered the surest guide to what is in the heart of things) instead of by the analytic intellect or bare faith, which seeks only the outer husks.
Ellwood understood that imagination, when respected and deliberately heightened, becomes a form of perception:
It can make the emotions feel the gods within things, and the eyes see them (…) Evocation, calling up the gods from within the self, is true magic.
He recognized, too, the central role of ritual as an imaginative engine:
It is through corporate ‘work’ that the magical cosmos is evoked; it is made by ritual actions done as if it were present.
Taken together, Adler and Ellwood show that what we now call the “mythopoetic,” “psychological,” or “nontheistic” approach to Paganism was not a marginal anomaly; rather, it was widespread in the avant-garde Pagan scene of the 1970s. For many practitioners, ritual was a technology of imagination, the gods were dramatis personae of the psyche and the natural world and belief was less a metaphysical assertion than a mode of creative engagement.
My own suspicion is that as neo-Paganism moved closer to the commercialized New Age mainstream of the 1980s and ’90s, these perspectives became less fashionable to articulate. Literalist language – gods as discrete metaphysical entities, magic as supernatural intervention – became the public-facing default. Meanwhile, rationalists and poetic-naturalists, who still cherished the mythic and ritualistic aspects of Paganism, increasingly kept their true views quiet to avoid accusations of disrespect or insufficient belief.
Which brings us back to the present, and to the quiet part.
The Quiet Part
In private conversation, some self-described polytheists and animists will readily admit that they do not envision deities as literal, supernatural beings. They describe them instead as archetypes, stories, metaphors, field-shaping presences in the psyche and in the natural world. They speak with reverence for Brigid or Odin while meaning something profoundly poetic rather than metaphysical. They freely acknowledge that what moves them is not divine physics but divine imagery.
Yet many hesitate to say this aloud in community spaces. Why?
I believe the partial answer is that Pagan discourse has tacitly absorbed the monotheistic expectation that “real religion” requires literal belief. To reject supernatural literalism publicly can feel like undermining one’s own tradition, or like betraying those who do take the metaphysics literally. And so a quiet, widespread nontheistic perspective persists beneath the surface, carefully phrasing things so they can pass in both worlds.
Mythopoetic Pagans simply stop whispering.
The Value of Saying It Out Loud
The nontheistic stance – that gods are psychological and poetic personifications of natural and human potencies – is not a betrayal of Paganism but an affirmation of its deepest strengths. It places myth, ritual, imagination, ecology, and embodiment at the center of religious life. It clarifies rather than diminishes. It honors what actually happens in ritual, in trance, in storytelling, in the heightened space where imagination becomes a lens on reality.
By acknowledging this openly, Paganism gains:
- Honesty about how many practitioners already relate to their deities.
- Philosophical clarity grounded in imagination, ecology, and psychology rather than in contested metaphysics.
- Pluralism that respects literalists and poets alike without forcing either into the other’s framework.
- A deeper understanding of ritual as an evocation of personal and/or communal meaning rather than as a petition to external entities.
Most importantly, this honesty frees practitioners from the inherited assumption that mythic language must point to literal beings in order to “count” as religious. It recognizes that religion can be a creative, expressive, meaning-making practice – a living art form – without requiring belief in supernatural machinery.
Toward a More Truly Diverse Paganism
Contemporary Paganism thrives on multiplicity: hard polytheists, soft polytheists, animists, occultists, reconstructionists and poetic naturalists all find a home beneath its canopy. What mythopoetic Paganism contributes is not a superior interpretation but a willingness to articulate what many already know intuitively: that myth is a language, that gods are metaphors become companions, that ritual is embodied imagination and that the sacred is often encountered most powerfully in symbol, story, and nature.
To say this openly is not to weaken Paganism but to reveal its poetic heart; the same heart Adler and Ellwood saw fifty years ago, pulsing beneath the masks of the gods.
And for many Pagans, whether whispered around campfires or confessed quietly to trusted friends, this sentiment has been true all along.