No, It’s Not “Both Sides”

There is an argument I keep running into on certain corners of the internet — and increasingly in comment sections where the algorithm has decided I might enjoy a fight — that goes roughly like this: Pagans who cite historical Christian persecution of their traditions are self-victimising, because Christians were persecuted by Pagans first, and therefore it all evens out. Both sides. Wash your hands of it. Move on.

I am a Hellenic-Celtic Pagan. I observe the Wheel of the Year. I am learning Gàidhlig na h-Alba, slowly and imperfectly. I am Anglo-Scottish by heritage, born in Spain of all places, living in England, writing this in English — which is itself a point I will come back to, because the irony is not lost on me.

I want to engage with the “both sides” argument seriously, because it is not entirely without basis — and then I want to explain why it still doesn’t hold up.

The Argument Worth Engaging With

To be fair to the people making this point, they are not entirely wrong about the early history. Before Christianity gained institutional power, it existed as a minority movement within a polytheistic Roman world, and it was treated as such. Pagan communities did blame Christians for local disasters; the phrase attributed to Tertullian, “no rain, because of the Christians,” captures a genuinely hostile cultural attitude. Christians were, at various points, subject to persecution under emperors like Nero and Diocletian. That is documented history and I have no interest in disputing it.

The argument also makes a reasonable broader point, which is that most major religions have, at some stage, been both oppressors and oppressed. Probably true. Not especially comfortable for anyone, but broadly accurate.

So why doesn’t it function as the conversation-ender people seem to think it does?

What “Both Sides” Erases

Because the history doesn’t stop there, and the trajectory matters.

Once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire — formalised by the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 AD — the power dynamic inverted entirely, and it stayed inverted for roughly a millennium and a half. The same Theodosius who made Nicene Christianity the sole orthodox faith of the empire then spent the 380s and 390s systematically dismantling everything else. Haruspicy was prohibited on pain of death. Magistrates who failed to enforce anti-pagan laws faced criminal prosecution. In 391 and 392, a series of decrees banned all public and private sacrifices, divination, and temple access, with penalties including property confiscation and exile.

This wasn’t ideological drift. It was state policy.

And it didn’t start with Theodosius. Persecution of Pagans in the late Roman Empire began under Constantine, whose conversion is often framed as a moment of tolerance, but who also ordered the pillaging and demolition of pagan temples to make way for Christian churches. His son Constantius II continued the project between 337 and 361: laws from the 350s prescribed the death penalty for attending pagan sacrifices or worshipping idols. Temples were closed. Pagan teachers had their licences to teach revoked, effectively ending a thousand years of what had functioned as freedom of intellectual speech.

The “both sides” framing treats a few decades of intermittent Roman persecution of Christians as equivalent to over a thousand years of systematic, state-backed suppression of Pagan practice. That is not equivalence. That is category error.

The Wheel They Kept and the People They Didn’t

There is a specific irony embedded in all this that cuts particularly close when you actually observe the Wheel of the Year.

The four great fire festivals at the heart of Celtic Paganism — Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane, and Lughnasadh — are all explicitly Gaelic in origin. They are documented in early Irish traditions, evidenced archaeologically across Britain and Ireland, and represent the Gaelic peoples’ relationship with the land, the seasons, the dead, and the returning light. The Church did not eradicate them. It absorbed them.

Samhain became Halloween, then All Saints’ Day. Imbolc became St Brigid’s Day — a goddess quietly reclassified as a saint, which is either elegant syncretism or quiet erasure depending on how charitable you are feeling. Lughnasadh became Lammas, “loaf-mass,” retaining the harvest symbolism while reassigning its origin. Beltane became May Day celebrations that the Church spent centuries trying to tone down with limited success.

The winter solstice is the same story on a grander scale. Christmas falls when it does not because of any documented birth date but because of the Roman festival of Sol Invictus and the Norse and Germanic midwinter tradition of Yule. The Yule log, evergreen decoration, the twelve-day festival structure — all of these come from traditions the Church was actively suppressing in their original forms, while simultaneously incorporating their aesthetics. King Haakon the Good of Norway is explicitly documented in his saga as aligning Yule celebrations with Christmas as a conversion strategy. Pope Gregory I, writing in 601 AD, was admirably explicit: he instructed missionaries not to destroy pagan sacred sites but to consecrate them, “so that the people, not seeing their places of resort destroyed, may abandon idolatry and resort to these places as before.”

The same pattern extends into the basic units of time, which nobody seems to notice because they are so thoroughly embedded in everyday use.

Most of the days of the week in English are named after pre-Christian deities. Sunday and Monday are named for the Sun and Moon — celestial bodies with explicit religious significance in Roman and Germanic traditions. Tuesday is Tiw’s day, named for the Norse god of single combat. Wednesday is Woden’s day — Odin. Thursday belongs to Thor. Friday to Frigg, or Freya, depending on which scholars you prefer. Saturday is the one Roman holdover, named for Saturn. When the Germanic peoples encountered the Roman seven-day planetary week, they mapped their own gods directly onto it. The result has been sitting in every English-language calendar, unremarked, for over a thousand years.

The months follow the same pattern. January is Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and thresholds. February takes its name from Februa, a Roman purification festival. March is Mars. May is Maia, a goddess associated with growth and spring. June belongs to Juno. The Church spent centuries asserting dominion over the calendar — moving festivals, consecrating days, renaming sacred sites — and somehow never got around to the names of the months and days themselves. Every time someone writes the date, they are invoking a small pantheon of pre-Christian deities without thinking about it.

I was born on a Monday. Mōnandæg in Old English. Moon’s day. My patron deity is Selene — the Greek goddess of the Moon — and I follow the lunar phases as part of my practice. I find it difficult to be entirely neutral about that.

The traditions were taken. The people who held them were not.

The Languages

This is where I want to say something that tends to get siloed into a separate “linguistics” conversation as though it has nothing to do with religion or cultural identity. It has everything to do with both.

The suppression of Celtic languages across Britain and Ireland was not incidental to the suppression of Celtic Pagan culture. It was the same project.

In Ireland, the Statutes of Kilkenny in 1366 made it illegal for English settlers to speak Irish or associate with native Irish cultural practices. Henry VIII’s Act for the English Order, Habit, and Language in 1537 declared English the sole official language of Irish administration, courts, and church. Elizabeth I’s 1571 decree banned Irish-speaking Catholic priests from ministering in Gaelic-speaking regions — criminalising the native language in its own religious life. A 1737 penal-law era ban on Irish in courts in the north of Ireland was only finally repealed at Westminster in 2025. That is not ancient history. That is within living memory of some people’s grandparents.

In Scotland, the Statutes of Iona in 1609 did significant groundwork, explicitly requiring that Gaelic chieftains’ children be educated in English and reinforcing the authority of the Protestant church in the Highlands while formally ending what the legislation called “subversive Gaelic practices.” The aftermath of Culloden in 1746 saw the British government ban Highland dress, the bagpipes, and the speaking of Gàidhlig. The 1872 Education Act then established English as the sole language of instruction in Scottish schools, with children routinely punished for speaking Gàidhlig. The Highland Clearances — the forced eviction of Gaelic-speaking communities from their lands between roughly 1750 and 1860 — broke apart the linguistic networks that had sustained the language for centuries.

In Wales, the Welsh Not was a wooden token hung around the necks of children caught speaking Cymraeg in school, passed from child to child until the end of the day, when the wearer received corporal punishment. In documented use from the late 18th century through the early 20th. The Laws in Wales Acts of 1535–1542 had already made speaking Welsh in court illegal — a ban not overturned until 1942.

The reason this matters for a conversation about religious persecution is straightforward: the language was the tradition. Gàidhlig na h-Alba, Gaeilge na hÉireann, Cymraeg — these were not just communication tools. They were the vessels for the mythology, the ritual language, the oral tradition, the names of the festivals, the stories of the gods. When Patrick Sellar described Gàidhlig in 1816 as “the barbarous jargon of the times when Europe was possessed by savages,” he was not making a neutral linguistic observation. He was describing a culture he regarded as primitive and whose erasure he considered progress. The institutions doing that erasing were, consistently, Christian ones — the Protestant church in the Highlands, the Anglican-aligned state apparatus in Wales, the colonial administration in Ireland.

Languages don’t die. They are killed. And the people doing the killing generally knew exactly what else they were destroying in the process.

A Note on the “Burning Times”

I want to be careful here, because there is a specific piece of history where Pagan communities have overclaimed, and honesty requires acknowledging it. The figure of nine million witches burned during the early modern witch trials — popularised by Gerald Gardner, founder of modern Wicca — is not supported by the historical evidence. Current historical estimates put the figure at somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 people killed across roughly 400 years. Still a horrifying number. But those people were also not being executed specifically for Paganism — they were executed under a theologically distinct witch-hunting framework.

Gardner was wrong, and current Pagan scholars broadly acknowledge this. Inflating the numbers damages the credibility of legitimate historical grievance.

That said: the overcounting of one specific historical event does not invalidate the much longer and better-documented record of Roman-era and medieval Christian suppression of polytheist practice, or the well-documented colonial suppression of Celtic language and culture. Those are separate questions. The people shouting “the numbers are wrong” sometimes treat it as a complete rebuttal of everything, which it isn’t. It is a correction of one exaggerated claim within a much larger and solidly evidenced history.

The Symbols They Took and What They Did to Them

The misappropriation of Pagan tradition is not only a matter of festivals absorbed and languages suppressed. It also extends to symbols — and symbols have been misappropriated twice, which is a particular kind of thoroughness.

The triskele — the triple-spiral motif carved into the passage tomb at Newgrange, dating to around 3200 BCE, predating the pyramids of Giza by several centuries — is one of the oldest surviving symbols in the British Isles. It appears across Celtic artistic traditions in metalwork, stonework, and jewellery, associated in various contexts with the Otherworld and with the cycles of life, death, and rebirth. It now also appears on a considerable amount of tourist merchandise, used as a vague signifier for “Irishness” or “Celticness” in ways that have been cheerfully decoupled from any understanding of what it originally represented. More troublingly, it has been adopted by various far-right nationalist movements who found “Celtic” imagery useful for their purposes. The symbol survived the Church. It is currently being contested by people with wildly different levels of understanding of it.

The triquetra — three interlocking arcs forming a continuous trefoil — appears in Celtic knotwork and in Viking-age Scandinavian contexts. Medieval Christianity adopted it as a visual representation of the Trinity: three points, indivisible, continuously interlocked. It appears in the Book of Kells. The Church used this symbol so thoroughly that it was, for several centuries, considered distinctly Christian. Then modern Wicca and popular culture — most notably the television series Charmed, which adopted it as its “Power of Three” emblem — reclaimed it as a Pagan symbol. The result is a symbol that, depending on who is wearing it and where, can signal Celtic heritage, Christian faith, or Wiccan practice simultaneously, and which most people encountering it cannot reliably distinguish between.

The pentagram and pentacle are where this gets most personally pointed, for me.

The pentagram — a five-pointed star drawn in a continuous line — appears in ancient Mesopotamian contexts, in Pythagorean mathematics, in medieval Christian iconography as a representation of the five wounds of Christ, and in early modern alchemy. The pentacle — typically an upright pentagram enclosed in a circle — is used in Wicca and broader modern Paganism to represent the five elements: earth, air, fire, water, and spirit. The five points in balance, harmonious, fully enclosed. The inverted pentagram, point downward, became associated with diabolism in nineteenth-century occultist theory, and was adopted specifically as the Sigil of Baphomet by Anton LaVey when he founded the Church of Satan in 1966 — a goat’s head inscribed within the inverted star.

These are meaningfully different things. The orientation matters. The goat matters. They represent different traditions with different histories and different intentions.

I wear a pentacle. It is upright, enclosed, unambiguous in its symbolism to anyone familiar with it. I have had it confused for the Sigil of Baphomet on multiple occasions — by people who registered “five-pointed star” and went directly to “Satanism,” with no pause for the distinction. That confusion is not accidental. It is the product of a cultural context in which any symbol associated with non-Christian spirituality tends to get collapsed into a single category labelled, broadly, as sinister. The Church did not invent the pentagram. It did not invent the pentacle. What it did, over centuries of systematically equating Paganism with diabolism, was create the conditions in which a person wearing an ancient symbol of elemental balance gets asked if they worship the devil.

That is what demonisation looks like at the scale of a piece of jewellery.

The Irony of Who’s Writing This

I am aware, and I think it is worth being explicit about this, that there is a not-insignificant irony in an Anglo-Scottish person making this argument in English, from England, having been educated entirely in English, in a post that will be read in English.

(I say Anglo-Scottish rather than British deliberately. “British” is a label with its own imperial history — one that has functioned, consistently, to subsume distinct national identities under a single convenient administrative category, largely on English terms. Writing a post about exactly that kind of cultural flattening while casually deploying it felt like a particular kind of irony I could do without.)

I do not speak Gàidhlig fluently. I am a learner — currently working through SpeakGaelic — slowly and imperfectly working my way through a language that was beaten out of schoolchildren a few generations ago and is still spoken by fewer than 60,000 people. The Scottish quarter of my heritage passed its culture to me largely through English, because that is what the history produced. I did not choose that. I am not responsible for it. But I am also not going to pretend it is not the situation.

There is a further layer to the irony, which I might as well be direct about.

I grew up not Christian but adjacent to it — as most people in Britain are, whether they consider themselves believers or not. I identified as an atheist before I identified as Pagan. The path to Hellenic-Celtic practice did not go through any childhood faith; it went, obliquely, through history and mythology and a growing sense that the secular-materialist framework I had absorbed from British culture was accounting poorly for things I actually cared about. I came to Paganism as an outsider to Christianity, which means I have no apostasy to perform, no deconversion narrative to offer. I simply never signed up to begin with.

I am also gay and asexual, which is not an entirely neutral biographical detail in a post about institutional Christianity and the legacy of suppression. The Church’s record on queer people is not a separate history from the suppression of Pagan practice — it is the same institutional machinery running the same logic: define the acceptable, criminalise everything outside it, and call the result morality.

Homosexuality was criminalised in England under the Buggery Act of 1533, passed under Henry VIII — the same monarch whose Act for the English Order, Habit, and Language four years later began the systematic suppression of Irish. The proximity is not coincidental. Both were projects of the same Christian colonial state, asserting orthodoxy in religion, language, and sexuality more or less simultaneously. Male homosexuality in England was not partially decriminalised until 1967, not fully equalised until considerably later, and the intervening centuries produced a great deal of suffering that the institution responsible has not uniformly acknowledged.

The blasphemy laws add their own layer. England’s common law offence of blasphemy — not abolished until 2008 — existed specifically to protect the Christian faith and, through it, the established Church over which the Crown is Supreme Governor. As a Pagan, my religious practice would have been considered blasphemous. The last successful prosecution under that law, in 1977, was brought against Gay News for publishing a poem depicting Christ. The overlap between “blasphemer” and “homosexual” was, in that instance, entirely literal. If those laws had remained in force and been applied consistently, I would be a criminal solely for existing — not for anything I had done, but for what I believe and who I am.

That is the company “both sides” asks me to extend equal sympathy to.

What I will say, in contrast, is that modern Paganism — and I am careful to say modern, because historical Pagan societies were not uniformly tolerant either — has broadly not imported that framework. The traditions I practice do not have doctrinal opposition to queerness written into their cosmology. The Wheel of the Year does not have a position on who I love. Selene does not require me to be straight. That is not a small thing, after a lifetime of being adjacent to an institution that considered my existence a theological problem requiring correction. It is, in fact, quite a significant one.

I did not leave Christianity. I was never included in the version of it I kept encountering. That is a different relationship to the institution, and it shapes how I read its history.

Which brings me to the last personal irony, and the one I find strangest.

My name is Ewan — Eòghann in Gàidhlig, from the Old Irish Eogan, cognate with the Welsh Owen and the Old French Yvain. The etymology is generally traced to a Proto-Celtic root related to the word for Yew: ivos, or something close to it. The Yew — ìobhar in Gàidhlig, a word preserved in dozens of Scottish and Irish place names — was considered sacred across pre-Christian Celtic and wider European Pagan traditions. It is associated with immortality, the Otherworld, and the cycle of death and rebirth. The oldest living things in Britain are Yew trees. Many of the Yews standing in British churchyards predate the churches by centuries — sometimes by considerably more — which is consistent with Gregory I’s instruction: build on the sacred sites that already exist rather than clear them. There is a Yew at Fortingall in Perthshire estimated to be somewhere between two and five thousand years old. It was there before Christianity reached Scotland. It is probably still more permanent than most of what followed.

My name, translated honestly, is something in the vicinity of “born of the Yew” — or at least born in its lineage. I did not choose that. I did not know it for a long time. But it is the kind of detail that gives you pause, once you start paying attention to what the words in your life actually mean and where they came from. I am a Pagan named, etymologically, for a Pagan sacred tree, living in a country that spent several centuries trying to destroy the linguistic tradition that preserved that meaning. The name survived. The language is still endangered. Both facts seem worth holding at once.

I am not writing this as a spokesperson for Celtic Paganism, or for anyone who practices it, or for any of the communities whose languages and traditions I have been discussing. I don’t have that standing. I’m a hobbyist learner with a deep personal investment in traditions that were historically suppressed, writing a blog post on a Sunday. What I can do is point at the record, acknowledge the irony of my own position honestly, and hope it prompts some people to look further.

Which brings me to the only practical point I have to offer.

If You Want to Do Something About It

The most direct response to centuries of language suppression is to learn the languages. Not everyone can or will — these are genuinely difficult languages to acquire without immersion — but the resources exist, they are largely free, and using them is a small act of refusal against the erasure.

For Gàidhlig na h-Alba (Scottish Gaelic), the best starting points are LearnGaelic, which offers structured free courses at every level from absolute beginner upwards with full audio support, and SpeakGaelic, a joint project from MG ALBA, the BBC, and Sabhal Mòr Ostaig (the national centre for Gaelic language and culture in Skye) that runs across BBC ALBA, BBC Sounds, and YouTube. Both are free. Duolingo also has a Scottish Gaelic course, which is a reasonable entry point if you prefer gamified learning, though LearnGaelic and SpeakGaelic go considerably deeper.

For Gaeilge na hÉireann (Irish), Duolingo’s Irish course is one of the better ones on the platform, and Teanglann.ie is the most comprehensive Irish dictionary available online, with audio. Conradh na Gaeilge (the Gaelic League) runs classes and resources for learners at all levels and has been doing so since 1893.

For Cymraeg (Welsh), Say Something in Welsh is frequently recommended as one of the most effective speaking-focused methods available and has a strong learner community. Duolingo’s Welsh course is also solid. BBC Wales operates extensive Welsh-language media through S4C and Radio Cymru, which is worth consuming even at beginner level.

For Gaelg (Manx) and Kernewek (Cornish) — both endangered, both actively being revived — Say Something In offers courses in both, which is genuinely remarkable given the size of their speaker communities. Culture Vannin supports Manx language revival on the Isle of Man. For Cornish, Kowethas an Yeth Kernewek (the Cornish Language Fellowship) provides downloadable lessons and learning materials.

None of this requires fluency. Even a passing familiarity with the sounds and structure of these languages is a form of acknowledgement that they exist, that they survived, and that the people who kept them alive under considerable institutional pressure were doing something worth continuing.

That is, I think, the whole argument. Not guilt. Not accusation. Just acknowledgement, and the small practical step that follows from it.

I assume that’s not a very controversial position to hold. Apparently, for some people, it is.