The word "pagan" is also a word that has changed its meaning. The labels we give each other often are first given by opponents - and often grow out of fables. Thus as we have seen the Catholics were so named by Gnostics. Thus city sophisticates labelled people as "pagans" meaning "country yokels" (or for a while - those not enlisted in God's army), using the Latin word for "country district" (pagus). These country folk had a country, therefore "pagan", religion. They believed in "local" spirits, local healers and the sacredness at nature. After a while "pagan" simply became a word for anyone who did not belong to the patriarchal and Biblical religions of Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

Were the victims of "witch-hunts" in the rest of Europe "pagan"? Ronald Hutton has baldly stated that none have been proved to be pagan - although we have seen that the Roma (gypsies) were condemned explicitly as pagans. If we tested Hutton's statement by examing trial records we run into a major difficulty. This is because we cannot assume that what the Courts then defined as Christian would be so defined today. The "subject" of a Christian monarch then had a duty to obey the established Church and thus be a "Christian". Thus people were accused of being heretics and disloyal to the Crown if they disobeyed the Church. Thus those accused of witchcraft were assumed to be Christian dissidents or heretics rather than pagans. Malleus Maleficorum defined its witches as heretics who were "forsaking the catholic faith". The same assumptions pervaded everyday life

But, when it came to personal practices, people were much more eclectic. From the records they mixed and matched a range of beliefs from both Christian and Pagan sources. Some who called themselves Christian, were perhaps more pagan than Christian by today's definitions. Giordano Bruno, burnt at the stake on February 17th, 1600, had tried to convert the Pope to a religious system based on that of pagan Egypt.. (He was a famed mathematician and astronomer who developed concepts of an infinite universe with many worlds well ahead of such as Galileo. (VC26))

The literate who rebelled against the Medieval Church and State assumption of control over their religious beliefs still expressed their beliefs in the Christian terms to which they were most accustomed. Some said they were part of a better "greater church" as did Porete; that they were honouring a Female Divine Holy Spirit as did the followers of Guglielma; that the inner voice within them was that of Holy Spirit, as did the Cathar women who were among the first targets of the Inquisition. The Church made little difference between them and the less well educated. They were all labelled as heretics, often also as "witches", and they were all sent to the stake, axe or noose. Those labelled as "witches" were often the ill educated but again this is a generalisation. Some "witches" studied their work and the techniques of ectasy as is shown by some of the surviving grimoires or personal magical "recipe-books".

Hans Kung, one of the most authoritative Catholic theologians of the 20th Century, the Director of a major German University faculty at Tubingen, concluded: "it is beyond dispute that there would have been no trials of witches without a popular superstition which had a pagan stamp."; P611, that was "an underground, uncontrollable popular culture" .. and "the background to this is the archaic anxiety about magical knowledge and practice which was so widespread among the people .[plus].. a patriarchal anxiety about solitary women and their often real knowledge of contraception and medicine." (P612-3). Trevor-Roper, an important Catholic historian, concluded "some of the coarser elements were directly derived from German Paganism p146 n7 .The result were, Kung stated, "the greatest mass killings in Europe outside of wartime." 614.