Paganism
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98 free Paganism trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Paganism began as an insult. Latin paganus meant a villager or a civilian, and early Christians used it for everyone who was not a soldier of Christ. Nobody called themselves pagan until the 20th century, when Wiccans, Druids, Heathens and reconstructionists reclaimed the word for a family of new religions inspired by pre-Christian Europe. Today there are over a million practitioners in the United States alone and the pentacle sits on the list of approved headstone symbols at Arlington. These 98 questions run from antiquity to the present. Theodosius and the closing of the old temples, the last pagans of Lithuania, the druids as Caesar and Pliny described them, Stonehenge and its solstice alignment, Perun and the idols of Kiev, and the Gaelic festivals Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh. Then the revival: Margaret Murray's discredited witch-cult, Gerald Gardner and the New Forest coven, Doreen Valiente and the eight-word Rede, the Wheel of the Year hammered out with Ross Nichols, Iceland's Asatruarfelagid, Romuva's state recognition, Kemetism, Hellenism and the Pagan Federation. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Latin pagus, a country district, is the root of pagan and of which other English word?
Peasant
Peasant came through the French paysan from the same Latin pagus; a paganus was first a villager and, in Roman army slang, a civilian, the sense Christians probably borrowed for outsiders.
Q 02In the Greek-speaking eastern Roman Empire, pagans were most commonly called what?
Hellenes
Hellenes meant Greeks, yet for centuries the word marked a pagan, so Christian Greek-speakers called themselves Romans instead.
Q 03Which church father wrote The City of God against the Pagans after the sack of Rome?
Augustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo wrote it to answer pagans who blamed the sack of 410 on Rome's abandonment of its old gods.
Q 04Which Roman emperor, raised a Christian, tried to restore the old gods in the 360s?
Julian
Julian revived animal sacrifice and earned the nickname the Apostate, but a spear wound on campaign in Persia killed him after 20 months as emperor, and his revival died with him.
Q 05Which country, the last pagan state in Europe, officially converted to Christianity only in 1387?
Lithuania
Lithuania's grand duke Jogaila accepted baptism to marry Poland's young queen and take its crown, then had his own people baptised in 1387.
Q 06The Gaelic festival Samhain marks the beginning of which season?
Winter
Winter: Samhain opened the dark half of the year, when the boundary with the world of the dead was thought to thin, and its night became Halloween.
Q 07At which Gaelic festival were cattle driven between bonfires before going out to summer pasture?
Beltane
Beltane, on 1 May, opened the summer: the fires were meant to guard the herds from disease, a custom still seen in Ireland in the 19th century.
Q 08Imbolc, on 1 February, is also the feast day of which Irish saint?
Brigid
Brigid: historians suspect the saint and her feast Christianised an older festival of a goddess of the same name, tied to lambing and the first signs of spring.
Q 09Lughnasadh, the Gaelic festival of the god Lugh, opens which farming season?
Harvest
Harvest: Lughnasadh fell on 1 August, the day of the harvest fair, and one Irish tale has Lugh founding it as funeral games for his foster-mother.
Q 10Yule was a midwinter festival of which peoples before it merged with Christmas?
Germanic
Germanic peoples kept Yule, and the word outlived the old religion: the Scandinavian languages still call Christmas jul.
Q 11What do modern pagans call their eight-festival cycle?
Wheel of the Year
The Wheel of the Year is younger than it sounds: British pagans assembled it in the mid-20th century by joining the solstices and equinoxes to four old Celtic festivals.
Q 12Which Roman midwinter festival gave slaves temporary freedom and turned the social order upside down?
Saturnalia
Saturnalia suspended all work each December, masters waited on their slaves at table, and a mock king was chosen to preside over the revels.
Q 13Which 1948 Robert Graves book proposed eight holidays of an 'ancient British festal system'?
The White Goddess
Q 21Which Egyptologist's 1921 book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe shaped early Wiccan theology?
Margaret Murray
Margaret Murray argued that the witches of the trials belonged to a secret pre-Christian religion; historians have since discredited the idea, but early Wiccans built on it.
Q 22At which Greek sanctuary did Apollo's priestess deliver the ancient world's most famous oracles?
Delphi
Delphi was the centre of the world to the Greeks: in myth Zeus loosed two eagles from opposite ends of the earth and they met there, at a stone called the navel.
Q 23Doreen Valiente rewrote Gerald Gardner's Wiccan rituals to cut passages he had borrowed from which notorious occultist?
Aleister Crowley
The White Goddess argued that all true poetry honours one ancient goddess, and modern pagans' picture of an age-old cycle of festivals owes much to it.
Q 14The monk Bede wrote that which Christian festival took its English name from a pagan goddess of spring?
Easter
Easter: Bede said the Anglo-Saxons had feasted a goddess called Eostre in the month that became April, and scholars have long argued over whether he invented her.
Q 15Which day of the week is named after Woden, the chief god of the pagan Anglo-Saxons?
Wednesday
Wednesday is 'Woden's day', a translation of the Roman 'day of Mercury': early English speakers matched their god Woden to the Roman Mercury.
Q 16Gerald Gardner, the founder of Wicca, claimed he was initiated in 1939 into a coven based where?
New Forest
New Forest: historians disagree on whether the coven ever existed, and those who accept it think it formed in the 1930s, not in the distant past Gardner claimed.
Q 17What was the title of Gerald Gardner's 1954 non-fiction book that publicised Wicca?
Witchcraft Today
Witchcraft Today could appear only after Britain repealed its last witchcraft law in 1951; before that Gardner had hidden his ideas in a novel, High Magic's Aid.
Q 18Which priestesses tended the sacred fire that was never allowed to go out in ancient Rome?
Vestals
The Vestals served for 30 years from girlhood; one who let the flame die was beaten, and one who broke her vow of chastity was buried alive.
Q 19Gerald Gardner directed a Museum of Magic and Witchcraft on which island?
Isle of Man
Isle of Man: Cecil Williamson opened the museum at Castletown in 1951 and installed Gardner as its 'resident witch', and Gardner later became its director.
Q 20Wicca is typically duotheistic, venerating a Horned God and which female deity?
The Triple Goddess
The Triple Goddess, Maiden, Mother and Crone, shares the altar with the Horned God in most covens, but some Wiccans worship her alone and others honour many gods.
Aleister Crowley's words ran through Gardner's early rituals; Valiente, his high priestess, spotted them, cut most of them and wrote fresh verses such as the Charge of the Goddess.
Q 24What is the Wiccan name for the volume of rituals and spells copied by initiates?
Book of Shadows
Book of Shadows: once a secret text handed only to initiates, the name reached millions when the TV series Charmed gave its three witches a book of the same title.
Q 25What do Wiccans call seasonal festivals, as opposed to the lunar Esbats?
Sabbats
Sabbats take their name from the 'witches' sabbath', the midnight revel that witch-hunters accused their victims of attending, which Wiccans turned into a word for their own feasts.
Q 26In Wicca, a pentagram inside a circle is usually called what?
A pentacle
A pentacle: the star inside it is far older than Wicca, having served the followers of Pythagoras as a sign of recognition and of health.
Q 27Until 2007, which US department refused the Wiccan star on soldiers' headstones?
Veterans Affairs
Veterans Affairs gave way after the widow of a Wiccan sergeant killed in Afghanistan took her fight for his memorial to court.
Q 28The Church of All Worlds, a neopagan group formed in 1962, took its name from which science-fiction novel?
Stranger in a Strange Land
Stranger in a Strange Land: in Heinlein's novel a human raised on Mars founds a church of that name, and its real-life imitators still call themselves Waterkin after his water-sharing rite.
Q 29Which god, worshipped by Roman soldiers in underground temples, was shown slaying a bull?
Mithras
Mithras drew many followers from the legions and stood for loyalty to the emperor, but his cult faded fast once Constantine turned to Christianity.
Q 30In Norse belief, what kind of thing is Yggdrasil, which stands at the centre of the cosmos?
A giant ash tree
A giant ash tree: Yggdrasil holds the nine worlds, from the gods' Asgard to the underworld, and is said to survive the end of the world to shelter new life.