I'm trying to understand the precise distinction between pagan and heathen. My immediate motivation is that I'm reading Sir Frank Stenton's Anglo-Saxon England. Online dictionaries have been imprecise, often offering the words as mutual synonyms. Some issues: are pagans/heathens necessarily polytheists? Did the Romans refer to pagans (as 'others') while having a multitude of gods themselves? Is either word derogatory? Does heathen imply a lower level of civilisation?
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The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language gives four definitions of role, the first of which is
- also rôle A character or part played by a performer.
while the other three definitions (related to functions or characteristic behaviour) do not offer rôle. So for some people the circumflex indicates a particular meaning. Not for me.
A couple of colleagues and I have been going through some Google NGrams. At first it seems quite conclusive that plundering is a far more sea worthy activity than pillaging, and plundering is certainly the more pirately thing to do:
In an actual example: British critic: and quarterly theological review, Volume 16 (pp. 516 to 518), they appear to use pillage and plunder interchangeably as nouns, but only plunder as a verb. This seems fitting for water-borne criminality.
In this discourse of plunder (page 2) pillage is said to be something that makes up plundering.
However, the further I read into the samples provided by the Google book search, it seems that pillage and plunder can be used interchangeably, it's just that plunder is a far more popular word.
In fact, although it is a much rarer occurrence than "pirates plundered", "pirates pillaged" does appear in literature. Some examples:
Outside of buccaneering, there is a lot of synonymous usage of plunder and pillage - here are some examples:
In a text about the history of English government, on page 94 they write:
Commercial plunder, however, was to be more destructive than military pillage
On page 554 of The new encyclopædia; or, Universal dictionary of arts and sciences they define Pillage by using plunder. An later on page 687 they define plunder using pillage.
There seems to be no difference in the meaning of the two words in The works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume 7 on pages 408 and 410
Again I find the same in "The Forum, Volume 17" (plunder, pillage)
So, in conclusion, it seems that plundering and pillaging are the same thing.
Best Answer
As descriptive terms, both pagan and heathen are out of date, but whereas pagan remains in common use to contrast Abrahamic religion from various pre-modern and revived polytheistic competitors, heathen is usually an aspersion, akin to idolator, infidel or heretic.
In older days, not a few older dictionaries listed them as interchangeable, even assigning circular definitions (i.e. heathen: a pagan; pagan: a heathen). Pagan, too, was more broadly applied: as the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia has it
Interestingly, the 1898 Webster's Collegiate Dictionary suggests a reverse trend from the modern usage:
But by the mid-20th century, heathen seems to have fallen out of favor as a synonym for pagan; see for example an Ngram of heathen gods vs pagan gods. Pagan and heathen are at once imprecise and exonymic, and not employed by modern anthropologists.
Pagan remains in the common term for the state cults, polytheistic worship, and/or idolatry of the classical Greco-Roman, Egyptian, Norse, and Celtic worlds (as remembered and mis-remembered in the Christian tradition). Outside of some impolite circles, pagan is not applied to the modern major religions, and rarely to folk religion/animism/shamanism. Thus, worshippers of Apollo or Odin are described "pagans," but traditionally spiritual Iroquois or Baka are not, nor the adherents of Shintoism or Zoroastrianism.
Adherents of neo-pagan movements may describe themselves as pagan or heathen; those who choose one may consider the other to be improper, but there does not seem to be consensus.