This is posted in the waiting room of an Irish hospital. Interesting glimpse into their culture.
The full text of the poster
This symbol has been developed by the Hospice Friendly Hospitals Programme to respectfully identify the End of Life.
This symbol is inspired by ancient Irish history; it is not associated with any one religion or denomination.
The white spiral represents the interconnected cycle of life, birth, life and death.
The white outer circle represents continuity, infinity and completion.
Purple has been chosen as the background colour as it is associated with nobility, solemnity and spirituality.
In this hospital the symbol may be displayed on a ward to add respect and solemnity during end of life or following the death of one of our patients.
Paganism is incredibly diverse, I will give you that. “Pagan” is more of an umbrella term for many different beliefs with some common elements.
But christianity for example is also an umbrella term - you have catholicism (whis then has the many different orders and stuff under it), evanjelical christianity (with its many denominations) and orthodox church (which may or may not have different groups under it, I don’t really know). And even two different people within one denomination of the larger group of christianity may hold a slightly different set of beliefs.
Paganism is just a larger umbrella. I also went with Celtic paganism as it narrows it down a little more, that’s why I went for that rather than simply saying “paganism”.
Now I get what the hospital tried to go for. But saying it is not tied to a religion is I think a little unfortunate.
Really close, but off by one part: paganism is not an inclusive term. It’s an exclusive term. Rather than groups (originally) agreeing they are pagans, Christians decided anything not Christian is pagan. The modern meaning of pagan is euro-centric because that’s where Christianity took hold. The Norse and the Celtic and the Baltic and the Germanic “pagans” likely would not see themselves as on the same side of the argument against Christians. Grouping pagans together is like grouping barbarians together across the world. Literally, because barbarian is also a derogatory term. (bar-bar was the racist interpretation of foreign language by the Greeks and then Romans)
The meaning is shifted now because of 2000 years of Christian erasure. So sure, it might now be that Pagan is an equivalent type of term as Christian, covering many groups that identify themselves as their parent term, but that’s not the historical context. That makes a difference when talking about the actual history.