Hope is a popular subject at Christmas. In a predominantly Christian overculture, hope often arrives wrapped in a particular story: a world in need, a promise given, a saviour born, a future secured. I hear that language sometimes as comfort, sometimes as certainty, sometimes as the insistence that hope is something you can have if you believe the right things.
As a Pagan, I don’t speak that dialect fluently. I don’t live inside the assumptions that make it feel intuitive. I don’t experience the world as fallen in the way that Christian theology often frames it, nor do I think my primary spiritual goal is to be saved. If anything, I’m more likely to feel that we need saving from the overculture: the system that normalises extraction and calls it progress, that converts forests and rivers into resources, that eats people’s attention and sells it back as outrage.
So what does hope mean within Pagan and Earth-centred traditions, especially for those of us in crisis? Where do we derive it when we don’t have a single redemptive narrative that guarantees a happy ending? And what can Paganism teach us about hope when we face grief, illness, injustice, burnout, ecological collapse, or simply the slow, grinding wear of modern life?
A note before I continue: “Pagan” is a broad and contested term that encompasses wildly diverse beliefs and traditions. I write from my own particular location within that diversity: as a Wiccan and a practitioner of Lukumí, an Afro-Cuban religion. What I offer here are reflections shaped by my experience, not a definitive statement about what all Pagans believe or practise.
Hope is not optimism
I want to make a distinction: hope is not the same thing as optimism.
Optimism is a temperament, a mood, a lens. Hope is more stubborn, more moral, and, in the best sense, more inconvenient. Optimism says, ‘This will probably work out.’ Hope says, ‘Even if this does not work out the way I want, I will keep finding the next right thing to do.’ Optimism is about likelihood. Hope is about commitment.
That difference matters because much of Pagan spirituality is deeply committed to reality, not as a cold, clinical ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’ posture, but as a sacred intimacy with the world-as-it-is. Bodies age. Death is real and cannot be undone. And yet the world is not meaningless. The world is ensouled, entangled, storied, responsive. Paganism, at its best, doesn’t ask us to deny the darkness to deserve the light. It asks us to attend.
That is where Pagan hope begins, in my experience: not in denial, but in relationship.
When I look for hope in my own spiritual traditions, I don’t find it as a promise that everything will be fine. I find it in the reciprocity with life. I find it in the refusal to abandon the world. I find it in the insistence that the sacred is not elsewhere, not only above or beyond, but here: in weather and water, in breath and bone, in grief and humour, in community, in the more-than-human world that holds us even when we’ve forgotten how to hold it.
This kind of hope doesn’t require the world to be perfect. It requires us to be present.
That may sound gentle, and sometimes it is, but it also has sharp edges because attention is not politically neutral. To be attentive is to notice what is being done to people and places. To be attentive is to see how quickly institutions can reach for neat narratives when reality is messy. To be attentive is to recognise how often ‘hope’ is used to silence anger, or to pressure someone into premature acceptance, or to make unbearable situations feel meaningful so no one has to change them.
I am wary of hope when it is offered as a command. ‘Be hopeful’ can be another way of saying, ‘Don’t make me uncomfortable.’ It can be a polite form of abandonment or spiritual bypassing dressed up as virtue. Real hope does not rush people or demand a performance. Real hope can sit in the room with despair.
What the ancient world can teach us about hope
The ancient pagan world is surprisingly honest about hope as a practice. Ancient Stoic philosophy taught that character matters more than external circumstances. If I cannot change a situation, I can still choose how I meet it. I can choose integrity. I can choose courage. I can choose not to compound suffering with self-betrayal. That is a kind of hope: a hope rooted in character rather than outcome.
Aristotle provides us with a language for this as well. He was interested not in spiritual escape but in eudaimonia, a flourishing life. Flourishing is not constant happiness; it is a life shaped by virtue, by phronesis (practical wisdom), by the ongoing work of becoming someone capable of meeting reality well. In a crisis, Aristotle doesn’t offer us a guarantee. He offers us a question: what does it mean to live well now, inside this particular constraint? What does it mean to be a good human when life is unavoidably painful?
This emphasis on character as spiritual work appears across many Pagan and Earth-centred traditions. In Lukumí, the Afro-Cuban tradition I practise, we work to develop iwa pele—good character, gentle character—through ongoing relationship with the Orishas and with community. Hope is not an abstract feeling but a quality you cultivate through discipline, devotion, and right action. You become someone who can carry hope, not because life is easy, but because your character has been shaped by practice. The Orishas model this: Obatalá embodies patience and clarity; Oshún embodies joy even in the face of hardship; Oyá embodies the courage to face transformation and death. Hope becomes less about expecting rescue and more about alignment with divine qualities that help you meet what comes.
Mythology also offers some lessons. Myth does not promise that the gods will solve everything for us. It describes a cosmos in which powers conflict, where desires collide, and where fate and choice weave together.
If you want a Pagan teaching on hope that can survive crisis, look at Demeter. When Hades takes Persephone, Demeter does not ‘look on the bright side’. She rages, she grieves, she refuses. The world responds to Demeter’s grief; the land becomes barren. Grief is not treated as private but as ecological. It changes everything. And then, eventually, the story bends not towards a perfect resolution, but towards a pattern: Persephone returns, and she departs. Loss is not undone; it is integrated into the structure of time.
That is pagan hope in its most mature form: not the fantasy that we can keep what we love forever, but the knowledge that love continues to matter even when we cannot possess it. We learn to live with seasonal return and seasonal absence, to make meaning without insisting on permanence, and to grieve without collapsing into nihilism.
This is why, as a Pagan, I am drawn less to ‘hope’ as an emotion and more as an orientation. Hope, in this sense, is the decision to keep relating, to keep loving, to keep showing up, to keep making offerings, whether you conceive of offerings as devotional acts, ethical acts, or practical acts of care. Hope is the refusal to become spiritually homeless in the world.
Where Pagan hope arrives
Hope within Pagan traditions often arrives through very ordinary doorways.
Hope arrives through the body. When someone is in despair, their world contracts. The future becomes a threat. The imagination loses range. One of the simplest Pagan moves is to return to the body as sacred ground. Breath becomes a prayer. Eating becomes an act of alliance with life. Rest becomes defiance in a culture that treats exhaustion as a badge of worth. Touching a tree, standing under the sky, and feeling the cool breeze on your face are not quaint grounding exercises. They are a re-entry into relationship with a living world that is bigger than your pain.
Hope arrives through the seasons. This can be complicated, because ‘after winter comes spring’ can be a platitude that ignores chronic illness, trauma, or grief that does not lift on schedule. But the seasons still teach something important: life is not a straight line of improvement. The world knows how to move through phases without declaring any single phase a failure. There is a time for growth, rest, harvest, and lying fallow. In a crisis, it can be profoundly hopeful to remember that contraction is not the same thing as defeat. Sometimes the most life-honouring thing you can do is endure, conserve, and wait for a different kind of strength.
Hope arrives through community and devotion. Paganism is often portrayed as individualistic, but many enduring Pagan traditions are deeply relational. Even solitary practice is usually in conversation with ancestors, deities, spirits of place, and the more-than-human world. Hope grows where there are witnesses. Many Pagans derive hope from the presence of particular deities, ancestors, or spirits who model qualities such as endurance, ferocity, clarity, patience, humour, and justice. In crisis, devotion can become a scaffold not because it removes suffering, but because it gives suffering a place to be held. The question shifts from ‘How do I make this stop?’ to ‘How do I keep my integrity whilst I pass through this?’
And hope arrives through meaning-seeking. I’m careful with meaning here, because we can turn tragedy into a lesson too quickly, as if pain must justify itself to be tolerable. But meaning-seeking, at its healthiest, is not about rationalising suffering; it is about refusing to let suffering be the only voice in the room. It is about asking, ‘What matters to me even now? What do I want to protect? What do I want to honour? What do I want to refuse?’
That, again, is hope as commitment.
When despair is engineered
A great deal of modern despair is not ‘existential’ in the abstract; it is engineered. It is produced by systems that profit from our exhaustion, loneliness, and distraction. It is intensified by inequality that is framed as personal failure. It is normalised by workplaces that treat human bodies as interchangeable. It is deepened by political economies that ask us to accept the slow dismantling of the living world as the price of convenience.
When someone is in crisis, it is not always spiritually helpful to ask them to ‘be hopeful’ if what they need is justice, support, housing, safety, healthcare, community, rest, or simply the right to be angry about what is happening. Pagan traditions, with their emphasis on the sacredness of the Earth and the reality of cycles, can offer a kind of hope that is also the refusal to call exploitation normal, to treat burnout as inevitable, and to spiritualise what is, at its core, structural violence.
Sometimes the most hopeful thing you can do is stop collaborating with despair.
That might look like practical changes, boundaries, and withdrawing your attention from outrage machines. It might look like rejoining your local ecosystem, literally and socially. It might look like activism. It might look like mutual aid. It might look like learning skills that make you less dependent on systems that are not designed for your wellbeing. None of this is romantic; it is grounded, and about the kind of world we consent to live in.
Hope is not only something I feel. Hope is something I do with other people. It is the act of making a future more inhabitable, even when I cannot guarantee I will live to see it.
Borrowing and lending hope
I sometimes refer to ‘borrowing hope’ and ‘lending hope’. There are seasons when you cannot manufacture hope from inside yourself. In those seasons, hope can be carried by others: by a friend, a ritual, a community, a deity, a memory of who you are when you are whole, a tree you visit, an ancestor whose story reminds you that survival is possible.
Paganism is good at this because it is comfortable with mediation. The sacred comes not only through us, but also through things: candles, stones, water, words, breath, song, food, touch, and place. We don’t have to be in a constant state of spiritual confidence. We can be tired and still light the flame. We can be doubtful and still make the offering. We can be angry and still pray. We can be numb and still sit under the sky. This is how we give the soul handles when it cannot hold itself.
Pagan hope doesn’t just look up. It also looks down, out, in, around, and encourages participation, even if it’s tiny. A glass of water. One text message. One walk around the block. One refusal to scroll into despair at midnight. One moment of attention to something that is still beautiful. One act of solidarity. One act of care for the living world. One act of care for your own body as if it belongs to the Earth and deserves gentleness.
Hope, then, becomes less a shining ideal and more a rhythm. A practice of returning: to relationship, to the body, to the world, to community, to meaning-seeking—and returning, again and again, not because everything is fine, but because you are still here. Pagan hope is a vow of presence.
Presence to the world as it is, with all its grief and beauty. Presence to the people we love. Presence to the living Earth that continues to breathe, even under strain. Presence to the gods and spirits we relate with, not as vending machines for outcomes, but as powers that shape us, challenge us, and accompany us. Presence to our own souls, even when they are messy and frightened and not at all inspirational.
Hope is what we do when the world is not arranged for our comfort. Hope is what we do when we refuse to make cynicism our personality. Hope is what we do when we choose to keep our hearts permeable in a culture that rewards numbness.
Hope is the decision that darkness does not get the final word in how we live.
If the ancient world offers a final lesson, it might be this: the gods do not save us from being mortal. They teach us how to be mortal with dignity. They teach us how to love what is transient without turning away. They teach us how to grieve without being emptied of meaning. They teach us how to act with courage in the face of uncertainty. And if Pagan hope has a distinctive flavour, it is that it does not require a perfect ending to justify love. It does not require that suffering be deserved. It does not require a cosmic courtroom. It asks only that we remain present to a world that is sacred and worth loving.