Scholars group Wicca, Druidry, Heathenry, Rodnovery and solitary practice under one umbrella term, but the traditions inside it often pull in opposite directions. Michael Strmiska's comparative survey Modern Paganism in World Cultures draws the sharpest line: reconstructionist traditions such as Heathenry and Rodnovery aim to rebuild a specific historical religion, Germanic or Slavic respectively, as faithfully as surviving evidence allows, treating archaeology, saga literature and early chronicle sources as constraints on what may be claimed. Eclectic traditions, of which Wicca is the clearest example, instead treat historical and cultural material as raw ingredients to be freely recombined, borrowing a ritual structure here and a deity there without claiming to restore any single ancestral religion intact.
Kathryn Rountree's edited volume on Pagan and native faith movements in Europe adds a complication: several reconstructionist traditions were shaped, in part, by nineteenth and twentieth century nationalist movements that used a reconstructed pre-Christian past to build a modern ethnic identity, a history some practitioners embrace and others work to separate their practice from.
The word Pagan is not universally accepted. Barbara Davy's study of the category in the United States notes some reconstructionist practitioners reject the label outright, preferring their own tradition's name alone, since grouping a historically grounded reconstruction with freely eclectic practice obscures more than it explains. The umbrella survives in academic use because it names a real family resemblance, small autonomous groups, no shared scripture, a general orientation toward nature and the seasons, without claiming the family agrees on how that resemblance should be built.