Modern Pagan and Heathen Organizations by Year of Founding

The path opens in 1964, when the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids split from the Ancient Druid Order with Ross Nichols as its founding leader. It teaches in three grades, Bard, Ovate and Druid, mainly by correspondence and distance learning, and a 2018 report in The Wild Hunt describes it as the largest Druid order in the world, with over twenty thousand members in fifty countries.

Founded in 1967 in Southern California by Frederick Adams, Feraferia is an eco-Pagan fellowship centred on the divine feminine. Margot Adler describes it as small in numbers but influential on American Neo-Paganism, and in the 1970s Adams joined Carroll Poke Runyon and Oberon Zell to form the Council of Themis, an early attempt to unite Pagan groups.

Founded in 1969 by Else Christensen with her husband Alex, this early American and Canadian group presented Odinism as an ancestral Northern European religion. Jeffrey Kaplan identifies it as historically significant in shaping the folkish, racially exclusive current of modern Heathenry, which later organizations on this path define themselves against. It is a historical organization and has not been practised continuously.

Co-founded in April 1972 by the poet Sveinbjorn Beinteinsson with twelve founding members, the Icelandic Heathen organization was recognized as a religious body on 16 May 1973. That recognition let it perform legally binding ceremonies and receive a share of the church tax, and Wikipedia reports about 6,250 members in 2025.

Incorporated as a nonprofit religious organization in California in 1975 and ratified by thirteen founding covens, this body was formed by Wiccan elders from several traditions to secure legal standing for witches and covens of any lineage. It has no single founder, and it describes itself as cross-traditional.

Founded in 1976 at Clonegal Castle in Ireland by Olivia Robertson, Lawrence Durdin-Robertson and Pamela Durdin-Robertson, the Fellowship honours the Goddess in her many forms, especially Isis. It is explicitly non-exclusive, so members may belong to other religions, and Wikipedia notes that membership is free and all members have equal privileges.

Isaac Bonewits founded this United States organization in 1983 and served as its Archdruid until his death in 2010. Unlike orders built on Celtic sources alone, it takes a comparative approach across Indo-European cultures, including Celtic, Norse, Vedic and Hellenic, and it organizes local groves and trains its own clergy.

Founded in the United States in 1987 as the Ring of Troth, this Heathen organization is explicitly universalist, open regardless of ancestry, and its policies bar folkish and racialist positions. It stands on the opposite side of the Heathen split from the Odinist Fellowship, and Edred Thorsson was among its founding figures before leaving.

Tamara L. Siuda founded Kemetic Orthodoxy in 1988 and leads it under the title Nisut. It is a reconstruction of ancient Egyptian religion, and its church body, the House of Netjer, trains and ordains clergy. New members undergo the Rite of Parent Divination, performed by its clergy to identify a primary parent deity.

Emma Restall Orr founded this UK Druid organization in February 2003. In 2010 it became the first Pagan religious body granted charitable status by the Charity Commission for England and Wales, after a four-year application. It applied for membership of the Inter Faith Network in 2012 and was initially rejected, which led to two years of dialogue including a House of Lords discussion.

The path ends with a charity rather than a church. Registered as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation with the Charity Commission on 31 July 2014, PaganAid is run entirely by volunteers and funded by Pagan donations. It grants money to trusted organizations working on poverty relief and environmental protection, and the people those projects serve may be of any faith or none.