You clearly have no idea of what "the modern version of paganism" is.
It was created, re-discovered, re-invented (take your choice), by a man named Gerald B Gardner, who created Wicca under the influence of Margaret A Murray's now discredited theory that the "witches" of the 14th to 17th centuries who were the target of the Inquisition and others during the witch-craze were the survivors of an underground pagan religiomn that had existed since pre-Christian times.
He, Alex and Maxine Sanders, popularised his ideas during the 50's and 60's after the repeal of the Witchcraft Acts.
Over the years his claims were debunked but he had sparked an interest in both paganism and the Craft.
My deities may well be not real any more than the gods of every other religion in the world may be.
As it happens your rant above tells me one thing loud and clear - I hit a nerve!
Whether Jeremy has any idea about the modern version of paganism - what about his assertion that we know (and can know) practically nothing about the ancient religions from which it is supposed to derive? I suppose the Christians did do a pretty good job in eradicating many strands of pagan belief and practice in Europe and many other parts of the world (the Spanish had almost miraculous success in wiping out Central and South American native beliefs, Carlos Castaneda's sham fabrications notwithstanding).
However, regarding how much can legitimately be traced to genuine historical origins - have you any thoughts on Robert Graves' "The White Goddess"? (Graves' book attempts to trace what he calls 'lunar knowledge' back to an ancient 'tree' alphabet, of which we certainly have a number of examples). I picked up a copy the other day - it's not my usual kind of reading these days, having abandoned any belief in the 'spiritual', whether it be of pagan, christian, buddhist or any other religious origin. I meant to read Graves' book decades ago when I first learned of it from Colin Wilson's 'The Occult', but never got round to it (I can hear Jeremy and Leonard shouting "Damn good thing you didn't" 
)
However, if anyone is familiar with Graves' book, and think it worth a look, if only from a scholarly point of view, then I might get round to reading it.
Robert Graves was another disciple of Margaret A Murray. She was a highly respected Egyptologist and, when WW1 made excavations in Egypt more of less impossible, she transferred her interest to Sir James George Frazer's (a hero of hers) area of expertise, anthropology (see The Golden Bough) and began to formulate her theory that not only were the witches persecuted during the witch-hunts of the 14th to 17th centuries the followers of a Europe-wide underground Devil worshipping cult that had existed ever since the coming of Christianinty, but was, in 1921, still flourishing underground.
She published The Witch Cult in Western Europe that proclaimed this theory.
There was however a huge flaw in the contents of the book. She had, instead of adjusting her theory to fit the evidence, edited the evidence to fit her theory. She ignored the fact that the witches tales of Sabbats, flying to them, orgies with the Devil, feasting on dead and unbaptised babies were obtained by torture or the threat of torture and accepted them as nothing less than the unvarnished truth. She used the fact that a lot of the stories told by witches from a large arera of Europe told the same stories to justify her claim of an integrated European witch cult ignoring that, in the vast majority of cases, the answers were the same because the prisoners were fed the same leading questions and would say just about anythhing to get the torture to stop. The idea that a Coven of witches was always 13 members was gleaned by Murray from probably the only freely given confession to witchcraft, given by Isobel Gowdie in 1662, the only known instance of this particular "fact".
It was because of her standing in the academic community, achieved by her work on Egyptology, that academics who saw the faults in her arguments and saw her misuse of evidence, closed ranks and stayed silent about the glaring errors in the work and, by the time they decided to speak out, people like Gerald B Gardner, the founder (aka inventor) of modern Wicca and Robert Graves had accepted the story hook, line and sinker.
Her book is well worth a read if for no other reason than to show what you can get away with if you have a strong enough reputation; the Golden Bough is also worth reading but I would not recommend trying it at one sitting and, great though it is, even Fraser, later on in his life, admitted that it contained errors.
