“Why is it, also, that more recent spiritual ancestors seem to get neglected, in favour of those who are ancient enough to lack faces, names and individual traits, unless we invent or dream those for ourselves?... Can it be that the nameless, faceless, mysterious prehistoric dead are a more convenient focus for memorialisation and eulogy as ancestors because they are more malleable?” – Ronald Hutton, in his afterward to ‘This Ancient Heart: Landscape, Ancestor and Self. These are questions that we need to ask. Paganism has a complex relationship with its own history, as Ronald Hutton has repeatedly exposed. Blood and Mistletoe, and The Triumph of the Moon establish the lack of provable antiquity in modern Druidry and Witchcraft respectively. Of course as many Pagans are keen to point out, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but the truth is that our known history is not what we might want it to be. I find it really interesting that the idea of unbroken lineage and tradition holds such power for us. It seems like an indicator of authenticity and a form of validation, but is it? I have a fascination with religion as a subject of study, and the one thing this has taught me is that all religions change over time. In a religion that continues and lives, there is no one authentic, true since the beginning way of practicing the religion. There are factions, heresies, fundamentalist bids for a purer form, re-imaginings, influences from other religions. If we had unbroken descent from the ancient Pagans, it would be fair to expect that what we do would bear much less resemblance to them, then modern Christianity bears to mediaeval Christianity. The trouble with our more recent Pagan ancestors of tradition, is the sneaking suspicion that they made a lot of things up. On the Druid side, Iolo Morganwg is infamous for ‘finding’ ancient texts, largely by thinking about what he wanted the ancient Druids to have been like, and writing what he felt they should have said. He wrote some beautiful, profound and powerful material that you will hear spoken in Druid rituals today, and he tried to pass it off as ancient history. Some of his frauds may have been so good, and so clever that it may be impossible to tell now what exactly was his own creation. In gifting us with his amazing inspiration, he’s also obscured, perhaps forever, truths about the past. This is the man who gave us the phrase ‘the truth against the world’. As ancestors go, he’s a challenging figure, but he is a very real part of the ancestry of modern Druidry, whether we like him or not. He is too distinct a person, with less than perfect motives, and we cannot repackage him as a saint. Similar things can be said about the way in which Gerald Gardner sought to create a back history for his witchcraft, with a story of covens and mentors that cannot be substantiated at all. How many others who claim lineage, and history are honest, and how many are fraudsters, or guilty of wishful thinking, or imaginatively joining the dots? Mostly we don’t know. However, who we want our ancestors of tradition to have been, tells us a great deal about ourselves. When we look to the past for validation, we need to ask what it is that we want to validate, and why? Most modern Pagans have Christian ancestors – we have a few generations now that have grown up Pagan, but most of us can name the Christians in our bloodline, even if it makes us uneasy to do so. Most of us live in cultures where Christian thinking has dominated society, creativity and ideas about religion for more than a thousand years. We cannot throw off that influence, we cannot be other than products of the history behind us. We might want to talk about ancestry in terms of ancient Paganism, but we ignore the influence of Christianity to our detriment. We cannot know ourselves if we do not know what is acting upon us. When we’re talking about ancestors, it’s important to recognise who we want them to be, and the role of our own wishes and ideals in how we imagine our ancestry. What Ronald Hutton tactfully alludes to in the opening quote, I will repeat less gently. We like our ancient ancestors and we honour them precisely because they are unknown to us and can be anything we want them to be. We project our desires and dreams onto them, and find those same dreams and desires entirely validated by the process. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this so long as we know that’s what happens. If we use our fantasy of our ancestors to justify our beliefs and actions, we can create a closed loop of reality which no other ideas can permeate. We get self-perpetuating stories, which might be entirely wrong and harmful to us. All of our ancestral lines will include people who did truly awful things. We are all the descendents of rapists, murderers, slavers, thieves, liars, manipulators, irresponsible gits, lazy misers and every other vice you care to think about. We are all the children of the very worst that humanity is capable of. We may choose to celebrate being the children of the very best humanity is capable of, because we are that too, and that’s a good thing, where it inspires and uplifts us. Whoever our ancestors were, they were people in their own right, and not products of our imaginations and desires, no matter how much we want them to fit neatly into our stories about who they should have been. Nimue Brown is an author, whose work includes Druidry and the Ancestors, published by Moon Books. This Ancient Heart is also published by Moon Books and includes essays from Emma Restall Orr, Philip Shallcrass, Jenny Blaine, Caitlin Matthews, and Penny Billington alongside an impressive array of academic voices as well. www.moon-books.net |
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