On Heritage

I came across a MediaMatters news item dealing with the recent Fox News treatment of Wicca and Paganism (for the record, it's Fox News, I'm not surprised and only mildly outraged).  As I am wont to do, I posted some replies in the comments section, which went down in flames shortly after when MediaMatters pulled the article.  But I wasn't posting in response to people making various horrible statements about Pagans and Wiccans.  I was mostly responding to other Pagans and Wiccans tossing around some of the old nuggets we've been recycling for over a decade now.

By now most Wiccans I know are well aware of a number of important details about our history.  I'm sorry if this is old news to any of the few folks who read this blog.  Given the crowd I run with, I'm sure it is.

So here goes.  We are not ancient Pagans.  We are not older than Christianity.  Christian holidays are not Pagan holidays in disguise, nor are those our holidays to claim.  With all that stated, let's get into the details.

So let's start with the age of Wicca.  By now a growing number of modern Wiccans are coming to the sensible realization that Wicca can't be demonstrated to have existed in any form substantially similar to today prior to Gerald Gardner.  Personally, I have little doubt that the New Forest coven existed in some form roughly similar to Gardner's description.  But by Gardner's own admission what he introduced to the world had an awful lot added and changed.  And with the aid of Doreen Valiente and others, what was to become Wicca, and the wider Wiccan-inspired world around it, was something other.  Inspired, yes.  Beautiful, yes.  Meaningful, yes.  But not the same.  But beyond that, there is little evidence of predecessors to New Forest existing prior to perhaps the mid-1800's at the earliest.

But even if there was, could we claim an ancient heritage stretching back to Rome, Athens, Gaul, Thebes, and Scandinavia?  Hardly.  If we suppose for a moment that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and we assume there were groups we simply haven't found yet because of their secretive nature, frankly I don't think it changes the picture at all.  If that were true, comparing us to the Religio Romana, Hellenism, or the cult of Isis, you'd expect some broad similarities.  Aside from the fact that both contain mystery cults and both share some names for their deities, Wicca and any and all ancient paganisms are strikingly different.  If there is some unbroken lineage yet to be discovered, it is one of the longest games of telephone ever undertaken and the end result is very much the same as the childhood game.

We have polytheistic reconstructionists out there.  They don't, so far as I am aware, claim direct, unbroken heritage with ancient Egypt or Rome.  They attempt to, through archaeology, resurrect the practices of our ancestors as best they are able with material gained from scientific and scholarly endeavor, and not through 1600 years of word of mouth.  And many, though not all, are quite incensed by our insistance that we can claim some substantial piece of those cultures.

But beyond that, conceptually, we have some very incongruous components in Wicca as compared to anient Paganisms.  Mixing pantheons alone brings us into contrast with the ancients.  There was the Religio Romana, under which one could worship any number of deities from any number of cultures.  And in that faith there were numerous attempts to adopt other pantheons as reflections of the Roman deities, but make no mistake, they would not have considered all Gods one God and all Goddesses one Goddess.

Neo-Platonists were by and large Pagans who had an idea of a universal Good, through which all things were derived and in that there were forms that descended from that Good with gradually more recognizeable, but more flawed forms.  Whispers of Gardner's Dryghten.  But even they didn't have a single God and a single Goddess as a functional layer in there.  If you brought up the idea to them, they might be willing to discuss it as it wasn't necessarily completely out of touch with their philosophy.  But the fact that it could fit in that world view, doesn't mean it ever did.

So let's again assume that somehow there was a development over the centuries and all the Pagan holdouts got together and formed such a framework, and let's say that made it to today, we would still, at best, be a derivative of that group, and not of the various ancient cults and religions themselves.

Now that we've established that, let's look at holidays.  A common item tossed about is that Pagan holidays, and therefore Wiccan holidays, were the inspiration behind modern Christian holidays.  First off, many of those assumptions are simply incorrect.  The timing of Easter, for instance, was derived from Judaism, another faith with a luni-solar calendar, and a much more logical connection.  As it was a centrepiece issue of the Council of Nice, there's actually a good amount of documentation supporting that, as opposed to Ostara.  Ostara, itself, was a month in one of the Germanic societies of the day, but it was not a holiday and there's substantial doubt it was a Goddess.  Plus the Easter/Ostara connection only really exists in English and a few other Germanic languages.  Christmas was, indeed, likely timed off of Saturnalia, but beyond a date on a calendar, it got precious little else from it.

So how about the celebrations?  The Yule logs, the eggs, Santa, Halloween, etc?  Those came not from ancient Pagan traditions, but from folk traditions.  Some of them, like Santa hearkening back to Odin, do have some whispers of Pagan roots, but they bear as much similarity to Christianity as they do to Wicca.  That is, not very much.  And again, these various traditions are different in almost every culture that celebrates them.  Those that are more universal now, like the Christmas tree, came first through a single cultural tradition, over a thousand years into Christian domination in Europe.  They are at best an extension of globalism and consumerism.

But say we scrub every single last shred of Pagan or folk influence out of modern Christianity and it would still be Christianity.  And that is probably my biggest gripe with the 'you got your celebrations from us' argument.  So what if they did?  It's not a central part of their faith, just a fleeting public expression of it.  It doesn't take anything away from the credibility of Christianity.  But claiming that we have some sort of intrinsic ownership of those holidays stretching back over the millenia takes away from our credibility.

So what ARE we, anyway, if we aren't that?  If Wicca is not ancient, is it valid?  Absolutely.  And in my view, we are the culmination of a variety of religious and philosophical ideas as well as numerous cultural currents in Western society.  The secret societies, the great poets honoring the old Gods, the mystics and cunning men.  The spiritualists and ceremonial magicians and cultural sentimentalists.  THEY are our heritage.  And we should be very proud to call them our forebears.  And as Wicca and Paganism start to look more and more like ancient and contemporary Polytheisms and Animisms, we can know that our history validates our modern path as much, if not more so, than a legendary lineage.

The Witch's God and the Witch's Goddess

So I'm stuck in a rut on theology for a bit, because it's what's mucking about in my head.  What has me spinning is the widely understood concept of the Wiccan Goddess and God.  Let me be absolutely clear, I'm not initiated.  So I don't pretend to know what goes on inside of initiatory Trads with respect to theology.  Frankly, it makes no difference to me.  I use the term Wicca strictly in reference to the system which has sprung up around Gardner, Cochrane, etc. with full understanding that it grates on the nerves of some initiated Trad folks.  I mean no offense, I assure you, but language is at best a near proximation of human thought, and a clumsy tool with respect to the divine.  So Wicca it is, caveats included.

I have come to find tremendous meaning and depth in the symbols of Wicca.  The Turning of the Wheel and the celebrations surrounding them, the triple Goddess and the God of the hunt.  The focus on the four classical elements and the ritual structure of it, as diverse as it may be.

I find myself less drawn to the things that make it 'witchier'.  Any of the forms of fortune telling such as scrying, runes, tarot, etc, really just don't speak to me.  Some of the non-divinatory pieces commonly found as trappings such as numerology and astrology really don't fit either.  And they don't need to as none of them are quintessentially necessary to Wicca or Paganism, from my experience.  Perhaps it's a knee-jerk geek reaction.  Skepticism nearly to a fault is a hallmark, for better or worse, of the modern science community and for good reason.  Frankly, skepticism is to science what food is to us humans.

So I guess what I'm really saying is that I'm not entirely sure I'm a Witch so much as I'm a Pagan.  (queue the terminology forestorm)

I've also come fully to the realization that I am a hard polytheist, something I hear is becoming, or perhaps has always been, the case in Wicca.  But more so than that I find myself disagreeing quite firmly with the idea of archetypes and thought-forms as a conception of deity.  I don't see the Wiccan Goddess and God as symbolic of all gods and goddesses.  The semi-popular Wiccan hymn  that starts with a chant of "Isis, Astarte, Hecate..." kind of grates on me for that reason.  Nor do I see those goddesses and gods as aspects of the divine feminine and divine masculine.  In short, I feel the Wiccan God and Goddess are as real, tangible, and distinct as the old gods and goddesses.  To put a stamp on it, if I get anything at all from Neo-Platonism or any other form of monism (as in mono meaning one, not monastery), it isn't in the form of "All Goddesses are one Goddess, all God are one God".  Perhaps it all boils down to a single, unknowable entity, and perhaps that doesn't make a lick of difference to me if I can't know it.

So now that all the gods and goddesses are their own beings and we aren't being reductionist, am I about to pick myself a pantheon and become a reconstructionist?  Kind of.  To me the Triple Goddess and the Horned God are very much the central characters in my divine space, and they have been for the whole of my life as a Pagan.  For whatever one might say about Wicca, its age, and its lineage, its central deities speak to me as themselves, not as core representations of others.  And they do so louder than the others.  And so while I feel I've had a connection with Demeter and Papa Legba of late, I'm not a priest of either so much as an... admirer, we'll say.

But that has left an interesting issue in my head.  One that makes me wonder about whether or not the ancients struggled with it, too.  And what's more it makes me wonder how reconstructionists and revivalists (my term here.  I'm meaning groups that revive worship of specific pantheons without strictly aiming for authenticity) wrestle with it.  If these are my chief deities, but I recognize the validity and stature of the other deities, how do I reconcile that with the fact that many of the other deities cover the same 'turf', so to speak.  Can you view Odin, Apollo, Zeus, etc as real divine characters with their classical roles and myths without having to confront the inherent issue with overlap?  With some deities, it's not a problem.  Deities of love, war, oceans, etc, can easily share divine territory (yes, I'm getting middle-school mythology here.  I know the traits of the gods are not that simple).  But what of chief deities?  What of the Norns and the Fates, who are said to govern all of destiny?  The tale of Demeter and Persephone governed the Greek seasons, but there were others that served the same function.

Do I reoncile that by simply picking a winner?  Do I take the truth versus factual distinction here by saying these are simply allegories?  I'm inclined to take the latter path.  As a science geek I know well how writing developed (at least so far as archaeology tells us) and that it had multiple likely origins.  And certainly Odin didn't give the Egyptians heiroglyphs, nor did Thoth scratch out early Chinese characters on turtle shells thousands of years ago.  But they are, in fact, real to me and their stories are important, if symbolic.  And here I am in Religions 100 again learning about truth versus fact.

I suspect I have a lot of meditating, ritual, and research to do before I come to any kind of satisfactory conclusion here.  And I'm sure the conclusion is not nearly so important as the meditation, ritual, and research.  But I think finally, over the past year, I feel I finally get what the gods are telling me.  And while I don't have the whole picture, I've got some substantial pieces.