The Ends of History.

Browsing the HAD site today I had something of a laugh, an appropriate response to the vast majority of the claims found there. I read a document named The Sanctity of Burial: Pagan Views, ancient and Modern by art historian Robert J. Wallis and sociology lecturerer Jenny Blain, a paper delivered to the equally grand sounding conference “Respect for Ancient British Human Remains: Philosophy and Practice” held in Manchester in November of 2006.

The attitude of this document is typical of many of those to be found on the HAD site, which is to say it attempts to conflate modern British pagan beliefs, in all their excellent ragtag diversity, with whatever passed for organised religions among the prehistoric peoples of these isles. Interestingly, Heathenry is here included in a description of modern paganism as part of “an alliance of nature-orientated religions, paths or traditions”. The apparent nonsense of describing Heathenry as a “nature-oriented” religion pales beside the implication throughout the paper that this admittedly disorganised group of modern beliefs - to call it an alliance is specious - has anything at all to do with whatever passed for religious beliefs and practices among the prehistoric people’s of the British Isles and further afield.

It seems that the glorious revisionisms of past scholars such as Margaret Murray and James Frazer have not gone away at all but survive, as a pagan tradition, in the ideas and claims of Blain and Wallis and HAD. Whereas previous fictive histories were presented as historical theories - undetermined accounts of things which actually happened - here in Blain’s and Wallis’ paper we find a foundation for fiction much more sophisticated yet eminently more disposable, that of identity politics. In this paper Blain and Wallis identify modern pagans by the inelegant term of “new-indigenes” because, they claim, modern pagans choose to identify with “indigenous perspectives”, which seems strange considering that the indigenous religious perspective of the British Isles and Europe has been shaped by getting on for 2,000 years of Christianity, that any indigenous pre-Christian religions here have been extinct for around the same number of years and also that any appropriation of extant non-Christian religious traditions from elsewhere in the world contradicts any claim for connections to prehistoric native British religions and peoples. This massive misrepresentation of the term indigenous aside, this perspective of the “new-indigene” is inspired by that great cultural leveller - that universal solvent of all tradition which is loved by the traditionally bereft - sociology, in particular the ideas of Michel Maffesoli whose thesis is built around the idea that useful and healthy perspectives of societies and cultures are best founded in imaginative recreation rather than in historical fact. This paper, then, is more concerned with the creative, sociologically-enforced training of a paganism already planned as “an alliance of nature-oriented religions” than with an appreciation and documentation of the natural growth of new and authentic religious movements.

Under this perspective and its implicit conclusion that it is perfectly fair to make unrealistic claims about history, society and genealogy in the service of “Pagan identity”, which seems to be at the heart of HAD's revisionist programme, it’s the flip of a coin whether you see the future of paganism as magic realism or as SCA but either way it looks like it will be a very good idea for modern pagans to make themselves aware of the genuinely modern origins of their religious beliefs, even if they do wish to identify with the pre-Christian peoples of Europe and the British Isles, that they themselves may be ambassadors for their own beliefs and not succumb to the tender social representations of a hegemony presumptive, else the resulting “Pagan identity” will be that of a clown. Pagans will not be taken seriously if they do not take their own history, society and genealogy seriously and recognise that their history, their society and their genealogy are identical with those of non-pagans.


(Quotations included for review purposes only.)