While on the subject of HAD it’s useful to point out that they have no more legitimate claim upon the religious disposition of human remains found in museums and other collections than do the Christian churches or anyone else. Yes, the word pagan is used to describe the religious beliefs of the pre-Christian peoples of the British Isles and the handful of people who compose HAD use the same term to describe themselves yet there is no continuous epistemological link between the two groups and no reason for HAD to claim special authority in this issue simply on account of a shared adjective.
It’s unclear why the ancient dead, long departed from their bones, should give a fig about the location of their mortal remains or about the feelings of modern career pagans on the matter, yet HAD reserves for itself the option of pursuing the interring or other disposal of these remains during some 21st Century C.E. made-up ritual fabricated from Arcadian sentiment and mangled ritual magic. If the ancient dead are found buried or otherwise intentionally disposed of then this happened with all due ceremony and honour already a long time ago accompanied by authentic rituals and beliefs and HAD may as well be chanting and wailing over a beef broth bone. If the ancient dead are found in circumstances which lead their discoverers to believe they were not buried with due ceremony and honour then there will very likely have been a social reason why such a person is left to rot where they dropped and it’s not the place of modern pagans to contradict them. What doesn’t seem to figure in HAD’s field of visions is the fact that the term ancient dead refers to more than the rags, bones and hanks of hair they prefer to retroactively claim as their own people but also to the people who placed these items in the ground in the first place. Their religious beliefs - and HAD have no better insight into what these may have been than informed non-pagans - should be respected and observed.
The ancient dead, dear friends, are long gone from here and even were they still here wouldn’t understand a word of the rituals smudge-muttered over their remains anymore than we would understand theirs. Broadly, we are each the descendents of the ancient dead, their kin, and their bones are their legacy to us, gifts left behind that we might learn of their lives and their deeds. They are as much the kin of the Archbishop of Canterbury and Richard Dawkins as they are the kin of anyone who calls themselves a druid or a witch or a heathen. Either we recognise the fact that these bones are dead gifts - and the word dead is operative here - from which we might learn with respect for the manner in which these gifts are kept or, in this multicultural age where religion is unhinged from ethnic origin, we dispose of these with all due ceremony, and I mean all due ceremony.
Showing posts with label HAD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HAD. Show all posts
Friday, 18 July 2008
Thursday, 17 July 2008
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.)
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.)
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