Northern Earth Feature

Playing Games With The Past by Peter Lemming

NEO-PAGANS AND WILLFUL ERRORS

Neo-paganism has adopted a number of ideas about prehistory as its own. The eight festivals of the year, for instance, so frequently described as the Celtic year, have never been celebrated as a continuum until recent decades. The quasi-mythological cycle that ties them together, frequently differing between groups, is a convenient pastiche created to support the idea of its ancient sanctity. Other notions have taken root in our contemporary construction of ancient reality, such as, for instance, the attractive notion that there was once a widespread belief in a Great Goddess, or even a matriarchy. Many of these ideas are at least archaeologically suspect (a fact acknowledged by feminist archaeologists too) and have more to do with modern Western self-consciously post-Christian attitudes than with reality. Truth adapted to suit our personae.

Another willful error is the idea of the Green Man or sheela-na-gig as an ancient god/goddess or evidence of clandestine paganism in the Middle Ages. It is now quite clear that whatever visual precedents we can dredge up from prehistory, both the foliate head and the lascivious hag are images that appear in 12/13th-century Christian architecture in France and spread out from there eventually to Britain and Ireland. Whatever archetypal resonance they may have acquired in the countries they appeared in, the fact is that the Church of that time saw no contradiction in their inclusion in the repertoire; hence, they are Christian devices that neo-pagans in particular find useful to construct false histories for. The so-called Green Man is primarily a mediaeval image popular and meaningful in Christian architecture and hagiography - not a Celtic god; however, he is a wonderful figure, relevant to today's idea of paganism, and it may truly be said that if the Green Man did not exist, then neo-pagans would have to invent him (which indeed they have)! But let mediaeval Christians have their own ideas about him, without us projecting our modern preconceptions back at them.

Earth mysteries has played a part in helping breed other such misconceptions, as it is always throwing up nice concepts, most of which eventually fall by the wayside after taking them down a few dead ends and offering people some pleasure and some insight. One of the most successful of these now-discarded dreams is the idea of earth energy, some kind of unknown force that flows along leys, can be dowsed, etc. People who subscribe to this rarely seem to acknowledge the wealth of work that has been done to establish the existence or otherwise of such energy, which has indicated that whatever it is that people pick up - the numen, atmosphere, buzz or whatever - it isn't some kind of weird and even unknown energy in the usual sense of that word. Nonetheless, people go along with it, because it sounds good and because the energy is so 'subtle' their insistence on it raises their subjective sensitivity profile - street cred in the New Age/pagan movements.

A crossover from this idea of our environment buzzing with mysterious energies is the often-heard pagan idea that the eight 'ancient' festivals are particular points of energy in the calendar; do a rite on the appropriate day and may the force be with you. Trouble is, though, that there isn't any special energy on those days; to get your magic working, you'd be better off checking the moon and planetary situations than this spurious ancient calendar. Moreover, what evidence there is of activities on these days does not suggest religious or magical rites but social ones; some would seem to have been agreed points in the year when people could get together and get merry, find mates, make bargains, etc., and times when either agricultural and pastoral work were relatively quiet and could be left for a few days - hence the times of traditional fairs. The implication is that on these days in the year we shouldn't be sneaking off in our little closed ritual groups but getting together with people and celebrating the wheel of the year, ritually or otherwise, in large open gatherings.

Another obvious point is that Imbolc, say, which is the beginning of spring, and plonked around February 1st, will differ depending on where you are. Imbolc in Kent is a rather different time from Imbolc in Fife. Lammas/Lughnasad fairs can take place anytime over a six-week period either side of August 1st. The same latitude must apply for all the four Celtic quarter-day festivals - the likelihood is that if they were celebrated as seasonal rites, then they would be moveable feasts, varying not primarily on a calendrical but on a geographical basis, and also on a pragmatic one, ensuring that gatherings would not clash. There is no such calendrical latitude, however, about the equinoxes and solstices, but only the latter seem to have been closely celebrated.

The point is, therefore, that there is nothing inherently special about February 2, May 1, August 1 or October 31! Each will differ according to place, planetary influence and of course the understanding and intent of those celebrating it; any difference in 'energy' is no more than the usual difference between one day and the next, one morning and the afternoon following it.

I've been a pagan for 21 years now, and as the years go on I realise that more and more people are twisting or ignoring evidence and fact and reneging on reason, just for the sake of their own precious ideologies and personalities. It's pernicious and as dangerous in principle as any totalitarian re-education.

Do we need to import and then misconstrue historical precedents for our new paganism? If historicism is its own validation, then let us have sacrifice, or we're too squeamish for that, let us support hunting as community protection of livelihood against predation, or the cock-thrashing of Shrove Tuesday as a way of easing the privation of the dead of winter by making slaughter and brutality fun for all the family. Why must so many keep repeating as fact old archaeological and folkloric ideas that are now realised to be unlikely? Can we not be content that our own mythology needs no precedent and we do not need to project our contemporary head-trips back on to our ancestors?  Do we need to be so densely resistant to knowledge and reason in our championship of the right brain and our revisionist approach to history?

Notes on further reading

Books which back up this rant are easy enough to find, though not always from the most 'popular' (and inaccurate) publishers. Get the bibliography from Ronald Hutton's Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles; read Kathleen Basford's The Green Man, Roy Judge's The Jack in the Green or Jorge Andersen's The Witch on the Wall rather than anything else on the Green Man or sheela; almost any up-to-date archaeological text on the Celts will make the situation clear with regard to Iron Age Celtic festivals; Ronald Hutton's The Stations of the Sun emphasises the relative modernity of our folk events and customs and has again a reliable bibliography. That's if you really want to know what is old and what is new, what is known and what we imagine.

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