Paganism & A Racist Moment

So I was chatting with an academic on Twitter who teaches the Celtic Romantic period (Romantics are like, the 1800s-1860s and Romanticism is a movement that occurs all over Europe in different flavours. The Celtic Romantics are in many ways the beginning of our contemporary pagan romance with Irish and Welsh myth, fantasy memories of nature, the wild, the ancient tales, old traditions, bards and princes and the like)

He wrote a bit on Arthur Machen's racism - oh lord - and I had torn my hair out in frustration.

Part of the genesis of my Fencraft writing was a very specific aim: I wanted to do ceremonial magic, which did not appropriate Jewish mysticism (my personal feelings on how appropriative it is, and how much damage it does, are actually quite nuanced; but in a public and quasi-professional capacity, I think pagan communities should be moving away from that where possible and creating new ways of doing old magics). And so, part of the mission statement for the project as a whole was to not promote racist authors - this, very specifically, was about Lovecraft and the "Lovecraftian", which is a term that turns up all over my early notes to talk about Stellar encounters.

Anyway, it turns out that Machen was hoo boy, like to the extent of being really into Franco. So I've toned back my original mission statement a bit; I can't win them all. Living authors with the capacity to do harm are right out; content notes on the reading list for the most egregious texts, and with recommendations not to read them whenever possible; but the thing about Machen is the problem in a nutshell of demanding one does not interact with traditions and practices from other cultures; namely, that if you're a white Englishman, most people who are prominent in your culture have politics and values that are a nightmare, and what do you do with that?

Anyway, I was talking about this with an academic on Twitter, and he noted offhand that the period of 1880s-1930 is the real dangerzone in English (and European) literature, where you're virtually guaranteed the author unsavory views.

This interests me on two grounds.

The first is: the Victorians are the most recent piece of "pastness" we have, and so the myths they had about themselves tend to occupy an outsized place in our cultural memory,

I'm thinking particularly of "in the past, women didn't work or have sex but stayed at home and got married", which is a Victorian cultural ideal that's not even true about the Victorians themselves. But it tends to influence our view of the entire past, and so people make persistent blunders like "in the past women couldn't show their ankles" when, in fact, it was very trendy for a Georgian lady to wear fancy socks and buckles specifically to show them off. Or things like, "it's unrealistic for a black Doctor Who companion to visit the Tudor period", as if the entire past had the melanin quotient of a Jane Austen adaptation about rural aristocrats attending dinner parties with one another.

So, an awareness that beliefs about Victorians are colouring our views of the entire past is helpful to just challenge any assumptions you're making.

I'm actually a big fan of literature 1880-1930; it's a gender tragedy thing, an attraction to the confining masculinity on display in media of this time. David Davis wrote something about this on the Manhunter film,or possibly this piece on the transmasculine gaze; the transmasculine attraction to men-with-a-secret, whether or not its explicitly queer or trans. I recognise the trope in myself at once! I'm a Wilde-and-Brideshead transmasc; hardly a novel personality type.

If there's something especially imperialistic and racist about the mood at this time - perhaps because it was the beginning of the end of British imperialism, causing people of a certain status to cling to it more fervently - then perhaps I've been making assumptions about how racist (or, at least, what kinds of racism) people in the past were.

But the second thing is, I'm reflecting on how 1880-1930 is really the beginning of the modern occult and pagan revival. I get a little irritated by reactive statements on social media about how white paganism is always racist; its a bit shit, obvs, to have the entire concept of you having a religion be dismissed casually, and especially when you are being intentional about your work and life and have no more desire to hang out with racists than the next person (or are actively in danger from racist organising).

I think it's a unavoidable question: if there was a particularly intense and overt racist reactionary movement occurring at the same time as the Pagan revival, well, what's the relationship there?

Was the revival being prompted by the same social forces (say, a collective insecurity and feeling of unsafety that accompanies change? Or, perhaps, the disruption caused by change creating a crack through which dissonant ideas could flow?)

There's definitely overlaps between pastoral-pagan children's movements like the Woodland Folk and similar - there were a handful of these, I've got them in a Fortean Times - and overtly imperialistic movements like the Scouts and Girl Guides, and the Hitler Youth. And I've learned some interesting things from Twitter recently, about how the (Hindu) swastika came to be a Nazi symbol, the way various esoteric movements flowed into the nascent Nazi movement.

(This is worth considering seriously, because of the way wellness/new age influencers overlap online with reactionary, racist, QAnon and other conspiratorial influencers. There's a very real convergence there, with some wellness people laundering profoundly troubling ideas into a more palatable form. Can we learn from history on this? And I see it in my own real-world social communities. Gods love them, but my pagan friends who are deep into anti-vax and whom I love and worry for greatly, because of the way online anti-vax material is used as a gateway to hardcore evil)

If that's what people were reading and thinking in this period, how does that come into the books and ideas that most influenced our movement?

Were there working class pagan revivals? I mention this because honestly, a lot of this phenomenon is being created by the tendency of privileged, upper class people to find value in racism, and these people having the most freedom to write books and create leisure-time movements. Were there manifestations of the pagan dawn in other, under-studied parts of society, which had different values? (or is it the sort of thing that really does flow from being a leisured Classicist who can subscribe to folklore periodicals and travel to India?)

There's a lot of ways you can take the question - and to clarify, the goal isn't really to judge or exclude or make Decisions or cancel, it's more about curiosity and knowing where we came from, and the richness that questioning can bring; one of those, journey-not-destination processes.