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21 November 2019 18:42![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
haptalaonI'm very troubled by things I've read about British folklore.
I've just finished reading Triumph of the Moon by Ronald Hutton - a history of modern pagan witchcraft. Hutton is a huge intellectual crush of mine: a real historian who investigates magic, druids and the occult. Reading his books have made me admire history as a discipline, and learn more about how historians are really like journalists in a way, looking the truth and considering all the angles. I always learn new things from his books and - even when they puncture much-loved Pagan fakelore, it doesn't shake my faith and im often appreciative to learn the origins of ideas I use every day. Something doesn't have to be real to be true.
So I recommend all Hutton's books, and if you're pagan, a Wiccan or witch, Triumph of the Moon is a must read.
In Fencraft, we don't seek a literal religious truth. Instead, we co-opt people writing or cresting works which seem go be responding to the land into a lineage of quasi-prophets hearing part truths about rhe Landweird. Tolkien, Gerald Gardener, Syd Barrett and the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water stand side by side as whispered fragments of it. This is a convenient handwave which welcomes in a broad church of belief, permits pop cultural paganism, and encourages playfulness.
So normally, something like Triumph wouldn't bother me: I don't need Murray to be literally correct, bevause I can understand the cool bits of her books as the Land dreaming of itself, a partial truth, a possible mythos.
But Hutton writes about the extent to which Victorian folklorists were...awful. shamefully awful to the "simple" country folk who they collected folklore from. They had a theory that pagan beliefs and rituals survived in rural areas, hidden by folk traditions which they had forgotten the significance of (but which an outsider to the community who was a wealthy academic understood perfectly). They then went out to collect folklore, recording only what matched their hypothesis, and in some cases over-riding local folk about how their own local rituals ought to be performed. He gives many examples, and it feels ugly. It's the exact same racist attitude early explorers applied to "savage" tribes, applied to like, the Cotswolds and the Yorkshire dales and the entirety of Scotland.
This hits me right in the feels. Fencraft is very, very inspired by folk horror: the archetypal genre of "the country folk know something you don't know about ancient rituals at the stones". And it eagerly draws in stuff like Robin Hood and the May Queen and the Green Man. In other words, this shitty Victorian hypothesis underpins how *i* feel about rural traditions in the country side. It's also *my* fantasy of the land. It's what I want to find there. When we talk about seeking the Landweird it is, in part, this "pagan survivals" which we seek to find.
In other words, I can't feel the proper abhorrence at these Victorian chaps without also feeling abhorrence towards something I cherish and find joy in. Awkward!
& it's not like, say, finding out that Gardener was an inveterate liar, because what he created still has meaning and reality for people. Or finding our the Green Man was invented in 1927, but knowing he still walks the land regardless of when he was named.
It's having someone identify and (rightly) challenge that the whole underlying framework of what you're doing is a problem. I'm not really sure what to do about it, but I do feel...I do feel alienated from what I've been doing and like I kinda don't want to continue with it in the current form. Not sure how to move forward at all.
I've just finished reading Triumph of the Moon by Ronald Hutton - a history of modern pagan witchcraft. Hutton is a huge intellectual crush of mine: a real historian who investigates magic, druids and the occult. Reading his books have made me admire history as a discipline, and learn more about how historians are really like journalists in a way, looking the truth and considering all the angles. I always learn new things from his books and - even when they puncture much-loved Pagan fakelore, it doesn't shake my faith and im often appreciative to learn the origins of ideas I use every day. Something doesn't have to be real to be true.
So I recommend all Hutton's books, and if you're pagan, a Wiccan or witch, Triumph of the Moon is a must read.
In Fencraft, we don't seek a literal religious truth. Instead, we co-opt people writing or cresting works which seem go be responding to the land into a lineage of quasi-prophets hearing part truths about rhe Landweird. Tolkien, Gerald Gardener, Syd Barrett and the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water stand side by side as whispered fragments of it. This is a convenient handwave which welcomes in a broad church of belief, permits pop cultural paganism, and encourages playfulness.
So normally, something like Triumph wouldn't bother me: I don't need Murray to be literally correct, bevause I can understand the cool bits of her books as the Land dreaming of itself, a partial truth, a possible mythos.
But Hutton writes about the extent to which Victorian folklorists were...awful. shamefully awful to the "simple" country folk who they collected folklore from. They had a theory that pagan beliefs and rituals survived in rural areas, hidden by folk traditions which they had forgotten the significance of (but which an outsider to the community who was a wealthy academic understood perfectly). They then went out to collect folklore, recording only what matched their hypothesis, and in some cases over-riding local folk about how their own local rituals ought to be performed. He gives many examples, and it feels ugly. It's the exact same racist attitude early explorers applied to "savage" tribes, applied to like, the Cotswolds and the Yorkshire dales and the entirety of Scotland.
This hits me right in the feels. Fencraft is very, very inspired by folk horror: the archetypal genre of "the country folk know something you don't know about ancient rituals at the stones". And it eagerly draws in stuff like Robin Hood and the May Queen and the Green Man. In other words, this shitty Victorian hypothesis underpins how *i* feel about rural traditions in the country side. It's also *my* fantasy of the land. It's what I want to find there. When we talk about seeking the Landweird it is, in part, this "pagan survivals" which we seek to find.
In other words, I can't feel the proper abhorrence at these Victorian chaps without also feeling abhorrence towards something I cherish and find joy in. Awkward!
& it's not like, say, finding out that Gardener was an inveterate liar, because what he created still has meaning and reality for people. Or finding our the Green Man was invented in 1927, but knowing he still walks the land regardless of when he was named.
It's having someone identify and (rightly) challenge that the whole underlying framework of what you're doing is a problem. I'm not really sure what to do about it, but I do feel...I do feel alienated from what I've been doing and like I kinda don't want to continue with it in the current form. Not sure how to move forward at all.
