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26 November 2019 13:15![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
haptalaonOne interesting fact from Triumph of the Moon is that historically, our Pagan forebears were all conservative.
(In the context of the UK, this means politically right wing, but specifically committed to How Things Were. For example, believing in the value of an aristocracy, of land rights, of heritage.)
And they viewed their Paganism as a sort of extention of that, a yearning to go back to an idealised past in the countryside, away from modernity - which they associated with like, socialism and progress and cities and workers and the future. Instead of peasants on the land, in harmony.
This makes a certain kind of sense: in the 50s, only the economically/class privileged had the freedom & time to fart about in robes, and access rare occult texts, and travel to the Orient, and be harmlessly eccentric.
I find this fascinating bevause nowadays, I'd say pagans tended to lean left. However, I talked it over with my man and he thought it was more complex: pagans tend to be *counter cultural*, but not always left wing. That could be, people who don't believe in politics at all, to people with very niche political views (like, being an anarchist or being really into feudalism). Among my irl pagan friends, I've got a handful of "I don't believe in voting" types.
I think he's right, and it's interesting. When I was at the October Rebellion, I was singing Jerusalem to myself in the mornings to keep my spirits up. It's a wonderful hymn (and from a Fencraft perspective, it's ours: it's a mainstay in folk horror).
One of my Affinity Group said he enjoyed hearing it, and mentioned that it was actually an old socialist hymn too. A vision of going back to the land, and to brotherhood. (As they say in Arcadia, "the land shall be made a commonwealth of man, working together and playing together")
And indeed, that's how I feel about it too. My socialism follows the Arts and Crafts movement: a belief that industrialisation and mechanisation transform men into objects and machines, and that destruction of the countryside and togetherness of the soul and of rhe imagination is the crime at rhe heart of capitalism.
So it's fascinating to me to hear how our Pagan forebears broadly speaking saw socialism as rhe reverse of this.
Really, I think "going back to the land" is a powerful drive for anyone not happy with the way things are, the past being a foreign country in which we can imagine things were different, and could be again.
(In the context of the UK, this means politically right wing, but specifically committed to How Things Were. For example, believing in the value of an aristocracy, of land rights, of heritage.)
And they viewed their Paganism as a sort of extention of that, a yearning to go back to an idealised past in the countryside, away from modernity - which they associated with like, socialism and progress and cities and workers and the future. Instead of peasants on the land, in harmony.
This makes a certain kind of sense: in the 50s, only the economically/class privileged had the freedom & time to fart about in robes, and access rare occult texts, and travel to the Orient, and be harmlessly eccentric.
I find this fascinating bevause nowadays, I'd say pagans tended to lean left. However, I talked it over with my man and he thought it was more complex: pagans tend to be *counter cultural*, but not always left wing. That could be, people who don't believe in politics at all, to people with very niche political views (like, being an anarchist or being really into feudalism). Among my irl pagan friends, I've got a handful of "I don't believe in voting" types.
I think he's right, and it's interesting. When I was at the October Rebellion, I was singing Jerusalem to myself in the mornings to keep my spirits up. It's a wonderful hymn (and from a Fencraft perspective, it's ours: it's a mainstay in folk horror).
One of my Affinity Group said he enjoyed hearing it, and mentioned that it was actually an old socialist hymn too. A vision of going back to the land, and to brotherhood. (As they say in Arcadia, "the land shall be made a commonwealth of man, working together and playing together")
And indeed, that's how I feel about it too. My socialism follows the Arts and Crafts movement: a belief that industrialisation and mechanisation transform men into objects and machines, and that destruction of the countryside and togetherness of the soul and of rhe imagination is the crime at rhe heart of capitalism.
So it's fascinating to me to hear how our Pagan forebears broadly speaking saw socialism as rhe reverse of this.
Really, I think "going back to the land" is a powerful drive for anyone not happy with the way things are, the past being a foreign country in which we can imagine things were different, and could be again.
