(This is part of my continuing waffling on how to practice while living in urban Flanders and being of urban background myself, and in another country from my birth country, when the current trend in Paganism seems to focus on the authenticity of local tradition and local magic. I'm veering towards the idea that gods make homes in people just as they might make homes in places and you carry them with you, but I may be in the minority, and it's not like that makes the problem of appropriation go away. Impostor syndrome, why yes...)
I think the bringing your gods with you is a really interesting model, and you're right - we are having a "moment" in paganism for focuing on the local.
Fencraft, I think, would tend to agree that gods have been *brought* here by the many migrations of people, but would ultimately prioritise a “gods of where you are” model. That's why anti-white-nationalism is so core to the tradition. Not just because racist fucks are drawn to folklore like buzzflies to a turd, but because anyone who is here can hear the voice of the Landweird (regardless of where “here” is). It's not really about bloodlines or ethnic “rights" to certain pantheons or practices, it's “are you here and participating? Then you're where you need to be”
I'd definitely say that the models worth rejecting outright are, any which restrict divinity along racial/ethnic/national lines *alone*. In part because that's a very racist horseshoe, which starts somewhere laudible but goes all the way around to something repellent.
I think the most important parts of appropriation discourse are, say...I'm really into African Diaspora Religions, and so they sometims get boiled down to “are you Black” or “are you Black & Cuban” etc. And I don't think that's what it's about. It's more like, are you willing to initiate with an actual house linked to the tradition, fly to Cuba three times a year, learn the tradition as it has been handed down, learn Haitian Kreyol so you can speak to people in your community; are you going to do this properly, or are you going to be a tourist - possibly erasing and undermining living traditions with your far more powerful platform for spreading shallow versions of the faith.
The city in an interesting one, I'm going to get some quotes for you about it. In terms of Landweird, I am very in love with London, my home, and that sense of layers built on layers upon layers is never more vivid and visceral than when within a city, where you can feel its age and development; I get a very strong something off those parts of London where a medieval pub has survived right next to a skyscraper, a sense of something breaking through that is dissonant and represents a potential break from the everyday towards mythic time. If I'm to be honest, I get it far more strongly in London than I do near standing stones and other more clearly “pagan” places. And every city has so much history within it, so much ancientness. In London, we have the temple to Mithras and Tamesis, Isis-of-the-Thames; and then in British mythology we have ancient King Lud of Ludd's gate and Bran's head under Temple Hill; and then we have the particularly London folklore, of the London stone and the Crossbones graveyards and all the weirdness of the City of London; and we've got the anglo saxon mooring posts rotting at low tide on the mudflats. And every city was once open ground.
So, to my perception, the ancient gods of the land are still present in the city, but they have been made strange by the process of what has happened to the land. Divinity is tidal, and tied to the land, and so the Powers I found in London always had to have this particular hysterical-yet-constrained quality, something tangled that was far more straightforward the further up the Thames you travelled. I'd also say that my personal practice has been unavoidably changed by coming to the mountains; I miss the princes of the city so much, but I for one cannot hear their voices here. But I keep it alive in my Reading, and I keep a Tube map in my box of sacred tools. Maps can often be used to find your way in places they were not originally intended for.
OK here's what I was reading this morning, it's Alan Moore in Hellebore zine edition 2:
“It strikes me that our urban settlements may be the only plaes where the Wild Gods walk, since only civilised populations nurture an abiding fear/fascination for the rural and primitive. The ancient primordial horror may be a construction onlyof the sophisticated but culturally rootless modern mind...I would suspect that since our earliest urban cultures, we've situated our terrors beyond the neatly-ruled boundaries of the artificial landscape that we have imposed; out in the remote fractal wilderness where who knows what goes on, and who knows what they do. The countryside, the natural world, is observably beyond human authority and the human concept of time, and as such, is the perfect recepticle for our most lurid imaginings.. We measure our progress as civilised creatures by how successfly we have disconnected from the dirt, violence and ecstasy of our arboreal origins, and thus our uneasiness tends to start where the good roads run out. It must be said that a subset of this dread of rural places is almost certainly a dread of rural people, perhaps shading into a fear of the poor and disadvantaged generally”
I though this was great, as well as a pretty good analysis of the Wanderer's Map model, where folklore and folk horror are constantly trying to navigate between the civilised and uncivilised worlds.
no subject
I think the bringing your gods with you is a really interesting model, and you're right - we are having a "moment" in paganism for focuing on the local.
Fencraft, I think, would tend to agree that gods have been *brought* here by the many migrations of people, but would ultimately prioritise a “gods of where you are” model. That's why anti-white-nationalism is so core to the tradition. Not just because racist fucks are drawn to folklore like buzzflies to a turd, but because anyone who is here can hear the voice of the Landweird (regardless of where “here” is). It's not really about bloodlines or ethnic “rights" to certain pantheons or practices, it's “are you here and participating? Then you're where you need to be”
I'd definitely say that the models worth rejecting outright are, any which restrict divinity along racial/ethnic/national lines *alone*. In part because that's a very racist horseshoe, which starts somewhere laudible but goes all the way around to something repellent.
I think the most important parts of appropriation discourse are, say...I'm really into African Diaspora Religions, and so they sometims get boiled down to “are you Black” or “are you Black & Cuban” etc. And I don't think that's what it's about. It's more like, are you willing to initiate with an actual house linked to the tradition, fly to Cuba three times a year, learn the tradition as it has been handed down, learn Haitian Kreyol so you can speak to people in your community; are you going to do this properly, or are you going to be a tourist - possibly erasing and undermining living traditions with your far more powerful platform for spreading shallow versions of the faith.
The city in an interesting one, I'm going to get some quotes for you about it. In terms of Landweird, I am very in love with London, my home, and that sense of layers built on layers upon layers is never more vivid and visceral than when within a city, where you can feel its age and development; I get a very strong something off those parts of London where a medieval pub has survived right next to a skyscraper, a sense of something breaking through that is dissonant and represents a potential break from the everyday towards mythic time. If I'm to be honest, I get it far more strongly in London than I do near standing stones and other more clearly “pagan” places. And every city has so much history within it, so much ancientness. In London, we have the temple to Mithras and Tamesis, Isis-of-the-Thames; and then in British mythology we have ancient King Lud of Ludd's gate and Bran's head under Temple Hill; and then we have the particularly London folklore, of the London stone and the Crossbones graveyards and all the weirdness of the City of London; and we've got the anglo saxon mooring posts rotting at low tide on the mudflats. And every city was once open ground.
So, to my perception, the ancient gods of the land are still present in the city, but they have been made strange by the process of what has happened to the land. Divinity is tidal, and tied to the land, and so the Powers I found in London always had to have this particular hysterical-yet-constrained quality, something tangled that was far more straightforward the further up the Thames you travelled. I'd also say that my personal practice has been unavoidably changed by coming to the mountains; I miss the princes of the city so much, but I for one cannot hear their voices here. But I keep it alive in my Reading, and I keep a Tube map in my box of sacred tools. Maps can often be used to find your way in places they were not originally intended for.
OK here's what I was reading this morning, it's Alan Moore in Hellebore zine edition 2:
“It strikes me that our urban settlements may be the only plaes where the Wild Gods walk, since only civilised populations nurture an abiding fear/fascination for the rural and primitive. The ancient primordial horror may be a construction onlyof the sophisticated but culturally rootless modern mind...I would suspect that since our earliest urban cultures, we've situated our terrors beyond the neatly-ruled boundaries of the artificial landscape that we have imposed; out in the remote fractal wilderness where who knows what goes on, and who knows what they do. The countryside, the natural world, is observably beyond human authority and the human concept of time, and as such, is the perfect recepticle for our most lurid imaginings.. We measure our progress as civilised creatures by how successfly we have disconnected from the dirt, violence and ecstasy of our arboreal origins, and thus our uneasiness tends to start where the good roads run out. It must be said that a subset of this dread of rural places is almost certainly a dread of rural people, perhaps shading into a fear of the poor and disadvantaged generally”
I though this was great, as well as a pretty good analysis of the Wanderer's Map model, where folklore and folk horror are constantly trying to navigate between the civilised and uncivilised worlds.