Why the past?
This is something that I have having a bigger and bigger problem with as times goes on. I really don't understand the obsession with the distant past that is within modern Paganism. When I started out it all made sense, it was a nature based religion and it worshipped old gods and therefore the past was important, ancient monuments were important as that where people in the past worshipped them and so on, and then I started my degree and that all changed.
My degree was in Archaeology and I specialised mostly in prehistory (European, though with a bigger emphasis on Britain as that's where I live and where I was taught, however my undergrad dissertation was actually on rock art in France). The department I was taught at was great. People there were really forward thinking, they tended to differ from mainstream archaeology and develop more exciting ideas about the past, that's not to say that they were all enfant terrible, my Iron Age lecturer is quite a revolutionary thinking in that period and he is now curator of the Iron Age at the British Museum. It was heavily theoritical and we were basically taught how to think differently, how to interpret things and how to read critically as well as learning what we can actually say about the distant past. That is where for me the past became a problem for me, because everything I had read about the past in Pagan books was revealed to be romantic crap supported by huge sweeping statements that are based on what are now outdated notions within archaeology.
"There are several ideas about ancient sites most of which involve the idea of leylines-lines of energy in the earth's crust-which ancient people were aware of and could influence by these structures" (Moorey 1996; 24)
I have never come across leylines in any academic work on ancient monuments. The writer says with such conviction that ancient people (and what do they mean by ancient? anything before the romans? That was a bloody long time and a lot happened) were aware of them and did control them and insinuates that that is why ancient monuments exist, which is crap. You cannot explain every single prehistoric monument in Europe with one idea that has no supporting evidence.
There is so much that we cannot know about past societies and their religious beliefs and practices is one of the biggest problem areas and archaeologists argue over it all the time. If something can't be explained in archaeoogy it is described as 'ritual' whether or not it actually means it was a ritual object or practice or not. 'Riual' means, 'this is too weird, we haven't yet found an adequate explanation for it'. It may be something very mundane. I would even go so far as to say that we, as modern people, can't really understand ancient gods the same way ancient people did because our relationship with where we live and each other and the things that these gods have governed is so different now.
On top of this, what's wrong with the present, with the new? Why this constant harking back to the past? What's wrong with developing a new relationship with an ancient deity and using that? Why not take it to it's fullest and develop a new deity? Why do we have revisionist religions? Most people here do not seem to think that modern paganism is a resurrection of the past, nor do they think that there has been a suppressed continuation of paganism in the backwaters of the world. I can no longer reconsile the two and I really cannot comprehend the obsession with the past an longer.
My degree was in Archaeology and I specialised mostly in prehistory (European, though with a bigger emphasis on Britain as that's where I live and where I was taught, however my undergrad dissertation was actually on rock art in France). The department I was taught at was great. People there were really forward thinking, they tended to differ from mainstream archaeology and develop more exciting ideas about the past, that's not to say that they were all enfant terrible, my Iron Age lecturer is quite a revolutionary thinking in that period and he is now curator of the Iron Age at the British Museum. It was heavily theoritical and we were basically taught how to think differently, how to interpret things and how to read critically as well as learning what we can actually say about the distant past. That is where for me the past became a problem for me, because everything I had read about the past in Pagan books was revealed to be romantic crap supported by huge sweeping statements that are based on what are now outdated notions within archaeology.
"There are several ideas about ancient sites most of which involve the idea of leylines-lines of energy in the earth's crust-which ancient people were aware of and could influence by these structures" (Moorey 1996; 24)
I have never come across leylines in any academic work on ancient monuments. The writer says with such conviction that ancient people (and what do they mean by ancient? anything before the romans? That was a bloody long time and a lot happened) were aware of them and did control them and insinuates that that is why ancient monuments exist, which is crap. You cannot explain every single prehistoric monument in Europe with one idea that has no supporting evidence.
There is so much that we cannot know about past societies and their religious beliefs and practices is one of the biggest problem areas and archaeologists argue over it all the time. If something can't be explained in archaeoogy it is described as 'ritual' whether or not it actually means it was a ritual object or practice or not. 'Riual' means, 'this is too weird, we haven't yet found an adequate explanation for it'. It may be something very mundane. I would even go so far as to say that we, as modern people, can't really understand ancient gods the same way ancient people did because our relationship with where we live and each other and the things that these gods have governed is so different now.
On top of this, what's wrong with the present, with the new? Why this constant harking back to the past? What's wrong with developing a new relationship with an ancient deity and using that? Why not take it to it's fullest and develop a new deity? Why do we have revisionist religions? Most people here do not seem to think that modern paganism is a resurrection of the past, nor do they think that there has been a suppressed continuation of paganism in the backwaters of the world. I can no longer reconsile the two and I really cannot comprehend the obsession with the past an longer.