Great minds think alike

Since we're on the subject of invented histories, Chas Clifton has posted about Druidry and made-up history. He writes:

It is the "crisis of history" again. Can your religion get respect when it is based on non-existent "history"?

The subsequent discussion in the comments is interesting, too. Actually pretty much all religions have a mythical origin story, but some are more plausible than others. And since Pagans like to think of ourselves as reasonable people, having made-up histories is not consistent with our self-image. Religion doesn't need to have an ancient pedigree to be valid; it's your personal response to the great mystery of existence that matters, and how you live your life, and how you deal with the community (which includes other-than-human people, of course).

"Stolen" festivals?

I am frequently disappointed by the number of Pagan blogs and websites still banging on about Christians stealing our festivals. In fact, many of the modern Pagan festivals were "retro-engineered" from Christian ones. But in fairness, it must be pointed out that the reason we don't have continuity with ancient paganisms is because they were stamped out by Christianity (though the transition was not always violent, I know).

Although we honour the same deities as the ancient paganisms, there is a lack of continuity between us and them. We do not make sacrifices to propitiate them; and we are also the heirs of Enlightenment science and individualism, and the Romantic movement, and all the other historical events of the intervening centuries, especially the current environmental crisis. We must create a religion for our own contemporary needs, not a quasi-historical re-enactment of an imaginary past.

Admittedly, when people talk about a festival "stolen" from us by the Christians, they are referring back to the (now debunked) scholarship of the fifties and sixties which assumed that Christian festivals were overlaid over ancient pagan ones (which, in the case of Christmas and Hallowe'en, is actually true). So modern scholars need to get their work out there where it will be read by the general public. Ronald Hutton has done an excellent job of this with his books, of course, but he is the exception to the general rule.

The eight festivals celebrated by contemporary Pagans have their roots in ancient practice, but all eight were not celebrated by any one group, and the modern meanings are different. There are some excellent articles on the Association of Polytheist Traditions website debunking some of the claims about festivals.

• Samhain myths by Robine Herne (2004)
• The Eightfold Wheel of the Year by Alexa Duir (2003)

Of course, many contemporary Pagans have read Ronald Hutton's Stations of the Sun. If you haven't, you should, along with his latest one, The Druids, and The Triumph of the Moon: a history of modern Pagan witchcraft.

a wasted opportunity

Well, I suppose I'm going to have to do a review of Bonekickers.

Frankly, I thought it was mostly awful. The characters were quite good, but the plot was terrible, and the script was occasionally dire. The beheading of the poor Muslim guy was in very poor taste, and completely gratuitous and unnecessary for the plot. The caricature of right-wing Christians seems unfair, because even though some of them are severely mad & bad, they haven't actually killed anyone yet. And the next episode doesn't look as if it's going to be much better.

Archaeology is exciting and interesting in its own right - you don't need to jazz it up with conspiracy, murder and mayhem to make it more exciting. In short, this was a wasted opportunity.

Don't make it bad

There's a lot of bad archaeology out there. Caveat emptor - if you see books claiming extra-terrestrial or Atlantean origins for pyramids, civilisation, and the like, don't waste your money.

Here's how to spot false claims and bad archaeology:

• Putting the hypothesis before the evidence. Frequently, authors of bad archaeology create a hypothesis (for example, "Ancient Atlanteans built all the pyramids") and then selectively go around looking for evidence to back up their claims.
• Ignoring part of the evidence. For example, UFO enthusiasts claim that the Nazca lines were landing-strips for UFOs - but then when you see the whole picture, you realise that the alleged landing strips are the feet of a giant bird.
• Deciding that our ancestors were too stupid to invent stuff on their own (so they must have needed help from aliens or Atlanteans to get civilisation started)
• Re-interpreting myths to suit themselves. Instead of legends of gods and goddesses being taken at face value as slightly exaggerated stories of humans or what they actually purport to be - hey presto, they are in fact legends of visits from extra-terrestrials.
• Bad data. Use of old maps, special places, ancient legends, esoteric interpretations of religious writings, instead of excavation reports and historical evidence. In short, bad data.

The difficulty is that some proper archaeology deals with things like ancient sites being aligned on solstice sunrises and the like; but then bad archaeology extrapolates from this into realms of fantasy.

The point is, real archaeology, which describes how our ancestors actually lived, is far more interesting than bad archaeology. I find the fact that civilisation developed gradually over many millennia and built upon earlier technological and intellectual developments much more satisfying than the idea that some alien being kindly bestowed the gift of fire and writing on Mr & Mrs Ug, who weren't clever enough to think of it for themselves.

Here's some examples of proper archaeology:

• The development of writing in Mesopotamia
• History of timekeeping devices
• British prehistory
  

Why ley-lines annoy me

Ley lines result from a process of joining up monuments on the map that have no connection with each other, possibly based on the assumption that all medieval churches were built on top of ancient pagan sites (in reality, only a few were, such as Knowlton Henge and St Paul's Cathedral). Thus you get a rather arbitrary line drawn across the map joining monuments that were built hundreds, even thousands, of years apart.

They're linear. Surely energy moving in the landscape would move in swirly patterns around the contours of the hills and the geology? More like water. I don't think Chinese feng shui practitioners have detected any ley lines, though they're very good at finding energy movements in the landscape. There are also electrical currents in the Earth's crust and mantle, which interact in a complex way; these are known as telluric currents. Ley lines are also not the same as song-lines, which are actually known to Indigenous Australians as the 'Footprints of the Ancestors' or the 'Way of the Law'.

When Alfred Watkins talked about leys, he was talking about prehistoric trackways. The whole concept has been expanded to mean mythical energy lines across the landscape, such as the Mary and Michael Line (which is sometimes depicted as swirly, but does arbitrarily join up unconnected monuments).

Also, ley lines are becoming congested:

Ley lines in certain parts of Britain are becoming so congested with hippies, travellers and mildly frightening-looking people with coat hangers that the government has today announced a multi-million pound ten year ley line building programme.

I'm not saying that there isn't energy in the land (it feels to me as though there is); I'm just deeply skeptical about it moving along mysterious and arbitrary lines.

Of course, if you want to argue for ley-lines as a mythopoeic or metaphorical construct, that would be different. But I very much doubt that they objectively exist, especially as there are no ethnographic parallels and little or no evidence for them in indigenous British folklore.