Strange rumour

It has just been brought to my attention that there is a rumour going round that PfA and HAD are joining forces, with PfA becoming part of HAD.

Certainly this has been suggested to me by several members of HAD, but I have always said no, and will continue to say no.  I still haven't been HAD.

Pagans for Archaeology is an independent body representing those who are opposed to reburial and who support archaeology and museums. Its position is therefore incompatible with HAD's view, which is that reburial is one of a range of options (and presumably the preferred option) for dealing with ancient human remains.

Woolworths alignments

A researcher at the School of Mathematical Sciences at Queen Mary, University of London has applied the techniques used by the kind of people who find mysterious alignments in the landscape to another mysterious and lost civilisation: the mysterious late-twentieth century Woolworths tribe.

"We know so little about the ancient Woolworths stores," he explains, "but we do still know their locations. I thought that if we analysed the sites we could learn more about what life was like in 2008 and how these people went about buying cheap kitchen accessories and discount CDs."

It's good that someone is highlighting the pseudo-science involved in finding mysterious alignments. Actually there are some very simple principles involved in this pseudo-science:

1. Ignore any sites that don't fit the data
2. Ignore any differences in age or culture of the sites involved (because obviously all churches were built on ancient pagan sites)

Beaker Folk wisdom

Her Reverence the Archdruid Eileen has posted a marvellous exposition of how the Christians "stole" the Pagan festivals - including some less well known ones like the feast of the Norse god of hangovers, Bleindin.

January 1 - "The Feast of the Holy Name" was originally a feast dedicated to the Norse god of headaches, Bleindin. Believers would stay in their houses, with the blinds down and the lights off. A day of fasting and silence - the fast only broken by special ceremonial food such as raw egg yolks with Worcestershire sauce, and fry-ups.

Anyone who still thinks that the Christians stole the Pagan festivals would do well to read the excellent book Stations of the Sun by Ronald Hutton, which carefully examines the evidence for the origins of the modern Pagan festivals. It's a lot more complicated than you think.

It's also worth reading the following articles from the Association of Polytheist Traditions:

Ritual and Festivals

• Lupercalia: adapting an ancient Roman festival for modern times
• The Victory of Lugh: a short study on the meaning of Lughnasadh
• Winternights
• Samhain myths
• The eight fold wheel of the year

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.

1421

In fourteen hundred and twenty-one
Zheng He sailed the ocean grey.

...or did he?

The 1421 hypothesis is, unfortunately, bad archaeology. I really liked the idea that the Chinese had discovered America, but unfortunately, it has been decisively debunked and appears to be wrong. The various structures which are claimed to be of Chinese origin are apparently not; and documents in the book are frequently mis-dated and have novel interpretations put on them. It was a really nice idea, but sadly not.

Author Gavin Menzies claims that the Chinese discovered America in 1421. The book seemed quite convincing, but other historians have since comprehensively demolished it, apparently. The wrongitude of his claims is more apparent in his latest effort, 1434, in which he claims that a Chinese ship landing in Tuscany sparked off the Renaissance. That is obviously wrong, because the Renaissance was sparked off by the rediscovery of classical texts and the introduction of inventions from the Islamic world and perhaps by other more internal trends. Besides, it seems unlikely that such a nebulous and widespread phenomenon as the Renaissance could have been triggered off by a single contact, even if it did actually take place.