Thinking on Construction

[Labrys]

Some recent conversations set this train a movin' on the mental track.  Since various trads visit here...thought I would throw it out there.  I like the odd anachronism as well as the next woman, but I have limits....

This may get a bit long.  Ok, ok...this WILL get long.  First I want you to read a bit of a visualization to get you on board where my mind goes on a certain topic!

Imagine you own a lovely Victorian style house.  One of the real ones, not a new-built kit home; but the honest to long-live-the-Queen real deal, rattling radiators and all.  You find it beautiful---the most beautiful type of home.  It reminds you of a time you can scarcely recall, when you visited you aging great-grandmother in England as a tiny child.  So your home reminds you of her own dark wood, velvet draped house, of stories your parents told of happy holidays spent there, songs sung there and stories told there.

Now, imagine your beautiful Victorian house burned down.  Luckily you are fully insured and you tell your insurance man you want to rebuild your home as it was and he sets the wheels in motion.  As soon as the roof beam is up, you give the crew a beautiful hand-made evergreen wreath to hang from it's end.  The home will come again!  But now something happens that you didn't think about.  Your spouse says to you, "Honey, could we just put the electrical wires IN the walls this time instead of outside when they retro-fitted the place originally?"  Because, originally, you see....back when it was a new house--the new technology was gas lights, not electric!   You say, "Sure, why not---it is the 21st century!"

Then your contractor comes and tells you that the foundation will have to be done differently because of building code changes, and the walls must be 2 x 6 construction.  And the kinds of wooden floors your house had are impossibly expensive and rain-forest destroying, how about those beautiful new bamboo floor products?

And your eldest child reminds you how the windows let in cold and asks if you won't put in the new double glazed windows in vinyl frames that won't drip moisture, mold, and let cold in and heat out every winter.  You have to admit, the heating bill often made you catch your breath in shock!  That makes you think that that old romanticly bare-raftered attic might need some re-thinking, too.  And painting that triple floored manse was a nightmare, so you tell  the guys to go on and order vinyl siding.

And then you remember getting up on that tottering ladder to clean the gutters and think a new covered gutter system, while it is not Victorian, it won't detract from the beauty a bit and will assure you not busting your butt falling down.  As the house walls and windows and roof goes up, your contractor comes back again to tell you that radiators are so very old school and simply not done now; would you consider radiant flooring in the bathrooms and modern propane or gas fireplaces?

Finally, you are ready to furnish and move in.  Your new house looks like a spiffed up spit-shined version of the old one.  It has all the grace and beauty of the old times , but none of the creaky, costly inconveniences caused by old technology.  You have a neighbor down the road who has a Victorian and this guy clicks his tongue at you for not "staying authentic", but you suspect he is just jealous.  His wife is the only one in town who expects the part time cleaning lady they hire to show up in a uniform, for crying out loud----so he lives in a Victorian to boost his ego playing "lord of the past-times manor"??  You ask him, sarcastically, if he also gets to work by horse and buggy.  He stomps off.

This is basically, to me, admittedly a liminal sort who skirts ALL organized traditions with a skeptical eye, the issue with reconstructed religions.  You have those who feel a need to re-live the past very literally instead of reconstructing the beautiful spiritual parts that have lingered and left us in awe of ancestors without the creaky bits of life that were attached by the century that saw it as living religion.  I get a pain with people who think that religion has to be 'played' like an SCA weekend.  I have a hard time believing that any man, woman, or child of the Viking Era would not have loved EVERY modern convenience of our age---they would have instantly adapted.  It would not change who they were, it would ease their way and make a religion more gloriously joyous, not simply a sometime matter of propitiation and fear as EVERY old faith occasionally had to be.

I know Greek reconstructionists who do no ritual whatsoever.  They say, "Well, you know, back then a hundred oxen would have been sacrificed.  I have no oxen, so I CAN'T practice my faith.  Athena will just have to know how much I adore her."
Trust me, Athena is NOT that kind of girl...get off your ass, you lazy idiot and make changes to bring your love for Athena into this century.  She was a city girl, you know....and a hundred oxen aren't 'round the corner!

I don't feel that the past was "better"....only different, with harder circumstances in some ways, and better circumstances in others.  Life was hard, but populations were lower, life was more valued and people depended on each other more and on technology less.  The present day makes some aspects of life easier, but it doesn't mean comrade-ship cannot be elevated to what it once was as an act of worship, does it?  The best thing about humans is that we are the thinking species, we can reason and choose and not simply repeat by rote like parrots.

An old Catholic friend used to decry what she called "Cafeteria Christianity"...what she called it when Christians picked and chose which parts of the Bible to believe in and obey.  I thought this pretty silly....it is a book of history and belief written by men.  Men ARE fallible and make errors.  Now, further along in explaining how things work, we see those errors.  It makes little sense to revere a bit of text saying to kill witches, for instance, when you know that a "witch" might have just been the spooky looking old lady down the road---and that your cattle didn't die of her "hexing" but of foot and mouth disease!

Choosing the best parts of a beloved tradition to re-create in modern dress is not, in my opinion (note, no humble!), but good sense.  Inclusion of the modern and saving the best of the old IS reconstruction at it's best.  After all, I have a late Victorian Age piano....and NO, it has no "skirts" on its legs!

[Zenon]

"Re-constructed" to me is always something new.  There is no way we today can practice a religion exactly like it was done in the past - our brains are different.  We can't possibly feel the same way as people centuries ago, with no books or technology.  It's a new experience.

[Brijrian]

Here, Here!, Kudos, Dittos, and the like. I have to agree with you Labrys. It is downright IMPOSSIBLE to do exactly what our ancestors did in their rites, etc. Particularly the Druids, since they thought it was sacrelige to write anything down.

And of course, that doesn't mean that our rebuilt, refurbished religions won't be just as meaningful as the old ones. They are just different, and honor the gods of our ancestors and of whose existence we are aware of.

The whole point of religion is to have some method of contacting and becoming closer to the Divine/God/Goddess. It HAS to be something that you can relate to. It HAS to be something that will fit into your life, however modern. It HAS to have meaning.

Or you might as well not have one at all.

That is why I love Wicca and Witchcraft so much. They tend to draw wisdom and practices from many different paths. On the surface they seem archaic and renaissance-ish. But they have deep meaning for the practitioners, and when it comes to magic and manifesting your desires, there is all of that delightful modern science about quantum theory thrown in. Not to mention all of the stuff that science *can't* explain yet!

*Brijrian

[Labrys]

Bri..yes, I do think the adaptable nature of modern witchcraft is one of its greatest strengths.  While I admit I don't usually call myself a witch in religious terms, I am often regarded as one. 

I often think that neo-pagans with such a profound wish to live in the past have simply never grounded themselves in the real history of that past!

[Lark]

One of the issues that I see in Recon paths and to a certain extent in Wicca as well is an emphasis on what our ancestors were doing and how they worshipped without looking at how those beliefs and practices are relevant to our lives today.

Speaking merely in terms of Wicca here since that is my path, I see people holding rituals and talking about how their ancestors would be planting the fields and fertilizing the crops, and slaughtering the animals to get them through the winter.  Yet these are things which have no part of the modern lives of most of us.  If we can't tie what we are doing to how it impacts us in the here and now we are basically play-acting and not truly creating a religion at all.  We have to find ways to take what was appropriate to our ancestors and make it also fit what is true of us in our modern lives.  When I lead Sabbats in my Trad I may speak of what our ancestors did, but I then talk of how it effects our modern lives.  Our ancestors may have planted grain and harvested it...we plant the seeds of our projects and plans and eventually we bring those to fruition.  Seeking the modern meaning to ancient traditions is what keeps our paths alive and growing.

-Lark-

[Labrys]

Exactly my thought.  I used to think, when that Greek recon bemoaned his lack of cattle, lol, what a twitterpated nit!  Cattle were moveable wealth back then...NOW, money is moveable wealth.  Use money as a sacrifice, you fool!  He could even have "sacrificed" money to groups that need funding to fight for the right to practice Hellenic paganism IN very Orthodox Christian Greece!

It isn't really that hard to find viable modern meanings that parallel things in the lives of our ancestors, it just takes some thought.  The more of that is done, the faster paganism will assume a fully functional broader ranging appeal.

[Brijrian]

I often think that neo-pagans with such a profound wish to live in the past have simply never grounded themselves in the real history of that past!

Speaking of that...I keep wondering what on earth our ancestors did with babies! My biggest question is how they dealt with baby poo and potty. It's messy enough in the modern times when we can wash our hands and the like. What did they do without running water?

*Brijrian

[Labrys]

Speaking of that...I keep wondering what on earth our ancestors did with babies! My biggest question is how they dealt with baby poo and potty. It's messy enough in the modern times when we can wash our hands and the like. What did they do without running water?

*Brijrian

My understanding is cloth diapers stuffed with dried moss for absorbency.  And lots of washing up at the creek.  Older toddlers, outdoors, went about pants-less.  Doing it down your own leg doubtless made you catch on to what it was all about more rapidly!

[Sorsha]

Lots of good points made here! I think it is necessary to move with the times in many aspects of life. I mean, you wouldn't want a doctor performing surgery on you using implements from the civil war era when he has access to the best modern medical technology has to offer would you? Isn't it kinda the same thing?

~~Sorsha~~

[Zenon]

In my circle, when people talk about "harvesting" or any example of what ancestors used to do, we use it as a metaphor, we use something analogous to this for our magic work, it helps us direct our energies to a goal and tunes us to the season.  I think this is to dig deeper into the esoteric meanings of the sabbats.  For example if this is a harvest season, what are we harvesting in our lives, what are we preparing for, in our selves, mental, spiritual, etheric?

[Lark]

Yes, that's the way my Trad approaches the various Sabbats as well.  We tie the meaning to our modern lives.  Like Judy Harrow says, practicing "Uncle Wicca" gradually makes things meaningless.

-Lark-