Some stuff about cultural appropriation crossed my inbox this morning again, in the form of this blog post, which I rather liked.  And given that it crossed my path on Facebook, I commented on it there, on Facebook, before I realized that maybe this idea deserves a bit of wider play and awareness.

See, I’m a history teacher, and while I don’t deny that there were a series of different directed campaigns against “witches” in Europe and the Americas at various points, I think that to characterize the Catholic Church’s efforts to stamp out pre-Christian religions as the “Burning Times” is kind of to miss the point.  I mean, if we look at the last few hundred years — actually, no, let’s look at the last 1,800 years in the context of pagan issues, and just highlight a couple of the big issues by five-decade stretches.

1. 300 AD —  Roman Empire ‘converts’ to Christianity as a way of establishing a social norm
2. 350 AD — Roman Empire’s conversion results in a huge internal fight over what those norms are, anyway (arianism vs. ‘orthodoxy’ vs. pagan)
3. 400 AD — Military incursions into the Roman Empire result in the collapse of frontiers
4. 450 AD — Roman successor states start to appear
5. 500 AD — Germanic (Visigoth, Ostrogoth, Franks, Anglo-Saxons, Jutes) kingdoms emerge all over Europe
6. 550 AD — War among the Germanic kingdoms
7. 600 AD — Era of Culdee Church (half-Druid?-Half Christian?) in British Isles
8. 650 AD — Wildfire spread of Islam across southern Mediterranean
9. 700 AD — Islamic incursions into Europe
10. 750 AD — height of the Muslim Caliphate in Spain
11. 800 AD — Charlemagne’s mini empire
12. 850 AD — Norse (Viking) incursions begin
13. 900 AD — height of the feuds of the feudal era
14. 950 AD — Danish invasion, partial conquest, and partial driving-out from England
15. 1000 AD — Milleniarian movement
16. 1050 AD — Crusader era, sorta
17. 1100 AD —  Crusader era, sorta
18. 1150 AD — Reconquista in Spain
19. 1200 AD — Western Europe starts trying to cope with Aristotle as an intellectual meme; Albigensian Crusade
20. 1250 AD — Condemnation of Aristotle, intellectual retreat into mathematics
21. 1300 AD — Templar controversy; English imperialism vs. Wales, Scotland and Ireland; Teutonic Crusades agains “Europe’s Last Pagans”
22. 1350 AD — the Black Death, the Great Schism
23. 1400 AD — the 100 Years War, Wars of the Roses
24. 1450 AD — Contact between Europe and India sought; anti-Islamic war at its terminus in Spain; end of Byzantine empire
25. 1500 AD — New World Contact achieved; decline of the Irish bardic movement; Lutheran/Calvinist separation
26. 1550 AD — Wars of Religion, exploitation of the New World in progress; Anglican separation
27. 1600 AD — Wars of Religion, protestants vs. Catholics
28. 1650 AD — height of “witchcraft trials”;  Separatists move to America;
29. 1700 AD — Enlightenment and beginnings of Scientific Materialism; African slave diaspora to America
30. 1750 AD — Industrialization and Enclosure, African slave diaspora to America.
31. 1800 AD — Napoleon Bonaparte, and rise of Atheism as a legitimate movement; Anglo-American wars vs. Mexico & Indians (continuing)
32. 1850 AD — Invention of “modern warfare”, full industrialization, (some) Chinese migration to America.
33. 1900 AD — Glittering era of European imperial power world wide, followed by disastrous World War I. Communist revolutions
34. 1950 AD — Hardship and difficulty post World War II; Pax Americana; Pax Sovieta(?)
35. 2000 AD — rise of computer society; Banking scandals reveal modern finance as a form of cultural imperialism; drug wars

I don’t want this post to turn into a “Those poor Europeans and Americans of European descent had it rough! and they’ve had it rough for a long time!” post, because a) it’s not true, and b) that’s not what I’m trying to get at.  What I am trying to get at, is that the “Burning Times” suggested in Pagan and neopagan circles have in fact been going on in a series of small, and relatively loosely-organized and local anti-Witch and anti-pagan movements that were part of larger political issues for close to two thousand years. I haven’t even touched on Caesar’s campaigns against Druids, or later Roman opposition to Gaulish and British paganism, or Catholic missionaries like St. Boniface, or Charlemagne’s forcible baptisms and burning of sacred groves (as part of his larger political conquests and goals, mind you).

This is a whole lot of political, social and economic turmoil — migrations, changes in food and diet (potatoes in Ireland, anyone), collapse of traditional medicine (Avicenna was a popular and useful medical textbook almost until 1900 and the beginnings of bacterial-based medicine), changes in the land under the feet, people moving to get away from the “pagan traditions” of their villages because they’ve become Protestant Separatists, criminals getting shipped to Australia, the Industrial Revolution changing how everyone lives (moving from subsistence farming in the villages to living in dingy apartments in the cities), massive pollution, modern chemistry, automobiles and airplanes and mobile phones and…

Oh, my.

Even if we go back 500 years, just to the beginnings of the cultural, economic, social and economic exchanges (unequal though they were) between Europe, the Americas and Africa, we see the utter transformation — through disconnection, disappropriation, disenfranchisement, dislocation, disfamiliation, and discommunication — in short, the full range of dysfunction — of the land on which people live, the lifeways with which they live, their food and drink, their schooling and education, modes of work and creativity, their symbol-set for understanding the universe, their religious patterns, and their magical minds.

And I wonder if at least part of the reason why Hoodoo and Voudou and African Traditional Religion (ATR) are growing so popular among occult-minded ‘white’ Americans these days, is that the traditional memes and mindsets of their ancestors have been broken — and have been broken for a LONG time.

I don’t say this because I want to excuse ‘white’ American or western European cultural appropriation, or because I want to overturn the myth of the “Burning Times” or because I want us all to say “oh those poor Europeans, with their broken culture.” But I do think there’s evidence of an elongated era of change and overly rapid disturbance in the affairs of the small, who only hope for a long summer as Gordon says.  It’s evident, I think, that between the Myth of Progress and the shattering of the old ways, and the challenges of the Catholic story through Luther, Cranmer, Agrippa, Calvin et al., that I have to go back almost four hundred years — almost twenty generations — before I can be entirely sure that all my mother’s and father’s known ancestors were living on the European side of the Atlantic.   More, I can pinpoint three ancestors in that chain who had to abandon everything — home, land, furnishings, family, church, community — to search for a better life somewhere other than where they were:  Richard, who apparently came to this country in possession of two suits of clothes, three “long guns” and his two sons, in 1645; Sarah, driven from her husband’s home and land with her two young children in the (Bank) Panic of 1837;  Josiah, who abandoned the new family homestead in Ohio to try his luck in Oregon, alone; Albert, who grew up alone in Japan while his (ahem) ‘zealous’ parents did missionary work in the upper reaches of the Yangtse River valley for the Presbyterians.

If my grandparents had tried to initiate me into any family mysteries or ancient pagan cults, I’d have known them for a lie before too long. The family records refuse to hold anything resembling an unbroken lineage from pre-Christian days to the present:  and the wide-gaping Atlantic Ocean itself declares as solid a break with the past as any frontier yet named in human history, saving only the gap between Earth and the Moon.

There’s no lineage here, no elder tradition.  But I think there’s something in human beings that longs for lineage and ancient tradition.  And I think that in part, the modern “witchcraft” movement is an attempt to invent it, just as the attempts to link Freemasonry with the Druids and the cathedral-builders and the architects of Solomon’s temple were part of that same invention.

So, again. I’m not really sure what to do with this information.  I’m pointing out that European relationships with spirit realms have been deeply disrupted for centuries, and that the hunger for that connection, generation by generation, is likely to be in continuing turmoil for some time to come. We can remember the issue of the Samaritans in II Kings 17:24-28, who have no idea why the land doesn’t let them live in peace:

24 And the king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Cuthah,Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the people of Israel. And they took possession of Samaria and lived in its cities. And at the beginning of their dwelling there, they did not fear the Lord. Therefore the Lord sent lions among them, which killed some of them. So the king of Assyria was told, “The nations that you have carried away and placed in the cities of Samaria do not know the law of the god of the land. Therefore he has sent lions among them, and behold, they are killing them, because they do not know the law of the god of the land.” Then the king of Assyria commanded, “Send there one of the priests whom you carried away from there, and let him go and dwell there and teach them the law of the god of the land.” So one of the priests whom they had carried away from Samaria came and lived in Bethel and taught them how they should fear the Lord.

There’s going to have to be a lot of long, slow, hard work to develop anything resembling the magical or pagan or educational or martial lineages that still survive in Asia, and that survive among some Native tribes of North and South America, and elsewhere. Because first, we’re going to have to learn to value them for their own sake. Then we’re going to have to agree to let go of our egos enough to agree to follow someone else.  And that’s not going to be easy for people who’ve been raised in a vacuum that separates us from understanding our own history of separation and disunion.

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