THE OCEAN; WHERE EVERYONE CAME FROM
slothrust – horseshoe crab, @randomingoftherandomness , kirsten sims, hrvoje majer, jfk, dunkirk (2017) dir. christopher nolan, haevn – the sea
The mentality that is preached in a lot of Christian circles that you have to be grateful and happy no matter what is so so harmful
You're allowed to have feelings and be angry and be sad and that is not a sin
You know what I see a lot of new age hippie dippy people do it as well
This year I learned that evangelical Christians don't believe that Catholics are Christian and it blew my mind.
I was raised Presbyterian in Utah and all my friends were of different faiths, just not Mormon and all of us non-Mormons stuck together. I studied early Christianity with the intent to be a youth minister until studying Christianity made me lose my faith when I realized the winners abuse and make up rules and what was left of Christianity is whatever the catholic church said and the evidence to the contrary was just catholics calling other sects heretics.
I never spent much time around evangelicals, but now that I know survivors of it... Wow. I totally see the (evangelical) atheists and pagan converts from evangelical Christianity in a new light. That prosperity gospel got some of them so twisted and fucked up they are unable to see any other kind of Christianity.
They are super dangerous and terrifying and no one really seems to be talking about it. There also this dooms day element to not give a shit about the destruction of this planet that also freaks me out.
I grew up Catholic in a heavily Catholic area but I did encounter it when I went to camp when I was ten and one of my cabin mates told me I was so nice that it was a shame I was going to hell.
But yeah, there are always people who have been disillusioned by evangelical Christianity who move into Pagan spheres without realizing just how much toxicity they've absorbed and are just trying to swap out the surface dressing.
One of three things happens: they confront that toxic behavior and achieve personal growth in paganism; they become disillusioned with with paganism because it doesn't solve their problems and move onto adopt some other belief systems dressing and just keep repeating the process; or the worst case scenario where they become disillusioned with paganism because it doesn't solve their problems and boomerang back to evangelism with a bonus vendetta against the evils paganism.
Having been a witch for over two decades now, I have seen this play out over and over again.
The other option is that they become atheists with just as much toxic evangelism and its just as frustrating.
^^^ That part! I grew up in one of the largest evangelical churches in the country and whose pastor was the head of the SBC when I was a kid. I’m also from the US South I won’t go into the toxicity of it or all the trauma I still deal with, but that last part is something I see SOO often. And it’s a big reason I draw a distinction between classical atheists and Nu Atheists/antitheists. For people reading who might not be familiar, classical atheists simply lack a belief in deities. Antitheists, on the other hand, actively believe there are no deities and many spend far too much time trying to convert people to their way of thinking. And from an academic Religious Studies perspective, it’s why I take the often controversial option that Nu Atheists are, indeed, part of a religious tradition.
There’s no agreed upon definition of religion, but some of the common markers of missionary traditions are having a mythos, holy text(s), attempts at conversion, etc. And, tbf, I often say this to instigate a debate lol. But at the same time, they really do mirror evangelical Christianity specifically. They replace the Bible with books like The God Delusion, the title of which always makes me 🙄 They replace Jesus and Paul with Dawkins, Hitchens, and Hawking. They maintain the fervor and feeling of superiority of evangelicalism, just turning it in a different direction.
that1fangrl asked:
Genuine Question. I thought Christmas was an example of Christianity stealing and rebranding other cultures. If not, how does Yule differ from Christmas in a historical sense?
esotericecology answered:
As much as I deeply respect the desire to learn and the willingness to do so, I am not going to do all your work for you.
If you want to seek out more information about this, you should start by looking into the concept of Interpretatio Christiana, which is the dogmatic term for what you’re describing–the Christian reinterpretation of ‘pagan’ beliefs to better assimilate and colonize into non-Christian lands. After that, you should do some research into the proto-Germanic history of Yule, particularly in the time before Christianization. You could also benefit from getting some knowledge on Midwinter festivities throughout history as a whole, since we as a global historical humanity kinda always have taken any and every excuse to get roaring drunk and eat bread and set things on fire, which is pretty much 95% of all the concepts of Midwinter.
Yule is a big part of the combo but it was also the Christian bastardization of saturnalia and mid winter we have evidence from the fucking Bible that say Jesus was born in the spring closer to easter which Easter is just an apropiation of Ostara it isn't any where close to the time Jesus was crucified in 30ad because if we are to believe the Bible there was a solar eclipse during his crucifixion and the only solar eclipse in 30ad in Jerusalem was all the way back in November
The funny part about my what you just said is that it makes it blatantly obvious that you did actual literal none of the research on the topics I flat-out handed to you on a silver platter that would tell you how wrong you are, and yet.
Stop getting all your knowledge on the history of Christianity and religion as a whole from a fucking Pinterest infographic about the "wheel of the year" and research things for yourselves.
I literally just named the name of the pagan holidays that the Christian apropiated and what days they would take place if the Christians were actually celebrating what they said they celebrating I literally agreed with you and added on information
You misunderstood entirely what I was saying. Christmas was never a pagan holiday nor did it appropriate from other pagan holidays. Easter is not an appropriated Ostara. This is a "discussion" that happens every damn year and gets debunked every damn year.
Again. Please do your actual research first.
What are you talking about historically christan colinzer's saw people celebrating yule and thought it would die down it didn't so the church slapped on yeah this was actually when Jesus was born now it's about Jesus. Christmas was even banned in the America's by colinzers because they saw it as to pagan
When the American colonizers first moved to North America, it was to escape religious persecution in England. They were a sect of Puritans, who were very zealous in their faith.
When the Puritans banned Chistmas in the American colonies, it was not because of their fear of "pagan origins". It was actually because they did not want to mar the holiness of Christ's birth with the giving of gifts, which was seen as enticing greed, material wants, and distracting from the purpose of the holy day, which was intended to be spent in prayer and contemplation (as were most days for Puritans, admittedly).
The gift-giving aspects were also directly taken from the lore of Saint Nicholas, so that, too, was never taken from paganism.
Again: please, please, PLEASE, do your research before just saying these things.
People, please!
The Christians have done plenty of messed up shit over the years, but they did not steal Christmas.
THAT WAS THE GRINCH
All the rest of you unfollow me I want to spend more time alone with hippieghost.
“With East Anglia having such a long coastline, it would be expected that the region abounds in traditions of magic and mystery concerning the denizens of the deep, namely mermaids and their kin. With one notable exception (which I will describe below), this is however not the case. It may be that these tales have now been lost, as there are many church pews and bench-ends carved into the likenesses of mermaids by the mediaeval craftsmen that made them, or it may be that, not having a wild and rocky coastline, these stories never developed as they did in other areas. However, East Anglia does have a tradition of 'land-based' mermaids, continuing the theme of a living landscape and the magic thereof begun in the previous chapter, and these are known as 'Meremaids' or 'Merewives'.”
—
The Devil’s Plantation:
East Anglian Lore, Witchcraft & Folk-Magic
Chapter 2: ‘Mermaids, Giants and Spectral Hounds’
by Nigel G. Pearson
biscuit-making-bitch asked:
If you don't mind sharing, I'm curious what your personal experience with Brighid has been like? It would be disingenuous to say I'm new to paganism at this point, but I'm still very inexperienced. Personally, I feel Brighid was the first god to be open to me. She very, very patiently waited while I made peace with the fact this is what I believe and even more slowly started to practice. The extent of my practice at the moment is lighting a candle for her every night. She's been nurturing, patient, and fiery (lol) when I am not doing what I'm supposed to.
Hello! Ime, Brighid is the first deity many folks reach out to or feel welcomed by. To me, this makes perfect sense given her role as Brighid nam Bratta, especially. Nightly prayers are also something I’ve done, both exclusively to her as well as more elaborate prayers that began and ended with addressing her.
But as you rightfully pointed out, she’s not only a mother. She’s a poet, a smith, and a healer. All of these aspects include fire: the fire a mother has for her children, the fire of passion in poetry, the fires used in healing, the fires in the hearth to warm a home and cook, and the fires of the forge. Like many parental figures, she’s not afraid to get after you if you’re outta line or not living up to your potential. I find that I feel/have felt her fires in all these aspects of my life. My religious and personal landscapes have shifted so much over the years, but that seems to be a rather constant force for me.
anyway as long as we’re talking abt this I just wanna share a tweet thread that resonated w/ me today
[image description: a series of tweets from twitter user @ sofftestpunk, reading as follows:
like I literally don’t care if you’re gay, are you QUEER?
I’m specifically part of the queer community and NOT the LGBT+ community. ive never felt like part of the LGBT+ community. I am QUEER. and my community is QUEER. and if you’re not queer then cool I’m sure you have your own communities n shit but I’m looking for my peers in mine
the key distinction for me is that the queer community is browner and Blacker, the LGBT community has always appeared painfully white and uncomfortable for me to personally be involved with. the queer community is also more radical, practicing radical unlearning of concepts like
family, love, gender, sex etc and reframing and rebuilding these things. the LGBT community has never, in my experience with it, been as driven about breaking down these systems and more often aim to be able to live safely within them
for me, the lgbt+ community is white, skinny, cis, abled etc. it’s the LGBT society at my uni; a room of sex segregated white people with very strict expectations of sexuality, expression, bodies etc. self professed queer spaces are the messier underbelly, the mixing
the fuzzy boundaries and the fuck the boundaries, the ugly and unattractive, the new and different, the too loud and too weird. that’s my family
muted the thread btw because people don’t know what “personally” or “in my experience” mean :^)
end description.]
noticing some of y’all get real angry about people feeling unwelcome in LGBT spaces because of racism/ableism/cissexism/fatphobia. maybe try channeling that anger towards the racism/ableism/cissexism/fatphobia instead of the people drawing attention to it, yeah?
I need one 😍
This is about the fifth time I've seen a post circulating about purple doors or purple hardware of some sort on a witch's house. I....REALLY want to know where this comes from.
Because there is so much modern witch lore that deals with "hidden ways" that witches would communicate or announce their presence to each other....and so much of it is completely fictional. (And anything dealing with something being purple is an automatic red flag for historical reasons.)
Don't get me wrong - I absolutely love the idea of a purple door or a purple doorknob on a witch's house. That sounds freaking fabulous. Hundred percent would do it myself. I'm with you there, OP.
I just...these infographics that get passed around with no sources attached to them (ever) are really causing a lot of confusion and I'd love to get to the root of it.
Does anyone know the source of the image or any sources on the myth of the purple door?
Phew, I just went down a rabbit hole and I’m not sure I actually found THE answer, but I found some interesting stuff. I’ve also rewritten this response several times as I stumbled across something new each time I was about to post it. First I’ll go over those things, as there might be something to gleam from each layer deeper I went. So let’s go in order of newest to oldest. First I found a ton of images like the one above liked back to facebook groups, but most were private and I couldn’t get any good dates on them, many were recent, as in this and last year.
Then I found an article on Witchipedia from late 2019 that included this:
Recently, a trend among witches of painting their doors purple to mean “A witch lives here” has sprung up. This seems to have started with a Facebook meme a few years ago, though it has been reported to me that some occult stores were selling signs saying “A purple door means a witch lives here” even before the meme appeared. Since I don’t have exact dates for either, I can’t say which came first and I have no idea who came up with it or where they got it from.
So that confirmed that it’s at least somewhat recent. Google has a search by custom date feature, so I went back year by year, starting in 2019 to see if I could spot the first time something like that was mentioned.
I found A LOT of articles about Feng Shei, the mystical meaning of colored doors, witchcraft and protection spells on doors. Many of those posts all used similar wording, saying pretty much the same thing, in that “I rewrote an article” kind of way you see often if you’re reading a lot of articles on the internet. So it had to come from somewhere, and all of these poorly paid authors were just copying each other, who copies an original. For anyone who’s not familiar, that’s how a lot of online journalism works.
For the past decade, THIS 2010 ARTICLE by Home Curb Appeal has been quoted and plagiarized by every website I found that talks about the meaning of a purple door. And I’m not even a little bit sure where Home Curb Appeal got this idea or if they’re the original, but it’s the oldest version I could find and it’s important either way. The only difference is that at some point they suddenly started adding in the idea that a purple door means a witch lives there. I can’t nail down that date yet, but and I suspect it was after 2013 and becomes gradually more popular from 2015 on. Here’s why.
August 17, 2013. Tumblr user @onetwistedpixie-blog made this post, quoting the same HCA article above, but saying that it sounds like a witch to them. It only got about 70 notes, with one follower saying they were leaning towards painting their door purple.
About a year passes, Sep 23, 2014 and the only post I could find was from a facebook group. It’s the exact tumblr post, taken nearly 1 for 1, but to a group that has a lot more people. I’m messaging the group owner to ask some questions about the groups population back then. Now the group has nearly 10k followers. Even if it didn’t have many back then, it’s one of those posts that can easily be shared to other larger groups. There are about 70 shares from that post, most are private groups, one groups that shared it the same day also has about 6k followers currently, some individuals have between 400 and 1k friends. The post is still being shared from this post as recently as September of last year.
So far, and I bet I could spend another several hours checking into this and find an actual linage of shares and spreading of the idea, it looks like that tumblr post getting put on facebook might have been the spark. It was easily memeable, easy to spread, made it’s rounds on facebook, got really popular on pintrest as well, and has made it’s way home to Tumblr. That’s my best guess and unfortunately all the time I have to research on the topic. What a rabbit hole.
All that said and done, I’m probably going to paint my door purple. It’s my favorite color and everyone already knows I’m a witch. Might as well go with the meme, since it’s already got traction.
Side note: As I write this, I find an other interesting mystery. I found some posts from pinterest of a similar image, dated 2006. Pinterest didn’t exist until 2010... So I guess google is a little messed up. Because of this, I’ve excluded pinterest results from all of my research as well as some other websites that have similar problems of the dates on google and their pages not matching up. It just seems unreliable and I’d rather go by the publish date on the website I find stuff on.
WELP! There it is.
Excellent research there. I am thoroughly impressed with your skills!
And this is yet another example of how a meme can become a "fact" if it's repeated often enough, even when devoid of context or sources.
So yeah, witchy purple door symbolism? Modern myth. Creation of the internet.
But by all means, witches - paint your doors and enjoy!
well at least of all the modern myths, this one is benign and isn’t stealing anybody’s shit
As far as we know, anyway. Let's hope it remains so. Cause I like the idea of having a purple door.
Ok, this has always struck me as the kinda thing you'd find in a house magic book. Started going through them and Ellen Dugan's Cottage Witchery does list purple as color associated magic and that is 2005.
I am going to through some more of the books I have and see what I can find
@breelandwalker what did you mean by
“And anything dealing with something being purple is an automatic red flag for historical reasons.”
Oh! I was going to expand on that and I forgot. Thanks for the reminder!
Historically speaking, purple is a difficult color to come by. The dyes that made purple products were not cheap and for quite a long time, they weren't common either, since purple was a color reserved for nobility or at least the upper class. It didn't really become available to the wider public until the 1850s when the first synthetic dyes made richer fabric colors more affordable for the working classes. (Glass doorknobs made with manganese were manufactured from the mid-1800s to early 1900s, and these turn purple when exposed to UV light over time.)
Even then, the association between purple and magic is a fairly modern one. Older associations align the color with royalty, clergy, high rank, and rarity. It's possible that the association with spirituality and ritual carried over to modern color correspondences that mark purple as a color for magic, mystery, spiritual power, and wisdom.
In the 20th century, we also see a lot of pagan authors including references to witchy "codes" in their writing. These were largely based on the idea of a secret pagan society which survived by hiding in plain sight during the witch panics of the middle ages. Witches would allegedly "signal" their presence to each other with small tokens, such as the presentation of an acorn. Historical evidence for these claims is thin on the ground to nonexistent.
While it's no surprise that a color as special and desirable as purple would be associated with magic, and even assuming that there WAS some kind of secret witch cult passing signals back and forth, the lack of access to purple materials would seem to make the prospect of using purple doors and suchlike a highly unlikely one. (Not to mention that a secret code that you advertise with something as blatant as an unusual paint color for your front door is...a pretty lousy secret code.)
So anytime I hear about purple being associated with witchcraft practices alleged to have originated before the 1900s, I am immediately suspicious of the claim.
This doesn't mean purple isn't a magical color - it most certainly is! But we must carefully examine claims of antiquity for modern practices, because most of the information we have now is either reconstructed or straight-up invented. Some people try to add weight or legitimacy to their practices by claiming that they're older than they really are. Which is patently ridiculous because older doesn't always mean better.
There’s so much actual research in this that it makes my little academic heart sing haha
It's time we decolonize the Cascadian volcanoes
If we can say Denali instead of Mt. McKinley then we can say Lawetlat'la instead of Mt. St Helens. The mountain is named Tahoma, not Rainier. Naming a mountain after Jefferson doesn't erase its true name of Seekseekqua.
One name tells of the thousand years indigenous history and culture of the tribes who live there. The other name tells me nothing but colonialism.
I’ll never get over how much stories change in modern interpretations based solely on being forced to be viewed in a mainstream lens.
The story of the Túatha dé Danann, right? The way they appeared in Ireland and the way humans ultimately came to be on the island. It’s codified in one narrative style as an epic story about the ascension of a group of god-kings at the expense of the beings they warred against.
But growing up, I was told this story that lead me to understand it as circular and as a geographical event, and explanation of what could physically be observed to be true.
Túathe dé Danann literally means children of Danann, Danann being an earth entity who literally manifested as earth, soil, ground etc. And the TTD’s descending beings, the aos sí, are people of the mounds, hills, etc. So these beings are aligned with earth. Their war was with the formorian, meaning the dark sea.
Their war was told to me as the geographical formation of the island: one that happened before the story, during the story, and will just continue on at different intensities forever. Water vs Land makes an island!
Then humans were said to sail there, so the order of the trials and adversaries they face makes sense.
First attempt: the formorian (the sea) must be overcome.
Second attempt: Túathe dé Danann (the land) must be lived with.
Third attempt: the sky opened up and forced the people back onto their boats until they asked Ireland as an abstract concept to give them refuge.
So there I was told the story in a way that was to be understood as a step-by-step explanation of how a society comes to be: the people arrive somewhere (over the sea in this case), they learn how to live on the land there and adapt to it, and then they form the philosophical construct that is their society for the safety this social contract brings them.
But if you codify the story using the linear narrative structure of a colonized academia and literary scene instead of the circular version told in folk lore, it becomes about god kings who colonized and humans who were simply allowed to live after they sufficiently begged. Which…I see why a very colonized academia likes and understands that story better; but now the actual lesson and purpose of the story is lost—which is, to teach people about both the geographical and anthropological origins of Ireland.
And look, this isn’t a story or case I find particularly offensive. I just wanted to show a case where it was very obvious and easy to explain what was being lost so that folks who read this might consider how much of many stories are lost to the colonial linear narratives at the heart of academia and literature. And also, so they might consider how mangled “myths” sound to the people of their originating culture.
So, you tagged this “academia”, so I’m going to respond to you as an academic, and as a trained Celticist who has devoted the last two years to the study of both Old Irish and Middle Welsh, with a specific focus in Mythological Cycle texts.
The invasion narrative, as we understand it, is a masterpiece of pseudohistory, with its origins in the 9th century Historia Regum Brittonum, which is popularly if inaccurately attributed to a figure called “Nennius”. We can actually observe how the narrative was changed over the years, because in this very earliest account of the invasion cycle, neither the Tuatha Dé nor the Fir Bolg are included in the invasion of Ireland. They were added later, as an attempt to explain multiple variant traditions, in the ~11th century Lebor Gabála Érenn, which is, in itself, a masterful combination of contemporary politics, Christian delicacy, and pre-Christian tradition. Earlier versions of it most certainly did exist, such as in the now-lost Cín Dromma Snechtai, which is believed by most (but not all) scholars to date from around the 8th century, but this is the earliest complete form of it that we have. It should also be noted that, while a decent amount of the material is pre-Christian in origin, enough to make mythographers very interested in it, it is, just as much if not moreso, a product of the 9th century literary elite. It was made by them, for them. They did their best to preserve the traditions of their ancestors, I won’t tolerate any slander or criticism of them for that, but they preserved them as THEY understood them.
There is no complete folkloric account, least of all a pre-Christian one. That is not to say that the version that you heard is WRONG, because I truly don’t believe that a myth can be “wrong’ or “inaccurate”, rather that it doesn’t have continuity with the medieval sources and therefore….we CAN’T study it. There’s….nothing to study. Nothing that’s been written down. If we had a 17th century scribe being like “Yeah, that’s what happened”, it would be one thing, but we’re limited to the extant sources. Now, folkloric studies are a real thing, and the work they do is incredibly valuable, and we use folklore often as a means of tracking a myth across time. It’s one of our most important sources for understanding the potential pre-Christian origins of a given myth, because we can look at competing oral traditions across a wide span of the island and compare them against one another and the written medieval accounts. However, that would be worthless in terms of the invasion scheme because, as I just said, it was always viewed and intended as a formulation of the literary elite. You will not see any reference to Partholon or Nemed in peasant stories recounted in Co. Wicklow. What you have is one interpretation of LGE, a medieval text written by and for the rich, but it’s an interpretation that is fairly at odds with the medieval material, though we are, generally, willing to agree regarding the cyclical nature of the material. One group goes in, another group goes out, though each brings new innovations.
Now, why do we not agree with this interpretation?
As you say, academia is a product of colonialism, and it has and continues to uphold colonialism and racism implicitly. I’ve…seen too much in the last couple of months to deny it. And I’ve been fighting too hard against a priori assumptions regarding LGE and colonialism for too long. Since before I even began formally working in the field.
That being said, I would deeply appreciate if the work we did wasn’t simplified to colonialism, so let’s go into the linguistics: Tuatha Dé Danann is a late name for the Tuatha Dé, as I’ve discussed before, and as scholars have for the most part accepted. We generally agree that there was a goddess named *Anu*, but she was a minor Munster tutelary goddess. Tuatha Dé should, instead, be read as “People of the Arts/Crafts”, with craftspeople being at the top of the medieval Irish social ladder. The Fir Bolg bring in law, the division of land into provinces, etc. while the Tuatha Dé bring in the nobility. It makes sense for a highly socially stratified society like Ireland - The Tuatha Dé were not just thought of in terms of beings gods; they were also viewed as being emblematic of the nobility as a whole. The reason why they were associated with the mounds wasn’t due to being associated with the earth per se, rather that, instead of the association with the divine being in the heavens, as a modern Christian understanding would have it, the divine was instead linked to the underground. This might seem like quibbling, but there is a not-insubstantial body of evidence to support that anything below the earth was considered to be a means of reaching the gods, hence why you have so many sacrifices offered up to rivers, lakes, bogs, etc.
The Fomoire’s etymology is considerably more controversial, which is in keeping with the generally shadowy nature of the Fomoire as a whole, but, in Old Irish, it would be better, if we were to do a literal translation, to translate it as “Under the Sea” (Under the Seeeeeeeaaaaaa/Darling It’s Better Down Where It’s Wetter/Take it from Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Sorry). With the preposition fo meaning “under” + the neuter i-stem noun “Muir.” That being said, the modern interpretation of the name is less dependent on that, and suggests that the “Mor” component is more cognate to the “Mare” component in “Nightmare”, describing some sort of fright or horror, which is also there in the Morrigan’s name. Furthermore, while this is a new argument, I wholeheartedly agree with the idea that the Fomoire were not viewed, in the very earliest sources, or even unanimously after the earliest sources, as a rival group to the Tuatha Dé. Rather, there is a strong level of evidence to suggest that the Fomoire and the Tuatha Dé were viewed as being one and the same, reflecting different aspects of the supernatural. (Cath Maige Tuired’s impact in “codifying”, as much as any of this can be codified, the depiction of the Fomoire as a rival tribe, and it was a direct result of the Viking invasions and represents a brilliant manipulation of the tradition.)
Additionally, it cannot be said that the pseudohistorical narrative regards the mortals as “begging” for their lives - Even the Fir Bolg, who are given the shortest end of the shaft, get off considerably lighter than that. The sons of Míl, in a move basically unprecedented in world mythology, wrest control of the island from the gods, banishing them beneath the surface, which sets the tone for Mortal-Supernatural interactions throughout the rest of the literature, as the Tuatha Dé can be alternatively helpful and vengeful towards the mortals (which is very rich when you consider who the Tuatha Dé took the land from.) There is the very real idea that, if the Tuatha Dé were given half a chance, they would take the land back again in a heartbeat, but they can’t, and so an unsteady truce exists between them and the mortals of Ireland.
I leave it to you as far as whether you believe this or not, but there is literally one thing in this life that I can claim for myself and it’s knowing the Mythological Cycle of medieval Ireland inside and out. We devote our lives to the preservation and promotion of this material - Spending years learning the language, teaching the language, reading, editing, and translating manuscripts that have sometimes been halfway erased due to bad vellum, and we do it for next to no money because we’re often given minimal funding by colleges that would often rather see us removed entirely. I have next to no chance of actually being able to get a job in the field, but I do it anyway out of love for this material and a STRONG desire to protect it - Both in terms of protecting it from the natural causes of age and decay that can wreck havoc on a manuscript and from the white supremacists who would use it as an excuse to promote their utterly vile ideology. God knows that we’ve had our issues with white supremacy in the past, God knows we still have a lot of demons to exorcise, but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t doing real or valuable work with the medieval sources, or that none of us care. We DO care, and that’s why we work so hard with this stuff. Furthermore, the worst interpretations of the material ended around the 1950s, and even they generally relied on an Indo-European model as opposed to, point blank, saying that, because it was the natural way of things, THIS happened. That interpretation comes from the 19th century and is very well discredited at this point. There are very few scholars who are even willing to study mythological material. I’m….one of a very small number.
Most of my mentors in the field have been Irish, people whose first language is Gaeilge and who are thoroughly enmeshed in their own culture. I would walk the halls of my uni and hear the professors going back and forth in their native language, having the time of their life. I never felt excluded, even when they sometimes forgot not all of spoke it as well, I was just happy to see it alive and well. They didn’t enter the field for fame or glory or riches, they did it because they LOVE their native culture so much that they decided to devote the rest of their lives to protecting it, and for their sakes, I’ll beg you to reconsider separating “academics” from “people from the culture they’re studying”, because the lines aren’t drawn that clearly. Academia has its problems, but not in the way that you’re describing, speaking as an academic who travelled halfway across the world in order to better study this material.
So as one might expect from coming back to the tumbles after a... what, three year hiatus? Most of the blogs I was following have died. As they do.
Time to go blog hunting!
Anybody have good suggestions for the following corners of the tumblr?
- Brythonic Polytheism
- Celtic reconstructionism/revivalism
- Paganish academia
- Altar/sacred space inspiration/porn
- General deity devotions - I'd especially love to connect with other poets
Hit me, new friends!
I’ve been gone for a long time myself! It seems several of us are popping back up atm
