Actually I’m Wiccan, I don’t believe this, and I know very few pagans who believe this. Those who have expressed views like this at pagan groups I’ve been in usually don’t stick around. They tend to get stuck with the label “fluffy.”
(The fluffiest pagan I’ve ever met went on to become a fundamentalist Christian, then a satanist. This is actually rather typical – the ones who go all out for the “I’m-a-reincarnated-witch-from-Salem” stuff are the ones who were never serious about Wicca as a spiritual path in the first place, and trade it in for the next small shiny faith.)
However, I’d like to point out an odd descrepancy. Wiccans are frequently criticized – by Wiccans and non-Wiccans alike – for playing fast and loose with history. Christianity and Judaism rarely are. for example, all of my dictionaries list approximate centuries for the lives of Moses, David, and Soloman, who were most likely mythological characters.
And many of the Protestant branches of Christianity don’t resemble Christianity as it was originally practiced – their values are thoroughly modern. Are Presbyterianism and Pentecostalism as they are practiced really the same religion as that practiced by the original Christian communes? Does sharing a God entitle the newer Christian faiths to a shared history?
I don’t have answers to these questions. What do you think?
(PS – there’s nothing wrong with running naked around in the woods. Most religious practices seem silly to outsiders – I’m given to understand devout Catholics eat the blood and flesh of their God on Sunday mornings.)
Popular acceptance, I suppose. There are people who make this point, there would just seem to be fewer of them. I once talked about Cecil’s Is there any historical basis for the events of the Jewish Exodus? at a seder, so I guess what I’m saying is bringing this up can equate to taking your life in your own hands.
I guess it depends on what you mean by “fast and loose.” Claiming that Wicca held on as a real underground movement for 1300 years or more, suddenly to “come out” recently has rather little to recommend it. Claiming that the “burning times” had anyhing to do with Wicca is simply false.
On the other hand, David and Solomon, while legendary (not mythological), may very well have been based on real people, if on events that were magnified out of proportion to the reality–and the time period in which they would have flourished is as real as Britain’s Arthur, (although certainly not as portrayed in the works of Malory, Tennyson, or White).
Even the notion that David and Solomon (and Moses) are legendary is less than 50 years old, has only received serious treatment in the last 15 years, and is not yet actually conclusively proven, so there is a substantial body of literature that has examined the periods in which they would have lived. The very fact that you can claim that they are “mythological” is a sign that Judaism is not being given a pass–the historians who have researched the evidence and drawn the conclusion that David and Solomon might be fictional are often Jews and Christians who are examining the reality behind the story.
In contrast, any number of people who wish to be pagan are known to claim a history that we know to have been invented in the last century. There are, of course, also Christians who claim that “real” Christianity went underground around 300 C.E. and they are also generally the targets of derisive laughter (even when they make their living printing imaginary histories on cartoon strips).
Generally, with more education the more legendary aspects of religious history have come under scrutiny and are moved away from the category of history. No one believes that the Donation of Constantine is real. Most scholars, today, see the story of the temptation of Jesus as symbolic, yet some 19th century scholars argued over whether Jesus could have been taken to a mountain high enough to see the whole world. I know of no aspects of Jewish or Christian history that are not subjected to re-examination or analysis. However, that analysis has not yet always made it to the popular press or texts. The Wiccan faux history never made it into serious historical texts, so it is easier for the layman to dismiss.
I don’t believe that. I do believe that there were pagan survivals, co-existing with and frequently merging with Christianity into all sorts of hybrid forms. Some of those hybrid forms are still around of course – every Christmas and Easter we get reminders of that.
I don’t think what we’re practicing is the same thing as the people out in the fields of Northern Europe before Christ – for that matter, I doubt members of “Celtic paganism” or “Norse paganism” were practicing the same thing as each other. I suspect such things varied wildly from village to village. And I doubt these people would recognize us as their spiritual descendents.
I do not believe that paganism “went underground,” only to resurface in its modern form. I do not believe Wiccans were burned at Salem.
Still, I guess what irritates me is (as usual) the double standard. The few “fluffy” Wiccans who go in for Gerald Gardner’s invented history are held up as the standard, and our religion mocked on that basis (as in Apos’s post, which I originally responded too).
Yet we lived immersed in invented histories that even many standard reference sources accept as true, and many of these invented histories are Judaeo-Christian religious. So why aren’t these religions similarly dismissed?
No educated Christians, of course. But Apos up there was denigrating my religion on the basis of its most ignorant (and loudest) members. Christianity does not fare any better when held up to the same criterion.
Anyway, back to the thread – having read the Harry Potter books, I don’t see any connection to Wicca at all. They all seem pretty secular/liberal-Christian to me, though maybe the sisters Patil (being named after Hindu goddesses) are Hindu.
Oh, and Rowling has said (ad nauseum) that she made up the spells, and would’ve thought that her bad Latin was a dead giveaway
Ninja_Pizza_Guy , your reply made me laugh. And yes, that analogy of opinions and assholes is very true. I told my ignorant friend that. She didn’t get it. :smack:
Nor would I presume that you did believe it. I do not hold that everyone (or anyone) practicing Wicca is a nutcake.
The complaint raised was that somehow Jews and Christians get a pass on some of the factually uncertain but widely accepted history while pagans do not. My point was that the salient points in Jewish and Christian history were accepted for a very long time (and examined as if they were historical) and that the research to overturn some of those beliefs is rather recent (and not yet all conclusive) whereas some of the stuff that has been widely published regarding pagan history has been known to have been invented almost from its first publication and has been roundly debunked since that time. I do not know of any educated Wiccan who believes that the “burning times” were an assault on paganism any more than I know any educated Christians who believe Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, James, Peter, and Jude all sat down in a couple of years and put together a comprehensive work called the New Testament. It is simply a matter of signal to noise ratio: with fewer Wiccans (or pagans) wandering about the countryside, any of them who spout silliness get noticed as “Wiccan” while a Jack Chick type gets dismissed as a fringe element of the larger Christian body.
dare_devil, if you’re really up for some frustration, ask 'em why Harry Potter is evil, yet the Chronicles of Narnia are good. Many of the same themes are present in both works (magic! witchcraft! sorcerers! talking beasts!), yet one is constantly ridiculed and the other held up as a model of children’s literature. Possibly because one of the two doesn’t constantly beat you over the head with the Christian allegory. I’ll leave it as an exercise for you to guess which one this is.
Just smile and nod, nod and smile. You’ll get through.
My Grandma is the sort of Baptist who believes anything any TV preacher says without needing any further information. So the other day she started her crap about Harry Potter being evil because it has something to do with witchcraft, and I asked her why the Wizard of Oz was acceptable. She boggled, actually took a step backward as this new thought struck her, and weakly said, “Well, we didn’t know what the Bible said in those days.”
Sometimes the sheer enormity of the ignorance depresses me.
P.S.-- I love you, Grandma, even though you drive me insane.
Grandma also told me she regretted ever letting me read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe because it got me interested in “all that occult stuff”. That was before she found out it was Christian allegory written by one of the most articulate and intelligent Christians of all time.
Well, I didn’t know about that site, but I was going to comment that I’ve often found that fundies absolutely hate Lewis. I’ve never quite been able to figure out why.
Perhaps the phoenix feather (or other magical component) in your wand has lost its power. I’d ask if your wand was stiff or whippy, but that would be getting off topic.
On topic, there are just too many obvious reasons why the HP magic can’t work in the real world to take any fear of it seriously.
