[QUOTE=Helen’s Eidolon]
But I have to admit the reconstructionist thing throws me. I certainly get the desire for accuracy - as an ancient historian, that’s my goal, too. But it seems like, at least in the religions I know something about, the non-individual framework is what has come through in the historical record as significant and/or come through at all. It must be impossible to feel as if you’re truly approaching ancient religious experience without temples, religious hierarchy, accurate knowledge of the mysteries, someone willing to mummify you and wrap you appropriately, etc. etc.
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And this is the problem of reconstruction.
No matter how complete our archaeological knowledge of something, there are bits that have gaps, things alluded to that we don’t have information on, things with varying interpretations, things that just don’t work anywhere that we can get to from a modern-day cultural framework.
So people bicker about it. And there are arguments about whether anyone should do the things that are alluded to but not described in detail at all (an example would be seidh, an oracular trance practice associated with Asatru), what to patch gaps with (cultural borrowings from neighbouring or related cultures, making shit up/divine inspiration, attempted extrapolation from extant data, etc.), how closely one should push to emulate ancient culture within modern culture, whether by forming separatist enclaves or trying to push modern culture to new norms, what things are cultural relics to discard and what are theological points to keep, and so on.
My personal approach is looser than many prefer in some places and stricter by far in others. For example: most of the Kemetic temples go far further into cultural reconstruction than I think is feasable, trying to hang the theology of a god-king or its representatives on people who are not extremely wealthy (essentially owning the entirety of a nation in name, and having heavy influence over it in fact) and obligated to provide for their entire demesne with that wealth. (God-kings do not have mortgages.) So I spend a fair amount of time figuring out what parts of that theology I think of as essential – which leaves me with an outlook that I suspect resembles the communitarianism of early Christian groups more than anything else – and find the whole god-king thing as no more tenable in the absence of that structure than priestly Judaism is without the structure of the Temple. (This is why I’m not in an organised Kemetic denomination; they all have either god-king wannabes or cabals of priests intended to fulfil the ceremonial role thereof. So I’m a happy heretic trying to figure out how it works with a less centralised structure.) At the same time, I’m uncomfortable with the level of borrowing of concepts from African Diaspora religions that are fairly mainstream, and am much stricter about where I’m willing to take borrowings from and how much I’m willing to borrow.
The concept of the ancient Mysteries is one that’s really touchy in reconstructions – many of the Mediterranean religions had them, and we don’t know what they were. Some people are all gung-ho about Mysteries, and the IMO more rational of us sort of go<, “Uh. We have no idea how. If we’re meant to have Mysteries, someone will reveal 'em to us sooner or later.” A friend of mine who was at the time doing Canaanite recon did part of a ceremony which we know the physical details of fairly extensively, and it went off well enough that the rest of her group said, “Let’s do the Mystery!” She was dubious. Eventually she decided that they’d work up to doing the ritual they knew about from the historical record in full, and if the Mystery happened, then they’d know how to do it, but intending to do it was foolish.
Basically, the reconstruction process is full of adaptations and people bickering about which adaptations are the right ones. I think the only reconstruction that’s been around long enough to have a settled canon of practice (aside from a few minor things that settled on a canon now known to be historically inaccurate but which works for the membership) is Asatru, and I still hear about these arguments there.
From the earliest times gender-crossing was regarded as a powerful act of magic. As a transgender Witch, I inherit a very old legacy. The Polish anthropologist Maria Antonina Czaplicka lived among Siberian tribes near the end of the Czarist period, before the Siberian natives were collectivized by the Bolsheviks, when their old traditions were still intact. She found that the oldest traditions of shamanism were attributed to women including transgender women. In later times non-transgender men learned the techniques, but took up cross-dressing to follow the traditions. Cite: M.A. Czaplicka, Aboriginal Siberia, Chapter 12: