Full Moon: "Reconstruction" versus context restoration (a pagan pedant's primer)

It's Friday, and I can now hear the robins at dawn. Hello.

Some posts that I describe as overdue are focused on topics that I have meant to write about for very literal years. But occasionally, I feel inspired by a topic that I never really meant to make the focus of an entire newsletter installment because I took for granted that if someone was already subscribed for a while they would likely soak in enough clarifying remarks, footnotes, etc. to develop an understanding of where certain opinions of mine lie, without me ever calling attention to those opinions in some isolated way; even if my assumption were correct, this wouldn't account for what someone might think if they just read a single post on its own (or perhaps just the preview on social media), and one of my most autistic traits is how I can't bear for anything I say to be mistaken for meaning something it doesn't mean at all. I will elucidate, refine, and contextualize until I forget to eat or drink.

Of course, writing a separate essay to dispel erroneous interpretations of other posts does not do much good for reaching those same random stumblers-upon that I've now been considering. And just to reassure, I have received absolutely zero complaints about anything I've written in the past, so this isn't some scrambling maneuver to correct optics for fear of an online dogpile. The truth of the matter is simply that if I think a post has been overdue without me realizing as much, then I personally prefer to write it rather than ignore it. Nobody who "ought" to see it may see it, but that's irrelevant: when I find missing context, it must go un-missing.

And that itself brings me to this week's subject. It's time to elaborate about why, when I address matters related to any modern neopagan practices, I can become relentlessly pedantic about the historical background (or lack thereof) for many words, concepts, or activities. Hopefully that pedantry isn't accompanied by rude snobbery, but even if I've succeeded on that front, I would understand someone inferring that my interest in authentic vs. perceived historicity equates to me demanding historical "purity" from my own animist/pagan life. And indeed, some of what I do might qualify as reconstructionism of a sort; I even tag some posts here with that word. But in actual fact, I don't think it's important to study the past just so we can all avoid modern inventions, and I would be the first to claim that what I practice is an amalgamation of old and new — and probably the new predominates, and the old is still largely based on speculation. I would also not prefer that someone see me as intelligent for knowing "the truth" about bygone peoples and languages. For one thing, most of what I know in this field is that which I know I don't know, and ditto for my favorite scholars; for another thing, accumulated information is not intelligence.

So what is my purpose in debunking etymological misconceptions, or in similar tendencies that this newsletter periodically indulges as necessary preambles or as outright tangents? My short answer would be that the useful kind of pedantry is a vital act of high-context resistance to a low-context culture. The long answer is... well, read on.

Reconstructionism: from naysayers to grifters to fascists

There is no unified reconstructionist movement within modern neopaganism. I believe this is the case for several reasons:

1. Reconstructionism concerns itself with culturally distinct practices, so when a reconstructionist movement or tendency emerges it always come with some ethnolinguistic or geographic qualifier, e.g. "Celtic" reconstructionism, or for those who already want to split hairs[1] about different Celtic subgroups, perhaps "Insular Celtic" reconstructionism and even within that heading "Brythonic" (or "Brittonic") reconstructionism.
2. Within any of these specific situations, it's also highly likely that more than one thinker or organization will have their own idea of what legitimate reconstructionism ought to look like.
3. A lot of reconstructionists would rather not be identified as neopagans anyway because of that pesky neo- prefix.[2] The reconstructionist is of course uncorrupted and untainted by anything that happened later than the Middle Ages, maybe the Iron Age. Maybe the Bronze Age...

I'm growing sardonic already, but in fairness (and maybe not even surprisingly) I have some sympathies. I think a great many reconstructionists pursue their quest in good faith. The defining characteristic of reconstructionist ideology is the desire to recover something that was homogenized or violently suppressed by the Roman Empire, by Christianization, by the Reformation, and by the Industrial Revolution. This is a deep, now-transcontinental psychic wound that ties directly to the loss of land-connectedness among people now classified as "white" (and who for several hundred years have collectively made this everyone else's problem). Would it not be magnificent to reverse that damage with a spiritual blueprint from the distant past?

Yes, it would be. But the largest obstacle to using such a blueprint is that nobody has found one yet, and in all likelihood nobody ever will. We have surviving mythology, but often from manuscripts that are newer than the stories themselves, so we don't know what the "original" stories were. We have many enduring customs that indicate pre-Christian roots, but these customs have probably also evolved beyond such origins. We have archaeological artifacts, but these usually require interpretation. We have modern Euro-descended people who claim to have inherited very ancient traditions through their families, but most of the time (even if not all of the time), as I will get to later, they are lying or deeply mistaken. And there are even more fundamental challenges such as:

• Formally codified belief systems are typically a feature of religions in cultures that have writing systems, and even these have been subject to societal evolution and theological debate.
• Most pre-Christian pagan cultures on the European continent did not develop writing systems until relatively close to the time when they were exposed to Christianity or adopted it.
• In the case of pre-Christian cultures without writing systems, any formal codified belief system that did hypothetically exist within a certain time period is impossible to retrieve because no orally inherited version is guaranteed to match its earlier source.

Therefore, the most we can usually extrapolate about these past cultures is discrete fragments of what people may have practiced, and not something on the level of saying, "The Celtic horse goddess Epona was revered every year on x day from the Bronze Age through the Iron Age, and here is what happened in temples that were built to her, and here is a chant that travelers would recite to ask Epona to guide their horses, and now she definitely survives as the legendary Welsh figure Rhiannon through the following etymological developments..." The major exceptions are preserved Greek and Latin written sources, but besides being exceptions they still demonstrate marked heterogeneity in the authors' values or any religious basis thereof. One might well argue that in lots of cases an animist culture's mythology is the closest one will find to a belief system, but examining those stories still often won't directly explain what an initiation would look like to become a priest of Thor. That information would very likely have been occult — that is, secret. Now it is gone.

The most rigorous reconstructionists know this intimately, so if they want to remain true to themselves they are left with vague, unexciting suggestions of knowledge that don't encourage practical application. I am sure this isn't very satisfying, and it virtually necessitates either driving oneself mad in the quest for something concrete — or becoming a lifestyle naysayer, spending all one's time critiquing the inaccuracies in what other people practice. This would of course be the bad kind of pedantry, and if it were someone's primary encounter with reconstructionists, no wonder reconstructionists frequently get stereotyped as annoying.

But it can deteriorate from here. Recognizing that there are so many gaps to fill in for what we know of the past, many people who still posit a reconstructionist goal can become prone to embellishing what's missing. And there would be nothing wrong with this on the surface, but pragmatically speaking it's a marvelous way to induce infighting about what degree of embellishment is acceptable vs. reprehensible. Going a step further, for many people who place such a premium on historicity while being frustrated with its ambiguities, there's ample opportunity to be led astray by whatever pied piper is sufficiently charismatic to sell them a reasonably convincing "solution" to all the missing pieces.

Grifters slip in here. My hunch is that they mostly aren't the kinds of grifters who set out to deceive others — more likely, they buy their own bullshit. But this is still a serious problem. I have lost track of how many people out there offer (spi)ritual services or writings with an attitude of, "I'm not like all those silly, fake, Wicca-inspired, New Age idiots! I belong to the Old Way, the Real Way that people in [insert place here] used to follow for thousands of years," and then postulate things about their practices that are about two parts historically informed to ten parts unverified personal gnosis. To be clear: sometimes there is nothing wrong with unverified personal gnosis. But as ritualists we should not be calling it anything other than what it is. And if someone is quite convinced their own personal gnosis comes from somewhere other than themselves, they can sadly make a very good show of historical authenticity for reconstructionists who (like anyone) may confuse authenticity with earnestness.

And where the grifters go, so do the fascists. For any readers who already harbor a negative perspective on reconstructionism, this next issue may go without saying. But for those less aware, fascists stalk readily through reconstructionism, preying on the psychic wound I already mentioned. They love to fill in missing information with anything that will support white nationalism, patriarchal gender roles, and the rest of their diseased philosophy; they can bellow the loudest about how much the past matters to them, recruiting new membership from people who aren't already politically primed to steer clear. They can offer an attractively total worldview that mirrors the reconstructionist's priority of rejecting anything newfangled. And they can misdirect the reconstructionist's anger about why it's so hard to uncover that which has been lost. They will still blame Christianity, but only insofar as they consider it an extension of Judaism.

All of this is tiresome beyond measure.

Historical ignorance: grifters & fascists all over again

Now indeed, I have raised the problems with reconstructionism to agree with reconstructionism's critics about how if we lack adequate information from the past, a fetish for reproducing the "authentic" past immediately becomes very silly if not dangerous. But unfortunately, avoiding reconstructionism's worst consequences will not happen through simply walking in the opposite direction. Too often I encounter misguided arguments that because it's both difficult and risky to develop a pagan ritual life by some metric of historical accuracy, any sort of educational effort around real history, etymology, etc. amounts to skeptical fun-killing at best and prescriptive authoritarianism at worst.

I wish I were placing a strawman here, but I'm not; like I said at the outset of this post, no one has complained to me directly about my own pedantry, but the fuller story is that when I move through public neopagan or neopagan-friendly spaces, especially online, there is always going to be someone who acts like people are pissing on their lawn when those people have just made a very neutral corrective explanation, sometimes a purely informative talk or writeup not even directed at them. I don't routinely make "well, actually" posts on social media or the like, but I guarantee that if I were to do something like that about how the English day name of Friday is actually derived from Frigg's day, not Freyja's day, there are higher than 50% odds that someone I've never even interacted with before would come out of the woodwork to huff, "Why can't you just let people call it Freyja's day? It doesn't hurt anyone!" no matter how kind and playful my tone, and despite how I never said people mustn't call it Freyja's day.

As it happens, because Frigg and Freyja may or may not be different Germanic cultures' names for the same goddess[3], I don't even think it's that misleading to equate Friday with Freyja. And if people who feel more allegiance to Frejya by that name — regardless of how they feel about Frigg — would like to have a day of the week relating to her, then of course that doesn't hurt anyone. Any remark I could make in a public forum about Friday originally relating to Frigg would have been made because of thoughts I might harbor around giving Frigg her own due if someone were interested, or around having an accurate understanding of the English goddess that an English word comes from. There are utterly obnoxious ways to bring the topic up, of course[4]; however, this doesn't mean that bringing it up at all should be construed as a personal attack.

But I digress. This is just one example of how someone will prefer the story of a word (or a holiday, or a custom) that they've carried in their own head, and if you tell them even indirectly how that version of the story isn't "real" they will react in defense. And in fairness to them, I sympathize just as well as I sympathize with the reconstructionists. We have been shaped by a hegemonic Christian culture where disagreements about the truth have sometimes resulted in death sentences. And beyond that, stories are the foundation of how we understand the world, so to inadvertently ascribe to someone what Tyson Yunkaporta would call "wrong story" can often shake that person to the core. Cognitive dissonance cannot abide itself.

The trouble with this defensive response comes when it happens over and over on a systemic level. And while perpetuating misinformation has been possible for as long as human language has existed, maybe longer, today we live among opportunities to misinform with extraordinary speed. Whether or not someone shares my belief in the value of bringing the past forward to enrich the present and future, if enough people shrug off evidence-based information that's offered about the past because it makes them feel like they might want to reshape their worldview and they don't want to do that work — this makes those people ripe for exploitation. I can accept that some real tokens of the past will always gradually be replaced by mythology, and that consensus reality depends on said consensus, but I am very reluctant to stand by while fellow ritualists accumulate a sum total of information so ill-founded that they then will swallow snake oil. To use the earlier example again, it matters very little if Friday winds up being mapped more to Freyja than to Frigg because modern Germanic polytheists (or similar) have made an organic determination that Freyja is a deity they want to associate with that day; whereas it matters a great deal if this remapping belongs to a wider pattern of people buying in to things like flat earth memes because first the memes are just entertaining and then the memes are all they actually know.

If grifters can make names for themselves by purporting historical authenticity among people who are devoted to it, they can make even better names for themselves by purporting historical authenticity among people who don't even think about it most of the time. This may sound paradoxical, but what I have long noticed about non-reconstructionist neopagans of any stripe is that anything that appears sufficiently old still tends to hold great caché. The reconstructionists are just the people whose fixation on the old extends to rejecting the new. For everyone else who isn't a transhumanist techno-utopian (and maybe even for some who are), perceived antiquity still frequently implies enhanced power. That which we deride as New Age/Wellness commercial scams relies at least fifty percent of the time on selling "ancient [insert culture] wisdom" to people who are trusting enough to assume that nobody would just make up something about the past to sell a product.

Therefore, should fascists seem to only lurk in reconstructionism, nothing could be further from the truth. The tricks that fascists can use on the reconstructionists are, again, markedly if not more effective among people who haven't practiced differentiating real history from little throwaway soundbites. I don't like to complain too vociferously about platforms like TikTok lest this be conflated with suspiciously misogynist-sounding gripes about teenage girls having fun discussing magic online; but as for TikTokification, Goopification, whatever we want to call the phenomenon of cutting up already loose knowledge bases into even tinier, ultra-commercial snippets, I have plenty to complain about. We've gotten Qanon out of it, because we are living through a catastrophic acceleration of context collapse.

"Returning"... to high-context

What is the way out between reconstructionism and sheer historical ignorance? We could run headlong into the embrace of the new and only the new, but so far that attitude has recently brought us the ever-shifting cult of suckers for the blockchain, the NFT, the LLM, and terraforming Mars while the Earth dies. I think that on some basic level modern paganisms are all destined to grapple with the past because of that core inspiration by something, whatever it was, that pre-dates Christianity. We are trying to "return" to something even if we know better than to "retvrn" to some Hyborian Age where men were men and so on.

I would like to join other voices who posit that one thing we most need to return to is being a high-context culture instead of a low context one. High contextuality is a feature of indigenous communities, as well as of communities that may no longer qualify as indigenous but that still exist separately from a hegemonic, homogeneous, imperial culture. It can also arise in cultures that are more what we would think of as "Westernized" today, but generally the underlying process there of modernization, individuation, rationalization, and domination is a context-killer. Contextuality works on a continuum.

As for what it denotes, a proper anthropologist could give a better explanation than I can, and Wikipedia goes over it with some thoroughness; but for my purposes here, a reductive yet hopefully useful summary of contextuality is that it refers to how much the members of a culture (usually correlated with an ethnolinguistic group) implicitly recognize the wider context of what they're communicating, whenever they communicate. A high degree of contextuality results in someone not needing to spell things out through direct language for the listener to infer extra non-verbal details, which might be added through body language or might be considered self-evident through the relationship between the speaker and the listener.[5] A low degree of contextuality results in that which goes unspoken being assumed not to apply, and any nuances to a situation require direct mention.

The ways these styles contrast are typically seen in interactions where someone from a high-context culture may find someone from a low context culture to take things overly literally, to miss what "should" be obvious detail, and to need to talk things through much more before reaching a conclusion; the low context culture member may in turn find the high-context culture member to express their thoughts without a clear point, to give confusingly vague information, and to dance around things that "should" be said plainly. And in both cases, one person may find the other rude, either for failing to catch some implied rules of etiquette or for assuming something that wasn't implied at all. It's also possible to observe additional linguistic layers to this contrast when looking at different languages' morphosyntactic styles: high-context cultures' languages are often marked by fusional, agglutinative, or even polysynthetic word forms, allowing for looser word order; low-context cultures' languages are frequently on the analytical side, requiring strict word order to make up for the grammatical information that's missing from the words themselves.[6]

This is by no means a one-to-one correlation, but it's interesting, especially because of how more modernized and imperialized cultures are more likely to use analytical languages. As implicit context is stripped away, subtler methods of embedding grammatical relation are traded for blunter syntax. Many linguists take it for granted that analytical languages are "naturally" favored over time, but is this the case? Perhaps a colonizing, imperial path has been carving itself through one language after another, for centuries.

Now, because of how I was raised in a very low context culture, as might be quite apparent I have a very low-context way of communicating, in the sense of anticipating all the context that someone else is going to miss if I don't say it. But to be frank, while this is instinctive for me — especially given my type of autism — I wish it weren't the case, because I see it as a coping mechanism for living in an atomized society where nothing can be taken for granted from one's peers, neither love nor generosity nor basic necessities of life. I would much rather live within a paradigm where everyone is operating from such a position of mutualism and relationality that far less needs to be said directly. I would like it to be safe to assume.

And as for how this connects to (neo)paganism, I think it's low-context thinking that facilitates so much misinformation about historical practices. When context is stripped further and further away, generation by generation, we are left with random tokens that we don't know how to really fit together anymore. Everything is splintered, drifting apart, entropic. We have to spend a lot of time — and words — fitting things back together, recreating the context that was once there. When some meme or idea is passed around in a bite size, poorly contextualized format, that can erode any remaining meaning behind it even further.

If we can reach the point of overthrowing capitalism, decolonizing land and mind, reweaving relations, and existing in true community, then historical pedantry probably won't have much more of a role to play. The right stories will be better able to find their way down through the ages, and the wrong stories may be more easily abandoned. But until then, preserving and restoring context through direct verbal clarification may be the best option I — we — have for preventing further damage.

Practical implications

By now, I hope that it's apparent my pedantry about matters of history, linguistics, anthropology, or other fields that intersect with neopagan practices does not really concern what those practices are, so long as they're broadly ethical. The concern is rather whether any practice, no matter how benign in execution, is informed by low-context beliefs, as that lack of context may build up in the long run and create harmful effects. There is a world of difference between a conscious choice of newly developed features to our rites vs. an unwitting adoption of newly developed features that are inaccurately ascribed historical weight. There is likewise a world of difference between puritanical reconstructionism vs. maintaining basic historical awareness.

In my opinion, we can all agree that modern-day engagement with the concept of witchcraft brings some potential for feminist analysis, and for some of us to call ourselves witches as an empowering maneuver, but it should simultaneously be possible to do all of this without fallaciously claming nine million real witches were murdered in "the Burning Times." Tens of thousands of people (primarily women, but not all) were murdered for perceived witchcraft (some of them actually practicing some ritual art but many of them not), and that still went hand in hand with the rise of capitalism and the theft of the commons, and this is bad enough on its own.

Similarly, it's fine to honor pre-Christian ancestors with modern ceremonies that may bear no resemblance to what those ancestors materially practiced, because we are hopefully doing what is right for our current time and place. However, we don't need to justify it by speciously claiming we are doing what those ancestors practiced.

It's fine if someone uses a modern name for an ancient holiday. However, their practice around that holiday may be enriched if they fully understand the background of the name they're working with.

It's fine if someone runs an entheogenic retreat in the woods. It isn't fine if they claim the ritual in question relies on an ancient tradition that this person invents or lies about. The truth of whether that tradition ever actually existed is worth knowing. And the cultural specificity of a real tradition matters.

I marked the top of this post with an image of Stonehenge, and I asked whether it mattered what modern day peoples celebrate there. Archaeologically speaking, there is still plenty to debate about what the site was used for in the past, and in my view the only self-evident details are that because a number of graves were dug on the premises, the site may have had something to do with death; because there's an important alignment with the horizon points for midwinter sunset and midsummer sunrise, those dates could have mattered for something that was conducted there; and because of culled animal bones that have been recovered, timing around midwinter is particularly likely. The rest is all still rather a mystery, but it hasn't stopped people from bringing their own ideas to the table now. And do I care about that?

Well, if the rituals that someone performs at Stonehenge now don't align with my own gut sense of what would feel right to do there, I can't say I would take part in what they were doing. But I'm not in any better position to have a historically informed answer than they do. At the end of the day, I don't care what choices they make, as long as those choices are made in good faith and don't pretend to be historically correct with zero material basis. That does not make me a reconstructionist — just a proud pedant.

[1] Such as myself. I apologize.

[2] Why do I so frequently favor that prefix or say modern pagan instead of just saying pagan? It's primarily because although I find pagan a meaningful term I think it simultaneously delineates a) the ritual life of Euro-descended people who had an animist and/or polytheistic worldview prior to Christianization, and b) modern people who reject Christianity in favor of something resembling what they understand of that older worldview. Most of the time, category b) has only partial or even minimal direct knowledge transmission from category a) and also relies plentifully on legitimate but deliberately syncretic occult frameworks drawn from pan-Mediterranean esotericism. So I prefer to add modifying language to category b) as a reminder that we're in a highly evolved phase of what pagan constitutes.

[3] I don't have a real opinion about this. There are fascinating arguments for and against it.

[4] Not the least of which being the sort of person who always opens conversations by broadcasting that they know real information and not the false information. Which is what I might be guilty of in some posts here. But there is hopefully a difference between providing clarifications about things that many in your audience may actually not know vs. preaching to the choir and waiting for everyone to affirm how enlightened you are.

[5] I say speaker and listener here as common linguistic terms of reference, but this might just as easily apply to someone signing and someone watching. I also suspect that many sign languages wind up being high-context due to several factors.

[6] For non-linguists: fusional, agglutinative, and polysynthetic languages display features when assembling words like smashing lots of roots together into uniquely specific compound words, or using a lot of inflectional prefixes or suffixes; analytical languages are more like modern English, where we don't convey things so synthetically and instead prefer shorter, less modifiable words that we can string together in a precise order to communicate what we want instead.

I enjoyed writing this very much, so I hope you enjoyed reading it. Next week, there will be a particularly unique reading experience; as previously announced, I'm going to share my first written interview with someone else who operates beneath the umbrella of antifascist apocalypse theory, none other than my inspiration Margaret Killjoy of Live Like the World Is Dying. If the interview is a popular format here, I hope I can build some more connections over time to repeat it with other people. Either way, the week after that will feature a post for the Occult subscriber tier — $5/month, please consider it since I remain unemployed — geared toward the holiday of Calan Mai (Beltane).