Reconstruction and revival

What it is

The question this whole section keeps arriving at: what to make of a tradition whose transmission was broken, and which is being rebuilt.

It is not a marginal problem. Almost every article here involves it, and the cases divide into three kinds that are frequently confused.

Survival under suppression. A tradition persisted through active prohibition, with losses. Native American ceremony, illegal in the United States until 1978. The potlatch, banned in Canada until 1951. Siberian practice under Soviet persecution. African diasporic religions maintained under slavery and afterwards. These are continuous, but not intact — knowledge was lost with the people who held it.

Deliberate reconstruction. A tradition ended, and modern practitioners rebuild it from texts, archaeology and folklore, knowing that is what they are doing. Norse heathenry works from late Christian sources; Baltic Romuva from folk song; Celtic Reconstructionism from medieval Irish and Welsh literature. Honest reconstructionists say so.

Invention presented as survival. A modern creation claiming ancient descent. The Gorsedd founded on Iolo Morganwg's forgeries; Wicca's original claim of an unbroken witch-cult; the Wheel of the Year assembled in the 1950s; the Rosicrucian fraternity that never existed.

Where it came from

The question is old, but its modern form comes from two directions at once.

Scholarship made the claims checkable. Historians and archaeologists established what could and could not be shown, and a great many origin stories did not survive. Hutton on Wicca, the Welsh scholars on Iolo, Casaubon on the Hermetica four centuries earlier — the same operation each time.

And the peoples concerned started answering back. Where an outside scholar once pronounced on a tradition's authenticity, communities now assert their own standing to define it, and the question of who gets to say has become as live as the question of what is true.

How it is used

Badly, most often, as a weapon. "Your tradition is made up" is deployed against modern pagans, against Indigenous revivals, and against communities whose practice has changed — usually by people with no stake in it.

That move deserves examination, because it is not symmetrical. Demanding that colonised peoples demonstrate unbroken purity is itself a colonial manoeuvre: the "real" Indigenous person is required to be unchanged, and any adaptation is taken as evidence of inauthenticity, when the disruption was inflicted by the same culture now doing the assessing. Native scholars have made this argument at length and it holds.

What we can and cannot say

We can say continuity is a spectrum, not a binary, and that every tradition on this site sits somewhere on it. Judaism after 70 CE reconstructed itself around study when the Temple was destroyed. Christian denominations have reformed themselves repeatedly. Modern yoga is a twentieth-century Indian creation. The question is never whether change occurred but how much, and who made it.

We can say the claim of continuity is checkable and that checking it matters. This is where the site's position sits. A practice presenting itself as five thousand years old is making a historical assertion, and historical assertions can be tested. When they fail, saying so is not an attack on the practice — it is refusing to repeat something false.

And we can say the value of a practice is not settled by its age. This is the other half, and it matters as much. People have kept the Wheel of the Year for seventy years, the Gorsedd for two hundred and thirty, Wiccan covens for three generations, and have formed real communities and real lives around them. That is what traditions are made of. The only unusual thing about these is that we can watch the making.

The distinction that has done the most work through this section is a different one: whether a tradition is rebuilding itself, or being taken apart by outsiders.

A Buryat practitioner reconstructing from Soviet ethnography, a heathen working from the Eddas, a Lakota community restoring ceremony after 1978 — these are communities repairing their own inheritance, with the standing to decide what counts.

A weekend workshop selling a sweat lodge, a deck of "shaman" cards, or an initiation nobody conferred is something else, and the objection to it — made consistently by the communities concerned — is not about authenticity. It is about who is doing the taking, from whom, and for what.

We cannot supply a rule that sorts every case, and this article does not pretend to. What can be said is that "is it authentic?" is usually the wrong question, and that "whose is it, and who says?" is usually the right one.

Further reading

• Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (1983).
• Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon (1999) — a demolition written with sympathy, and a model for how to do this.
• Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (1998), on the long American history of appropriating Indigenous identity.