“We Have Always Done It This Way”
There may be five words more dangerous to community history than almost any others:
We have always done it this way.
Have we?
Maybe.
But humans are remarkably unreliable historians, particularly when the history involves ourselves.
Memory is not a recording. We remember pieces. We fill gaps. We simplify complicated events. We forget people we disliked and enlarge the roles of people we admired. Stories become cleaner with repetition. Motives that were confusing at the time become obvious in hindsight.
Eventually community history can become community mythology.
That is not necessarily malicious.
It is human.
A gathering may begin for complicated reasons involving several people, competing ideas, limited money, a borrowed campground, and somebody who happened to own a vehicle large enough to move everything.
Twenty-five years later the story becomes something much cleaner:
“The founders created this place so Pagans could have a home.”
That may capture the spirit of what happened.
It may not capture what actually happened.
Those are different things.
This is where archives become wonderfully inconvenient.
The old newsletter does not remember the story the way we do.
The festival program lists someone we forgot.
The photograph shows that the thing everyone remembers being built in one year apparently existed several years earlier.
An old message reveals that the supposedly unanimous decision was anything but unanimous.
The evidence interrupts the legend.
Good.
It should.
If Paganism is going to become an intergenerational religious culture, we owe future generations more than good stories. We should leave them enough evidence to challenge our stories.
That might sound strange coming from someone who values bardic tradition.
I do value it.
The bard and the historian are not enemies. They answer different questions.
The historian asks, What happened?
The bard asks, What did it mean?
Trouble begins when either one claims to answer both perfectly.
This matters within Paganism for another reason: we already have a complicated relationship with historical authenticity.
Modern Pagan traditions may draw inspiration from ancient religions, folklore, archaeology, medieval literature, nineteenth-century romanticism, ceremonial magic, twentieth-century occultism, counterculture, environmentalism, feminism, reconstructionist scholarship, personal revelation, and modern invention.
Those ingredients can become tangled very quickly.
Something practised for thirty years can start being described as ancient simply because nobody remembers who introduced it.
A chant written at a festival can gradually become “traditional.”
A ritual created to solve one practical problem can later be explained as though it contained deep theological symbolism from the beginning.
A local custom can be mistaken for something practised everywhere.
This is how myth grows around communities.
But here is the part I think Paganism sometimes gets wrong: admitting that something is modern does not make it meaningless.
Suppose somebody created a ritual at a gathering decades ago.
People loved it.
They repeated it the next year.
Then again.
Children grew up participating in it.
Eventually adults who had participated as children began leading it themselves.
That ritual is not ancient.
It is tradition.
Those two words do not have to mean the same thing.
In fact, distinguishing them allows us to appreciate both.
An ancient practice tells us something about people who lived long before us.
A modern tradition tells us something about the community that created and maintained it.
Both have stories worth preserving.
The problem appears when modern communities become embarrassed by their own newness and start borrowing age as a source of legitimacy.
Perhaps we do not need to.
A religion that is confident enough to say, “We began doing this thirty years ago because it mattered to us,” may be healthier than one that needs to insist everything came from an unbroken secret tradition stretching into antiquity.
There is dignity in knowing where something began.
There is dignity in saying, “Our grandparents started this.”
That may eventually become one of the great differences between first-generation and third-generation Paganism.
The first generation sometimes searches for ancestors in ancient history.
The third generation may actually have Pagan ancestors.
And those ancestors will not be legendary figures.
They will have names, photographs, mistakes, arguments, unfinished projects, questionable fashion choices, embarrassing stories, and perhaps boxes of poorly organized documents in somebody’s basement.
In other words, they will be human.
That may be better than mythology.
Because once founders become legends, communities can become trapped by them.
The story becomes sacred.
The founder’s preferences become traditions.
The founder’s decisions become precedent.
And eventually somebody has to ask a very difficult question:
What happens when the founders are gone?