So, brief introduction: I took an extended break from paganism for a while there from a combination of disillusionment, exhaustion with the community and aggravation with the divine. I’m back, sort of, at least with one foot in the door (and there was no rejoicing). And I’ve been thinking a lot in my hiatus. So let’s get right down to it. Warning: This may be a bit disorganized; I haven’t sat down and written anything in well over a year so I’m probably even worse at it than I used to be.

I’ve written on this blog before about the issues of “earth centered” religion, about the way pagans tend to cling to problematic leaders in the community, and the problems of baggage. And I think by and large many of the points I’ve made still hold up, although I’ve changed my thinking on some of them. But I think I missed a lot of underlying problems and deeper structural issues and instead have focused on the manifest symptoms of a deeper rot. So let’s unpack an element of that rot, today; and what better place to start than with one of the principle ways that our entire framing of paganism is defined by racists? Let’s unpack how we handle “heritage.”

I’ve been in and around pagan communities for years, particularly of the heathen variety, but also general big tent pagan spaces. And I’ve seen countless wide eyed neophytes come into those spaces, asking where to start. The answer I’ve seen- and given myself, many times- is some variation of “Well, where is your family from, what is your heritage?”

Now, let’s get real. Paganism, insofar as the modern movement is concerned, is mostly traditions inspired by or attempting to reconstruct religions that died out a thousand years ago or more. If any of us trace our ancestry back that far, we’re almost undoubtedly related to people from all over at least one continent. Our “heritage,” for those of us who are white, is Christian insofar as we can trace it with any specificity that allows for a coherent, linear story.

So why do we come back to this point again and again? And why is “heritage” such a commonly cited reason for people to approach these traditions to begin with?

The Centering of Heritage

If one looks at contemporary paganism’s history it’s not difficult to establish a throughline, for most traditions. Everything from the pan-British syncretism of Wicca to the pseudo-scientific historiography of early Germanic paganism is unified in its connection to the Romanticist “back to nature” movements of the 19th century which saw a flourishing surge of occultism, naturalist spirituality and, the late 19th century being what it was, emergent nationalism.

Nowhere was the latter more prevalent than in places like Germany and Italy, in their attempts to forge unified national identities as storied and linear as what they perceived existed for the French or the English. Italy invoked the legacy of Rome, and the Volkisch movement in Germany fueled Empire and, ultimately, fascism. Likewise, Romuva emerged in the midst of a rekindling of Lithuanian national consciousness that led up to the country’s 1918 independence after a century of partition and occupation; similar movements took root in Ireland and elsewhere. All of these spiritual revivals were predicated in some form on the concept of modern nationality, in a way that would be alien to most pagans in antiquity, but that our modern movement has never fully reckoned with or attempted to shed.

It has to be said that most of our rhetoric around “heritage,” framed largely in terms of nationality, owes far more to the strains of ethno-nationalism and volkischness (I mean, ‘folkish’ came from somewhere, amirite?) that flowed out of Germany than the national liberation aspirations of early Romuva. After all, Romuva (and its neighbors) are hardly known in most of the west; Heathenry, of course, is ubiquitous, carrying all the ahistorical imperialist mindset the 1920s and 30s– and later white supremacist groups like the Asatru Alliance, AFA, and Odinic Rite– imbued it with.

This early centering of “heritage” in the web of neopagan spirituality has continued to present day, as best I can tell, from a combination of uncritical adoption and the generally more savvy nature of the more actively racist elements of the pagan world. There has been strikingly little in the way of structural criticism or deeper re-examining of the fundamental texts and scholarship that our traditions are built on, and a great deal of simple, tacit acceptance of things already established. But the groups- like the AFA, various Theodish assemblies, the more fascistic Roman and Slavic organizations- haven’t rested on their laurels; rather, they publish works and resources, fine tune the language and jargon of their respective traditions, position themselves in places of influence, and spread their message. All while well meaning pagans accept the terms that they set, and assume older, established and accepted texts to be apolitical and neutral scholarship.

It is these groups, along with the scholars that fueled and perpetuated their ideas, from Gronbech to Dumezil, that lay the foundation for how we still discuss heritage. And if we still use their terminology, their framing, and their priorities, then we ultimately have to reckon with the fact that we are upholding and giving legs to their projects, no matter what declarations we sign; every time we lean on the crutch of “What’s your heritage,” we’re carrying water for white supremacists.

But that only covers how we pagans internally frame and utilize “heritage.” There still lies the problem of why so many people arrive in our communities seeking after it.

Social Alienation and the Inexorable Nostalgia for “Roots”

Most people I know who come to paganism do so because they have some essential incompatibility with the religion they’ve been raised with. And truthfully, that’s a fine reason to seek something different, whether they’re an LGBTQ individual raised in a conservative evangelical setting, someone who chafes under the rigid hierarchy of Catholicism, or who just finds the often stifling Pauline doctrine of protestantism too difficult to morally square with their values. Leaving behind a system we don’t gel with to seek out one that better suits us is natural, it’s quintessentially human.

But what frequently comes up, aside from those things, among white pagans in particular, is a sentiment of seeking after one’s “roots,” trying to connect somehow with the world of spirituality by way of ancestry or vague naturism or, frequently, a combination of the two. The real underlying commonality that stands out to me, though, is the sense of alienation.

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that we live in a world that fuels social alienation. If you’ll all permit me to get a bit Marxist for a moment, I’ll even go a bit further and say that it is a function of our society, driven by consumerism, manufactured identity, brand-based tribalism and interpersonal competition to manufacture alienation, from ourselves, our peers, our communities, our labor, and our spirituality. And I believe that, more than anything, is the root of the atavism behind our attraction to “heritage.” An idea that once, it wasn’t like this. Once, life didn’t feel like this. And true, it once wasn’t. However, the pursuit of connection through blood lineage, in terms framed by nationality, is ultimately an attempt to solve alienation through the systems that uphold and propagate it. The more insidious elements of our community are, of course, fine with this; it achieves their ends, it draws people into their spheres, it perpetuates the use of their language which makes recruitment (and radicalization) more feasible. This is why, to my view, it becomes all the more imperative to shed this framing.

I want to take a moment here to say that I don’t think the pursuit of, or creation of new religious movements is folly, of course. I do think these pursuits are valid, and that they can be avenues for combating alienation and for reconnecting with one another. But they must be pursued critically, or we’ll recreate the structures we seek to escape. As such, we have to build up these movements in ways that foster community in a healthy way, that facilitate the building of personal bonds, and that allow for both an accepting and flexible framework for spirituality- probably paganism’s greatest strength- while avoiding the trap of simply reskinning existing religious frameworks, or perpetuating actions that harm marginalized groups.

There are quite a few ways that we fall into those pitfalls that I see regularly; for now I’m going to dwell on two that have been really sticking out for me.

Paganism as Personal Branding

The most pressing and most common issue I see among pagans is the way people come, ostensibly seeking a deep spiritual fulfillment, only to adopt paganism in only the most superficial sense; where the distinctions between heathenry or kemeticism or wicca are largely aesthetic markers, like the choice between Nike and Adidas. Personal choice and highly configurable aesthetics are king, and “pagan” as an identifier becomes subsumed into the personal brand.

This is something I’ve seen a great deal (and been guilty of), and it’s largely understandable; our culture conditions us to see our identities as things expressed through consumption. And so paganism becomes something to be consumed for the sake of identification; tattoos, hammer pendants, altar dressing. None of these things are bad in their own right, rather, it is the reduction of religious expression down to the point of consumption and regurgitation that fuels alienation. We come to jealously guard our personal brands, to resist criticism or refinement. We adopt our traditions not because we want to grow our understanding of them, and of ourselves, but because we like our initial impressions of them. We like those impressions so much, in fact, we begrudge being faced with the fact that our chosen tradition may not be quite what we thought.

Because personal branding can only persist in the context of total atomization, it drives us to face outward towards others only as billboards, and inward towards ourselves only to carefully groom and curate our chosen markers. We order our social media pages like tabletop zen rock gardens, shaping them purely to our personal tastes, following those who validate us and blocking and purging those who don’t. When someone critiques or questions our branding identifiers, it feels like an attack on our personhood. What communities we do create bear more resemblance to fandoms, with all the toxicity and purism that entails, than to religious fellowships. Everything becomes subservient to personal expression; and it’s something that, so far as I’ve observed, we all fall prey to. Myself included, without question.

How do we combat that? Well, it’s a struggle. I don’t know the answer; my thoughts on the matter make sense to me, but don’t feel useful. We have to push back against our impulse to commodify our religions. We have to accept a degree of heterodoxy and resist fandom-esque purism, especially in the context of religions with so many blanks that need to be filled. We have to see our spirituality less as yet another vector for capitalist consumption and cultivating our personal brand and identity and more as a bridge to connect us to other people. We have to, ultimately, do the work of building something, collaboratively, that can shatter the walls alienation has put around us.

What we can’t do is take shortcuts in building those things, which brings me to my last point.

The Fetishization of Indigeneity as “Authenticity”

Time to break out another statement that will be far from controversial:

Paganism has an appropriation problem.

Not just in the form of hippies with dream catchers, sage smudging, ayahuasca trips or faux-siberian shamanism, although like, good god, yes in all of those things. But even in the simple way we so often define it; the reason the r/pagan subreddit I moderated has for years gone with “Revivals of or traditions inspired by the extinct religious traditions of the Euro-Mediterranean Cultural Basin” (more or less). Because so many pagans happily, joyously go with the colonialist Webster’s definition. The problem is, claiming Hinduism, Shinto, and various indigenous practices as “pagan” not only perpetuates terminology imposed by colonizing powers, it appropriates those traditions to boost the profile of our own.

I’m sure everyone knows what I’m talking about. That vague insecurity about identifying as “pagan.” That nagging unease about not being taken seriously, about being seen as fringe or as a joke. And so we scoot into frame next to Hindus, or Buddhists. We co-opt Native American practices or imagery without being allies; we treat their traditions as fair game for harvesting in the same way we draw from religions a thousand years out of practice– in the same way our much more recent ancestors have harvested land, resources, blood, abducted children, culture, and more in the great machine of colonial extraction economics. We act in the service of white supremacy every bit as much as the Volkisch heathens all to assuage our insecurities and to shore up our brands.

We let that insecurity stifle our imagination, our drive and our potential and we instead rely on the fetishization of indigeneity for legitimacy. We romanticize peoples and traditions and take wantonly from them to attempt to fill the hole left by our own alienation. And that, I believe, is what brings us full circle to the problem of “heritage” once again. Because what is that desire that draws us to “heritage” if not the same New Age pursuit of authenticity through some sort of lineage? Whether lineage by our own imagined ethno-religious backgrounds, lineage by way of imagined aunts and grandmothers in imagined witch cults, or lineage by way of the stolen practices and markers of peoples we see as more authentically tied to the world than ourselves. The appropriation is just another manifestation of the same. And like branding, like appeals to ethno-nationalist ancestry, it can’t provide a shortcut solution to alienation. All it does is make us participants in an ugly legacy, the same ugly legacy as the folkish neonazis, the romantic nationalists, the Third Reich Occultists, the flippant and callous New Agers.

Don’t Worry I’m Almost Done

And so I’d urge everyone to avoid shortcuts. Given the histories of our various traditions, we walk on too precarious of a tightrope to risk them. Start conversations about how to break away from our curated bubbles. Try not to use heritage as a starting point when talking to newcomers; if they’re using it as a starting point, tell them to not restrict themselves to it. Explain why it’s a problem. Continue to push back against appropriation and see the connections between these things. Familiarize yourself with Marx’s theory of alienation, even if you disagree with communism, he’s at least undeniably right about that part. And like, I dunno. Be excellent to each other.