I think the deepest gift that honest history offers practitioners is not the destruction of their religion but its liberation from a kind of false dependency. If your practice only works because you believe it descends unbroken from ancient Mesopotamia or medieval Italy or pre-Christian Britain, then it is, in a certain sense, held hostage by a claim that can be falsified. And that is a fragile foundation. But if you can learn to say, “this practice is powerful and meaningful to me, and it was assembled from various sources in the twentieth century, and those things are not in contradiction,” then you have something far more resilient. You have a practice grounded in honest experience rather than mythologised history.
This is not the same as saying history does not matter. It matters enormously. Understanding where your practices actually come from, who shaped them and why, what was borrowed and what was invented: this knowledge enriches practice rather than diminishing it. But it requires a willingness to tolerate the vertigo, to sit in the gap between what you were told and what the evidence shows, and to discover that the ground is still there even when the map turns out to be wrong.
Your Tradition is Fake. Now What? On cognitive dissonance, practitioner identity, and the strange gift of honest history by Angela Puca
