#folk practice

What I have been thinking about the past few days is my own legacy. What am I building and who am I building it for? What does it mean in the context of my present life and support of the future generations to come? Am I honouring my ancestors and making them proud? And while reflecting on these answers, which have a wide variety of clarity to them, some so foggy it's just a dense cloud, others as crystal clear as a pristine mountain lake, a bigger question started bothering me.

The question that has been clanking around in the nogging is, does this even matter in the scheme of things if one doesn't work for preservation of life and building better systems so the next generations could live a semblance of any life at all? How much does it matter if we don't provide a social world organised for the better of humans and nature and not for profit? What does it matter if I build some semblance of material security for family and professional rigour and interest for my students, if the next generations won't have clean water, or peace, or privacy and anonymity, or even freedom to enjoy what I'm building to the fullest because they will be fighting and grinding for basic survival? Why would we let corporate and capitalist greed win for an inch of upward hierarchical movement, when the rich could topple it in the next second and no one would have any alternative support systems in place to help?

What legacy and systems and knowledge are truly of a priority in the current state of the world so that the next generations could build it further? All these questions are important to ask ourselves as individuals but also as practitioners. Some of us are practicing traditions that have few and far of people practicing them and we are basically doing conservation work. Others have a little more numbers but still, it takes effort and consideration to preserve and maintain the tradition.

I'm so jealous of people who decide to practice a form of paganism connected to their ancestry and only come from one ethnic background, especially when that background stayed relatively consistent throughout history and isn't made up of several ethnic groups that mixed together...

There's so much less research to do... 🥵

The focus in online pagan and related communities to return to ancestral practices and go back to your roots is weird and kind of promotes what I consider to be a problematic way of thinking, at least in many cases.

Yes, you should respect cultures and religions and such and not just join all willy nilly and uninformed. Even in open practices, research things from people in the culture is generally a good idea.

But, I don’t think people should be confined to what their ancestors did. It shouldn’t be a “if you want to practice a pagan religion, you should look to your ancestors’s practices pre-Christianity/colonization.”

Why?

-not everyone knows the culture of their ancestors, especially that far back. Christianity and colonization erased and blurred a lot of ancestral pasts to create a “new” and “unified” identity

-recently ancestors and living grandparents/great grandparents may have practiced a mix of things that came after colonization/Christianity (like a lot of folk religions in America)

-you might just not believe that just because your ancestors did?

-Saying you can only practice the culture of your ancestors is weird and complicated. Like, ancestor wise, I’m Brazilian and Central European. I wasn’t raised with much more than recipes that were passed down from the Brazilian side/common in my geographical area that is heavily Central European. Does that mean I’m close enough to the culture to practice indigenous religions and spiritualities from those areas? Even if I don’t have anyone to teach me, and have never been there? Even if it’s a bunch of different places in those regions? Is there a genetic distance that is too far?

I was a Hellenic Polytheist for a bit. Long story. I really believed in the Theoi, I researched a lot of primary and secondary sources. Damn I went to college and got a degree in ancient Mediterranean history and religion. Yet, people told me I wasn’t Greek so I couldn’t practice it.

I just feel like having a gatekeeping view to ethnicity/ancestry and religion/culture is a bit too close to nationalism to me.

And TO BE CLEAR I’m not saying you should ignore the idea of closed religions. A lot of those aren’t just an ancestral thing anyway. A lot of them just take a formal and long initiation practice if you aren’t raised in it. Which is valid, especially for religions that are complicated, specific, and are taken advantage of by mainstream society and capitalism. It’s more about protecting a culture that other people are trying to water down and erase than keeping it in a weird ethno-religion situation.