Allege that an originally pagan population kept some of its customs going after conversion to Christianity if you must, but it makes no sense to call that 'appropriation'. That's like saying that eight year old me stole seven year old me's bike.
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And - thinking specifically of England here - it's deeply patronising to suggest that the people who converted didn't *really* convert, and that their customs somehow remained magically pagan independent of the express will of the practitioners.
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The problem we continually face - and it's something that has become entrenched in the public imagination - is the belief in holdouts, i.e. a subsection of the population that remained resolutely pagan and kept that going secretly for centuries until today.
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It's the core of the Murray Thesis and it's responsible for a certain bugger of a stance that one keeps on running into, which I shall attempt to adumbrate:
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'(Custom) was originally pagan you know.' 'But there's no evidence to suggest it was.' 'Of course not, the Christians destroyed all the evidence.' 'So if the evidence was destroyed, where does this supposed knowledge come from?' 'Continuous clandestine practice, of course.'
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'But there's no evidence of such continuous clandestine practice.' 'Well, why should the practitioners tell someone like YOU about it?' It's Russell's Teapot but with paganism.
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And it's fascinating to watch how the claims of continuous clandestine practice adapt to whatever's in vogue at the time. People used to claim ancient Wiccan lineages until Wicca's modern provenance was publicly proven.
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Replying to @Cavalorn
It is frustrating as someone who studies continuance of certain traditions within the conversion era because like, I constantly stress that these people were by and large Christian and if people are being called pagan we only have the polemical evidence from Christian elites
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Replying to @AdmiralHip @Cavalorn
But one thing that really annoys me with the Irish historiography and that is even the suggestion of some traditions or stories or w/e having some pre-Christian/non-Christian influence suddenly means we’re as bad as Eoin MacNeill
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Replying to @AdmiralHip @Cavalorn
And that we’re saying early medieval Ireland is pagan with a Christian veneer. When in reality we can’t make hard lines like that regardless. Lots of reasons why stories and traditions hang on and continue.
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And it’s difficult to discuss what these are without framing it in Christian/pre-Christian languages because I’d rather not use native/outsider, since that assumes Irish people had no agency for how Christianity developed or was taken on there.
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Replying to @AdmiralHip @Cavalorn
But then for England you got people citing Tacitus for discussions about Woden and it’s like, CEASE.
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