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I have been thinking about pilgrimage lately, and what that word might mean to Pagan ears. Like so much else in our religions, it’s a concept that we have had to define for ourselves. Paganism, after all, does not have a long tradition of religious travel on the order of Catholicism or Islam; we have no Mecca or Santiago de Compostela. But we have created our own holy places: campgrounds and groves and bookshops, festivals and moots, and we have imbued the ancient places, the relics of the old pagan religions, with a new sense of significance.
Overlooking Thingvallavatn, the lake on the shores of Thingvellir National Park, Iceland. [Photo by Eric Scott.]
Less comforting is Blain and Wallis’s reading that Pagans, at least the British Pagans whom they studied at a variety of sites throughout the United Kingdom, have found ways to make themselves “neo-indigenous,” using language similar to those of Australian Aborigines or American First Nations peoples to lay claim to the landscape: “In Britain,” they write, “Pagans have adopted ‘sacred sites’ and ‘ancestors’ rather than ‘archaeological site’ or ‘monument’ or ‘remains,’ suggesting both a spiritual element to visiting and (particularly through ‘ancestors’) an implication of direct engagement with landscape rather than a more voyeuristic relationship with a closed past.” While this has led to some positive results –- Blain and Wallis mention that several ancient sites have been saved from the bulldozer thanks in part to Pagan efforts –- there is something obviously troubling about the mostly white Pagan population laying claim to indigeneity.
While Blain and Wallis are describing British subjects interacting with British sites, the situation makes me think of my own fascination with places abroad –- mostly Iceland, for me –- and my own sense of connection to a place with which I have no material connection. I have had a desire for “the north” for most of my life, a desire deeply intertwined with my practice of Asatru. Iceland, after all, is Saga-Land, home to the literature that informs so much of modern Heathenry. When I visited a few years ago, I took incredible pleasure in visiting the sites from my favorite old Norse stories: the farm at Borg where Egill Skallagrimsson spent his days, the hill where Gunnar slipped from his horse. But I was also aware that my love for Iceland was almost entirely concentrated on its past; until I actually met my Icelandic friends in person, they seemed less substantial than the ghosts of saga-time.
I suppose I come by it honestly: outsiders visiting Iceland have inherited a long tradition of writing, the fountainhead of which is William Morris’s account from the 1870s. Although he predates what we could call modern Paganism by decades, Morris was drawn to Iceland out of love for the sagas, and came to the island with a preoccupation for reading the modern landscape in terms of the Saga Age. The nation was his “true north,” the land by which he guided the compass of his soul, and much of his literary work references Iceland and its history. But he found the reality of the island and its inhabitants lacking in the passion and intensity of the past. His journals constantly reference the discrepancy between his romantic vision of the place and the benighted reality of it:
Just think, though, what a mournful place this is – Iceland I mean – setting aside the pleasure of one’s animal life there: the fresh air, the riding and rough life, and feeling of adventure – how every place and name marks the death of its short-lived eagerness and glory… Lord! what littleness and helplessness has taken the place of the old passion and violence that had place here once.
Morris’s account had a deep influence on two travelers who visited Iceland in the 1930s, W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, who published Letters from Iceland in 1937. It’s an odd book, full of unexpected styles and forms: a poem to Lord Byron (!) in five parts, a practical list of gear, a fictional letter between young girls, and a motley survey of other authors’ opinions on Iceland, “Sheaves from Sagaland.” But a sense of Morris’ romance pervades the text, as does Auden’s discomfort with the Nazi idealization of Iceland as the land of a “pure Germanic spirit.” “If they want a community like that of the sagas they are welcome to it,” he writes. “I love the sagas, but what a rotten society they describe, a society with only the gangster virtues.” Auden says this, but it’s clear that he bemoans the loss of that society himself, and has the same dissatisfaction with the living Icelanders that Morris had.
And I find myself wondering if this is all part of what pilgrimage is: the setting of expectations on a place, setting limits. When we travel to places in search of meaning, by definition we end up circumscribing those places. For Morris and Auden — and me too, though I’d like to think that in my visit to Iceland I managed to broaden my perspectives — their pilgrimage was enclosed by the limits of the past. Similarly, for Blain and Wallis’s “neo-indigenous” Pagans, these religious sites draw their meaning, their value, from a past that can claimed. Inventing pilgrimage also means inventing — and therefore limiting — the meaning of the places we visit.
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Been there, done that, and could not agree more !
Be here now, as they used to say….
I think the label “indigenous” is best left to describe the peoples displaced, conquered, or exterminated by imperial powers in the modern age.
I have to disagree with that as a definition, it just so happens to coincide with the majority, if not all, of indigenous peoples; but such occurrences have happened to everyone at some point in history, and everyone has indigenous roots somewhere – it becoming challenging when those roots are diverse without any ties to their immediate landscape, and thus no coinciding indigenous culture to draw from. Because all cultures are ultimately a reflection of a people’s environment, whether it be where they live or where they came from or the amalgamation of both, usually with subsequent generations.
I’m not condoning displacement, conquering, or extermination of peoples, just acknowledging that everyone’s history has had, to put it mildly, rough spots, and most cases didn’t end ideally, and history is forgotten, and new identities take root from the ashes – Britain, and Europe in general, has such history too. You have Celtic and Germanic peoples displaced, conquered, or exterminated by each other, then primarily by the Romans, followed by the Vikings, and throughout that entire time identity shifted and morphed, and gradually, with further displacement, conquering, or extermination, through the medieval period, industrial period, into today we have various peoples develop various identities, but are no less indigenous, just culturally divorced from the landscape through our current cultural structure that removes our ties to our landscape, not knowing where our resources come from and not participating in that process directly.
Studying world history from the neolithic to modern day really puts things in perspective. Cultures are never stagnant and are constantly in flux, changing with the environment. We tend to idealize and romanticize cultures that have deep roots to their environment – but they’ve changed too, whether they acknowledge it or not. Horses, for example, weren’t around North America / Turtle Island for most of the indigenous people’s history, but when they were introduced to the continent by the Spanish they were quickly adopted into the culture and tied into the origin stories.
How are those of us who migrated, with our own diverse backgrounds any different in that regard? New plants, animals, technology, and changing landscapes shapes our cultures. And what better way to develop a culture that has deep respect for our environment than to have it reflect where we live here and now – regardless of race?
That is where I have a problem – with the view that indigenous culture has to be associated with race, when cultures transcend race. The way people view their world, act, and live is a culture, and cultures have and still are respectfully adopted and adapted to changing worldviews – like how slavery is no longer tolerated in many places, that women have rights, and that killing your opponent is not glorious, but a crime. All things that our human species has done and condoned throughout the world at some point on our history. Race is the genetic makeup of a people that are a direct reflection of their many generations living in a particular landscape. Darker skin pigments reflecting the equatorial and high latitude regions, Paler skin pigments reflecting the polar regions, with minor differences beyond that – nose shape, eye shape, etc. We share the same original human ancestors and we’re ultimately not all that different genetically because those physiological characteristics would arise eventually when living directly on those associated landscapes for a great many generations. We’re not all that different in genetically, but we can, and do greatly differ in culture.
So when someone says “indigenous culture”, I simply regard that as a culture that reflects one’s landscape – whether a place their family recently migrated from where they have been for a great many generations, or the place they currently live, having lived there for many generations, or with their children and following generations – the combination of the two with stronger leanings with the reality of where they live, but have philosophical ties to where part of their family is from.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/pathsthroughtheforests/?s=indigenous