One of the joys of working here at The Wild Hunt is the freedom to follow my interests down the rabbit holes that present themselves. I’m the sort of person who gets intensely intrigued by a subject for about six months to a year before wandering away to the next thing, and that can be a good way of generating material for a monthly column, sometimes.
Lately, I’ve been interested in the subject of repatriated artifacts – that is, the growing movement to return artistic and historical objects back to the countries from which they were taken. Recently I have covered the agreement between Germany and Nigeria to repatriate over a thousand of the so-called Benin Bronzes, which had been looted by the British toward the end of the 19th century, and the return of 28 artifacts to Cambodia, India, Myanmar, and Thailand, which had been trafficked by the art dealer Douglas Latchford.
The Elgin Marbles, on display at the British museum. Image credit: Txllxt TxllxT – CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71169285
I began following news on the topic after editing an article by our editor-in-chief, Manny Moreno, in 2021 about a stolen 1st-century Roman mosaic that had been used as a coffee table in a New York City apartment. That story fascinated me for a number of reasons: the mosaic, as with all of these antiquities and artworks, is a direct physical link between the ancient pagan world and the contemporary world in which we Pagans live today.
We can actually touch the same things that the ancients touched (though we shouldn’t do so carelessly – and certainly should not use them as a place to set our cups of tea.) And in following the story of how a material object like that mosaic moves from the time and place in which it was created – how it was removed from Caligula’s floating palaces at Nemi in an 1895 excavation, only to somehow end up in an American apartment – struck me as an incredible metaphor for how the ideas of the ancient world have moved, often in unpredictable ways, to reach us in the modern world.
Importantly, seeing these objects as an embodiment of the cultural history behind them reminds us too frequently, that history came to us by harmful means.
A story told last winter in The Atlantic is illustrative. An Egyptian mummy’s coffin appeared in New York with “a sea of red flags: three conflicting ownership histories, the involvement of known traffickers, a forged export license that bore the stamp Arab Republic of Egypt before the country used that name.” The actual mummy itself had been unceremoniously discarded in such haste that his finger bone was still lodged inside the coffin afterward.
And who was the buyer? Some jumped-up tech billionaire desperate for a new conversation piece? A criminal magnate looking to ship it further down the line?
Nope. Try the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the fourth most visited art museum in the world, an august institution of unquestionable prestige – and still more than happy to try to buy a smuggled mummy if the opportunity avails itself. (The Atlantic notes that the Met was not charged with anything, though they did forfeit the coffin and apologized to the people of Egypt.)
The photo in the article shows the golden coffin of the Egyptian priest standing upright in a case to the right of a posing Kim Kardashian, dressed in a gold dress festooned with crosses. The symbolism seems too on-the-nose to comment on.
The simple fact is that modern Paganism is built on the transmission of cultural history, and often that transmission wasn’t mutually beneficial or voluntary. It’s no coincidence that the Atlantis Bookshop, foundational for much of the great occult revival that led to Wicca and from there to the rest of modern Paganism, is just down the street from the British Museum, an institution filled to the brim with ancient pagan artifacts that were the product of colonial adventures.
These objects absolutely inflame the mind with wonder and inspired the creation of the religions we follow today. They were also in many cases stolen from their original contexts and from the people who had a rightful claim to them. This latter truth does not erase the former, in my opinion – I don’t think modern Paganism is entirely the fruit of a poison tree, to invoke a legal phrase. But I do think that we as Pagans ought to have an interest in rectifying the situation as it exists today.
Koh Ker-style Statue of Ganesha recovered from James H. Clark’s collection [Cambodian Ministry of Culture]
The good news is that the repatriation movement is growing in force as museum professionals, governments, and the public come to support returning looted objects to their rightful owners. While much of the attention goes to high-profile cases such as the British Museum’s disputes over the Benin Bronzes and the Parthenon Marbles, also referred to as the Elgin Marbles, much is happening in less visible contexts, too. Earlier this month, for example, the Portland Art Museum returned nine items, including a killer whale hat, to the Tlingit Naanya.aayí Clan. The items had been removed from the tribe in the 1930s and 40s, and now are back in the possession of the Indigenous culture to which they rightfully belong.
“Although museums continue to try to do the correct thing and be on the right side of history in fulfilling their mission,” said the Portland Art Museum director, Brian Ferriso, “sometimes mistakes are made and it is essential for the wrongs of the past to be made right.”
So may it be with all of the treasures that have been unfairly uprooted. Until that happens, I plan to keep my eye out for more stories of repatriated artifacts relevant to modern Paganism and keep it as part of our coverage here at The Wild Hunt.
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