Just because it is your theory doesn't make it true.
There is a habit in some pagan magazines and books to state things that can't be proven as facts. Now I am all for theories and opinions, especially esoteric and occult ideas that are new.
The bug up my ass is the quasi-historical , and there is no way to put this nicely, bullshit people spout and get away with.
I recently re-read something that stated as fact that dancing was "invented" in the Paleolithic period as a religious expression.
It is an interesting theory, one that could have been expanded on and been the whole piece (it wasn't it was the starting place of a rather odd article). It is no more a factual statement about history than saying Neanderthals taught us the boogie-woogie, or the alien showed us how to two step.
We don't know. It is okay NOT to know. It is far better NOT to know and to theorize and debate. Once you set in stone (see what I did there?) a fact it is hard to change it. More than that people teach it to other people as fact.
This doesn't just go for pre-history. Pagan writers seem to delight in make-shit-up-istan. From ancient Egypt and Greece wild speculation put across as fact is both dangerous and makes us as a community look stupid.
From re-grouping or re-naming Goddesses, dismissing how ancient people practised entirely because it doesn't "fit" your opinion, making wild leaps to fill in things you don't know is not just irritating it is wrong.
You want to re-claim something? Good, fine, great. Just don't set yourself up as an expert on Egyptian magick or Hellenistic rituals because even really deep scholars have huge debates and theories and differing opinions on how things were done, when and why.
Ancient Egyptian beliefs were a complex mix of household Gods and Goddesses worship daily (much like modern Hinduism) and larger festivals and specific things were managed by temples. To understand the complex weave of places and sacredness that saturated their whole culture and arts, sciences and music is an enormous task. Priestesses were a permanent of life long fixture at temples (no marriages or kids), but the male priest would serve for three month blocks and return back to their jobs and families.
Slowly over time some deities would merge together, disappear and re-appear, rise and fall in importance and popularity. This doesn't mean they "were the same Goddess".
To the people worshipping them they were separate and distinct, regional and highly personal. We now have the perspective of vast time and vastly difference sense of space. It might be convenient to smush deities together that seem similar to us but with thousands of years and often hundreds of miles it would be a mistake. It is not factually accurate. It is lazy.
If we were trying to pin down all that had happened in terms of magick, rituals and beliefs in just the last hundred years of this century it would be near impossible. Trying to do so in the deep past is even more difficult because the further from that place we become the more difficult it is to understand not what they thought, but why.
Yes, history is masculised, and full of opinions that don't make sense when we strip them of much Patriarchal thinking. Yes some of the "normal" historical narrative don't seem to have all the answers. Yes, imagine, remember, theorize.
Just don't write thing in national pagan publications as FACTS when they are not.
Bright Blessings xxx
If you want to understand history a bit better do watch and read things by Proff Mary Beard, Bethany Hughes and Dr Amanda Foreman
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