Cultural Heritage: Yay or Nay?

[cigfran]

However, being biracial I quickly hit this wall of "well I don't know where in Africa my dad's ancestors were from" and "I'm an American, isn't it cultural appropriation to claim X pantheon if I didn't grow up around it?"....

I'm not biracial, but as an American this was a question I had to face in my own way. I was not raised with any ethnic/cultural awareness whatsoever - beyond the knowledge of the Welsh name - so if I were to be super-rigorous about it I would have to stick with identifiably American polytheism.

But I am not First Nation, so that's out... appropriation of that kind I'm just not going to get into. The dominant American religious expression - Christianity - is just a non-starter for a variety of reasons. And New Age - which appears to be a very distinctly American form - just had no resonance.

So what is one to do? In my case, the call to heritage was the only one that made sense.

In retrospect, and with a possible view to my own future, it occurs to me that Heathenism as an approach, rather than a specific pantheon, mixes fairly easily with American identity and values.



Of course, so does hedgewitchery... but that's a practice, not a faith, as I understand it.

[Shine]

I'm just, kind of, taking a poll about the pagans on the site who utilized their cultural heritage to find a path versus those who haven't.

So.

Did you base your pagan path off of the cultures in your family tree or not?

I gave it a shot in the beginning since that seemed like a reasonable place to start. I turned to Shinto and Zen early on, found it didn't fit, and tried out Asatru, which also didn't fit.

Then I found Kemeticism. Or, rather, Bast found me.

I've never really understood why some people place such huge stock in following a path based on ancestral considerations. I guess I can understand "connections" with ancestors, but I've seen some people get very vehement about following what you might call a "pure" line. Though I don't recall seeing that here. But then again, I post very little.

[earth_dragon]

I'm just, kind of, taking a poll about the pagans on the site who utilized their cultural heritage to find a path versus those who haven't.

So.

Did you base your pagan path off of the cultures in your family tree or not?

Bizarrely, I did not know I did at the time. I'm mostly of German ancestry (which is bound up with the celts way back), along with some other celtic and Cherokee thrown into the mix. I actually come from a huge extended family, many of whom I don't even know, and was pretty excited to eventually learn there are several practicing pagans among us. We also found out that our family line goes back to some who were persecuted during The Burning Times, although we don't know if any of the 'witch' claims were ligit. It's still an interesting and sobering thought.

With all that said, tho, Paganism would still be my way even if no one else in my family or ancestry had even heard of it. It's just what works for me.

[LiminalAuggie]

Just curious: Have you settled on any specific path, even provisionally? If so, which, and why/how did you arrive at that one?

Right now I've got a jumble of practices focusing on ancestor and land veneration, and a solar holiday cycle, handled in a sort of basic animist way. One of the deities that seems amenable to working with me as I try to set up a more personalized structured path I've identified as Gaulish, and that lines up nicely with at least part of my heritage, my current environment, and my historical interests.
I'm not sure at this point if I want to incorporate a more Celtic animist flavor into my animism, but I don't think it would be too contradictory.

In retrospect, and with a possible view to my own future, it occurs to me that Heathenism as an approach, rather than a specific pantheon, mixes fairly easily with American identity and values.

THIS. American identity is such a strong cultural force, I feel like the best way for me to incorporate any other heritage into my path is to try to apply a Pagan cultural approach to my American environment...more syncretic than recon, but either way requires a lot of research and effort. I'm very much in a trial and error period right now.

[veggiewolf]

...
Did you base your pagan path off of the cultures in your family tree or not?

Nope. I'm English on my mother's side and Scottish/Polish with a teensy drop of Lenape on my father's side. As far as I know, I do not have any ancestors from Egypt or that are FlameKeepers.

[Darkhawk]

Did you base your pagan path off of the cultures in your family tree or not?

I've been trying to formulate an answer to this thread for a while, and I'm just gonna punt and say what I've got: this is not a correct question, and I cannot answer it as phrased.

Ancestry is complicated.

My background is, in rough order of known percentages, Irish, Polish, English, German, Scots. (Because a subset of my English ancestors have been in North America since the 1600s, there is a remote possibility of unacknowledged Native American heritage, but since if it's there everyone involved lied about it vigorously and there is thus no evidence for it, I assume it is not the case.) I have been known to describe myself as half-Yankee, a quarter Boston Irish, and a quarter Polish, because I find it disingenuous to claim that my long-term-European-American background is not a coherent ethnicity. (I qualify for the DAR. If yer gonna qualify for the DAR that's some post-colonial American ethnicity in there, and mine is 'Yankee'.)

When I first started having recon-ish leanings, I investigated my ancestral paganisms somewhat. I spent a lot of time digging into one of them (Slavic recon) because it had some stuff that was close to what I was looking for, but mostly what I came away with from that time in my life is a sense of the importance of folk tradition and cultural knowledge. This is not not religious.

But: what are the traditional Irish ways of dealing with and training people who have the Sight? For example. How do you deal appropriately with a domovoi? What are the birth customs? What is written in the ritual memory of my blood as things that matter? These are things that I collect.

Meanwhile, what are the customs of the land I live in? I live in the region where my earliest European ancestors in North America lived. This matters to me, as a matter of blood and bone, even if I joke that I love living here because I find it soothing to listen to the sound of my Puritan ancestors revolving in their graves at night. But Europeans were not the first people to mark and shape this land, and it has older rules and customs. If I am of this land, I need to know the ways of this land and listen to the spirits of this land, and they are older than my blood kin's invading presence. Is this not ancestry as well, the meaning of place? I feel a responsibility to learn about the customs of this land, including something about those customs that predate my blood-kin's appropriation of the terrain.

And then there are other things. My father has been going through my grandmother's paperwork and documents as a matter of personal archival, trying to figure out what to keep and what to discard. And from this we find a variety of things. He gave me one of her books, an elderly hardcover she bought at auction, in the auction-house where she worked: a chronicle of the kings of Egypt. I had never known that Egypt was a lifelong love of hers, that she studied it and explored it. So today - when my calendar marks an ancestor festival - I will take my book over to my shrine for a while, and light a candle and pour water, and I will say, "Here. I thought you might like to read this." And this, too, is ancestry, a magic that I had not anticipated finding.

Ancestry is complicated. It doesn't always trace simple ways, and there are multiple ways of looking at all of it.

And of course there's the standard stock joke answer: yes, as a pagan I have returned to the religion of my ancestors. The Puritans. By which I mean "Unitarian Universalism".

[Shadow]

Did you base your pagan path off of the cultures in your family tree or not?

Nope. My ancestors are Scottish, Irish and French. My deities are Hellenic and my path is a work in progress built around what works for me.

[Aubrey_Rose]

I'm just, kind of, taking a poll about the pagans on the site who utilized their cultural heritage to find a path versus those who haven't.

So.

Did you base your pagan path off of the cultures in your family tree or not?

I did and I didn't. We have a good chunk of Native American ancestory in my family, and a lot of my belief system stems around the earth, the seasons, and nature. So in that aspect yes. I also have a solid Christian background which is also included. So really its kind of a blend of the two for me. With other aspects thrown in.

[Juniperberry]

I'm just, kind of, taking a poll about the pagans on the site who utilized their cultural heritage to find a path versus those who haven't.

So.

Did you base your pagan path off of the cultures in your family tree or not?

At first, no. After awhile I started wanting something that gave me some roots and heritage etc. Not because I felt it had spiritual significance, it was just a desire after coming from a broken family/foster care and not having anything like that in my life.

[Stardancer]

I'm just, kind of, taking a poll about the pagans on the site who utilized their cultural heritage to find a path versus those who haven't.

So.

Did you base your pagan path off of the cultures in your family tree or not?

I'm a norwegian, living in Norway. I have maybe one or two foreigners in there if you go far enough back (traders and ship owners bringing home a wife from England or Germany or something), but my ancestry is almost exclusively norwegian. I am aware of the norse gods surrounding me; of Njord in the sea for example. These fjords are his domain, no one elses.

But I'm not theirs and they're not mine. I acknowledge them as part of my cultural heritage, but since I've been claimed by others, I don't worship them. I've had an on/off/on relationship with Odin, but since nothing has really come of it, and I'm really no recon, I can't say there is any ancestral connection.

I also have no particular desire to honor the dead. They're dead and gone, and I (and the Gods) are alive and here.

I'm much more interested in the folk lore of the land surrounding me - fae and spirits connected to the norwegian rural beliefs (huldra, nisser, troll, etc..), but again - these are not connected with the Gods that picked me. In that, it was my interest in the stars and constellations that brought me to on the one hand astrology, and on the other hand Greek myths, and from there a line for Gaia, Athene and Pan to come into my life.