Golden Ages of the Past - Golden Future

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Mark: Welcome back to The Wonder, Science-Based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark.

Yucca: And I'm Yucca.

Mark: And today we are talking about golden ages of the past and as well as turning to look at golden visions of the future.

Yucca: Yeah. I think this is going to be a fun one. We were saying right before we hit record, it's it's a right for tangents as well.

Mark: yes, yeah, I imagine we're gonna, we're gonna fall down some rabbit holes on this for sure. Where this originally came from was a conversation that we had in one of the atheopagan community Zoom mixers that happens on Thursday nights, and, or and Michael, who is a member of the Atheopagan Society Council, raised this as a topic and he pasted into the chat a sort of semi facetious myth That many in the mainstream pagan community seem to embrace, which is this idea that once upon a time way back before before the Bronze Age, sometime in the late Either the Copper Age or the Late Stone Age, that there were people living in Asia Minor and in Europe who lived peacefully and in an egalitarian society where that were not characterized by patriarchy and where things were very groovy.

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: That patriarchy came along with these bronze sword wielding invaders and the result was militarism and class stratification and eventually the snowball that led us to capitalism and to where we are today.

Yucca: Very familiar with the story and the narrative. It pops up in a lot of different forms.

Mark: It certainly does. And it's a compelling narrative, right? Because part of what it tells us is it's not inherent in humans to be the way we are now,

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: you know, that having a male dominated society is not just a human thing, that it's A cultural thing that took over

Yucca: Mm

Mark: from something that preceded it.

And so it's understandable why that's appealing, because it offers hope, right? It says, well, we could get out from what we're in now. We could move in another direction. So, there's a lot of this backward looking, kind of nostalgic glow in these sort of root myths that inform much of modern paganism. Would you agree with that?

Yucca: I think so. And I think that there's also the more recent ideas of the unbroken line of Grandmothers practicing this witchy tradition that was secret, but it survived through, you know, all of the Christian takeover and, and all of this and that, that connects in a little bit with an idea that we have that something that's old is automatically good.

Or, automatically has more authority because it's an older idea.

Mark: Right, that it's valid, because it's persistent,

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: right, because it's lasted for a long time, it must have some kind of validity. Yeah, that's a really good point, and it's definitely something that crops up a lot in arguments about religion generally, not just about paganism or witchcraft.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: Of course, that was Gerald Gardner's story.

Right, Gerald Gardner, the creator of Wicca although he claimed that he wasn't the creator of Wicca, he claimed that he was initiated into a lineage of, an unbroken lineage extending back into the mists of time of this tradition of witchcraft.

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: maybe he believed that, maybe he didn't, but it's been pretty well established that it's not true.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: there's a, there's a book by the, the, pagan and witchcraft scholar Ronald Hutton, called The Triumph of the Moon, which very thoroughly and meticulously goes over all the different threads of this and establishes there's not really much there there.

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: Great book, great book, highly recommend it. So, so that's another of these, you know, these stories about antiquity.

Holding a different way of being that we, that we need to grab onto and try to work our way back to, right?

Yucca: Right.

Mark: And I was thinking about the Norse traditions, the, the heathen traditions as well. And in that case, what seems to be lionized most is Vikings, right? There's just a whole lot about Vikings.

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Which I get! Very, very, like, appealing visuals, and Feelings and aesthetics, and yeah,

Mark: adventurous, and there's all these sort of macho, warlike values of honor and courage and strength and duty and all that kind of stuff that are all, you know, I mean, they're very macho, but they're, but they're, they're good

Yucca: I get the appeal. Yeah,

Mark: Yeah, I totally do, too,

Yucca: I think that those are, that those can be, can be really good values, right? I don't think we should throw the baby out with bathwater with that, but you know, there's potential with anything for abuse, but you know, those are some pretty, those have their place,

Mark: Yeah, yeah. But once again, it's rose colored glasses, right? It ignores the fact that people who went Viking, which was a verb, not a noun you know, you went Viking they were farmers most of the year. I mean, they were just working the soil like everybody else and, you know, getting food. And, you know, they were farmers and they were traders and, you know, all that good kind of stuff.

Which is, you know, a much less heroic kind of myth than, you know, paddling an open boat across the North Sea to, you know, to, to strike into foreign lands and, you know, take stuff. And I can understand why that part of the story doesn't really get included so much but here we are, we're on a tangent, right?

But still, it's about golden pasts.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: So, Michael's host, Michael's, you know, quote that he put in the chat was very thought provoking because as we learn more, it becomes pretty clear that none of these golden era of the past myths is likely to be very true. There are kernels of truth

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: them. I mean, have, have there been women that were herbalists and knew natural cures for things in an unbroken line since the time of Arwen?

Antiquity? Certainly.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah, of course there have. Now, were they practicing a particular kind of religious framework around that? Probably not.

Yucca: Probably changed with the time as the society around them changed, and their view of the world changed, and, right? Yeah.

Mark: I mean, you know, it's like, did it make that much of a difference whether you invoked some goddess when you tied on a poultice or whether you invoked some saint? It, you know, it may, it may have been exactly the same thing. So, There's all this past stuff and that, that led to a very thought provoking conversation about kind of the nature of nostalgia

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: and this, this very human quality that we have of looking back on times in the past and seeing them fondly, even if they were terrible.

Yucca: Right. Even if we lived through them, or, but especially the ones that we didn't. I saw a short video recently of she looked like You know, maybe 16, 17 year old talking about how she was born in the wrong era, that she should have been from the 80s, right? And I remember, you know, being a teenager and, and the kids around me going like, Oh, we should have been hippies.

We were meant to be hippies from the 60s. And it's, I think people just do that. Yeah. Even if it's, of course, in the 90s, the 60s seemed like forever ago. Right.

Mark: Yeah it's, it's very funny. I, I mean, I was born in the early 60s, so I have, and my father was in a PhD program on the UCLA campus, so I have Other than memories of events, which I have pretty vividly, like the assassinations and

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: body counts announced on Tuesdays and Thursdays on the news, and, you know, the riots and, you know, a lot of stuff like that, but I remember going to my father's lab And all of the students that were around him, and they were all hippies, they were all, they were all dressed in that particular way because they were college …