Is My Libation To-Go Cup Authentic?
By: Kaye Boesme
Tags: Education, Authenticity, Classics, Religion, Theology

When I was growing up, I once asked my mother why I couldn’t find Neopagan books at the library across the river. We paid to have borrowing privileges at a city library with multiple rooms and a fancy computer checkout system. It seemed like a place that size would have a bit of everything.

Most of the Neopagan books were marked LOST in the catalog or missing from the shelves. My mother told me that because we lived in the Bible Belt, many considered it a moral obligation to make the books disappear. The explanation made sense at the time. In rural Missouri, we slipped religious jewelry under our shirts to avoid harassment in uncertain environments, and these were the postlude days of the American Satanic Panic.

While I knew that most Neopagans had to purchase their own books, I refused to believe that the ones I wanted were lost, so I tried to find them. The library organized itself by the Dewey Decimal System, and I shelf-read the upper 200s for anything that was not about Christianity.

This is how I found Frances Bernstein’s Classical Living: Reconnecting with the Rituals of Ancient Rome in the 292s.

It was different from the Neopagan how-to books I had read before, which often focused on witchcraft and crystals more than the religious elements I was actually there for. Bernstein’s book cited — and occasionally quoted translations of — actual Roman authors and real ancient holidays like the Saturnalia. I was floored. I worshipped Apollon and Mnemosyne, and if they were Greek gods, what if there was a more authentic way to venerate them, too?

There is a small, but growing, cohort within modern Neopaganism that reads both the Classics and the scholarship about them. Unlike classicists, we approach these texts with the intention of revival, remixing and adapting them into something that is fundamentally different from what classicists do, both in terms of our core questions asked and intended results of our inquiry. These two groups, classicists and Neopagans, circle and orbit one another without often touching, and one of the only points of overlap is in this space of evidence and interpretation. Unpacking the tension between these two groups—how modern Neopagans approach it, how we justify ourselves and decide what counts, and what we get right and wrong—gets into the politics of information privilege, authenticity, cultural appropriation, and the heavy lift of what it means to adapt a broken tradition.

How I Got Here

For me, grappling with questions of authenticity and scholarship began in my early teens as I nursed my feelings of unfairness about what was not in the library. For others, the reasons behind the actions might be different — I grew up in Neopaganism, and most people come into it as adult converts.

The modern rituals in the Neopaganism I knew as a girl involved casting circles. If formal, rituals required directional invocations, a practice of turning to the East, South, West, and North to invite elemental spirits into sacred space. Honoring a male and female deity together was usually important (as many Wicca-based practices rely on gender binaries). Community rituals involved sage cleansing before processing to sacred space, and there would often be drumming and dancing afterward using chants from the Reclaiming movement.

The rituals are very different from the sacrifice performed at the beginning of the Iliad, the libations documented on pottery, or the rites discussed by philosophers and others until the end of Late Antiquity.

Authenticity is a fraught word with positive and problematic connotations. Here, as a theist, I mean it in a positive sense: One wants to know that ze is worshipping a god in a way that the god is accustomed to and might want — the locus of concern is the deity, not oneself. In any theism, attention to tradition and history often mark authenticity. Even my mother, an initiated Wiccan priestess, reads scholarship and translated ancient writings about her patron goddess Hekate. In my teens, I was concerned about Apollon.

These thoughts took a back seat to activity in local Neopagan groups until I was halfway through undergrad. At Smith College, we had the Association of Smith Pagans (ASP), which celebrated the Wiccan holidays I was used to. It was also convenient. Dorm policy prevented me from burning candles and incense. ASP had permission to use reasonable quantities of lit objects in the chapel.

The autumn of my junior year, the anxiety started again. I read Sallust’s On the Gods and the World (often attributed as “Sallustius” in online, public domain translations), which became my gateway drug to Plato’s Symposium and the overwhelming array of what the Smith College library held in Classics — the room filled with red and green Loeb books, the basement where I learned the call numbers and continued the shelf-reading I’d started as a child, and the scholarly writing in JSTOR. I read almost all of Jonathan Kirsh’s God Against the Gods standing up in the basement stacks because it was finals period; I should have been studying for exams, I knew I should have been studying for exams, and I wanted to make the process of dodging my scholarly duty as inconvenient as possible.

I began doing libations for gods in a more historically accurate, and in my mind authentic, way. My purifications stopped using sage — I washed my hands and face or showered instead. I joined online listservs and started engaging with the community. And then I found out just how complicated authenticity can be.

Rolling a Stone Uphill

Reconstructionism is a broad term, often abbreviated recon. It refers to the adaptation of ancient polytheism and its structures, and its main concerns are authenticity and historical grounding. The term seems straightforward — until it isn’t. Antiquity lasted for a long time. Religious practices evolved, and information about those practices can simultaneously be scant and way too much. Much of Hellenism is still very DIY, or at least as DIY as a complicated set of secondhand IKEA furniture with the instructions missing.

The online community is also sprawling.

Online, there are fights about purity, syncretism, eclecticism, theology, favorite translations, the intersection of religion and politics, and geography from the blogosphere to social media and back again. We have memes, norms, and cliques, just like any other node on the web.

We are a busy herd of cats. Someone could text mine us and produce a lot of papers on us as a new religious movement (NRM). It’s hard to make sense of everything even on the inside.

On the outside are people who made the opposite decision — those who, like my mother, find deep meaning and community in Wicca or another Neopagan religion, but also those of any religious tradition who dismiss it outright. In my teens, a Neopagan I respected told me that recons were spiritually stunted. In my twenties, while avidly attempting to understand philosophy, I found Linda Johnsen.

Johnsen’s Lost Masters: Rediscovering the Mysticism of the Ancient Greeks looks at Ancient Greek thinkers through the lens of a Western woman who has studied South Asian religions and yoga. At the close of Chapter 19, Johnsen writes, “I love and respect the ancient Greek sages, but if I had to choose only one spiritual tradition to study, I would choose India’s. The yoga lineages are still alive, and techniques for translating intellectual knowledge into living experiences are still taught there. Enlightened masters aren’t just inspiring legends; you can still find Self-realized saints in India.”

This passage bothered me so much that I misremembered what she had written until weeks ago when I reread it. My memory wants it to be, There’s no value in repairing what has been broken because it’s hard, and why do that when you can have someone else’s stuff now. I still dislike it. To me, it’s choosing the instant gratification of the spiritual marketplace over doing the right thing for the gods and one’s community.

Reconstructionism is a heavy lift. It asks people to learn as they go without the certainty that someone in the community has already figured everything out. The closest thing to an instruction manual is a library of books.

Paywalls are Like Brick Shortages

Recons read both ancient texts— in translation or not — and scholars’ works. Many Hellenists have also published lists of important books online. They’re generally targeted at overwhelmed newcomers.

This is what sparked Sarah Iles Johnston to publish a paper that described her passive exploration of what’s in these lists. The core works many of us recommend have “coherence and singularity of meaning,” and Johnston had questions about what that meant for authenticity and how we construct religious knowledge.

Antiquity is messy, and survey texts prioritize getting people oriented to major themes and the general situation rather than opening the Pandora’s box of qualifiers. Classicists and recon Hellenists pick similar intro texts, and the bottom line for orienting any newbie is to get hir connected to something affordable, readable, and generic enough to ask questions and figure out where to go next.

In Hellenism, specialized recs happen on listservs or social media. Academic books can get expensive — especially for those with less class privilege. People who can afford them due to salary, academic status, language expertise, or a fabulous public library are at a great advantage. Articles can be easy if someone has graduated from a college with alum JSTOR access (when the journal is in JSTOR), but unaffordable otherwise.

In an Internet argument, a wall of citations is an intimidating thing to see. Access to more resources means more clout, and they’re definitely important. If one uses scholarly or primary source citations as the litmus test for authenticity, though, it risks stifling organic growth and change that is necessary for something like Hellenism to thrive. It is also not scalable.

For example, I have been a bookshelf of works specifically to refute inaccurate claims about women in Ancient Greek religion via the power of Alibris. The arguments I get involved in usually center on menstruation and ritual purity. I have not seen a lot of evidence for it being a concern beyond edge cases, mainly Isis worship.

However, there is plenty in ancient Hellenism that could be exciting grounds for an alternative history women’s rights movement novel. Do I ignore those things? One can’t prioritize a text in one case and not in another without inviting hypocrisy.

This matters when trying to rebuild a tradition. Sources are good because they satisfy a thirst for knowledge and authenticity. As with water, too much or too little is a problem.

Authenticity and Cultural Appropriation

The flip side of positive authenticity is the idea that there is a pure thing, that if only one could isolate it, one could arrive in a magical place where all is well and perfect.

In recon Hellenism, some have aimed for that purity by identifying the 700s-400s BCE as the correct and authentic time of Hellenism before its corruption. The fight has produced a split between what is recon and what is revivalist. If someone doesn’t like what another is doing, ze will probably call hir a revivalist.

This is fraught. There is no real difference between a recon and a revivalist.

Even recon Hellenists who ground themselves in the “purity” of the 700s-400s BCE recommend Sallust, recite the Orphic Hymns, and perform bloodless sacrifice exclusively, all from centuries later.

And Greeks exist today. They do have some continuity, especially with folk practices. There are ethnic Greek Hellenists across the political spectrum, ranging from members of far-right, nationalist organizations like the Golden Dawn (not to be confused with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn) to secular individuals resisting the Greek Orthodox Church to religious organizations like LABRYS and the Supreme Council of Ethnic Hellenes (YSEE). In Greece, recon Hellenists face considerable violence and discrimination from Christian Greek citizens despite improvements noted in the US Department of State’s Religious Freedom Reports over the past few years. Many once-sacred places are in Turkey from which Greeks were expelled during the Late Ottoman Empire.

Much of the West uses Greece as a rhetorical starting point. The narrative erases Greeks’ continuity while giving us Westerners an eidolon of ours. The supposed greatness of Western culture was given as a justification for European actions during the colonial period and beyond, and to this day, the narrative has led to the use of many Ancient Greek ideas and symbols by white supremacists, as the Claiming the Classical Workshop, Rebecca Futo Kennedy, Sarah Bond, and Pharos Classics, among others, have documented. Creating a pure, idealized history is central to much of this rhetoric, and so it bothers me how much the recon vs. revivalist paradigm (most often in conversations among us recon Hellenists of non-Greek descent) draws from that racist rhetoric without anyone realizing it.

The reality is that polytheistic history in the geographic regions in question did not end until these religions and philosophical schools’ repression in Late Antiquity. There was trade and conquest, peoples colliding and separating. Gods and philosophical schools rose in popularity only to fade and resurface again.

Many who spoke Greek, who worshipped Greek gods, and who taught Greek philosophy were from the diaspora left by Greek colonies and conquest, or not ethnically Greek at all. There are even echoes of polytheism into the Byzantine period. Representing this diversity and time scale is an important and necessary challenge.

Finally, as a feminist, one of my interests is in the intersection of gender and religion. Ancient Greek ideas about women and gender do not always reconcile easily with science or modern social realities. Many women never marry or have children. In America, we can have our own checking accounts, pursue an education, and vote. Dionysos is arguably non-binary, and so are many other deities, and yet we still adhere to traditions that assign he or she. Is it appropriative or “revivalist” to decide that things can evolve?

Finding New Quarries

Picking up and repairing something that existed millennia before modern feminism, civil rights, and current scientific understanding is a tall order. I often speculate, both as a queer woman who is a product of modern America and who grew up in an NRM component of it, how to do reconstructionism in a way that is not superficial.

One of the most exciting, optimistic shifts in the past few years has happened gradually. Living religions, or once-dormant ones, need to produce new texts and new traditions, and it needs people who are excited about texts and scholarship even if they’re sometimes very messy. This is now the case.

Polytheism is not a well-respected position in Western academia, so there are not many academics in disciplines concerned with theology, philosophy, and practice who are “out” as polytheists. Those who are openly polytheistic have built up a social reputation online. Some are pursuing or have received academic degrees, and they will tweet while they read or leave Tumblr asks open so others can ask questions about everything from veiling (which Ancient Greek women did) to finer points of Late Platonic theology (the hidden reason Twitter upped to 280 characters). Social reputation has opened up a crowdfunding and self-publishing niche so scholarship can be communicated to interested non-specialists. The reading lists that were once overwhelmingly academic texts have shifted to include works by coreligionists.

Making our own things and approaching texts and other people in good faith is at least a start to answering some of the why, the how, and the what of our interaction with — and remix of — the Classics.

When I was 22, just after graduating from college, I cut my long hair for the first time since an unfortunate bob cut in my preteens. I agonized for a long time over which god was most important to dedicate that act to. I knew from Burkert’s Greek Religion that such milestone dedications were not gender-specific, but I knew from Graf’s Apollo that offering hair to Apollon was more appropriate for young men. Should I make a gender equality statement and offer it to him anyway, I thought?

In the end, I offered my hair to Artemis and Athene, a blend of Artemis’ traditional role in women’s adulthood milestones and Athene’s focus on the polis — a reminder that I was an educated member of the voting public and that my responsibilities as a citizen in the world today do not match women’s from millennia ago. The choice blended antiquity and modernity, the Classics and a modern attempt to reconstruct meaning—a small step towards bringing two circles together through a deeply personal and visible action.

Kaye Boesme is a librarian, writer, and poet. She blogs about recon Hellenism at KALLISTI: Essays, and more information about her published poems and fiction are available on her web site, kayeboesme.com. Her librarian self can be found on Google Scholar, although allegedly, librarians library everywhere they go.