Daily Pagan News: Missing Link: When Ancestors Don't Match Your Religion (Kina'ani)
One issue in polytheism that does the Macarena on my last nerve is the insistence that a person must have an ancestral and ethnic connection to the polytheistic religion that the person practices. The deities call whom the deities call, and sometimes they ignore ethnicity and culture. There…
Not to mention, just having a particular ethnicity in your makeup doesn’t mean you know a damned thing about the cultures associated with that background. Having ancestors who were from indigenous tribes doesn’t mean much if you haven’t any connection to the living cultures today; being 1/16 Cherokee does not in and of itself make you an expert on shamanism.
I don’t follow a specific cultural/ethnic tradition with my paganism, but if I did, I’d have to throw that whole idea out the window anyway. To the best of my knowledge, my ancestry lines up with the traditions I’d be most interested in, but I can’t prove it empirically. I don’t have the ability to go back far enough to be able to find ancestors that I can be sure weren’t Christians or Jews. Even so, I should be able to explore Celtic or Norse paganism, or what have you, if I want to. Though I do think that if the path you’re exploring was made by people who are marginalized by today’s society (such as Haitian Vodun/Vodou/Voodoo) and you are not a part of that same experience, you need to tread VERY carefully to make sure you’re not contributing to that marginalization.
(Source: tessdawson.blogspot.com)
