POLL: New Forum Section?

Would you like a new forum section for historical speculations?

  • Yes, a 6th section for speculation in history and philosophy

    Votes: 47 64.4%
  • No. Historical Research should relax its standards and welcome all ideas.

    Votes: 3 4.1%
  • No. Keep standards in His Res; speculation can be addressed in Talking Tarot

    Votes: 12 16.4%
  • I either don't know or don't care.

    Votes: 11 15.1%

  • Total voters
    73

Laura Borealis

I don't see how removing the speculative type threads from Historical Research is going to harm Historical Research.

Agreed. One would think the serious historians would welcome the change. They won't even have to see the speculative threads unless they want to.
 

Yygdrasilian

Venus=Lucifer

Who decides what qualifies as "Historical Research" and what is merely speculative?

Does the "unbridgeable gap" between serious historians and occultists become an excuse to exclude certain viewpoints from discussion?

The danger, it seems, in creating this new forum lies in its' potential for censorship.
Not that avoiding certain conversations hasn't been obvious enough already.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
 

Alta

Just an update, Solandia has been away for a while.
 

gregory

##

= The Devil = the idol(ized) on the pedestal! (I am thinking of the poster, not the crowned One! (That One is mere. . . infatuation.)

;)

OK - I am infatuated with TCO. That's OK :) Though it may not be OK with him....
 

Teheuti

Who decides what qualifies as "Historical Research" and what is merely speculative?
Anyone can post to either. However, if the poster to HR can't point to any primary sources for consideration then I think various people might mention that they can see nothing to be researched, and therefore the topic might get more consideration on the speculative side. But, we'll have to see if it works or not. Likewise, as we regularly see, people come up with topics in which no one is knowledgeable or willing to look into them, and so the subject dies away anyway.
 

Teheuti

A recent article by Caroline Tully of the University of Melbourne is relevant to our discussion. The title is "Researching the Past is a Foreign Country: Cognitive Dissonance as a Response by Practitioner Pagans to Academic Research on the History of Pagan Religions" - available here: http://www.equinoxpub.com/POM/article/view/14018/11208

It deals directly with the conflict between the findings of academic research and Neopagan ideas about their own historical origins - which are often a mix of deliberately created myths and misconceptions spurred by unsubstantiated theories.

Cognitive Dissonance has gotten a lot of play as the human brain function that turns off or sidetracks our thinking when we hear a perspective that is antithetical to our beliefs. It takes the form of automatic rejection or refutation of that material and favors information that confirms one's biases. It's what happens when a Republican hears or reads a statement of fact by Democrats and vice-versa, such that neither can even hear, much less evaluate, what the other is saying.

One of the key works to which Tully refers is Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, which is a scholarly examination of the sources of Gerald Gardner's witchcraft.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Triumph-M...4496/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1333653751&sr=8-1
It is a masterful work that is fascinating reading, but it dispels a lot of fondly held myths.

Ben Whitmore then wrote a critique called Trials of the Moon: Reopening the Case for Historical Witchcraft. http://goodgame.org.nz/trialsofthemoon.html
Whitmore is not an historian, so, while some of his criticism seems to have merit, a lot of it is sloppy refutation without substance. Quite a few pagans find that Whitmore's perspective "feels good." Tully refers to criticisms of Whitmore about which he asks why he should be held to their scholarly standards.

Tully makes the point that "it is the methodologies of such research that need to be clarified [to non-academics]. When it comes to history and archaeology, not all ideas about the past are equal. . . . There are ways to distinguish plausible from implausible theories."

All three of the above works are discussed here:
http://the-pagan-perspective.com/2012/03/14/of-pagans-scholars-and-cognitive-dissonance/
The comments to this blog article are well-worth reading also.
 

The crowned one

It deals directly with the conflict between the findings of academic research and Neopagan ideas about their own historical origins - which are often a mix of deliberately created myths and misconceptions spurred by unsubstantiated theories.

Cognitive Dissonance has gotten a lot of play as the human brain function that turns off or sidetracks our thinking when we hear a perspective that is antithetical to our beliefs. It takes the form of automatic rejection or refutation of that material and favors information that confirms one's biases. It's what happens when a Republican hears or reads a statement of fact by Democrats and vice-versa, such that neither can even hear, much less evaluate, what the other is saying.

This is true, and worth trying to keep in mind. I see this with "conspiracy theorists" all the time, a narrowing of views to suite the idea, we get to a point where we filter and reject everything that does not include our beliefs, including old peers. Taking inference and unrelated events and creating causality is only one side of the same coin often.

I try to remember that idea's and beliefs are not intrinsic truths but more often then not anecdotal associations and corrolations of patterns we see fit, to fit our view. Keep a open mind, and remember ice cream sales go up proportionally to drownings, so ice cream causes drownings? No hot weather causes ice cream sales to go up, and more people to be in the water, I just correlated unrelated facts ;)