(Nimue)
Our understanding of history changes all the time. New archaeological finds, new science, and new understandings are constantly informing how we think about the past. This is particularly an issue for Pagans. As a community we have a fondness for old books. The trouble with old books is that old history can be really out of date.
Once upon a time if you dug up someone who had been buried with weapons, you would think you had dug up a man. Now that we can use DNA, we know that some women were buried with weapons and some men were buried with a lot of bling, mirrors and other ostensibly feminine stuff.
History changes, which is quite an odd thought. The values and meanings we might attach to things change, too.
It's problematic when people latch on to out of date facts. That aforementioned gender issue is one of them – gender roles and identities have always been more complex. Queerness isn't a modern invention, and yet there are a lot of people who imagine gender identity in history as a simple binary. Our storytelling habits of the last few hundred years have distorted impressions of gender in history.
Human learning evolves over time. What we know gets refined, and sometimes re-thought entirely. Failure to teach each other about the messy bits, the mistakes, misconceptions and whatnot can be really misleading. The way in which knowledge evolves is an important subject in its own right. All we ever have is the best understanding we've come up with so far. That doesn't mean we've failed if we come up with something better. It doesn't mean previous efforts were necessarily lies. Not understanding the processes of learning leads people into conspiracy theories and some very odd ideas about what's going on.
History doesn't stand still, you have to keep up with it.
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