Reburial Redux

Jan 31, 2009 Alun Politics, The Past 1 Comment Antiscience, Archaeology, Philosophy, Religion

Fol­low­ing Yvonne’s com­ment, I’ve uploaded the two pod­casts I recor­ded on Pagan reburial in the UK to Box.net. You should be able to access them at:
http://www.box.net/shared/z5k2bv7ao9
http://www.box.net/shared/sa1ojvzmnl

The reburial of remains issue is live again and it’s inter­est­ing for a couple of reas­ons. One is the eth­ics of study­ing and stor­ing human remains and the claims a reli­gious com­munity can make on the rest of soci­ety. This makes good head­lines. The other requires a bit more thought. Do the concept of the Pagan (or Chris­tian or Muslim) com­munity make sense?

The cur­rent reburial flap is centred around a fringe Pagan group. From the pod­casts you’ll see it’s not a main­stream Pagan pos­i­tion. Yet really what the pub­lic and the news media want from Pagans is simple and daffy ste­reo­type. White robes, long beards, made-up names and lin­eages. We’ll skip point­ing fin­gers at the dresses prom­in­ent Chris­ti­ans wear. The point is what makes a good story are people who play up to the ste­reo­type. Enter CoBDO®.

CoBDO® is/are the the Council(s) of Brit­ish Druid Orders. Back in the day when they were CoBDO® they were, if I under­stand cor­rectly a minor­ity group amongst Pagans. Since then CoBDO® have split from CoBDO West fol­low­ing a fight in a pub. I don’t know if CoBDO West is a registered trade­mark or not if they leg­ally a CoBDO or not. Hence the vague­ness over whether CoBDO is sin­gu­lar or plural. Any­way it’s all a big fight and the Judean People’s Front is hop­ing to stick it to the People’s Front of Judea by grabbing bones from a museum in Ave­bury for burial. Even if Eng­lish Her­it­age do say the bones can be rebur­ied, there’ll be a big fight to be had over whether it should be a CoBDO® or CoBDO West cere­mony which is performed.

This is all a con­cern to the major­ity of Pagans who don’t feel the need to get involved in a big shout­ing match to make a point. By play­ing to the worst ste­reo­types of the media a small group of people is get­ting to define what it means to be Pagan. That’s why I found the two inter­views with Yvonne Abur­row and Emma Restall-Orr inter­est­ing. You have two people from two dif­fer­ent Pagan pos­i­tions both with cri­ti­cisms of this cam­paign. It’s a micro­cosm of a pos­i­tion taken by the media for all reli­gions. Journ­al­ists and politi­cians are quite happy to talk with lead­ers of the Muslim com­munity or the Jew­ish com­munity, but is there a com­munity and who gets to speak for all? Does acced­ing to reli­gious requests mean that the gov­ern­ment will be endors­ing one form of a reli­gion over another?

As for the con­tent of the argu­ment that the bones should be rebur­ied, that’s an argu­ment for tomorrow.