Post by Blackbird on Jun 25, 2005 10:57:21 GMT -1
The following piece was posted up on the Multicultural Polytheistic Hearth - s2.excoboard.com/exco/index.php?boardid=5203
- and is reproduced here by kind permission of the author, Ariotanos Iuranantatios.
I thought it to be a very valuable piece of writing, involved as we are in traditions with which people are often claiming a genetic heritage. I'd love to see some discussion arising from this piece and the issues it raises.
Blood and Mathematics
A lot of people get into Reconstructionist faiths owing to their etrhnic descent. There's nothing wrong with this. Most people want to know at least something about their family history, their roots, and where, culturally and otherwise, they "come from".
However, to assume that blood is the sole determinant of membership in an ethnic religion is not only morally wrong, but also wrong-headed. Indeed, _the_very_notion_of_Celtic_Germanic_or_other_blood_is_totally_illusory_. A little mathematics will show why, and show how all of our roots spread far more widely than we suppose.
It goes like this: You almost certainly have two biological parents. No matter who raised you, your genetic material came from two, no more or less than two, people. And, of course, their genetic material came from two people each, which is why everyone has four biological grandparents. And eight biological great-grandparents, and so on, doubling with each iteration.
The average age of a parent, both today and, contrary to stereotype, in the pre-industrial age, is 21. If you don't believe me on the pre-industrial stats, read Peter Laslett's _The World We Have Lost_, which proves it using English church records. Now, for purposes of convenience, we can therefore assume that a "generation" equals 20 years. Note that is purely a biological generation. Other people bandy about 15 to 30 year spans but they usually mean a generation in social or cultural terms, such as the Baby Boom. We're only interested in calculating how many ancestors anyone can have at what date.
So, let's assume someone born in 1970. They will have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-parents, and so on.
One hundred years before their birth, they will have 64 ancestors. This doesn't seem like very many. However, in 1770, they will have 2048 ancestors. This is quite a few, though not more than could be found in a single village. In 1670, they will have 65,536 ancestors. In 1570, 2,097,152. This is now getting serious. This means, if you are of Irish ancestry, that, in the year 1570, your ancestors not only include every single inhabitant of Ireland who left descendents, regardless of ethnicity, but a not-inconsiderable portion of the population of the rest of the British Isles, as well. Keep in mind that 1570 is, for historians, early-modern, and not yet even medieval. The Reformation was well underway, and the Scientific Revolution starting. Mexico had been Spanish for 50 years. This isn't, in short, ancient tims in any sense.
And it gets worse, very, very quickly. By 1470, almost anyone will have something like 67,108,864 ancestors. This is the entire population of Western Europe, and then some, at the time.
To be sure, there are limiting factors. For one thing, some of your ancestors, at that distant date, will be ancestors of some of your ancestors, limiting the total a bit. Likewise, though some of your ancestors will belong to every ethnic group in Europe at the time, certain regions will have more of your ancestors than others. However, those regions are regions based on trade and marriage exchanges, not ethnicity. In other words, we can talk about genetic "populations" including, say, all the inhabitants of the Atlantic coastline, including all of the British Isles, as well as western France, Galicia, the Basque Country, and Portugal. We cannot talk about someone having "Irish" or "English" or "German" or Swedish" genetics, especially when you look back even as recently as to 1470.
And, keep in mind, we are not even halfway to the Pagan cultures we are trying to reconstruct. While each of us may have some predominance of one broad region in Europe in our ancestry, the constant growth in the number of our ancestors means that we also have a significant genealogical connection to every single person with modern descendents in every single ethnic or cultural group in Ancient Europe, and quite a few outside Europe as well, especially including the Middle East and Central Asia. We certainly have some of those people twice or more often, and others only once. And we may well _look_like_ some of them more, though probably not nearly as much as we think.
But the fact remains that, if blood or descent or ancestors are the criteria for entry, than every person of European descent, which would include African Americans, who are 30% of European descent on average, is blood heir to the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Basque/Iberian, Roman, Hellenic, Baltic, Thracian, Illyrian, Finno-Ugrian, Hunnish, Scythian/Sarmatian, Etruscan, Phrygian, Lydian, Lycian, Carian, Armenian, Phoenician, Jewish, Carthaginian, Syrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian relgions and cultures, at the very least.
And this is why the whole notion of belonging to an ancient ethnic group "by blood" is nonsensical. You can be of Irish, or German, or English, or Greek descent back to about the mid-1500s. Before that, you're "European", and probably quite a bit else, as well.
Copyright: Ariotanos Iuranantatios.
- and is reproduced here by kind permission of the author, Ariotanos Iuranantatios.
I thought it to be a very valuable piece of writing, involved as we are in traditions with which people are often claiming a genetic heritage. I'd love to see some discussion arising from this piece and the issues it raises.
Blood and Mathematics
A lot of people get into Reconstructionist faiths owing to their etrhnic descent. There's nothing wrong with this. Most people want to know at least something about their family history, their roots, and where, culturally and otherwise, they "come from".
However, to assume that blood is the sole determinant of membership in an ethnic religion is not only morally wrong, but also wrong-headed. Indeed, _the_very_notion_of_Celtic_Germanic_or_other_blood_is_totally_illusory_. A little mathematics will show why, and show how all of our roots spread far more widely than we suppose.
It goes like this: You almost certainly have two biological parents. No matter who raised you, your genetic material came from two, no more or less than two, people. And, of course, their genetic material came from two people each, which is why everyone has four biological grandparents. And eight biological great-grandparents, and so on, doubling with each iteration.
The average age of a parent, both today and, contrary to stereotype, in the pre-industrial age, is 21. If you don't believe me on the pre-industrial stats, read Peter Laslett's _The World We Have Lost_, which proves it using English church records. Now, for purposes of convenience, we can therefore assume that a "generation" equals 20 years. Note that is purely a biological generation. Other people bandy about 15 to 30 year spans but they usually mean a generation in social or cultural terms, such as the Baby Boom. We're only interested in calculating how many ancestors anyone can have at what date.
So, let's assume someone born in 1970. They will have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-parents, and so on.
One hundred years before their birth, they will have 64 ancestors. This doesn't seem like very many. However, in 1770, they will have 2048 ancestors. This is quite a few, though not more than could be found in a single village. In 1670, they will have 65,536 ancestors. In 1570, 2,097,152. This is now getting serious. This means, if you are of Irish ancestry, that, in the year 1570, your ancestors not only include every single inhabitant of Ireland who left descendents, regardless of ethnicity, but a not-inconsiderable portion of the population of the rest of the British Isles, as well. Keep in mind that 1570 is, for historians, early-modern, and not yet even medieval. The Reformation was well underway, and the Scientific Revolution starting. Mexico had been Spanish for 50 years. This isn't, in short, ancient tims in any sense.
And it gets worse, very, very quickly. By 1470, almost anyone will have something like 67,108,864 ancestors. This is the entire population of Western Europe, and then some, at the time.
To be sure, there are limiting factors. For one thing, some of your ancestors, at that distant date, will be ancestors of some of your ancestors, limiting the total a bit. Likewise, though some of your ancestors will belong to every ethnic group in Europe at the time, certain regions will have more of your ancestors than others. However, those regions are regions based on trade and marriage exchanges, not ethnicity. In other words, we can talk about genetic "populations" including, say, all the inhabitants of the Atlantic coastline, including all of the British Isles, as well as western France, Galicia, the Basque Country, and Portugal. We cannot talk about someone having "Irish" or "English" or "German" or Swedish" genetics, especially when you look back even as recently as to 1470.
And, keep in mind, we are not even halfway to the Pagan cultures we are trying to reconstruct. While each of us may have some predominance of one broad region in Europe in our ancestry, the constant growth in the number of our ancestors means that we also have a significant genealogical connection to every single person with modern descendents in every single ethnic or cultural group in Ancient Europe, and quite a few outside Europe as well, especially including the Middle East and Central Asia. We certainly have some of those people twice or more often, and others only once. And we may well _look_like_ some of them more, though probably not nearly as much as we think.
But the fact remains that, if blood or descent or ancestors are the criteria for entry, than every person of European descent, which would include African Americans, who are 30% of European descent on average, is blood heir to the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Basque/Iberian, Roman, Hellenic, Baltic, Thracian, Illyrian, Finno-Ugrian, Hunnish, Scythian/Sarmatian, Etruscan, Phrygian, Lydian, Lycian, Carian, Armenian, Phoenician, Jewish, Carthaginian, Syrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian relgions and cultures, at the very least.
And this is why the whole notion of belonging to an ancient ethnic group "by blood" is nonsensical. You can be of Irish, or German, or English, or Greek descent back to about the mid-1500s. Before that, you're "European", and probably quite a bit else, as well.
Copyright: Ariotanos Iuranantatios.
