Syncretism (s?ng’kr?-t?z’?m, s?n’-) n. 1. Reconciliation or fusion of differing systems of belief, as in philosophy or religion, especially when success is partial or the result is heterogeneous.
I don't care much about learning my European heritige. I know I have Irish, English, Italian, and Russian in me, but it doesn't interest me to look any further into it, in the spirit of, as Jason would say, Sankofa.I’d prefer really to forget about all that, and simply pick and choose things that work for the area I live in, and move on from there.
Most of us here are descended from European populations, and engaged in European cultures. This is really the root of our problem; we were raised as domesticated humans, and now we recognize how much we’ve been missing, and we’re no longer satisfied with that. We want more. We want to rewild.
This presents us with a unique challenge: the creation of a new culture. We have been domesticated, so the idea of ever being wild again is not open to us. There are certain effects that will probably always be with us. But other domesticated animals rewild all the time; they don’t revert back to their wild state, with no evidence that they were ever domesticated; they become something else. They become feral.
Cultural appropriation is a big issue that we as rewilding people need to wrestle with. Our own culture doesn’t work, and yet, we can’t simply pick and choose from other native cultures like a buffet. That’s just another form of imperialism, a final kind of theft that follows all the others. The task of rewilding is more complicated than that. The study of what works in other cultures provides a foundation, but it’s not enough on its own.
We can never entirely rid ourselves of what we already are. Our culture and all of its baggage are already lodged permanently in our heads. We ignore this fact at our own peril. What we do not examine is left free to rule over us, because we cannot see what it does or how it moves through our thoughts. We have piles of examples of how it even makes it impossible to see how other cultures work. How much of native brilliance has been systematically ignored and dismissed because we could not appreciate it for what it actually is?
That’s why I believe central to the task of rewilding is syncretism. We need to find what works in other cultures, and we need to explore the depths of our own culture for the vague remnants of what once worked, and begin working those themes together. Rewilding cannot be as simple or as futile as running off into the woods to “play Indian.” It takes a life-long creative struggle committed to creating a new, syncretic culture.
Remember, wild human societies, cultures that work, honor their culture and their ancestors. We need to find what in our culture, what in the traditions of our ancestors, is worth honoring, and tie that together with the native traditions of the lands we’re becoming native to. Those traditions can hardly remain unchanged as we make them native to a new land, but we cannot dismiss them entirely, either, because they’re already too much a part of us. The tools of belief, myth, and tradition are the only handles we have to keep those threads from burrowing deep into our minds and ruling us unchecked; with those tools, we can explore the fault lines of civilization, and not just rescue ourselves, but redeem whatever good our culture once had before it became civilized.
That means exploring our various European cultures and traditions. There are strands there worth exploring, common elements found among animists and old-growth cultures as well. It’s a mine-field full of subtle dangers, to be sure, but if we shrink from that task, I don’t think rewilding is truly possible. We are what we are, and we cannot deny that. We can’t simply indulge a fantasy of “playing Indian,” and we can’t allow simple cultural appropriation. By the same token, we can’t allow the exploration of our own traditions to tip into the “bad old days” of Romantic racism. It’s a difficult middle road fraught with dangers, but I believe that’s the only real road possible out of domestication. Abandoning it to either side may lead us to a place superficially feral, but we’ll always have that last bit of domestication holding us back.
Simple mimicry will not suffice. We must create a new culture for a new type of human, the feral human. I’m not saying it’s easy, I’m saying it’s necessary. Rewilding must be syncretic.
Some examples to give an idea; these are all beginnings, I don’t think anyone right now is very close to the end:
Bill Maxwell’s “White Road”
Me “Entering Merlin’s Domain”
The native traditions of the place where you are give you a hint of how to relate to that land. I frequently quote