A recurring criticism of modern neopagan religion is that it is *inauthentic* - that it is an essentially modern movement with no real connection to the ancient indigenous paganisms of Europe.

A thread.

/1

From around the 1970s onwards, this criticism has tended to be advanced in the form of the claim that there is no *organic continuity* between ancient and modern paganism (eg because the evolving historiography of witchcraft shows that Wicca must have been a modern invention).
/2

But the claim is actually much older. It goes back to Victorian times and the late-C19 neopagan revival.

Back then, the claim was that neopagans had got the *ethos* of ancient paganism wrong.

/3

It seems to have become almost a cliché for critics to say that contemporary neopaganism was inauthentic because those who embraced it - who tended to be Romantic, artistic figures - had overlooked the essentially conservative nature of ancient paganism.

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The earliest example of this trope that I can find is from 1879, when the Leamington Spa Courier criticised neopagan writers of the Aesthetic school as peddling a false representation of the ancient world: "classicism... with a corrupt glamour of mediaevalism thrown over it".

/5

A few years later, in 1892, an article in the Saturday Review suggested that "Real paganism to the modern Neo-Pagan would have seemed Tory in politics, bald in art, and unadventurous in morals".

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Not long afterwards, in 1898, the classical scholar and Christian clergyman Lewis Campbell brought up the theme in his Gifford Lectures.

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In 1904, the Dundee Evening Telegraph declared that ancient paganism "had nothing in common with the luxurious sensualism of its modern namesake".

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The best known example of the trope came in the well-known Christian apologist G. K. Chesterton's "Heretics" (1905).

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It is also worth mentioning the later comment of the Christian scholar Eliot Rose, in his book on witchcraft "A Razor for a Goat" (1962), that "Gods with Persian names and Greek bodies would prove, on examination, to have thoroughly Bloomsbury minds".

/10

So... concerns about neopaganism and (in)authenticity go back a long way before, say, the mid-to-late C20 controversy over the accuracy of Margaret Murray's theories about witchcraft.

Long before then, critics were instinctively reaching for the "modern fabrication" trope.

/11

Perhaps it would be useful to ask why (historical) authenticity is seen in this way as a criterion for the spiritual value of a religious movement.

/End

I surmise that part of the answer is that, by the late C19, Christians had spent a century resisting arguments that their scriptures had been invalidated on historical grounds, so they were used to looking at religious claims through those lenses.