I rather like the term fakelore. It bubbles and brews images of spin doctors chanting nonsense long enough and loud enough for the gobbledygook of the moment to take root and in many cases, to thrive.

Neo-Paganism in general and Wicca in particular have been particularly susceptible to the enchantment of fakelorists. Take for instance the idea of calling Wicca the Old Religion. A casual reader would think that somewhere in antiquity there was some religious system that resembled Wicca. The snag is…it simply ain’t so. Despite many claims to the contrary and thousands of hours of research by various and sundry minds, not one shred of anything resembling Wicca has been found. In fact, not one shred of documented proof has surfaced to definitively say that anything resembling Wicca existed prior to the middle of the 20th Century. Of course at this point in time, that in itself would make Wicca an older religion since it has well passed the half-century mark. Nor is Druidry, despite the basic love of truth, free of the fakelorist’s art. One could say that the Revival period was speckled with champion fakelorists such as Iolo Morgannwg who had a penchant for inventing that which he could not find within early medieval texts.

I suppose we could say that the eight fold year has been shaped by the fakelorist’s pen. (Read that as conversations between Ross Nichols and Gerald Gardner over tea and a cozy fire.) For while it is based on the agricultural cycle in the British Isles (primarily Ireland), no one has yet established a record of all eight festivals being celebrated by a given clan, tribe or culture.

Another example may be the idea of Druidry, or Druidism, as a religion in and of itself. The evidence only supports the idea of Druids as a social caste with extensive training in different fields as diverse as divination and law. The white robe thing comes from an observation made of a relatively limited number of Druids belonging to one or at most just a few, Gallic tribes. Without exception, Druids in a religious context are portrayed as priests or facilitators of ritual associated with the indigenous religions of Iron Age Europe. It is unlikely that the ancestors had a unified name for their religion at all or for that matter that religious practice and protocol was constant across the vast reaches of the Celtic lands.

Paganism is not alone as far as fakelore goes. More and more the Bible is being interpreted as a very well done blend of folklore, fakelore and history. Take for instance the story about Moses and the bondage of the Israelites in Egypt.

Certainly slavery did exist in ancient Egypt and archeology has established that Israelite communities did exist in Egypt. However to date none of the evidence seems to hint at a mass slavery, as we think of slavery, of the Jewish folks by Egyptian overlords. It may well be that Exodus is a well crafted fakelore account of a labor dispute initiated by folks held in economic bondage rather than literal slavery. Personally I like the Biblical account better than the idea that Moses was merely the shop steward for a group of Jewish brick makers.

I suppose it could be said that fakelore has been a tool to expand and illuminate spiritual principles for as long as man has opted to search for meaning. Fakelore serves those poetic truths that give meaning and purpose to religion even if it does not serve the academic search for factual truth. In many cases the line between fakelore and folklore has been lost in the mists of time and we may never fully isolate one from the other.

As Druids we walk in that intersection where poetic truth and factual truth overlap and merge. Fakelore and folklore guide our practice and our belief systems along with historical fact and the implications drawn from archeological and anthropological research.

Perhaps the challenge is to evaluate fakelore, when it is recognized as such, in terms of whether it serves a higher spiritual purpose or is merely self-serving. Does it serve to illuminate or expand a spiritual principle or does it serve only to promote the tradition in which it is found?

On the other hand… does it really matter?