I don’t know where this blindness 0r refusal to acknowledge facts–no matter how insistent upon “fact” some of the people involved say they are–comes from, and it baffles me to this day…

I find it odd that so many people on the reconstructionist side view syncretism in a not too favorable light. After all, ancient Pagans had no issues with syncretism, and, to my view, were far less concerned with maintaining some notion of cultural purity than some modern recons. In my own personal practice I am a recon myself and I largely keep my practice centered on one historical group of people (or perhaps closely related groups of people would be more accurate), yet I love to learn about and learn from any culture and religion I encounter.

Roughly, I’m thinking in terms of old and new. Even if Wicca is 500 years old(which I doubt), it’s still new compared to religio Romana. Most of Druidry is modern religion created wholecloth from the material of old myth, and it’s distinctly different from the various strains of Celtic reconstructionist polytheism.

People who are Wiccan have no desire to revive the religion of ancient Thessaly (a place associated strongly with Witchcraft), just as those who practice ancient Greek religion have no desire to revamp that religion into a wholly new structure.

So…there is something to the Neo-Pagan / Pantheist division I suppose, as a matter of reductionist study.  It doesn’t really matter where you draw the lines, nor how many of them.  But the value in this for me, Star, is to think about the people who might fall on one side or the other of that line — what else do they have in common?   

The people you describe as “pantheist” are a little fussy for my taste, but I’ve still got a lot more in common with them — as people around a campfire or as a voter or as an online sparring partner — than I do with most of the evangelical Christians I know.  So while I’d land on the “Neo-Pagan” side, the strength of the division between me and any given pantheist (or what I believe Isaac Bonewits might call Meso-Pagan) is pretty small all things considered.

To Pythia’s point above: the real value of the conversation for me is to go “ya know, while the ‘eclectic Wicca’ of a lot of festival rituals is a good least-common-denominator for me, some of those wonderful people who want the community of these festivals find them pretty thin gruel.  So as someone who took a vow to community, I have some thinking to do on how to satisfy them too.”

While I’m always a fan of going the moderate route if and when possible, and to attempting to reconcile differences across various perceived divides, I do fear that the extremes in this particular matter–which have been outlined pretty thoroughly and accurately in your above characterization–are viewpoints that will be largely irreconcilable, at least as they’re espoused by some people at this point.  We can hope for the best, of course, and try and steer ourselves and our own individual communities to a fruitful and equitable balance point whenever we can, and that’s probably the best any of us can do, for good and/or ill.