There are of course pagan NRMs – just as there are Christian and Hindu ones. But as with paganism, that alone does not make all paganism an NRM any more than it makes Christianity or Hinduism one. I’m not necessarily sure, Jonathan, why you think the contemporary indigenous rhetoric “is seriously unwholesome in a few different ways.” It seems to me unnecessary and foolish, but I am not seeing the danger or what you are seeing. I agree with you that any “unbroken chain of secret pagan survival into the present day” is sloppy thought if not also too wishfully embarrassing in general. I think Ronald Hutton exposed much of the fallacy behind that romantic idea with regard to Margaret Murray’s pagan survivals in Europe. The underlying basics of pagan perception, however, are always present, and that alone allows us to tap into ancient sentiment and understandings that have a double irony in being as relevant today as they once were and still are. The unbroken tradition or traditions has/have indeed been lost in the West, but inasmuch as we connect with the earth and the natural cycles, we are never as far from ancestral understandings as the critics of paganism argue. If there are those who identify as ‘paleo-pagans’, fantasies or not, is there a problem? Even if there are some who extend indigenous identity to *all* contemporary pagans, it may seem a bit arrogant on their part, but is there really once again a problem? The rest of us know differently, and we just do not need to read their books.

But I do fear that allegations of something being ‘nonsense’ is at least 50% a value judgment, and I thought the pagan way is to live and let live. Indigeny and texts are important when we have them, but it the *pagus* or ‘locality’ that provides the framework for even these. And the people of the *pagus* are the pagans. I think if we were to substitute the word ‘locality’ for ‘indigeny’, or ‘local’ for ‘indigenous’, in Patsouris’ “Restoring Our Pre-Conquest Mind” text, we would have something to which most of us could subscribe.