Talk:Handfasting (Neopaganism)

from talk:Handfasting

The Wiccan use of "handfasting" for "pagan wedding" seems to arise around 1970. The earliest use I could find is due to Hans Holzer (1969). Holzer apparently wrote several books about Wicca, either "dramatized" documentaries or pseudo-documentaries. He probably didn't come up with the term but he may have contributed to its becoming "standard" in the pagan subculture. I would be interested in any reference to a Wiccan "handfasting" predating 1969. OED is of no use here, it is aware of the Wiccan sense, but its earliest (and only) reference is dated 2001. The "literal" interpetation (ribbons and so on) arises around 2000 and is not yet known to OED.

Clearly, the Wiccan term was taken from "Celtic folklore" books, OED cites Emyr Estyn Evans, Irish folk ways, 1957 "Like the Scottish hand-fasting, the system allowed the husband to test the usefulness and fertility of the wife" and the term seemed to fit both the "Celtic" the "sexual-liberation" flair of the Wiccan subculture perfectly, so at first, it was just made into an "ancient pre-Christian Celtic" thing allowing ad-hoc marriage (1970s to 1980s); with the appearance of "Wiccan self-help" books describing spells and rituals, apparently the "literal" interpretation of using ribbons arose (but the first evidence of this I found so far dates to 2000). With the internet, and yes, Wikipedia, this "handfasting ribbon" thing entered the mainstream, and since about 2006, you find "handfasting ribbons" all over the place, how-tos on DIY websites, and on sale ready-made on amazon[1] --dab (𒁳) 13:21, 26 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Article scope

This is the Neopagan wedding article, so it should ideally talk less about "handfasting" and ribbons and more about the breadth of Neopagan ceremonies and their legal recognition in various countries. --dab (𒁳) 11:58, 29 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Can we have a real Handfasting article?

For those of us that used the internet before 1999 and didn't decide to base our religious views on the movie The Craft and the ramblings of a pedophile, I would like to ask this article be restored to address the original pagan ceremonies of handfasting, what little we do know of them, rather than a tl;dr about an internet cult of obese basement dwellers making shit up as they go along while glorifying Gardner's 'Wica' - a child abuse cult by a child abuser who was thrown out of Freemasonry for kiddy fiddling who took the rituals verbatim (and even the term 'The Craft' a term used to indicate Freemasonry) to try and create his own weird whacky cult to gain access to teenage girls for his peculiar sexual habits?--It'd be really nice to see an encyclopedic article rather than a pedophillic internet cult article for this entry. Agendabender (talk) 15:27, 25 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Origin of the term

Did the author really mean it is a "history" term, that is a term used in the academic field of history? I think what was meant was "historical", a term used in the past, coming from the past. Cospelero (talk) 12:52, 1 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]