The Roots and The Flaws
The Olde Ways, as conceived of in the general fandom subconscious, are not, in fact, ancient, or even particularly old as religions are understood. The roots are found in Wicca, an “invented tradition” created, at first, by Gerald Brosseau Gardner (known by the name Scire when actively practicing) and later built up to the general modern form with the additional help of Doreen Edith Dominy Valiente.
Gardner was many things, a tea and rubber planter, a customs officer, a novelist. He was not an academic, and was, instead, an amateur anthropologist and archaeologist. Ordinarily, it is a good thing to be interested in things, and I in no way mean to say that amateurs should stop researching what they are interested in. I have been fortunate to gain formal education in the fields I have, but in the current age, it is a mere barrier of entry that is, in far too often a case, artificially enforced. Being an amateur becomes a negative when one attempts to do what Gardner did.
The foundation of the religion began in the first half of the 20th Century and has its basis in the witch-cult (cult here being used to refer to worship groups of pre-Christian deities, instead of the modern linking with high-control groups) hypothesis, henceforth referred to as the WCH. A discredited hypothesis. The WCH, pioneered by Karl Ernst Jarcke and Franx Josef Mone, is built on the central premise that the witch trials of the Early Modern period were an attempt to suppress a pan-European pagan religion that had persevered through Christianization efforts. The WCH used flawed evidence, cherry-picked from trial records, and presupposed that witchcraft accusations were truthful. The WCH is alternatively referred to as the Murrayite Hypothesis as its primary advocate was Margaret Murray, publishing her works defending the argument in the early 1900s. Notably, and the cause of this notation, is Murray’s contemporaries regarded the WCH as being a faulty theory built on poor scholarship.
Murray’s influence due to her entry in the Encyclopædia Britannica aside, there was only a single member of the Folklore Society who took the theory seriously. Gerald Gardner.
Where Gardner’s amateur nature in academia falls into fault is his claim of Wicca being a surviving continuation of said witch-cult. The religion itself finds itself being a stitched-together work of Thelema, barely understood Freemason rites, Theosophy, and a flawed understanding of the cunning craft. Gardner’s variation of a witchcraft religion began in the 1940s but began to spread after 1951, given the repeal of the Witchcraft Act of 1735. Notably, the term Wicca was never used by Gardener to refer to The Craft, instead being used as a term for practitioners, originally spelled Wica.
This might seem disconnected from the Pureblood Culture trope, if one is unfamiliar with Wicca. However, Wicca, like the Pureblood Culture trope, has eight festivals, called Sabbats. Like Pureblood Tradition, Wicca calls the full collection of Sabbats The Wheel of the Year.
The primary issue with the use of the Pureblood Tradition trope is that it furthers an ahistorical, debunked hypothesis, even if unknowingly on both reader and author’s parts. This, however, isn’t the end. Pureblood Culture as a trope claims that the traditions are being replaced by Christianity. The given festivals, however, are not truly pagan in nature, and more often than not arerooted in Christianity.