you can see echoes of the way the Romans staked a claim to Jewish mysticism after crushing Judea in the various aborted attempts...
you can see echoes of the way the Romans staked a claim to Jewish mysticism after crushing Judea in the various aborted attempts by the British to stake a claim to Native American and Aboriginal Australian mysticism, stymied only by modernity making it too difficult to achieve the necessary retcons.
I think the difference here is that the US and UK did not attempt to make indigenous spirituality an official state religion lol. It’s not like most Americans or commonwealth people take indigenous spirituality seriously. Otherwise we wouldn’t have people mining/logging/building telescopes on sacred land so frequently lol
not yet! but it took over three hundred years for the Romans to take up Christianity after occupying Judea, Australia at least still has over a century left to work this out.
you can see the early attempts beginning with Clancy of the Overflow and culminating in Crocodile Dundee as an attempt to paint white Australian bushmen as inheriting and ultimately supplanting the Aboriginal connection to the land, tempered by the uneasy awareness that the vast majority of Australians huddle in cities by the coast and don’t find the bush a particularly appealing place, and that the Aboriginal Australians are still here and maintain a separate political identity of their own.
The American Boy Scouts and other 20th century organs of youth formation absolutely cultivated a sense of continuity with native mysticism.
They also gave Kipling’s Jungle Book characters some prominence, to be really on the nose about the whole thing I guess.