The Evidence Base, and What Counts as Legitimate

What makes a method reconstructionist is that a claim about practice has to be sourced. The materials are of several kinds and they carry different weight. Literary texts, the Homeric and Orphic Hymns, Hesiod Theogony and Works and Days, tragedy and the poets, supply names, epithets and mythic narrative. Inscriptions supply what people actually did: sacred calendars listing which offering went to which deity on which day, cult regulations specifying who might enter a sanctuary and in what state, and dedications recording vows fulfilled. Archaeology supplies altars, deposits and the physical shape of a sanctuary. Modern scholarship on Greek religion is used as the working synthesis of all three.

Inscriptions are prized precisely because they are administrative. A calendar recording that a particular sacrifice was made in a particular month is not a poet imagining a rite, and it does not carry the literary shaping that myth does.

The standard this produces is that a modern rite is judged by whether it can be traced, and a practice with no evidence behind it is at best a personal addition and not part of the reconstruction. That is the contrast the tradition draws with eclectic modern paganism, which combines material across cultures according to what resonates. Neither approach is inherently the more serious, and the reconstructionist commitment is a commitment to a particular discipline about evidence rather than a claim to greater sincerity.