Yeah, there's nothing Celtic about it, either, and it's offensive for them to try to pull that off. If you go to the main page on here and search on Red Tent, there are a lot of the psuedo-tantric sex traffickers who are using these events as a way to recruit.
The neoplaygan "moon lodge" started in the 1980s as a pretendian thing created by Brooke Schiavi. But she told all the non-Natives that it was a traditional NDN thing (not sure what tribe she said it came from. I think she told the gullible white woman that all tribes did it). Susun Weed started one and then within a short period of time there was a "moon lodge" at every neopagan white people gathering. All the women who participated in those things firmly believed it was an NDN tradition that had been "shared" with all women, "because the elders said so."
Of course, these "elders" were all frauds. I've heard white women confidently explain that this is an oooold traditional Native thing. They would set up a structure like a nuage sweat lodge, but usually just out of sheets, and women would go in there. Some would do rituals, others would just hang out and draw on the walls or chat with the other women. It started out as a thing just for women on their moon, then the women-only space tended to get set up in the same area and it became merged into some of the formerly-unrelated women's rituals.
Here's a bunch of the stuff white women have written about it:
Background:
http://www.susunweed.com/moonlodge.htmNuage expansion:
http://www.deannalam.com/summit-3/Calling it "The Red Tent" and making it more elaborate and mainstream nuage, and making a lot more money off it, seems to have happened after Anita Diamant wrote a novel with that in the title. I haven't read Diamant's book, so I can't say what that's about except I think she brought in some Middle Eastern and maybe Biblical stuff. *shrugs*
The groups are all over the place now, and every one I've looked into is full of appropriators. They try to claim what they're doing is "universal," but that just means they've misappropriated from a handful of different cultures. There is some hard core misinformation about brown people being spread in these, usually all-white, groups.
You know, we might want to start a thread on the Red Tent thing itself, and compile the various mentions we have on the forum into one spot.
