A recent article by Caroline Tully of the University of Melbourne is relevant to our discussion. The title is "Researching the Past is a Foreign Country: Cognitive Dissonance as a Response by Practitioner Pagans to Academic Research on the History of Pagan Religions" - available here:
http://www.equinoxpub.com/POM/article/view/14018/11208
It deals directly with the conflict between the findings of academic research and Neopagan ideas about their own historical origins - which are often a mix of deliberately created myths and misconceptions spurred by unsubstantiated theories.
Cognitive Dissonance has gotten a lot of play as the human brain function that turns off or sidetracks our thinking when we hear a perspective that is antithetical to our beliefs. It takes the form of automatic rejection or refutation of that material and favors information that confirms one's biases. It's what happens when a Republican hears or reads a statement of fact by Democrats and vice-versa, such that neither can even hear, much less evaluate, what the other is saying.
One of the key works to which Tully refers is Ronald Hutton's
The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, which is a scholarly examination of the sources of Gerald Gardner's witchcraft.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Triumph-M...4496/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1333653751&sr=8-1
It is a masterful work that is fascinating reading, but it dispels a lot of fondly held myths.
Ben Whitmore then wrote a critique called
Trials of the Moon: Reopening the Case for Historical Witchcraft.
http://goodgame.org.nz/trialsofthemoon.html
Whitmore is not an historian, so, while some of his criticism seems to have merit, a lot of it is sloppy refutation without substance. Quite a few pagans find that Whitmore's perspective "feels good." Tully refers to criticisms of Whitmore about which he asks why he should be held to their scholarly standards.
Tully makes the point that "it is the methodologies of such research that need to be clarified [to non-academics]. When it comes to history and archaeology, not all ideas about the past are equal. . . . There are ways to distinguish plausible from implausible theories."
All three of the above works are discussed here:
http://the-pagan-perspective.com/2012/03/14/of-pagans-scholars-and-cognitive-dissonance/
The comments to this blog article are well-worth reading also.