Witching Culture

Contemporary Paganism, or Neo-Paganism, is a wide variety of modern religious movements influenced by the various pagan beliefs of pre-modern Europe.^[1][2] The religion of Pagan Witchcraft, or Wicca, was developed in England during the first half of the 20th century and is one of several Pagan religions. The figure at the forefront of Wicca's early development was the English occultist Gerald Gardner (1884–1964), the author of Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959) and the founder of a tradition known as Gardnerian Wicca. Gardnerian Wicca revolved around the veneration of both a Horned God and a Mother Goddess, the celebration of eight seasonally-based festivals in a Wheel of the Year and the practice of magical rituals in groups known as covens. Gardnerianism was subsequently brought to the U.S. in the early 1960s by an English initiate, Raymond Buckland (1934–2017), and his then-wife Rosemary, who together founded a coven in Long Island.^[3][4]

In the U.S., new variants of Wicca developed, including Dianic Wicca, a tradition founded in the 1970s that was influenced by second wave feminism, emphasized female-only covens, and rejected the veneration of the Horned God. One initiate of both the Dianic and Gardnerian traditions was a woman known as Starhawk (1951–) who went on to found her own tradition, Reclaiming Wicca, as well as publishing The Spiral Dance: a Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979), a book that helped spread Wicca throughout the U.S.^[5][6]

Prior to Magliocco's work, multiple American researchers working in the field of Pagan studies had separately published investigations of the Pagan community in both the United States and the United Kingdom. The first of these had been the practicing Wiccan, journalist and political activist Margot Adler in her Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today, first published by Viking Press in 1979.^[7] A second study was produced by the anthropologist Tanya M. Luhrmann in her Persuasions of the Witches' Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (1989), in which she focused on both a Wiccan coven and several ceremonial magic orders that were then operating in London.^[8] This was followed by the sociologist Loretta Orion's Never Again the Burning Times: Paganism Revisited (1995), which focused on Pagan communities on the American East Coast and Midwest.^[9] 1997 then saw the publication of Witchcraft and Paganism in Australia, authored by the anthropologist Lynne Hume.^[10] Next came the work of the American sociologist Helen A. Berger with her A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft in the United States (1999).^[11] Then there was Jone Salomonsen's study of the Reclaiming tradition in San Francisco, Enchanted Feminism: The Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco (2002).^[12]

Magliocco became interested in Paganism in the mid-1990s, intending to explore "the confluence of ritual, festival, gender and politics – the subject of my earlier research in Italy – in a new context". Initially she was interested in Paganism as a "folk revival, in issues surrounding the use of folklore from academic sources, cultural appropriation, and the construction of authenticity in the invention of rituals" rather than in any actual spiritual capacity.^[13] In February 1995, Magliocco attended the first Pantheacon conference, a meeting of practicing Pagans and academics held at a hotel in San Jose, California. It was at the conference that she took part in a ritual led by members of the Reclaiming Wiccan tradition, later characterizing it as "my first powerfully affecting ritual experience in a Neo-Pagan context".^[14]

Magliocco had initially intended to conduct a long-term period of fieldwork among a single Pagan group, with a focus on understanding their "dynamics of ritual creation", but ultimately was unable to do this; from 1994 through to 1997, she held a series of temporary academic appointments at universities across the United States, preventing her from staying in one area for any lengthy period of time and studying any one particular group there.^[13] However, from 1995 through to 1997, she was living in Berkeley, California, where she immersed herself in one of "the country's oldest and most active Neo-Pagan communities", that of the San Francisco Bay Area.^[13] Here, she befriended Holly Tannen, a folklorist and ballad performer who was well known and respected among the Pagan community of northern California. It was through Trennan that she was introduced to many other members of the Pagan community, including to a local Gardnerian Wiccan coven.^[13]

In 1996, she moved into a "small rental house" in the Berkeley Flats along a line of houses that were nicknamed "Witch Row" (a fact that she was unaware of at the time), and it was here that she befriended further members of the Pagan community; her neighbors were elders in the Fellowship of the Spiral Path, while another neighboring house was the home of Judy Foster, a founding member of the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn. Several streets away lived Don Frew and Anna Korn, the high priest and high priestess of a Gardnerian group known as the Coven Trismegiston.^[16] Deciding that she wanted to actively participate in the religions she was studying, Magliocco was initiated into the Coven Trismegiston, and went on to begin training in the Reclaiming tradition.^[17]

In 2002 she published her first academic study of American Paganism, Neo-pagan Sacred Art and Altars: Making Things Work. Witching Culture was published in the "Contemporary Ethnography" series of books, edited by the anthropologists Kirin Narayan of the University of Wisconsin and Paul Stoller of West Chester University.^[18] Magliocco dedicated the book to the memory of Andrew Vázsonyi (1906–1986),^[19] a Hungarian folklorist and novelist who had worked for two decades at the Indiana University Bloomington in the United States.^[20]

In her introduction, "The Ethnography of Magic and the Magic of Ethnography", Magliocco discusses how she first became involved with the Pagan movement, and includes extracts from the field notes that she made at the time. Going on to lay out the objectives of the book, Magliocco discusses the history of Wicca, and the influence that early anthropologists like Edward Taylor and James Frazer had on it as a burgeoning movement. Proceeding to discuss the pre-existing academic studies of the Pagan movement, she explains her own approach to the subject and how it differs from those of her predecessors, in particular focusing on her own spiritual experiences and altered states of consciousness that she experienced while taking part in Pagan ritual and her insider-outsider perspective on the Pagan movement.^[22]

Chapter one, "The Study of Folklore and the Reclamation of Paganism", offers a historical introduction to Contemporary Paganism, looking at its roots in the Classical World of Greece and Rome, and then the successive influences of Neoplatonism, Renaissance magic, the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment. Magliocco then looks at the influence that 18th and 19th century folkloristics and anthropology had on the Romanticists and then Pagan movement, in particular the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Brothers Grimm and Sir James Frazer. Proceeding to look at this relationship, she highlights the work of Charles Leland, Margaret Murray and Gerald Gardner, who drew from folklore in their own books, all of which heavily influenced modern Paganism. Magliocco argues that Contemporary Paganism can be viewed as a "folk tradition" on two levels; firstly, because it continues to work with and propagate the spiritual traditions of western esotericism, and secondly, because it acts as a form of "resistance culture" in opposition to dominant trends in western culture. Finally, she borrows the concept of "textual poachers" from the French sociologist Michel de Certeau, arguing that the Pagan community fit this model well, collating elements from a wide variety of sources and composing them into something new, in this case a religious movement.^[23]

Chapter two, "Boundaries and Borders: Imagining Community", opens with a discussion of how Pagans distinguish themselves from one another and from the wider society around them, before delving into the idea that folklore is vital to Pagan "group formation". Magliocco goes on to describe the Pagan community, with a particular emphasis on those in the United States, dealing with such subjects as ethnicity, education, gender and sexual orientation. Moving on to look at how Pagans forge their own identities, she highlights factors such as costume and use of language, and whether such Pagan coding is explicit, complicit or implicit. Magliocco discusses the various different Pagan traditions, and the community division between those who call themselves "witches" and those who do not. She then rounds off the chapter with a discussion of the anthropological fieldwork that she undertook among the San Francisco Bay Area Pagan community between 1995 and 2000, the Coven Trismegiston that she worked with, and the local Gardnerian, Reclaiming and NROOGD traditions that she encountered there.^[24]

The third chapter, "Making Magic: Training the Imagination", begins with Magliocco's assertion that the unifying feature of the Pagan movement is the ritual experiences that its practitioners undertake. Devoting the rest of the chapter to an examination of how Pagans "conceive of and practice magic", she argues that they do not do so in order to escape rationality, but rather they adopt a belief in magic in order to reclaim "traditional ways of knowing that privilege the imagination". Noting that within Paganism, artists are viewed as magicians, she suggests that magic should itself viewed as an art, with both having the goal of bringing about emotional reactions and changes of consciousness. Exploring the various different definitions of "magic" developed within anthropology, Magliocco notes that most contemporary North Americans equate "magic" with superstition and irrational behavior. She then looks at Pagan understandings of magic, highlighting that Pagans typically try to rationalize magic, viewing it as an energy force in an interconnected universe, one that must obey natural laws, rather than as some un-explainable "supernatural" force. Moving on, Magliocco discusses the Pagan concept of a sacred universe, looking at the veneration of the natural world and the celebration of seasonal Sabbats, and the relevance that that has for Pagan magical beliefs. Exploring Pagan ethics surrounding the practice of magic, in particular the Wiccan Rede and the Law of Threefold Return, Magliocco also studies the manner in which Pagans have re-adopted vernacular magic as a part of their religious practices.^[25]