Does the Pagan Resurgence Start with Folklore?

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“Politics is downstream from culture,” people like to say online — which is just a re-statement of something that I have long believed, that “Life imitates Art.”

Maybe I am just reflecting my online environment and the podcasts that I listen to, but folklore is suddenly big. My feed has a lot of British contributors in it; some have MA’s in folklore, which won’t get you a teaching job but maybe will give you the skills to write, make videos, and so forth.

So there is a plethora of podcasts, such as the Modern Fairy Sightings podcast, hosted by Jo Hickey-Hall, one of Ronald Hutton’s former graduate students. Zines like I haven’t seen them since pre-Internet days. One of my favorites is Hellebore, edited by Maria Pérez Cuervo, also a former grad student (fill in the blank).

So this is also niche stuff, but you have to add it up.

The Epigram, Bristol University’s independent student newspaper, just this week published an article “The Old Gods- The Resurgence of Paganism and Folklore,“

These traditions may seem to belong to another time – yet interest in paganism and folklore is growing across the globe. Shamanism, although not an organised faith, is the fastest growing religion in England and Wales, according to the 2011 and 2022 censuses. In the US, the number of Wicca adherents is now over 1.5 million. Wicca, founded in the early half of the 20th century by Gerald Gardner, is one of the most influential and popular branches of the modern neopagan movement, with a complex variety of branches, denominations and traditions across the world.

I am not sure where those numbers come from, so just consider them to be “hand-waving.” Counting Pagans is a real difficult problem.

North America’s Pagan resurgence, should one occur, is going to look different. But there are cross-overs. Just today I stopped at the nearest small-town grocery store. This guy was stocking the shelves (not one of the employees that I recognized, so maybe new), and he was wearing a big ol’ Mjölnir amulet around his neck, maybe a reproduction of the one at the linked page.

A Waking Dream: The New Age Salvation Army

This is what a background in religious studies plus sleep-deprivation will do to you.

On Friday I was in Manitou Springs, the old spa town on the west side of Colorado Springs, where I spent most of my twenties and had various formative experiences, such as meeting my wife, forming a coven, running a business, deciding to go to grad school — everyday stuff.

See, for instance, “The Witches of Manitou — More than an Urban Legend” and “One Night During the Cold War.”

Manitou has always been a tourist town, first peddling mineral springs, then a sort of generic “rubber tomahawks” Western tourism during the 1950s–1970s, with digressions into low-end art galleries, head shops, mountain-man paraphernalia, natural food stores, and of late New Agey stuff.

Having bought something at a shop selling Southwestern Indian jewelry, I went to Red Dog Coffee for a burrito, then crossed Manitou Avenue from the shady side (left of photo) toward the sunny side, where I had parked. I was tired, Foggy-brained. Needed coffee. I was so tired that I left my purchase there on the coffee house counter, and one of the baristas brought to my table. Duh!

In the crosswalk, I heard a resonant, ringing sound. I saw a man in a red coat holding a large red bowl, one of those “singing bowls” that played by running a wooden rod around inside the rim.

It made perfect sense! Adapting to the New Agey vibe in Manitou, the Salvation Army, collecting for its Christmas charity work, had switched to a singing bowl instead of the usual sidewalk bell-ringer with a kettle on a tripod. It was a “begging bowl,” like those used by some Buddhist monks!

I started feeling in my jeans pocket to see how much post-coffee change I had — or should i pull out some bills? (It’s a Christian denomination, but I still support the SA’s efforts).

Then I stepped up onto the sidewalk and turned toward the bowl-player. He was talking, trying to pull people into a gift shop. If I had dropped coins into his singing bowl, he might not have been pleased.

I walked a few yards to my parking spot, shaken to realize that I had been half in a dream-state. And I still had to drive through a hour and a half of high-speed multi-lane freeway traffic to Denver to visit a sick friend, which was Part 2 of my trip. Wake up! Be here now! No dreaming!

But we are always dreaming, just as the stars are always shining even when the Sun’s light over-powers them.

Lithuanian Pagans Gain More Official Recognition, But What Does that Really Mean?

A Romuva celebration (Euronews).

After repeated tries, the Lithuanian Pagan group Romuva, which was formally organized in the early 20th century, has received a higher level official recognition

Romuva has been granted official recognition following the Constitution and the Law on Religious Communities and Associations, as well as the Justice Ministry’s conclusion that it meets legal requirements. The ministry noted that Romuva has been active in Lithuania for 25 years [see below for why that matters] while its teachings and rites do not contradict Lithuanian laws and generally accepted moral norms. Romuva applied for official recognition on 17 May 2017, but at the time parliament rejected the move.

In 2019, [and again in 2023] the organisation appealed to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which ruled in 2021 that by refusing official recognition parliament violated the European Convention on Human Rights

Lithuania’s rulers abandoned Paganism in the 1200s (for political reasons at least partly), and the country became majority Roman Catholic. But if any European country did have a hidden “Pagan survival,” it was Lithuania. Or the nearest thing to it.

Once free of the USSR in 1990, Lithuania set up a hierarchy of “registered” religions — a hierarchy that might be on its way out. Right now, it looks like this, says Scott Simpson, lecturerer at Jagiellonian University in Poland and co-editor of Modern Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Central and Eastern Europe.

The media understandably struggle to explain the complex Romuva situation in simple and interesting terms to the average reader. They sometimes err on the side of making it sound like this is the first time that Romuva is counted as a religion at all, and sometimes err on the side of making it sound like they jumped straight to ‘established church’ (TASS has good example of that).

What has happened is that the religious organisation of Romuva, in keeping with Lithuanian law in spite of some hard-to-forgive discriminatory delay, has moved from being in the first tier (a ‘registered’ religious organisation) to being in the second tier (a ‘state-recognised’ religious organisation).  This will give them some more abilities, such as their religious marriages can automatically be counted as state marriages without the need for a separate trip to the registry office.

The change in status for the religious organisation isn’t, in theory, a change in status for the religion.  Citizens of Lithuania have freedom of religion and conscience, and can practice their religions without registration if they wish to do so. (You could call that ‘level 0’ of registration.) But what those citizens get by registering as a religious organisation is the ability to act as a legal corporate entity, for example to collect funds in an organisation-owned bank account. Of course, there is also an intangible psychological and social element of seeming like a legitimate religion when one has an official registration. (You could call this ‘level 1’ of registration.)

One of the most important metrics for making the jump upwards is to have been registered as an organisation at level 1 for at least 25 years.  Therefore, over time, there should be a small surge in requests to the Seimas for movement from ‘registered’ to ‘state-recognised’. Romuva reached that criterion long ago and yet was refused (twice!) the change in status by the Seimas.  This was a democratic vote, and yet the lack of solid objections to Romuva (that is, they were not credibly accused of crimes against the state or any other saliant wrongdoing that could make them undesirable to the Lithuanian state) means that this decision was discriminatory.  That’s not just my opinion, it was also the opinion of the European Court of Human Rights.  At least one other religious organisation has been refused in a similar way: the Jehovah’s Witnesses.  But a new government has come into power in Lithuania with a different composition of MPs and they voted this week to move Romuva to the position that they have qualified for.  (We will see if the Jehovah’s Witnesses also get another chance in the coming weeks.  Blood transfusions might be considered more an issue there.)

Presumably, although Romuva must be pleased to have been moved one rung up, they will someday want to try to move to the next rung, ‘traditional religion’. (We can call this one ‘level 3’.) It is much less clear what the procedure would be for doing that, or whether it is possible at all. The 1995 law says: ‘The State shall recognise nine traditional religious communities and associations existing in Lithuania, which comprise a part of Lithuania’s historical, spiritual and social heritage: Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Evangelical Lutheran, Evangelical Reformed, Russian Orthodox, Old Believer, Judaist, Sunni Muslim, and Karaite.’  One possible interpretation is that you only get on that list by being named on the list in the 1995 law.  And therefore, no-one else will ever be added unless the Seimas decides to pass a new law that supersedes that one.  Romuva will want to claim that they are ‘part of Lithuania’s historical, spiritual and social heritage’ and therefore should be added.

But if Romuva make a play for level 3, they will face a much murkier set of criteria with a lot more difficulty in proving incontestably to all stakeholders that they qualify. Romuva firmly believe that they should be recognised as continuing the ancient tradition which survived nearly intact from times centuries before those other ‘traditional’ religion’s arrival in Lithuania. (Note that current scholars of ancient Lithuanian religion are not in unanimous agreement with Romuva’s conviction in more than one way.) And they believe that their religion remained hidden in Lithuanian folk culture throughout the centuries means that they represent ‘spiritual and social heritage’ par excellence. To them, it is a gross injustice that they were not on the short list to start with.  

But, because the current Romuva started their project in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and their current organisation was only registered in 1992, they will have to fight to be recognised as legally representing the same religion as existed in the 15th century. Technically, the precedence of Sunni Islam in Lithuania (where fragmentation of organisations does not mean that they lose ‘traditional’ status as a religion) means that they don’t actually need to show that this contemporary organisation is the same as that ancient organisation.

So far, so good. But they do need to show that this contemporary religion is the same as that ancient religion. (Cue discussion of the Ship of Theseus, etc.) As much as the adherents of Romuva believe in their hearts that these two things are essentially identical, their critics will have no great difficulty in finding academic experts who will call that into question and call them related, but essentially different. Academic fashions change, and different paradigms circulate today than circulated back in the 1970s. And without a very clear consensus from a strong majority of experts who are consulted on this, the Seimas has no great motivation to initiate the messy and controversial process of drafting and passing a new law specially for them.  Especially knowing that it is likely to get bogged down in an abstruse discussion of nit-picky historical and archaeological details right from the start.

I suspect that the clock is ticking on these kinds of laws, anyhow.  They are out of touch with the rest of EU law and they regularly run afoul of the European Court of Human Rights. I would bet that Lithuania tosses out the whole ladder system long before Romuva manages to climb to the highest rung.

Talking about “Pagan Religions in 5 Minutes”

Pagan Religions in 5 Minutes brings together seventy short essays, each answering a question such as “Do all Pagans follow the same festivals?”1 or “What are Technopagans?” or “What is the difference between Wicca and witchcraft?”

It’s part of a “5 Minutes” series from Equinox Publishing, which also publishes a book series on “Contemporary and Historical Paganism.”

Here is the whole series, Religion in Five Minutes. You can find Pagan Religions in 5 Minutes at the Equinox website or here at Amazon (North America).

In the video, book co-editor Angela Puca is joined by three other Pagan studies scholars — Sabina Magliocco, Jenny Butler, and Giovanna Parmigiani — to discuss the book and related questions.

  1. The author is Australian, hint hint. ↩︎

I Will Be Interviewed for the Cherry Hill Series. Meanwhile, Check Out These!

Register here for the live cast

I am not a Pagan teacher, Witchcraft influencer, or anything like that. Usually i see myself as the person approaching a panelist at an American Academy of Religion session, saying, “Would you consider turning your paper into an article for The Pomegranate?” Kind of a behind-the scenes person.

I figure I will talk about the state of Pagan studies in academia, about Pagan history in the Anglosphere, and whatever other skeletons I can drag out of the closet. (Holli Emore, Cherry Hill’s executive director, is interested in a 1980 case where a Wiccan leader was charged with murder after a Halloween shooting in the Texas Panhandle.)

I did my term as co-chair of the Contemporary Pagan Studies unit, but under the AAR system (which is wise), you get five years, and then it is someone else’s turn, so that they can get the professional exposure, make connections, and bring in fresh ideas.

So this interview will be live-cast on Zoom but later put on up on the Cherry Hill site to watch for free, along with others, such as these Pagan scholars:

Graham Harvey, who got us all saying “contemporary Pagan” instead of “Neopagan” and whose book on animism is becoming ciassic.

Caroline Tully, prolific Australian scholar, Pagan organizer, and associate editor of The Pomegranate.

Giovanna Parmigiani, author of a new book on southern Italian Pagans that I will be discussing more soon.

And there are more!

Animal Sacrifice: Are They Doing It Wrong?

Possible animal sacrifice location
A possible animal sacrifice location in the Howard Beach area. J.C. Rice (New York Post)

The New York Post had two articles recently on apparent animal sacrifice in the Jamaica Bay area of Long Island (politically in both Brooklyn and Queens).

“Animal Sacrifices on the Rise in Queens with Chickens, Pigs being Tortured in ‘Twisted’ Rituals” appeared on September 7, 2024.

Animal sacrifices are surging in Queens, with chickens, pigs and rats being tortured, mutilated or killed in “twisted” religious rituals in parkland surrounding Jamaica Bay, The Post has learned. 

In a little over a month, at least nine wounded animals or carcasses have been discovered in the federally-managed Spring Creek Park in Howard Beach and the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Broad Channel — including five live pigs with partially severed ears.

Creatures recovered from the revolting scene also include a near-dead baby rat tied up in a bag with chicken bones; a freshly decapitated chicken head; a live hen in distress; and a dead dog with its neck snapped.

Ethnographically, the article adds, “Jamaica Bay has been a popular religious site among members of the Hindu Guyanese and Indo-Caribbean diaspora living in nearby neighborhoods, including Richmond Hill and Ozone Park..”

The Post was back on September 14th with “Feds, City to Crack Down on Animal Sacrifices in NYC’s Jamaica Bay after Dog-Carcass with Snapped Neck, Wounded Pigs Found. Mobile lights were to be installed to thwart the evil cultists operating under cover of darkness! I wonder how that worked out.

“Feds, City” should talk to their colleagues in South Florida about this problem. It was there, after all, that a legal case arose that led to the Supreme Court’s verdict in Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah. For a good backgrounder on the case, listen to Heather Freeman’s Magic in the United States podcast episode on the Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye. (A print transcript is also available at that link.)

In essence, per the Court, animal sacrifice for religious purposes is not illegal in the United States under the First Amendment.

Animal sacrifice pops up repeatedly in the Bible. Many Muslims partake in qurban (animal sacrifice) at the feast of Eid al-Adha. Some Orthodox Jews have a practice of waving a live chicken overhead while praying on Yom Kippur Eve, then slaughtering it for a meal according to the kosher rules. And Christians describe Jesus as the Supreme Sacrifice, some descibing themselves as “washed in the blood of the [sacrificial] Lamb.“

A. J. Jacobs, a non-religious Jewish writer in NYC, devotes a semi-humorous section of his book A Year of Living Bibically to attempting to join Hasidic Jews iin this ritual.1

Pagan studies scholars have tended to skirt sacrifice in the Afro-Diasporic religiions, which is why Heather Freeman’s podcast was an exception. There has been some writing on blót in Asatru, which may include sacrifice, starting with Michael Strmiska’s 2007 article “Putting the Blood back into Blót: The Revival of Animal Sacrifice in Modern Nordic Paganism.”

Animal sacrifice was a key religious practice of the pre-Christian peoples of Germanic Northern Europe. It is now being revived by some modern Pagans who reconstruct pre-Christian Germanic religious traditions, drawing on medieval Icelandic literature as well as Anglo-Saxon literature and other related sources (155).

Jefferson Calico’s 2018 book Being Viking: Heathenism in Contemporary America devotes an entire chapter to the topic, examining its social, religious, and ethical contexts, noting that “Eating the sacrifice2 becomes a sacred as well as a dissenting act that calls into quesion and occasions a critique of secular, mainstream American eating practices” (314).

Sacrifice means to make something sacred by connecting it to the divine, yet when it comes to the Jamaica Bay incidents, I have so many questions. Were all these animal remain the product of sacrificial rituals?

The Asatru would have eaten the “blotted” pig — were the ones found abandoned by some urban homesteader? A dead dog? Killed in ritual or killed to cause pain to its owner? Baby rat? (Mom made him get rid of it?). Cops3 operate with simple categories. What happens when you make a collar and end up in court being grilled4 by a First Amendment lawyer? Is it easier just to put up some lights than sort out the perpetrators, when some are criminals and others part of a protected class?

  1. Subtitled “One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible,” the book describes his attempt to follow all the Hebrew Bible’s rules while living in New York City — with a very patient wife. [↩]
  2. As is normally done in most cultures. [↩]
  3. Like vegans. [↩]
  4. Pun intended. [↩]

Bloghouse-Keeping

First, welcome to a bunch of new subscribers! Subscriptions are free, and you receive an email whenever I publish something

On a computer or tablet, you will see the sign-up box in the right-hand sidebar. On a smartphone, you have to scroll scroll scroll down past the recent blog posts to find the Subscribe button. The blog is free and always will be.

Almost all posts on Letter from Hardscrabble Creek are mirrored on the Facebook page, and there is a link for that in the sidebar too. Mobile users will have to scroll down and down to find it. You can also follow it on MeWe.

Expect more posts on the field of Pagan studies soon!

‘The Super Natural,’ or How to Write about ‘Woo’

I blogged here before about things disappearing in my house — kitchen utensils, corkscrews, keys, etc. (See “Pixie Problems, or Working Things Out with the ‘Cousins’ (1)” and Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.)

Things have been better since then. There is a pentagram pendant that has disappeared and re-appeared at least three times, but as long as I am wearing it or have it in my pocket, “they” leave it alone.

And then a book disappeared, almost snatched out of my hands.

The book was The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained (2016), a collaboration between scholar Jeffrey Kripal (I think of him as “the professor of woo”) and author and experiencer Whitley Strieber. (The 2017 paperback edition had the subtitle “Why the Unexplained is Real.“)

Strieber had been a novelist with several bestsellers in the horror category, such as The Wolfen and The Hunger, both of which were adapted as movies.1 All this took a new path after publication of his 1987 bestseller, Communion, about his family’s experience with “the Visitors” at their Catskills home in 1985–86. Communion in turn spawned follow-ups, a podcast, and a whole website, Unknown Country, devoted to UFO-related paranormal experiences.

It’s important to note that Communion never states that the “Visitors” were offworld visitors who came from their home planet to study Earthlings, although many people assume that. Blame the thirty-five previous years of “flying saucers” stories and films. The first movie was, in fact, The Flying Saucer, (1950).

What it was, says Jeffrey Kripal, was a Goddess experience — and that was something many readers could not grasp.

Not only did [Strieber] speak his secrets in public, but he also spoke reverently and fearfully of a divine presences that was feminine, that broke and rode him like a horse . . . by so doing he spoke of a presence at the very heart of the unconscious of the religious West, a presence that has been repressed and denied for three millennia. He spoke of Her (151).

Beyond Kripal’s reading of Communion as fundamentally a work of Goddess mysticism, part of the eternal matter of sex, death, and the sacred, this is a book on how to approach these experiences as a writer.

But first, who took my book?

According to Amazon, I bought it in 2018. I found it to be profounding unsettling — and I have been around this block more than once. I think the sentence that stopped me was one of Strieber’s: “The living, who we call the dead, come close to us now, calling to us to open our minds to a new vision of ourselves” (245).

I write “one of Strieber’s,” because the book is arranged in alternating chapters, each author taking his turn. More on that below.

So Super Natural stayed in the bedroom bookcase, where live all the books that we don’t want casual visitors to be noticing. Then came a day earlier this year when I wanted to share something in with my wife. I pulled it off the shelf and set it down (on the bed?), but it was more like something took it, because I could not find it again. She and I both looked, to the point of checking under the bedroom furniture with a flashlight. No book. (And they have not given it back either.)

“OK, housewights,” I said, “Are you more powerful than Amazon?” I re-ordered another hardback copy, this time from an affiliate seller, a Goodwill store in Tacoma. It duly arrived, and it has not vanished. So I could re-read it and attach sticky notes.

‘Super Natural’ as a Writing Guide

I call it a guide to writing about “woo,” in other words, the paranormal, the Other, the unexplained, whatever you care to call it. Quoting William James, Kripal speaks of a “future science” of “radical empricism, that is, one that took every human experience, however strange or apparenty impossible, under its careful gaze without prejudice of assumption. This book is an attempt to practice just such a radical empiricism” (40).

What Kripal in particular has done is set out series of techniques by which scholars can approach something like Strieber’s experience — and which Strieber himself employs to some extent in his chapters.

First is the “phenomenological cut,” just taking the experiences on their own terms and seting aside “the questions of their possible external source, cause, or truth value” (44). It is hard to just describe what is happening without fitting it into your religous framework (or lack of one) or your world view.

There are more: Kripal also discusses techniques of comparison, history, hermeneutics, and erotics.2 For example, in his summary these these approaches, he notes under hermeneutics

Consider the possibility that some of these encounters may be mediated expressions of another form of mind (maybe ours) making contact with the human ego and transmtting some symbolic signal. Recognize that, generally speaking, extraordinary visions and experiences are ot what they seem on the surface, that they must be interpreted. Recognize the roles of fantasy and projection in the production of these potential signals, but do not assume that everything imagined is imaginary. Imagine double. Hone your Hermes practice, your hermenutics (341).

Super Natural is a book that I will return to on its own merits. But I urge anyone trying to work in Pagan studies, esotericism, or around the shunned mystic fringes of any other religious tradition to study is a manual of academic craft as well,

  1. I’ll always remember Susan Sarandon as the reluctant but erotic vampire. [↩]
  2. His scholarly career began with studying Bengali Tantra and the worship of Kali, and he had . . . experiences. So he is not a newbie here. [↩]