(Part 1 here)

Just to continue the previous discussion, let’s look at a Pagan scholar’s (in both senses of the term) book, Niki Bado’s Coming to the Edge of the Circle (Oxford University Press, 2005).

Its subtitle is  “A Wiccan Initiation Ritual.”  But is that all that it is about? Nope. What she is doing is challenging the model by which anthropologists and scholars of religion have been understanding initiation and rites of passage for the past century, Arnold van Gennep’s “tripartite model.”

Fifteen years ago, when I wrote the introduction to Witchcraft Today Book Two: Modern Rites of Passage, I too used van Gennep’s model: separation, liminality, and finally reintegration into the group. It was the gold standard, so to speak.

Going out, experiencing something, coming back and re-integrating—it explains everything from the teenage years to Freemasonry.

But what Nikki Bado did five years ago was to offer a new model of initiation, one based on what she called somatic praxis, “a repetitive discipline that engages both the body and the mind in learning” (viii). Her analogy is learning to drive a car, which also requires a “body-in-practice.”

One thing you could say right away was that van Gennep’s model focused more on the person-in-the-group, whereas Bado’s is more about how the person herself changes through “the ritual performance of initiation,” which she describes more as repeating circles than as movement out and back in again.

“As a scholar,” she writes, ” I intended from the outset to use Wiccan initiation ritual as material to think with” (145). In other words, her goal is not to discuss Wicca and only Wicca, but initiation in general.

There is a lot more too it, of course, and Bado spends many pages basically explaining Wicca. But she always returns to the body-in-practice model.

There is some parallel here with Tanya Luhrman’s “interpretive drift,” although that model  focuses more on cognition. (And Luhrman, having gathered what she needed for her dissertation and Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft, sailed off into the sunset, leaving an island of angry natives behind her.)

Bado as a Pagan scholar has several purposes:

1. To propose a new model of initiation that can be applied across religious traditions and cultures.

2. Since she herself follows a new religion—Wicca—and is also writing about it, she has to demonstrate that instead of a “special pleading” she is actually able to offer scholarly (not practitioner) insights that are “otherwise not available to scholarly examination” (145). Thus she must turn her “insider” status into an asset, lest she be accused of taking the easy way, writing about what she is already involved in, perhaps with less than full objectivity.

(Never mind that Jews write about Judaism, etc. Members of new religious movements are viewed with more suspicion as to their contribution to the larger work of the academy.)

3. By using Wicca as her model instead of some other religious tradition, and by discussing her own participation, she also does indeed make a case that Pagan scholars of religion can do good work in the academy. Her work and others’ work makes the study of Pagan religions and Pagan ways of being religious more legitimate.

Do they also help Pagan practitioners? Perhaps indirectly. But that is not what sold the book to Oxford University Press. Point number 1 and possibly number 2 sold the book, I suspect.

When you write an academic book proposal for a publisher, you try to forecast good sales in the scholarly market—and, as sort of holy grail, adoption of your book as a classroom text that students must buy. Sales to “general readers,” i.e., the practitioner buyers, are secondary or even tertiary, behind library sales. The publisher hopes for them, but they are not what push the book’s publication, most of the time.

During my first semester of graduate school, I was told a cautionary tale. It was about a Christian pastor who went back for a PhD in religious studies. But one day he had had enough. He stood up from the seminar table and exclaimed, “That’s my Jesus you’re talking about!”

The pastor’s reaction is the typical believer/practitioner one. He expected his advanced studies to “strengthen his faith,” perhaps.  He resisted setting aside his Christian truth claims, “bracketing them out,” to use the common expression.

Read this post at the Religion in American History blog about an attack on a professor of Catholic Studies who criticized the Roman Catholic hierarchy. The comments, thus far, are intelligent.

The problem, however, is a constant one—even between Pagan practitioners (I don’t like the term “believers”) and scholars in Pagan Studies, who are indeed mostly but not all Pagan practitioners themselves, in some way, shape, or fashion.

Religious studies is not-theistic, nor is it atheistic. But it is not theology. There is some tension between the two approaches. (I should point out that the AAR includes theologians too, although some think that the academy is plagued by dangerous religious liberalism.

(On a somewhat bookish online discussion group someone recently claimed that scholars in Pagan Studies pursued their intellectual interests only to gain stature within the Pagan community. Not hardly. For every fan that you may gain, there probably is someone else ready to denounce you as an enemy of true Paganism.)

For instance, when I wrote Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America, one of the question that I wished to attempt to answer was, “What do we (Pagans) mean when we talk about nature religion.”

You will get a different view with a different “we” if you read Bron Taylor’s  Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future.

So if I were revising Her Hidden Children (I have no plan to do so), I would have to take his ideas into account. The conversation would continue. Not that I am right and he is wrong, or vice versa, but I would have to sort out the differences and similarities, intellectual influences (e.g., he gives Henry Thoreau much more space than I do), and so on, because I think that Dark Green Religion is a significant book, and it would be a glaring omission to ignore it now.

These are just two books, against the flood of practitioner-oriented texts coming out from Llewellyn and other publishers.  And neither I nor Bron (so far as I know) are teaching workshops on “How to be a better nature-religionist,” complete with breathing exercises, movement, and song. Other people could do that much better. Audiences want to hear a speaker with a schtick.

We do what we do because we like to think about these things, trying to find paths through the intellectual underbrush.  (“Eliade used to go up the hill this way. Is that path still useful?”)

Meanwhile, you learn to argue whether there is such a thing as “religion,” even while continuing to use the term.