Tag Archives: American religion

The Shock of It All

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I have started reading Christine Wicker’s Not in Kansas Anymore: A Curious Tale of How Magic is Transforming America. (Jason Pitzl-Waters has also mentioned it.)

Alas, I’m too jaded to be shocked! shocked! by her revelation that magic–or at least magical thinking–is everywhere. When I see a chapter heading like “The Waitress Wears a Pentacle,” I think instead about the need for a good sociological study of class issues in the Pagan movement.

But that isn’t Wicker’s purpose. She’s in four-wheel drive, barreling down the overgrown road cut in the late 1960s and early 1970s by authors such as Susan Roberts (Witches U.S.A.) and Hans Holzer (The New Pagans).

The revival of interest in the occult and the supernatural is a current example of religious events that some have seen as being of great cultural signifiance and as reflecting serious social conflicts and strains of macroscopic importance.

That’s not Wicker writing, but rather sociologist Marcello Truzzi in 1971. He wrote a lot about the “occult revival” back then, although he predicted that it would fizzle out. He is not in Wicker’s bibliography.

Can you say “cycles,” boys and girls?

Here is Wicker:

People with, shall we say, expanded kinds of awareness are quietly blending among us, cobbling together spiritual lives that more freewheeling than anything else ever seen before.

[Not a trace of irony there.]

The waitress wears a pentacle under her blouse. The computer geek next door is a conjure doc. The mom down the street tells fortunes. Soldiers chant toward gods of war. Nurses send healing power through their hands. You have to know what to look for. You have to search them out, ask the right questions, notice the right signs, but they are there, here, everywhere around us.

[Trust me, your guide. I have walked among the Witches of Omaha, the headhunters of Houston . . . ]

And she is off to the Vampire and Victims Ball in Salem, Mass., just the place that any researcher would start.

If it gets better after Chapter 1, I will let you know.

(Blogging from Rico’s Cafe & Wine Bar. In downtown Colorado Springs. Where the demons are. Only I think that they are across the street at Tony’s Bar.)

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Barbara Bradley Hagerty, part 2

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Apparently, I’m a late arrival at this particular meme party. Various people have been all over Hagerty’s religion reporting on NPR before now. The gist: she lets her born-again evangelical values influence how she covers stories, and NPR administrators ignore her violations of their reporter’s code of ethics.

“Daily Kos,” the political blog, calls her a media whore.

This atheist is not happy either.

And there is even an anti-Hagerty entry at this church-and-state blog.

It sounds like a story for the guys at Get Religion, except that their views dovetail perhaps too well with Hagerty’s to begin with.

A delayed reaction to Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s NPR pieces

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Two weeks after blogging about it, I finally listened to National Public Radio reporter Barbara Badley Hagerty’s interview with the (mostly) teenaged Wiccans.

A thought struck me: Is Wicca still the only religion that requires a rebuttal? In this base, Bradley Hagerty goes to some teens at some big evangelical church in Colorado Springs for quotes about falling into Satan’s clutches and that sort of thing.

Elsewhere in her series, someone outside that church discussed the Pentacostal Toronto Blessing, but it was still within an overall Christian context.

One non-rebuttal voice was the manager of Celebration, the leading New Age (for lack of a better term) bookstore in Colorado Springs. Twenty years ago, when Celebration was much smaller, that job was filled by the notorious MC herself. Originally, the woman who started Celebration, Coreen Toll, was highly skeptical about Paganism, being at the time pretty much of a “white light” New Ager herself.

To her credit, Toll, who started quite small (one shelf of astrology books and a rack of imported India-print dresses in one room of her house) and built the store up from there, later developed an apprecation of Paganism in its various forms (Ka-ching Ka-ching).

Joseph Wilson: A Craft Pioneer’s Life

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Joseph Wilson published one of the first American Pagan newsletters, The Waxing Moon, in the 1960s and through his correspondence with Robert Cochrane, established the “1734” tradition or current or call-it-what-you-will in American Craft. (Another version of 1734 history is here.

His spiritual autobiography is now appearing serially in The Cauldron, but you may read the whole thing online here at his Toteg Tribe site. I recommend it. American Paganism suffers from too much how-to in relation to the what-happened.

More Wiccan History

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“The Founding Fathers of Wicca,” a graduate-school paper by Susan Young, currently at the University of Alberta, explores Aleister Crowley’s liturgical and other influence on Gardnerian Wicca. It was published in Axis Mundi: A Student Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, whose article index is here. The paper is in downloadable PDF format, about 180 KB.

Paganism on National Public Radio

This week, National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” program has been running a series on new religious movements, including Paganism. The initial segment, which includes an interview with J. Gordon Melton of the Institute for the Study of American Religion, can be heard online here.

If I am able to hear Thursday’s segment on Wicca live, it will be picked up from KRCC’s repeater somewhere on the highway around Wagon Mound, New Mexico.

That’s right, the notorious M.C. and I are going on the road for a few days. Blogging will resume around the 19th.

Episodic Religiosity

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Cultural anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse divides modes of religiosity into “episodic” and “doctrinal.” One relies on dramatic ritual experiences, the other on creeds, sermons, texts, exposition, etc.

In his book Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity, he writes that in small, tribal, or breakaway groups, “religious life is focused around very infrequent, traumatic ritual episodes.” “Traumatic” seems rather strong, unless, of course, you’re thinking of adult circumcision, the knocking out of teeth, scarification, tattooing, etc.–and a lot of Whitehouse’s field work was done in Melanesia, where some of these practices are or were common.

But now here is an example of a traumatic initiation ritual. If there were other candidates besides the late Mr. James, we can be sure that they will never forget their initiation.

The Revealer

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When I left (I thought) journalism to go to graduate school in religious studies, I thought that one possible later career path would be to be journalist specializing in real religion reporting, as opposed to merely retyping churches’ news releases.

That path was not taken, but others have taken it, and a new way to follow religion-reporting is The Revealer, a blog based at New York University.

From a current entry:

“The religious language with which Disney sold its Celebration [planned community in Florida] and with which buyers bought it isn?t coincidental. The town was — is — the most stunning example of civic religion aestheticized, an extreme-case scenario of gated communities and ?new urbanism? throughout the country, the realization the impulse to create through quaint, storybook settings the community once provided by more stringent faiths.

“But all good things must come to an end, and so Disney embraces evolution rather than creationism by putting its Garden of Eden on the block and announcing plans to build elsewhere.”

I am flattered that Revealer’s “Links–Pagan” page includes this blog and also The Pomegranate, which is taking a lot of psychic energy now as I prepare the first issue with our new publisher.

Drat that Mary Magdalene

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More attempted damage control from the Christian right to the fuss raised by The Da Vinci Code, about which I blogged earlier on Dec. 9, 2003.

Here, AP writer Richard N. Ostling writes a fairly snide review of Karen L. King’s The Gospel of Mary Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle.

(Credit to Religion News Blog, which has the dirt on all kinds of religious groups, so long as they are not “Christian apologists [or] countercult professionals.”)

Strictly Forbidden

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A list of laws against Pagan practice, from the late days of the Roman Empire (4th-6th centuries C.E.), compiled by Christopher Ocker of San Francisco Theological Seminary.

Those Christian emperors just swung a big ax. On the other hand, the divine Julian’s ways of dealing with Christians were much subtler. After all, why force someone who does not believe in the gods to teach the Iliad, which is so painful to their conscience?

Medicine man granted ‘confession’ right

Courtesy of Belief Net via Gus DiZerega comes this federal judge’s decisionthat a Native medicine man can enjoy the same privilege of keeping secrets that Christian clergy enjoy, when those secrets are given in confidence during sacramental confession or its equivalent. (UPDATE: Link is broken.)

Barbie, the Hot Pagan Witch

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I am in debt to Mark Morford’s SF Gate column on the latest, must-have Barbie doll. (Mattel offers a dark-complexioned version as well.) She would be just right to look down on you and your plushies while you are reading some of Llewellyn Publications’ latest teen-witch fiction.