Articles on Otherkin, Therianthropes

• Joseph P. Laycock, ” ‘We Are Spirits of Another Sort’:  Ontological Rebellion and Religious Dimensions of the Otherkin Community,” Nova Religio 15, no. 3 (2012): 65–90.   DOI: 10.1525/nr.2012.15.3.65

• Venetia Laura Delano Robertson, “The Beast Within: Anthrozoomorphic Identity and Alternative Spirituality in the Online Therianthropy Movement,” Nova Religio 16, no. 3 (2013): 7–30. DOI: 10.1525/nr.2013.16.3.7

“Therianthropic,” coined from the Greek words for “wild beast” and “man,” first showed up in 1886, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, when a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica wrote of  “Religions, in which animistic ideas still play a prominent part, but which have grown up to a therianthropic polytheism”—such as ancient Egyptian religion with the jackal-headed Set, etc., I suppose. Other therio- combinations go back to the seventeenth century, such as theriomancy.

Both Robertson and Laycock rely heavily on blogger Lupa’s book A Field Guide to Otherkin.

Laycock’s Otherkin scholarship seems to be a spin off from his work with the Atlanta Vampire Alliance, which produced Vampires Today: The Truth about Modern Vampirism.

Although he has to take time to explain the Otherkin “community” to his readers (I use the scare quotes because I have some reservations about the world community in such cases), Laycock is really engaged in religion scholars’ ongoing debate over what “religion” is or whether the word “religion” is useful at all in a scholarly setting. (There are those who claim it is not, that it merely masks political and social competitions.)

He places the Otherkin in the historical spectrum of Western esotericism and spiritualism: the idea of “walk-ins” goes back to the 19th century, for example, while the influential English esotericist Dion Fortune wrote of “possesion by ‘elementals’ or thought-forms . . . . Despite Fortune’s rather pejorative view of such people, Psychic Self-Defense has since been cited as an early reference to the Otherkin phenomenon” (71).

To Laycock, Otherkin are perhaps best described as an ” ‘audience cult,’ a movement that supports novel beliefs and practices but without a discernible organization. Individuals frequently participate in audience cults simply through reading books and watching television programs. . . . As an audience cult facilitated primarily by the Internet, Otherkin are free to practice whatever religion they like, but their identity tends to color that practice” (73).

There is more, but I am just summarizing a few points.

Robertson spends more time explaining the concept of Therianthropes’ self-descriptions of “awakening” to their dual natures, goes into “Internet religion — Therianthropy popped up on alt.horror.werewolves in 1992 — and concurs with Laycock  that Therianthropes “reify their anthrozoomorphic identity through the appropriation of spiritual concepts into personal mythologies” (10).

She spends time on the idea of shape-shifting through history and the return of totemism through neo-shamanic teaching as well as contemporary Paganism. But she also notes that there are Christian Therianthropes who see themrmselves as “having a gift bestowed upon them by God to redress the balance between nature and civilization” (23).

Her conclusion is that the Therianthropy movement “exemplifies the innovation of spiritual individuals in the postmodern age . . . popular occulture and re-enchantment in motion” (24).  In other words, the key sociology-of-religion concept of re-enchantment is more malleable and multi-faceted than previously discussed.

Sarah Pike on Witchcraft and American Religion

Religious studies professor Sarah Pike, author of Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community and New Age and Neopagan Religions in America discusses her work at the Religion and American History blog.

In a chapter I wrote recently on “Wicca in the News” about changing representations of Witches in American news media since the 1960s (Oxford Handbook of Religion and the American News Media, 2012), I argue that reporters today rarely depict Witches as evil or satanic, even though stereotypes from the 1960s and 1970s of sexy young female Witches or cuddly cookie-baking elderly Witches-next-door still remain. In the past 25 years since I entered my first occult shop and started asking questions, the boundaries between categories like religion and magic and the differences between “folk,” “popular,” and “institutional” religion are treated with more nuance. And scholars of American religions are more likely to take traditions like Wicca seriously than they did when I was a graduate student, because Neopaganism has become firmly established across North America and formally recognized in government branches and institutions such as the military and prisons.

Read the rest.

Now We Are Ten

10candlesTen years ago, I started a blog using Blogger’s FTP service to my own domain, which you cannot do any more. Blogs were the cool new thing.

If you go back and look at the archives (sidebar, scroll down past the blogroll), you will find that my concerns then looked a lot like my concerns now.

Progress is an illusion.

Umbanda, Evangelicals, and Gay Marriage


A report from Public Radio International on the Brazilian Spiritist religion of Umbanda focuses on a same-sex couple and conflicts with evangelical Christians.

Hogwarts for Vampires

Maybe if I had a bookish teenage daughter I would know this, but the boarding-school-for-vampires (etc.) genre has exploded.

Here is a typical cover blurb:

Two years after a horrible incident made them run away, vampire princess Lissa and her guardian-in-training Rose are found and returned to St. Vladimir’s Academy, where one focuses on mastering magic, the other on physical training, while both try to avoid the perils of gossip, cliques, gruesome pranks, and sinister plots.

Margot Adler and I were discussing vampire books about four years ago, when her quest to read them all had passed ninety titles. Cradle-Marxist that she is, she was trying to understand the vampire craze as being somehow a critique of capitalism.

I don’t think so—and definitely not in the Young Adult classification. Check out this list of suggested titles, linked from a website of a public library near me.

It could be more work for Joseph Laycock, the go-to guy in religious studies for vampire-ology, but he has moved on to otherkin, of which more anon.

RELATED? “We are more interested in the zombie at times when as a culture we feel disempowered,” [Clemson professor Sarah] Lauro said. “And the facts are there that, when we are experiencing economic crises, the vast population is feeling disempowered. … Either playing dead themselves . . . or watching a show like ‘Walking Dead’ provides a great variety of outlets for people.”

Robin of Kent (and His Merry Men)

A British historian argues that Robin Hood was based on a guerrilla bowman nicknamed Willikin of the Weald, although he might have passed through Sherwood Forest. (A snippet of the longer article from History Today)

That puts him fighting for “bad King John” (a minus) but against the French (always a plus for an English folk hero).

Whoever he was, check out his filmography. Where that leaves Herne the Hunter, I don’t know.

Freelancers versus Editors in the Digital/Print Age

Freelance journalist Nate Thayer’s blog post about his experience with The Atlantic has made some waves.

In short, Thayer was pretty annoyed when Olga Khazan, an Atlantic editor, asked him to re-write a piece published elsewhere for The Atlantic — for free. Thayer reproduced their email exchange, which included him reminding her that “exposure” does not pay any bills:

I am a professional journalist who has made my living by writing for 25 years and am not in the habit of giving my services for free to for profit media outlets so they can make money by using my work and efforts by removing my ability to pay my bills and feed my children. I know several people who write for the Atlantic who of course get paid. I appreciate your interest, but, while I respect the Atlantic, and have several friends who write for it, I have bills to pay and cannot expect to do so by giving my work away for free to a for profit company so they can make money off of my efforts.

Then a more senior editor, Alexis Madrigal, got involved, feeling Thayer’s pain but explaining how, gosh, publishing is in a tough spot and he just doesn’t have any budget for freelancers, even as he wanders the halls and ponders the magazine’s past glories

If I open up one of our musty tomes at the office, I can get sucked in for an hour just looking at the ads, or marveling at the eloquence of W.E.B. DuBois. When I look back at old Ta-Nehisi posts or see Fallows in the halls, I can get emotional. I was watching Ken Burns’ National Parks documentary, and he notes, offhandedly, how stories that ran in our magazine helped preserve Yosemite for future generations.

Commenters saw it differently:

I just love reading lengthy self-justifications from people who have full-time jobs taking other people’s work for free.

And

Congratulations: you’ve made your magazine’s arrogant, sorry-not-sorry half-apology and made it into a full out non-apology. The amazing thing is that you think you’re articulating a defense of the profound self-worship of The Atlantic, when actually, you’re engaging in it.

A lot of the comments does engage the money issue in intelligent ways, so if you are trying to write for money, it’s worth reading them.

Archaeologists Find Secret to Norse Sunstone?

This might be one of those “But we already knew that!” deals, but French archaeologists think that they have an actual example in hand of a “sunstone,” said to be used by the Norse to navigate in cloudy weather.

This one, however, comes from a Tudor-era shipwreck. Same principle though.

(LDS historians and scholars, this is not about you.)

Publisher Drops Suits Against Blogging Librarian

A  university librarian who described Edwin Mellen Press on his blog as “dubious” and as offering “second-class scholarship” was sued in turn by the press, but the lawsuit has now been dropped.

The lawsuits inspired scholars from around North America to rally behind Askey. Created by Martha Reineke, a professor of religion at the University of Northern Iowa, a petition demanding EMP to drop its lawsuits had garnered more than 3,100 names as of Monday morning.

EMP told CBC Hamilton on Monday that it “has discontinued the court case against McMaster University and Dale Askey.”

In a statement, the company added: “financial pressure of the social media campaign and press on authors is severe. EMP is a small company. Therefore [it] must choose to focus its resources on its business and serving its authors.”

The key words appear to have been “social media campaign.” In the relatively small world of academic publishing, it got results.

I notice that Mellen’s website describes them as a “non-subsidy academic publisher.” That was not always my impression, but OK. Another page, however, states “The Edwin Mellen Press refuses to write, rewrite, or revise any author’s text.” Not hiring copy editors saves money!

UPDATE: See comments.

Is Paganism Doomed?

No, this is not the judgment of one of the usual (Pagan) suspects.

It is a tangent spun off a column by Rod Dreher, who comments frequently on ecclesiastical matters. He was raised a southern Protestant, converted to Roman Catholicism, left that church over the sex-abuse scandals, and is now an Orthodox Christian — although he is aware that the Orthodox churches are not scandal-free either.

Although Dreher and I are a little different theologically, I think that he would pass the next-door-neighbor test, especially as he loves to cook and appreciates the cuisine of his native Louisiana. Maybe he would invite me over now and then.

Like many members of the chattering classes, Dreher has been looping back again and again to the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI. What does it mean for the future? and all that sort of thing. (Me, I wonder if the prophecy-falsely-attributed-to-St.-Malachy is right, and the next guy will indeed be the last pope. Then we can ask some questions.)

So in the course of musing on the future of Christianity and religion in general, he quotes some Brazilian who says that interest in Brazil’s established Afro-Brazilian traditions is diminishing.

[Quoting the Brazilian:] As I said in other topics, christianity in America and Europe is not the only faith that is hemorraging people: as follower of the so called ‘african paganism’ (macumba), here in Brazil, it’s baffling to see the temples devoid of young people: of the dozens of young man and woman I know only three (including me) are active. In my mother’s generation, almost everyone in Brazil was macumbeiro (follower of the macumba), today temples are closing, the priests are spiritually weak, and one rarely see the offerings to the spirits in the crossroads, beaches and graveyards.

And he decides that paganism [sic] is preferable to atheism, even if it is not the Real Thing.

Personally, I find paganism far more attractive than atheism, because pagans, however mistaken their understanding (from a Christian point of view) nevertheless share with Christians a recognition that there is Something There beyond ourselves, and the material world. I can have (have had) a fruitful, engaging discussion with my friend and commenter Franklin Evans, a pagan, in a way that I just can’t with friends who have no spiritual or religious beliefs, or a sense of the numinous.

My guess, and it’s only that, is that some pagans will fall away from the practice of their faith for the same reason many Christians are: because it doesn’t make sense in our scientistic, materialistic, consumerist world. At the same time, I think that paganism stands to gain overall from the unchristening of the West. If you look at the Asatru site, this neopagan religion speaks to longings that are deep within all of us, and cannot be suppressed forever.

Read the rest, it’s interesting.