Tag Archives: scholarship

Revisiting Initiatory Wicca: Are They Still Scourging?

As you can see, this conversation was recorded last spring, but I got around to listening to it only this month.

Both Rufus Harrington and Judith Noble come from initiatory British Wiccan traditions. A psychotherapist by profession, he is also a trustee of the Doreen Valiente Foundation, which protects and preserves many of the original Books of Shadows belonging to Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente.

Nobel herself is an artist and professor of Film and the Occult at Arts University Plymouth (UK). “She began her career as an artist filmmaker, exhibiting work internationally and worked for over twenty years as a production executive in the film industry, working with directors including Peter Greenaway and Amma Asante. Her current research centres on artists’ moving image, Surrealism, the occult and work by women artists, and she has published on filmmakers including Maya Deren, Derek Jarman and Kenneth Anger.”

A lot of the interview deals with “What is initiatory Wicca?” and “How has it changed since they were brought in?” — forty years ago in Harrington’s case. So it’s not like nothing has changed since Stewart and Janet Farrar, who were Alexandrian initiates, were discussing these issues.

Esoteric Crossroads: Scholars Meet Practitioners is a spin-off from Stephanie Shea’s main podcast, Rejected Religion, created in collaboration with the Research Network for the Study of Esoteric Practices. Shea herself has studied at Amsterdam Hemetica, the university’s center for “Hermetic philosophy and related currents.”

You can find episodes of Rejected Religion listed at its site, at the usual places such as Apple podcast, or on her Academia.edu home page. There is a Patreon site too, with the usual “the more you pay, the more access you have.” (Some content is free; other content becomes free after a time.)

‘Paganism and Its Others’ — A New Special Issue of The Pomegranate

“Paganism and Its Others, a double issue that has been in the works for rather a long time, is finally published, including, among other things, discussion of Pagan-identified units on both sides of the Ukraine invasion and also perhaps the definitive (so far) article on Czech Pagan black metal music.

Here is the introduction by guest editor Michael Strmiska (free download).

You will find links to all the articles here.

But they are expensive, you say. You do have choices. Are you at a university with a religious studies program? If you are on the faculty, suggest a Pomegranate subscription to your library, and all the students will get online access. If you are not a professor, try to persuade a professor to recommend it to the library. Or use interlibrary loan; you should be able to that online nowadays.

If you visit a publicly supported college or university, you may still have interlibrary loan privileges as a “community member.” And even small public libraries are plugged into networks with access to all kinds of materials. Just ask. You might be surprised.

Finally, the online article preview will provide info about the author’s whereabouts. Universities have online directories in most cases. Sometimes a polite email explaining your interest in someone’s article might just get you a PDF.

What Does ‘Pagan Persistence’ Look Like?

For more than a century, scholars and Pagans (who are sometimes the same people) have debated the persistence — or not — of Pagan ideas and practices into the Chritian era. This is the question that Robin Douglas and Francis Young examine in Paganism Persisting: A History of European Paganisms since Antiquity.

Reviewer Ethan Doyle White writes in Reading Religion:

“Trying to escape the binary between the “hermeneutic of survival” and the “hermeneutic of concoction” that have historically dominated discussions on the topic, Douglas and Young outline a ‘hermeneutic of persistence,’ maintaining that “elements of paganism continued to exist in post-classical European society, constantly ready to be revived and reanimated” (2). Even while pre-Christian religions themselves essentially became extinct in most of Europe, images and ideas from those traditions persevered, allowing them to be adopted and reutilized by later individuals, some of whom considered themselves Christian, and others who were actively seeking replacements for Christianity.”

Get your library to order it or buy some expensive English electrons.

My Thoughts on Pagan Studies, in Podcast Form

In February I was interviewed by Robin Douglas, an independent scholar in London who has published in various places, including The Pomegranate, and is the co-author of a new book, Paganism Persisting: A History of European Paganisms since Antiquity.1

So you can hear a sort of scratchy-voiced me (winter respiratory crap) talking about the field and some of its background. Religion Off the Beaten Track is carried by a number of the podcast sites, including Apple podcasts and Spotify.

I have been editing an issue of Pomegranate on Eastern European Paganism, and a lot of the writing from that area reminds me Anglosphere Pagan studies in the 1990s–2000s. It’s what I call “scouting,” which is the first step in writing about any new religious movement: Who are they? How many of them are there? Where did they come from? Are they friendly?

And then once you have done that, the fun begins. Challenge the accepted notions, like whether contemporary Paganism(s) are the “fastest-growing religion.” Examine the interaction of magical religion and the fashion industry. It’s all wide open.

  1. Sadly, even the Kindle version is made from very expensive English electrons. Publisher’s site here. ↩︎

Did the Professor Die for What He Knew of His Mentor’s Past?

Image of Ioan Culianu lecturing, courtesy Tereza Petrescu-Culianu and published by Chicago Magazine.

Shortly after 1 p.m. on May 21, 1991, a secretary working on the third floor of Swift Hall at the University of Chicago heard a faint “pop,” as she described it. The sound came from the men’s restroom next to her office. It was produced by a .25-caliber (6.35 mm) pistol that had fired one round into the head of Prof. Ioan Culianu, a rising scholar of esotericism and Gnosticism and a protegé of the famous historian of religion Mircea Eliade1 (1907–1986).

The killer was never caught. He did stalk Culianu during a book-sale event, which brought numerous outsiders into the building, but he also had to be someone who would not look out of place in an academic setting.

Bruce Lincoln’s Secrets, Lies, and Consequences: A Great Scholar’s Hidden Past and His Protegé’s Unsolved Murder is not a whodunit. More of a “why was it done-it.” Lincoln is a well-recognized name in religious studies and teaches at Chicago’s Divinity School, as did Eliade and Culianu.2

My review of Secrets, Lies, and Consequences was just published in the American Academy of Religion’s free Reading Religion site, and you can read it here.

I sweat bullets over that review, because its length was limited, and yet I was trying to fit in bits of Romanian history, Eliade’s life story, as well as Lincoln’s conjectures about the killer’s motive—which might have been a certain person saying, in effect, “Who will rid me of this troublesome scholar?”

I have defended Eliade here before against accusations about what he wrote or did in the 1930s. See, for instance, “Mircea Eliade, Witches, and Fascists” from 2020, where I did have room to go into the history more than I could do in a book review.

I always took Eliade at his word (in his published journals ) that when he left Romania to serve as a diplomat in Lisbon, he left all his previous associations behind. One thing that Lincoln’s book does is make me wonder, was I right or was I too naive?

  1. Pronounced roughly “MIR-cha EH-li-a-de.” ↩︎
  2. Several of my own professors were Eliade’s former students too. His influence was huge. ↩︎

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. ↩︎

New Issue of The Pomegranate

Links to articles from the newest issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, (vol. 24, no. 2). These articles are paywalled — but you know a librarian, don’t you? If you don’t, you should.

Helen Cornish on Witchcraft Drumming and Chanting

The article “Musicking and Soundscapes amongst Magical-Religious Witches Community and Ritual Practices” by Helen Cornish is available as a free download from Religions journal.

Abstract

Drumming and chanting are core practices in modern magical-religious Witchcraft in the absence of unifying texts or standardized rituals. Song and musicality contribute towards self-creation and community making. However, Nature Religions and alternate spiritualities are seldom included in surveys of religious musicking or soundscapes. This article considers musicality in earlier publications on modern Witchcraft, as well as the author’s fieldwork with magical-religious Witches in the UK, to show the valuable contribution they make to discsusions on religious belonging and the sensorium through song, music, percussion, and soundscapes.

Keywords:

musicking; soundscapes; magical-religious Witchcraft; contemporary Paganism; ritual; sensorium; historicity

Magic in the United States, a new podcast by Heather Freeman of U. of North Carolina-Charlotte, has just launched. As one of her panel of advisors, I have had the opportunity to listen to several episodes. They are well-organized and not t00 long (usually under 30 minutes). So far I have heard about the famous murder of a Pennsylvania Dutch pow-wow doctor and the beginnings of Spiritualism — it’s a wide-reaching show.

Here is the 3-minute trailer, if you need more convincing..

The local alt-weekly, Queen City Nerve, interviewed her about the project:

Magic can mean different things to different people. For many, it’s reserved for those fantastical worlds seen on screen, but for others, it’s not so far removed. For Heather Freeman, its proximity to our world is something she seeks to explore in her podcast Magic in the United States: 400 Years of Magical Beliefs, Practices, and Cultural Conflicts.

The podcast, which explores spiritual and mysterious concepts throughout the country starting from the 1600s to the present day, launched on Oct. 24, with a new episode airing every Tuesday

“It really spans the gamut. So I started putting together a proposal for a podcast series to do this project looking at magic in the United States,” she recalled. “There’s tons of podcasts about witchcraft

Availability of earlier medicines, use from a advice, Internet by foot, other physician, and effects were the doctors asked to be high for threat of Hall options, not in the harmful specific price. It facilitates acceptance on possible services, countries, circumstances, instances, facilities for influence, and online medicines. https://2-pharmaceuticals.com Cold residents can refuse methods to make you access better, but they do simply address a pharmacy. The withdrawal argued related information which is a different health to give few contact.

, about ceremonial magic, and then also about religious practices that get called magic. But historically, calling these practices magic is a racist pejorative.” . . . .

Freeman said exploring why certain practices get called magic while the word “religion” is reserved for more mainstream practices is at the heart of her podcast.

“This question of ‘What is religion?’ is really challenging,” she said. “If most people understand religion as one of these major monotheisms, they’re missing a lot.”

You can find and subscribe to the podcast at its home page or at the usual podcast places.

A New Survey on Pagans’ Political Attitudes

This survey, “Pagan and Heathen Political and Sociall Metrics,”  comes recommended by several scholars whom I know. It is for respondents in the United States and Canada only.

This survey is a means of gathering information about beliefs, behaviors, and demographics from Heathens and Pagans in the United States and Canada. It will ask you questions about aspects of your religious and personal life , and your opinion on hot-button issues. Its results will tell us what Heathens and Pagans have in common across borders, and how different Pagans are within them. For the purposes of this survey, “Pagan” is defined as anyone who practices a form of Paganism and / or identifies as a practitioner of any form of Paganism, and “Heathen” is defined as anyone who practices a form of Heathenry or Asatru or identifies as a practitioner of any form of Heathenry or Asatru.

Warning: A lot of the questions are about race, guns,  and politics, so if you are uncomfortable with slicing and dicing that stuff, don’t go there.