{"id":4356,"date":"2012-06-25T09:51:58","date_gmt":"2012-06-25T15:51:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4356"},"modified":"2012-06-25T09:51:58","modified_gmt":"2012-06-25T15:51:58","slug":"the-witches-and-the-stripper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4356","title":{"rendered":"The Witches and the Stripper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Someone at the Daily Mail<\/em> no doubt had a good time writing the headline “The drunken stripper from the Golden Banana, a coven of Salem witches and the ‘groping’ man horrifically impaled when she crashed into a flatbed truck<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

Yes, it is link bait, and I bit. Wouldn’t you?<\/p>\n

But it made me think: One of the many untold stories about the beginnings of the Craft in North America (I can’t speak for other places) is the involvement of people who were in or peripheral to the world of sex work.<\/p>\n

I have to make some revisions to an article that I wrote for an edited collection on sex and new religious movements. I’m doing Wicca, no surprise there, and am concentrating on sexual metaphor in ritual.\u00a0 I think, however, that the editor wants more on the “sexy witch<\/a>” archetype.<\/p>\n

Certainly a lot could be said about that, but in one article? Likewise,\u00a0 a lot could be said\u2014but has not\u2014about the nexus of sexual experimentation and contemporary Paganism. It’s not just Paganism, of course\u2014alternative sexual relationships and new religious movements have intersected many times. Hence this book. Consider, for instance, the Oneida Community<\/a> and its doctrine of “complex marriage,” a sort of 19th-century polyamory.<\/p>\n

The sexual impulse and the religious-creation impulse are often closely linked, it seems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Someone at the Daily Mail no doubt had a good time writing the headline “The drunken stripper from the Golden Banana, a coven of Salem witches and the ‘groping’ man horrifically impaled when she crashed into a flatbed truck.” Yes, it is link bait, and I bit. Wouldn’t you? But it made me think: One […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10,5,42,6],"class_list":["post-4356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-american-religion","tag-paganism","tag-sexuality","tag-wicca"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-18g","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1200,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1200","url_meta":{"origin":4356,"position":0},"title":"Sex and Witchcraft","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 3, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"The popular image of the sexually alluring witch goes back to Circe at least, was notable in the early modern period in the work of artists such as Hans Baldung, and got a big boost from Jules Michelet.It keeps popping up today. Sometimes it is lightly disguised, as in the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"sexuality\"","block_context":{"text":"sexuality","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=sexuality"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7160,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7160","url_meta":{"origin":4356,"position":1},"title":"Strange Doings in Hagley Woods","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 2, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"This \"cold\" English murder case caught my attention because of the involvement of Professor Margaret \"Grandmother of Wicca\" Murray, who apparently injected herself into it, somewhat after the fact, with tales of witches. (Never mind that \"wych elm\" does not mean \"witch elm.\") Some British writers have attempted to cast\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"crime\"","block_context":{"text":"crime","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=crime"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":684,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=684","url_meta":{"origin":4356,"position":2},"title":"'Witch school' OpensWhat struck me\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 1, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"'Witch school' OpensWhat struck me most about this article on Ed Hubbard's Witch School was not the culture-war angle (\"Residents Petitioned and Prayed to Keep It Away\"), but the sort-of positive response from Kirk White of Cherry Hill Seminary at the end.One also could make comparisons with the Frosts' School\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":457,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=457","url_meta":{"origin":4356,"position":3},"title":"She Went among the Witches","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 23, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Waterbrook, Random House's evangelical-publishing operation, has announced Wicca's Charm: Understanding the Spiritual Hunger Behind the Rise of Modern Witchcraft and Pagan Spirituality, a new journalistic survey of Wicca in America.From the Web site:Hundreds of thousands of people practice Wicca and other forms of modern Pagan spirituality in America today, and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Wicca\"","block_context":{"text":"Wicca","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=wicca"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=chascli-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0877881987","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5325,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5325","url_meta":{"origin":4356,"position":4},"title":"Sarah Pike on Witchcraft and American Religion","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 13, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"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 \u201cWicca in the News\u201d about changing representations\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8017,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=8017","url_meta":{"origin":4356,"position":5},"title":"It’s Because Texans Make Good Witches","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 6, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Yes, \"Wicca Grows in Austin\"! And beyond! Californians may recognize a familiar name in this Austin group too. The headline was a youthful pronouncement of mine, because it seemed that if you peeled off the Baptist conditioning, Texans were craz-eee. (Catholics? Maybe so, maybe no.)","rel":"","context":"In \"journalism\"","block_context":{"text":"journalism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=journalism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4356"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4371,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4356\/revisions\/4371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}