{"id":457,"date":"2005-06-23T20:32:00","date_gmt":"2005-06-23T20:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=457"},"modified":"2005-06-23T20:32:00","modified_gmt":"2005-06-23T20:32:00","slug":"she-went-among-the-witches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=457","title":{"rendered":"She Went among the Witches"},"content":{"rendered":"

Waterbrook<\/a>, 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>\"\"<\/em>, a new journalistic survey of Wicca in America.<\/p>\n

From the Web site:<\/p>\n

Hundreds of thousands of people practice Wicca and other forms of modern Pagan spirituality in America today, and journalist Catherine Edwards Sanders wanted to understand why such belief systems are rapidly attracting followers. When a routine magazine assignment led her to realize that her stereotype of Wiccans as eccentric spiritual outsiders was embarrassingly misinformed, her curiosity compelled her to understand the Wiccan mystique. With the support of a journalism fellowship, Sanders spent a year interviewing neo-Pagans and witches and found that the lure of this emerging spirituality was not the occult, but rather a search for meaning in an increasingly fragmented and materialistic culture.<\/em><\/p>\n

Publishing history repeats itself. The “routine magazine assignment” sounds just like the genesis of Stewart Farrar’s What Witches Do<\/em> (1969), while “journalism fellowship” echoes the writing of Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon<\/em> (1979). <\/p>\n

Adler, I am told, is also at work on her own re-working of DDTM, although I don’t know if it will be a third edition or an entirely new book.<\/p>\n

What I wonder about is how Sanders ended up with a publisher of chiefly Christian books, and what that placement bodes for this one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 journalist Catherine Edwards […]<\/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":[],"tags":[6,29],"class_list":["post-457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-wicca","tag-witchcraft"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-7n","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":10422,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10422","url_meta":{"origin":457,"position":0},"title":"A Festschrift for Ronald Hutton","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 28, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Magic and Witchery: Celebrating the Twentieth Anniversary of 'The Triumph of the Moon' will be published in September by Palgrave Macmillan. I love rolling the word Festschrift around, and if you are not used to it, this is what it means: \"In academia, a Festschrift\u00a0 (plural Festschriften) is a book\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/magic-and-witchery-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6351,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6351","url_meta":{"origin":457,"position":1},"title":"Judy Harrow","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 21, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Judy Harrow, one of the most influential East Coast American Wiccan priestesses and a damn fine writer too, is no longer with us. You can read tributes at The Witching Hour blog, on a Facebook page, and elsewhere, I am sure. From The Witching Hour: As an author she contributed\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Wicca\"","block_context":{"text":"Wicca","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=wicca"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13198,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=13198","url_meta":{"origin":457,"position":2},"title":"The First Wiccan Book Published in India","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 7, 2023","format":false,"excerpt":"A little more than twenty years ago, in the preference to his landmark study of contemporary Pagan Witchcraft, The Triumph of the Moon, the historian Ronald Hutton wrote that \"the unique significance of pagan [sic] witchcraft to history is that it is the only religion which England has even given\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"India\"","block_context":{"text":"India","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=india"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/ANI-20221216115613-300x205.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":11755,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=11755","url_meta":{"origin":457,"position":3},"title":"“The Woman Who Inspired Wicca”","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 25, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"This popped up on Twitter recently: There is no conference that I know of, which may say something about how small a set of academics are interested in Wiccan history. Maybe we Pagan-studies types do not have anything new to say right now, because this issue has been covered pretty\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"journalism\"","block_context":{"text":"journalism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=journalism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/witch-cult-tweet.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/witch-cult-tweet.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/witch-cult-tweet.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":7724,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7724","url_meta":{"origin":457,"position":4},"title":"Core Books in Pagan Studies","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 4, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"I recently completed an article on contempoary Paganism for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, so when it appears, I can at least say that I have been published by Oxford UP. Yay me. But is there still a market for academic encyclopedias in this day when undergrads must be\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"magical religion","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/magical-religion.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":873,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=873","url_meta":{"origin":457,"position":5},"title":"Wicca and Christianity","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 10, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"I have not yet seen it, but English scholar Jo Pearson has a new book, Wicca and the Christian Heritage. Amazon-UK link here.From the publisher's catalog:What is Wicca? Is it witchcraft, Paganism, occultism, esotericism, magic, spirituality, mysticism, nature religion, secrecy, gnosis, the exotic or 'other'? 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