{"id":5330,"date":"2013-03-15T17:56:06","date_gmt":"2013-03-15T23:56:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5330"},"modified":"2013-03-15T17:56:06","modified_gmt":"2013-03-15T23:56:06","slug":"articles-on-otherkin-therianthropes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5330","title":{"rendered":"Articles on Otherkin, Therianthropes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2022 Joseph P. Laycock, ” ‘We Are Spirits of Another Sort’:\u00a0 Ontological Rebellion and Religious Dimensions of the Otherkin Community<\/a>,” Nova Religio<\/em> 15, no. 3 (2012): 65\u201390. \u00a0 DOI: 10.1525\/nr.2012.15.3.65<\/p>\n

\u2022 Venetia Laura Delano Robertson, “The Beast Within: Anthrozoomorphic Identity and Alternative Spirituality in the Online Therianthropy Movement<\/a>,” Nova Religio <\/em>16, no. 3 (2013): 7\u201330. DOI: 10.1525\/nr.2013.16.3.7<\/p>\n

“Therianthropic,” coined from the Greek words for “wild beast” and “man,” first showed up in 1886, according to the Oxford English Dictionary<\/em>, when a contributor to the\u00a0Encyclopaedia Britannica\u00a0<\/em>wrote of\u00a0 “Religions, in which animistic ideas still play a prominent part, but which have grown up to a therianthropic polytheism”\u2014such as ancient Egyptian religion with the jackal-headed Set, etc., I suppose. Other therio-<\/em> combinations go back to the seventeenth century, such as theriomancy.<\/p>\n

Both Robertson and Laycock rely heavily on blogger Lupa’s<\/a> book A Field Guide to Otherkin<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

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\u00a0community<\/em><\/a> 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.)<\/p>\n

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<\/em><\/a> has since been cited as an early reference to the Otherkin phenomenon” (71).<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

There is more, but I am just summarizing a few points.<\/p>\n

Robertson spends more time explaining the concept of Therianthropes’ self-descriptions of “awakening” to their dual natures, goes into “Internet religion \u2014 Therianthropy <\/a>popped up on alt.horror.werewolves in 1992 \u2014 and concurs with Laycock\u00a0 that Therianthropes “reify their anthrozoomorphic identity through the appropriation of spiritual concepts into personal mythologies” (10).<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

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).\u00a0 In other words, the key sociology-of-religion concept of re-enchantment is more malleable and multi-faceted than previously discussed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2022 Joseph P. Laycock, ” ‘We Are Spirits of Another Sort’:\u00a0 Ontological Rebellion and Religious Dimensions of the Otherkin Community,” Nova Religio 15, no. 3 (2012): 65\u201390. \u00a0 DOI: 10.1525\/nr.2012.15.3.65 \u2022 Venetia Laura Delano Robertson, “The Beast Within: Anthrozoomorphic Identity and Alternative Spirituality in the Online Therianthropy Movement,” Nova Religio 16, no. 3 (2013): 7\u201330. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":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":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[10,68,24,5,4,11],"class_list":["post-5330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-american-religion","tag-animism","tag-christianity","tag-paganism","tag-scholarship","tag-shamanism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-1nY","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":405,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=405","url_meta":{"origin":5330,"position":0},"title":"Pagan Studies updateThree new journal\u2026","author":"Chas S. 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It's all a metaphor for living.\u00b6 I have been remiss\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"blogging\"","block_context":{"text":"blogging","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":390,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=390","url_meta":{"origin":5330,"position":3},"title":"Some Pagan Publishing Gossip","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 6, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Sarah Pike's new book, New Age and Neopagan Religions in America, just landed on my desk with instructions to review it for Nova Religio. 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