Witching Culture

Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America

Sabina Magliocco

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780812202700
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Fondamentalisme religieux et cultes

Taking the reader into the heart of one of the fastest-growing religious movements in North America, Sabina Magliocco reveals how the disciplines of anthropology and folklore were fundamental to the early development of Neo-Paganism and the revival of witchcraft. Magliocco examines the roots that this religious movement has in a Western spiritual tradition of mysticism disavowed by the Enlightenment. She explores, too, how modern Pagans and Witches are imaginatively reclaiming discarded practices and beliefs to create religions more in keeping with their personal experience of the world as sacred and filled with meaning. Neo-Pagan religions focus on experience, rather than belief, and many contemporary practitioners have had mystical experiences. They seek a context that normalizes them and creates in them new spiritual dimensions that involve change in ordinary consciousness.Magliocco analyzes magical practices and rituals of Neo-Paganism as art forms that reanimate the cosmos and stimulate the imagination of its practitioners. She discusses rituals that are put together using materials from a variety of cultural and historical sources, and examines the cultural politics surrounding the movement—how the Neo-Pagan movement creates identity by contrasting itself against the dominant culture and how it can be understood in the context of early twenty-first-century identity politics. Witching Culture is the first ethnography of this religious movement to focus specifically on the role of anthropology and folklore in its formation, on experiences that are central to its practice, and on what it reveals about identity and belief in twenty-first-century North America.

Part I
Roots and Branches

Chapter 1

The Study of Folklore and the Reclamation of Paganism

Field notes, October 12, 1996

On a moonless night in October, five Witches walk silently along the quiet Berkeley streets until they come to a place where three roads come together to form a Y intersection: a trivia or crossroads, the traditional province of the goddess Hecate. Rather than hoods and cloaks, they wear fleece and barn jackets against the evening chill. One carries a paper plate with offerings to the goddess, as described in ancient Greek texts: cakes, sprat and mullet, a fertile egg, feta cheese, whole garlic cloves, and grape-must cookies. Another carries a container of household food scraps—the katharmata, or sacrificial rubbish, specified by the texts—and a third holds a clay burner with frankincense and myrrh, to stand for both the katharsia, or sacrificial leftovers, and the oxuthumia, or fumigation to protect the participants against any unfriendly spirits. When they reach the crossroads, the high priest recites one of the Orphic hymns to Hecate:

I invoke you, beloved Hecate of the Crossroads and the three ways
Saffron-cloaked goddess of the heavens, the underworld and the sea
Tomb-frequenter, mystery-raving with the souls of the dead
Daughter of Perses and Asteria,
Haunter of deserted places who exults among the deer,
Nightgoing one, protectress of dogs, unconquerable queen
Beast-roarer, disheveled one of compelling countenance
Tauropolos, keyholding mistress of the whole world
Ruler, nymph, mountain-wandering nurturer of youth.
Maiden, I beseech you to come to these holy rites
Ever with joyous heart and ever favoring your priests and priestesses.

He carries the burning incense to the center of the crossroads and crushes it with his foot, leaving the plate of offerings on the curb as a decoy for the souls in the goddess’s train. Then the small company turns and leaves silently without looking back. As they depart, it seems that all the dogs in the neighborhood begin to bark and howl—an excellent omen that the sacrifice has been well received by the goddess and her unearthly hounds.

Neo-Paganism and revival Witchcraft are esoteric, ecstatic magical traditions whose roots in Western culture can be traced to ancient times. While they have not existed as continuous, uninterrupted traditions since time immemorial, some of the most important constructs of contemporary magical practice have a venerable history. They are heirs to what anthropologist Loretta Orion called “an enduring—albeit submerged—aspect of Western culture” that she calls the “Western spiritual tradition” (Orion, 1995:79–80). This chapter traces the roots of many Neo-Pagan and Witchen concepts, practices, and terms through history, showing the links between contemporary praxis and ideas that have been part of a long-standing Western tradition. A much more complete history of Neo-Pagan Witchcraft has already been produced by historian Ronald Hutton, in The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (1999). Rather than repeating his research, my aim here is to contextualize the practices I will be describing by framing them in time and space, revealing some of the sources of the many elements in this reclaimed tradition. A secondary goal of this chapter is to show how the study of folklore and its reclamation are part of the same strain of thought that arose from the Enlightenment and the earliest European contacts with non-Western peoples. These twin processes are so inextricably intertwined that to attempt to separate them means that half of the story remains hidden from view.

Much of the history of folkloristics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries involves the construction of arguments authenticating folklore as a real, genuine artifact of a group of people, whether construed in terms of class or ethnicity (Bendix, 1997). “Pure” folklore, in this view, was an expression of the voice of the people, devoid of larger political, economic, or ideological goals. According to these arguments, the revival of folklore, or its popularization and diffusion by the mass media or elite culture, automatically inauthenticated the lore. American folklorist and historian Richard M. Dorson, for example, decried the emergence of “fakelore,” the manufacture of folklorelike elements for commercial interests (Dorson, 1969); while in Europe, German folklorists coined the term folklorismus to describe folklore revived or altered for the purpose of attracting tourism or generating regional pride.¹ It was not until late in the twentieth century that folklorists began to understand revival and reclamation as part of the process of tradition, reflecting a larger shift in focus in the humanities and social sciences from studying texts and products to studying processes (Bendix, 1988; Handler and Linnekin, 1984). At the same time, historical research was illustrating how many traditions that appeared to be ancient were in fact of rather recent invention, and how claims of antiquity were themselves part of the process of authenticity construction (Wagner, 1981; Herzfeld, 1982; Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983). Authenticity itself came to be viewed as a construct that depended entirely on the perspectives and interests of the constructors.

This shift in how scholars understand the process of tradition making has led to an interest in how traditions change in response to social transformation, and how new traditions take shape to meet emerging social needs. While earlier folklorists would have dismissed Neo-Paganism as an example of folklorismus, “invented tradition,” or fakelore, folklorists today are more likely to understand it as part of the process through which traditions are shaped, selected, and reinterpreted by individuals and groups to serve larger social, political, and ideological ends.

But even by more conservative definitions of folklore as either “oral tradition” or the part-culture of oppressed groups, Neo-Paganism can be understood as a folk tradition on at least two levels. First, the Western spiritual tradition from which it draws has never been codified in a single text; rather, it has been preserved, like most folklore, through a combination of oral tradition and bits of writing, meaning that each successive generation has been free to change the tradition to better suit its purposes, and to interpret it according to the reigning ideologies of the time. Neo-Pagans are but the latest in a long line of tradition bearers who have adapted magical spiritual traditions to fit the surrounding cultural context. Second, this spiritual tradition has never been part of the dominant Western discourse; certainly since the Enlightenment, but I would argue even earlier, it has belonged to the occult subculture just below the radar of official institutions. Thus we can understand it as a form of resistance culture—an idea I will explore more fully in Chapter 6.

In laying out the history of the various elements that have come to be a part of this religious movement, I will show how the emergence of Neo-Paganism parallels the study of folklore and its construction of authenticity, and how academic concepts have had a broad and often unexpected influence on popular culture, beyond what their creators could imagine.

Classical Roots

Neo-Paganism’s earliest traceable roots go back to ancient Greece and Rome, with their polytheistic religions, mystery cults, and traditions of ecstatic knowledge and divination. While historians have usually chosen to emphasize the literary, philosophical, and scientific heritage the West owes to Classical civilization, they have often overlooked the mystical tradition to which Western culture is equally an heir. For alongside the Classical tradition of rationalism, there existed a tradition of ecstatic mystery religions that involved egalitarian societies with secret rituals where adherents directly experienced the sacred through altered states of consciousness, and shrines where seekers would consult priestesses who predicted the future, sometimes with the aid of hallucinogenic fumes. The mystery cults of Dionysus, of Attis and Cybele, the Eleusinian mysteries, and the Delphic oracle are just as much a part of Western heritage as are the writings of the philosophers and critics who dismissed them.

In Classical pagan² cosmology, the universe was permeated by animated and divine forces that were immanent in nature, and could also become embodied in human or animal form. This worldview first emerged in writing in Egypt and Mesopotamia in the third millennium B.C.E., and continued to find expression in a variety of magical papyri and texts throughout the ancient Mediterranean and Near East until the period of late antiquity, the second and third centuries C.E., when many cults and religions combined in the Eastern Mediterranean to yield a rich and complex magico-religious culture. Greco-Roman Egypt in the third century C.E., like contemporary North America, was a meeting place for many cultures and religions—a fertile medium for religious syncretism and the emergence of hybrid forms. From this period and cultural context emerged an important set of magical documents often referred to as the Greek and Demotic magical papyri. This collection of hymns, rituals, and spells preserve much of what we know today about certain magical and religious practices in late antiquity. We can think of these texts as early grimoires, or compendia of magical knowledge and techniques—the precursors of contemporary Neo-Pagan Witches’ Books of Shadows.

Two important sets of documents also preserved during this period are the Corpus Hermeticum and the Chaldean Oracles. Unlike the Greek and Demotic magical papyri, these texts preserve religious doctrine relating to the cults of Hermes and Hecate, deities associated with magic in late antiquity. The Hermetic texts were supposed to have been revealed by Hermes Trismegistos, himself a hybrid of the Greek Hermes, the god of communication and trade and the messenger of the otherworld, and the Egyptian Thoth, the ibis-headed god of wisdom and learning and the soul’s guide to the underworld. Hermes Trismegistos’s name means “thrice-greatest” in Greek, perhaps because he incorporated the greatness of more than one deity, or was believed by his followers to be three times as powerful as other deities. The Chaldean Oracles are said to be the prophetic utterances of a number of deities, including Hecate, a Greek goddess adopted by the Romans, who ruled over crossroads, magic, and the dead. Hecate, too, absorbed aspects of other goddesses in Classical antiquity: she was associated with Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, whose yearly migration to the underworld to be with her husband, Hades, was dramatized by the Eleusinian mysteries, one of the largest mystery cults in the ancient world, and with Artemis or Diana, the virgin goddess of the moon, ruler of the hunt and protectress of wild animals. Whatever we may think about cross-cultural borrowing today, it is clear that in late antiquity this kind of syncretism was the order of the day, and that material in these early texts is itself a collection of magical ideas adopted from other cultures and earlier epochs.

The following elements of Neo-Paganism can be traced to ideas and practices that come down to us from early Classical paganism:

the idea that the universe is composed of four elements: air, fire, water and earth;

the importance of the four points on the compass, or “cardinal points,” in magic;

the existence of multiple deities, as well as spirits of other kinds;

the idea of correspondences in the natural world, such that each deity, for example, had its corresponding planet, number, plant, mineral, color, day of the week, and hour of the day;

the magical principles of sympathy, homeopathy, and contagion;

the use of amulets, invocations, spells, and special tools to control spirits and forces of the universe;

cults in which the faithful underwent initiations that involved the revelation of a sacred mystery, often in states of religious ecstasy.

Neoplatonism

Neoplatonism is a modern term for the philosophical and religious principles of a group of late Classical authors who developed and refined the metaphysical ideas of the Greek philosopher Plato. Its founder was Plotinus, a Roman philosopher born in Egypt in the third century C.E.; other important Neoplatonists include Porphyry, Iamblicus, and Proclus. The doctrines of the Neoplatonists had a significant influence on the development of Western mysticism, from the early Christian founders, to the Renaissance magi, to the German and English Romantic revival. Gerald B. Gardner, the first to describe modern Neo-Pagan Witchcraft, believed that the spirit of Neoplatonic teachings lived on in the teachings of the Witches he was documenting (Gardner, 1959:188–89), and a number of my Wiccan consultants agree.

The central teaching of the Neoplatonists was the fundamental oneness of everything in the universe. “The One” was imagined as a divine unity that was infinite, perfect, and fundamentally unknowable by humans, given their limitations. From the One emanated a hierarchical set of realities that included the nous, or mind; the world soul; human souls; and the physical world of matter. Each emanation was thought to be a reflection of its predecessor in the hierarchy, so that all emanations existed as aspects of the One. Humans and the natural world were both believed to be manifestations of the One. “The Neoplatonists reasoned that if the One is immanent in all of the natural world, then (1) the natural world is fundamentally good and (2) all things in the natural world are paths to the One.”³ While it might seem counterintuitive to connect a modern movement reclaiming polytheism with the Neoplatonic monism, Neoplatonists did not deny the existence of multiple gods and goddesses but interpreted them, too, as manifestations of the One.

The Neoplatonists also taught that union with the One was achievable through a ritual process called “theurgy”. In the Classical world, theurgy involved drawing down the power of the cosmos, either into the bodies of adepts or to animate statues of the deities. While few Neo-Pagans practice the making of animated statues, deity possession is a feature common to the majority of Neo-Pagan religions. Neoplatonists believed that when humans failed to perceive the essential interconnectedness of the universe, and thus their unity with the One, they could become arrogant and fall into depravity and sensuality. Yet human free will also allowed them to experience connection to the One through mystical ecstasy, the goal of theurgy.

Gerald Gardner saw several similarities between the teachings of the Neoplatonists and the coven he documented. One was their belief in the existence of a greater unity beyond the individual goddesses and gods. In The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959), he wrote: “[The Witches] . . . realize that there must be some great ‘Prime Mover,’ some Supreme Deity; but they think that if It gives them no means of knowing It, it is because It does not want to be known; also, possibly, at our present stage of evolution we are incapable of understanding It. So It has appointed what might be called various Under-Gods, who manifest as the tribal gods of different peoples; as the Elohim of the Jews, for instance. . . . and the Horned God of the witches” (26–27).

Gardnerian priest Don Frew likewise sees a reflection of Neoplatonic cosmology in the Dryghtyn prayer, which is recited at the end of every Gardnerian ritual meeting:

In the name of Dryghtyn, the Ancient Providence,
which was from the beginning, and is for eternity,
male and female, the original source of all things;
all-knowing, all-pervading, all-powerful, changeless, eternal.
In the name of the Lady of the Moon,
and the Horned Lord of Death and Resurrection;
in the names of the Mighty Ones of the Four Quarters,
the Kings of the Elements,
Bless this place, and this time, and they who are here with us. (Crowther, 1974:39–40)

Don interprets the Dryghtyn as the Neoplatonic One: “eternal,” “the original source of all things,” “all-knowing, all-pervading, all-powerful,” beyond human categories such as male and female. He equates deities (the Lady of the Moon, the Horned Lord of Death and Resurrection) with the nous, or mind aspect of the One; the Mighty Ones with the world soul; and the Kings of the Elements with the natural world to which air, fire, water, and earth belong. He also explains the three initiatory degrees of Gardnerian Witchcraft as a process of theurgic ascent by which initiates achieve mystical union with the One in a series of stages, beginning with the world of matter and culminating in the level of mind, the third degree, at which time Gardnerian Witches learn the practice of theurgy, or surrendering the self to the deity during possession.

While there are a number of similarities between Neoplatonism and certain aspects of Gardnerian Witchcraft and, more broadly, Neo-Paganism, there are also many important differences between them. While American Neo-Pagans celebrate sensuality and the world of matter as fundamentally good, Neoplatonism was at its core an ascetic philosophy that drew strict distinctions between the spiritual and the material realms. Its adherents sought to free themselves from the slavery of the world of the senses by adhering to a life of austere discipline. Such a practice would not be embraced by the majority of American Neo-Pagans and Witches today.

Neoplatonism was rejected during the Middle Ages by some Christian dogmatists but reemerged during the Renaissance, when Italian magus and scholar Marsilio Ficino translated a number of Neoplatonic works, including the Corpus Hermeticum, attributed to Hermes Trismegistos, whom Renaissance magi erroneously believed to be a historical person living in ancient Egypt, around the time of Moses. Neoplatonism had a marked influence on the Romantic revival of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Whether or not Neo-Paganism is a direct descendant of Neoplatonism, each of these movements left is mark upon it. Among Neoplatonism’s most important contributions to Neo-Paganism are:

the presence of a gre...