Witching Culture
Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America
SABINA MAGLIOCCO
Series: Contemporary Ethnography
Copyright Date: 2004
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
Pages: 280
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fhfrj
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Book Info
Witching Culture
Book Description:

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.

eISBN: 978-0-8122-0270-0
Subjects: Religion
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. [i]-[vi])
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. [vii]-[viii])
  3. Introduction: The Ethnography of Magic and the Magic of Ethnography
    Introduction: The Ethnography of Magic and the Magic of Ethnography (pp. 1-20)

    In February of 1995, at the first Pantheacon, a conference of Pagans and academics in San Jose, California, I attended my first Reclaiming ritual and had my first powerfully affecting ritual experience in a Neo-Pagan context. Pantheacon 1995 became a turning point in my field research; the ritual was for me the beginning of a new understanding of the movement I was studying. In my field notes, I attempted to capture the intensity of the experience I had.

    The ritual starts late, like most Pagan events. About a hundred people are gathered in a large conference ballroom in a San...

  4. Part I. Roots and Branches
    • Chapter 1 The Study of Folklore and the Reclamation of Paganism
      Chapter 1 The Study of Folklore and the Reclamation of Paganism (pp. 23-56)

      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...

    • Chapter 2 Boundaries and Borders: Imagining Community
      Chapter 2 Boundaries and Borders: Imagining Community (pp. 57-92)

      In the process of helping me move, Berkeley Gardnerian elders Don Frew and Anna Korn came across some boxes in my basement that contained the relics of my childhood fascination with troll dolls. In them, we found the remnants of the troll temple, a cardboard structure decorated with childish paintings of earth, air, fire, and water, the principal elemental deities of the troll religion I had invented. Then there were the books I had crafted for the troll library: tiny, hand-lettered volumes that included The Iliad and The Odyssey, The Mabinogion, medieval Welsh poet Aneirin’s Y Gododdin, as well as...

  5. Part II. Religions of Experience
    • Chapter 3 Making Magic: Training the Imagination
      Chapter 3 Making Magic: Training the Imagination (pp. 95-121)

      The members of Coven Trismegiston have gathered at Don and Anna’s house for an evening of teaching and learning magic, held monthly at the new moon. We have pushed the furniture against the walls, creating a tight space between the sofa, the fireplace, the front window, and the bookcases where we can cast a circle. The altar has been set up on the coffee table, stacks of books hidden underneath: in the center is the Maiden Candle, from which the other candles are always lit. On either side are the statues of the goddess and god: Hecate and Hermes, guardians...

    • Chapter 4 Ritual: Between the Worlds
      Chapter 4 Ritual: Between the Worlds (pp. 122-151)

      Reclaiming’s Spiral Dance in San Francisco, California, may be the largest public sabbat in North America. Held yearly to celebrate Samhain, the Witches’ new year near October 31, it draws between fifteen hundred and three thousand participants, not all of whom are Witches or Pagans. Because of its size, it is in many ways atypical of Pagan rituals, which tend to be small, intimate, and participatory. Members of Reclaiming perceive this public sabbat as their “offering” to the San Francisco Bay Area community; they “put on” the performance for an audience. The Spiral Dance has a marked separation between performers...

    • Chapter 5 “The Juice of Ritual”: Pathways to Ecstasy
      Chapter 5 “The Juice of Ritual”: Pathways to Ecstasy (pp. 152-182)

      “I can’t believe they have to write books about ‘Why do these weird people do these weird things,’” says Don, alluding to my presence, tape recorder in hand, at the gathering. The room erupts into laughter. We are at Anna and Don’s place along with members of NROOGD’s Dark Star Coven, unraveling the maypole ribbons from the previous week’s Beltane celebration, and the talk has turned to visions and ecstatic states. One by one the members share stories of their visions and trances, connecting them with the reasons they were originally drawn into the religion, their initiations, and their experiences...

  6. Part III. Beyond Experience:: Religion and Identity
    • Chapter 6 The Romance of Subdominance: Creating Oppositional Culture
      Chapter 6 The Romance of Subdominance: Creating Oppositional Culture (pp. 185-204)

      For many mainstream Americans, the words witchcraft and paganism have ambivalent associations at best. In the eyes of most people, witches are make-believe figures from folktales and children’s literature, though some subcultures consider them dangerous agents of the devil who traffic with the supernatural in unsavory ways.¹ The term pagan, in turn, conjures up images of indulgence and dissolution from Hollywood B movies. Yet contemporary Pagans and Witches have embraced these terms as emblems of identity. By doing so, Neo-Pagans accomplish two important goals in the creation of a new religious culture: they reclaim terminology previously devalued by the dominant...

    • Chapter 7 “The Heart Is the Only Nation”: Neo-Paganism, Ethnic Identity, and the Construction of Authenticity
      Chapter 7 “The Heart Is the Only Nation”: Neo-Paganism, Ethnic Identity, and the Construction of Authenticity (pp. 205-238)

      On a sunny afternoon near the first of May, Pagans from all over the San Francisco Bay Area are gathered in Berkeley’s Live Oak Park for NROOGD’s Beltane celebration. At the center of this year-cycle ritual is the hobbyhorse, or “‘Oss,” borrowed from a May Day tradition in Padstow, Cornwall, documented in a 1953 film by American folklorist Alan Lomax. To NROOGD Pagans, the ‘Oss is an ancient spirit of the land, symbolizing its cyclical fertility and ability to sustain us. It consists of a large round frame covered in black fabric, on which is attached a long pole with...

  7. Notes
    Notes (pp. 239-246)
  8. Bibliography
    Bibliography (pp. 247-256)
  9. Index
    Index (pp. 257-266)
  10. Acknowledgments
    Acknowledgments (pp. 267-268)
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