NEOPAGANISM

NEOPAGANISM . The term Neopagan covers a wide variety of traditions that include re-creations of ancient Celtic Druidism (a British organization of sun worshippers who gathered in sacred groves), Wicca or Witchcraft, ceremonial magic, and neoshamanism (revivals of ecstatic journeys into the spirit world in indigenous and pre-Christian cultures). Neopaganism's historical origins lie in nineteenth-century religious movements such as Theosophy, folk practices such as tarot and astrology, studies in folklore and anthropology, the theatrical rituals of an Edwardian occult group called the Order of the Golden Dawn, and the countercultural milieu of North America in the 1960s. Neopagans' images of god and goddess emerged from nineteenth-century British folklore and literature and were influenced by the armchair anthropology of scholars like Sir James Frazer (1854–1941), author of the sweeping Golden Bough (1890), and the mythology of Robert Graves (1895–1985), author of The White Goddess (1948). In Europe, contemporary pagan organizations usually claim a lineage that is ancient and unbroken, often tied to nationalism and ethnic pride. American, Canadian, British, and Australian "Neopagan" communities differ in that they have been influenced by feminist and environmentalist movements and are self-conscious revivals created to be egalitarian and individualistic.

Heritage

Neopagans tend to emphasize newness, creativity, imagination, and invention over tradition, creed, established doctrine, and institutionalized religion, but they also claim ancient traditions as their heritage. Neopaganism did not emerge directly from ancient pagan cultures, even though a few Neopagans would argue that their religion descended through the centuries from a pre-Christian goddess religion. According to scholarly consensus, there is no direct lineage from ancient goddess cultures to Neopaganism. Contemporary Pagans (pagan was originally a term that referred to non-Christians or country dwellers) are "neo" in the sense that they are revising and updating what they can learn from ancient traditions to meet the needs of modern people. They believe that, in some aspects of life, ancient cultures have much to teach contemporary people, such as respect for the earth and maintaining a balance between humans and nature. They search for alternatives to the gods they were raised with by looking to Asian and Native American religions, and they claim that spiritual beings from other cultures are more accessible to humans than the Western monotheistic god.

The various forms of Neopaganism share a desire to revive ancient pre-Christian nature religions. In the process of creating new religions in the cast of old ones, Neopagans borrow from Native American and other available religious cultures. They tend to be tolerant of eclectic uses of other cultures' myths and traditions, but borrowing from Native American religions has been more controversial. Some Neopagans, for instance, argue that "white people" should only borrow myths and deities from their "own" cultural heritage, such as Witchcraft or ancient Druidism of the British Isles. Druids, for instance, often learn ancient Celtic languages and focus on their roles as caretakers of the woods. Neopagans who are intrigued by specific ancient cultures look to Tibetan, Greek, West African, Roman, and Egyptian pantheons. They find ritual texts, usually in translation, and fashion their rituals after mythological stories, such as the descent of the goddess Persephone into the underworld. Neopagans dressed as Aphrodite and Dionysos put in appearances at Neopagan festivals, and festival rituals encourage participants to explore divine archetypes from ancient pantheons of deities.

Witches, or "Wiccans," form the largest religious culture under the Neopagan umbrella and include, at one extreme, separatist feminist Witches who worship a great goddess in women-only covens, and at the other, traditional Gardnerian Witches who worship a god and a goddess together, claim to have the oldest lineage, and pass down their rituals from teachers to students who are instructed to perform them in exactly the same way. Gardnerian rituals emphasize the dual nature of divinity in the form of a paired god and goddess. An increasingly common kind of Witch is the man or woman who is an "eclectic Witch" or "Wiccan" and borrows from British traditional Witchcraft as well as from a variety of other religious cultures. Witches are sometimes trained and initiated through covens, but they are also self-taught or guided by correspondence courses and books, like Raymond Buckland's (1934–) Complete Book of Witchcraft (1986), which includes lists of ritual tools, directions for how to make ritual robes, simple explanations of Witchcraft's moral principles, and guidelines for basic rituals. Do-it-yourself Witchcraft has to some extent replaced traditional covens that included several levels of initiation. Another popular Neopagan title derived from traditional Wiccan teachings is the feminist Witch Starhawk's The Spiral Dance (1979), which encourages individuals to tailor their rituals to suit personal needs and preferences and includes sections on herbal charms, chants, blessings, spells, and myths.

Witches have only a few beliefs that almost all of them adhere to, and these include "The Witches Rede: An it harm none, do what you will" and "The Law of Threefold Effect," the belief that any action a person commits will return to that person threefold. These beliefs, or similar versions of them, are also held by other Neopagans, such as ceremonial magicians and Druids, who share Witchcraft's or Wicca's origins in early twentieth-century British magical groups.

Ceremonial magicians, another important community of Neopagans, are more likely to turn to late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century occultists for inspiration, especially the writings of the British occultist Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) and the Order of the Golden Dawn (started in 1888), which included the Irish writer William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) among its members. Ceremonial magic also draws heavily on Qabbalah, a Jewish mystical tradition. Ceremonial magicians may blend these traditions with their own interests in religious cultures as diverse as Haitian vodou and Tibetan Buddhism, while others stay within the bounds of organizations like the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), which Crowley joined in 1912 and which involves lengthy study and specific rites of initiation. Where ceremonial magicians emphasize their Golden Dawn heritage, Witches identify with the work of the English civil servant Gerald Gardner (1884–1964), whose novel, High Magic's Aid (1949), and pseudo-anthropological study of a coven, Witchcraft Today (1954), are founding documents for contemporary Witchcraft that have influenced many other Neopagans as well.

Although organizations like the OTO and Gardnerian Witchcraft offer structured guidelines for their members and levels of initiation based on the secret societies of the Freemasons, many Neopagans choose to create their own spiritual practice by drawing on information from a rich array of teachers and traditions. Hierarchical structures were common in the earliest Neopagan groups and still characterize some contemporary Neopagan communities, but by the twenty-first century many ritual groups had become more loosely structured and egalitarian. Elders are still acknowledged for their wisdom and experience but not viewed as all-powerful. One of the ways in which American Neopagans adapt religious traditions of the past and other cultures is to make them more democratic and inclusive, and this is particularly evident in the new rituals they create.

Rituals

Ritual is the touchstone of Neopagan religious identity and community. Neopagans honor the cycles of nature with rituals at new and full moons and on eight seasonal festivals, including the solstices and equinoxes. Regular rituals are often held in small groups for any number of purposes, including healing and personal spiritual growth. Rituals are usually held in circles and are facilitated by ritual leaders, who explain the purpose of the ritual, invite deities or spirits to be present, monitor the group's energy, and end the ritual in such a way that everyone returns to a normal state of consciousness. Ritual spaces are generally oriented in relation to the four cardinal directions and feature altars that hold statues of deities and symbols of water, air, fire, and earth. Neopagans also periodically hold rituals to mark life passages, including death rites, baby blessings, and marriage vows. Rituals and festivals held as seasonal celebrations include retellings of ancient myths, theater, ritual performances, music, feasting, and storytelling.

Because of their interest in bringing back the past, Neopagans perform Egyptian rites based on ancient texts, dress like Renaissance mages, and engage in Yoruba divination, replicating the original as best they can. In 1993 large numbers of Neopagans attended a festival in Nashville, Tennessee, to honor the goddess Athena, whose statue there is the largest indoor statue in the Western world (according to a report in the Neopagan magazine Green Egg). The reconstructed ancient Greek games included a ritual to pay tribute to Athena. Rites of Spring, a Neopagan gathering that is held annually in western Massachusetts, hosts a "Medieval Feast," during which medieval music is played and festivalgoers are served by "wenches" dressed in period costumes. Some men and women have become Neopagans as a result of their interest in historical reenactment and are involved with the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), a medieval reenactment society. Historical re-creation and science fiction, especially Robert Heinlein's (1907–1988) Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), contribute to the colorful aesthetics of Neopagan rituals and gatherings.

Connection to Nature

Because of their close identification of deity with nature, Neopagans often travel from cities and towns to worship in the woods and to establish nature sanctuaries to honor their gods. Several Neopagan organizations have established retreats and sanctuaries, where stone altars and ritual circles are constructed in the woods to facilitate interactions between Neopagans and the natural world. Circle Sanctuary in southwestern Wisconsin is a prominent Neopagan organization that in the 1980s bought land specifically set aside for the enjoyment of the Neopagan community as a retreat and sanctuary from the outside world. Gatherings and other ritual events held at the sanctuary include caring for the land, planting flowers, and learning about local edible plants and the healing properties of herbs. Lothlorien in southern Indiana was also established as a Neopagan retreat and, like Circle, is open to people of all faiths as long as they are tolerant of others. Named after the novelist J. R. R. Tolkien's land of the elves, the Neopagan Lothlorien is envisioned as a magical place, where spiritual beings are free to roam, and it is accessible to humans who treat the land properly. Nature sanctuaries are one way that Neopagans put their religious ideas into practice, because these sites are set up to facilitate ongoing relationships among humans, spiritual beings, and nature.

Beliefs

Neopagans create rituals and establish nature sanctuaries to provide what they see as much-needed alternatives to other available religious options. They believe their special role is not to maintain tradition, though there may be some who try to do this, but rather to change self and society. They practice "magic" with the understanding that it means changing consciousness in accordance with will, thus taking charge of their lives instead of relying on institutional religions. Because they begin with the assumption that the self is sacred or divine, Neopagans place the responsibility for change with each individual. Even when social and political structures are seen to need changing, the self and not the institution is the agent and locus of change.

Many Neopagans see the self as flawed and the world in which they live as desperately in need of transformation, but their approaches to cultural change vary. According to some Neopagan authors, destructive ways of relating to each other, ongoing interpersonal and global violence, and environmental devastation are some of the ills that need to be addressed as personal healing takes place. That said, it is important to point out that such beliefs do not necessarily lead to social and political activism in Neopagan communities. Neopagans participate in a range of activist activities. On one end of the spectrum is the entirely private pursuit of transformation, in which one consults information in books and on the Internet for guidance. At the other end is involvement with public protest actions, such as the Neopagans who marched as a "living river" at the World Bank meeting protests in Ottawa in 2001 and a group of Witches that gave an "earth-based blessing" when they joined other religious groups at the School of Americas Protest in Columbus, Georgia, that same month. Some Neopagans publicly challenge the American status quo, while others focus inward on personal changes. In contrast, some Neopagans are not pacifists or countercultural activists but instead feel comfortable serving in the military.

Regardless of their political preferences, Neopagans generally have a tendency to privilege internal over external authority and experience over belief. They focus on self-exploration as the best route to truth and knowledge. The explosion of information available on the Internet and in bookstores makes it seem unnecessary to rely on religious elders, though they are still sought out for their ritual experience, charismatic presence, and detailed knowledge of specific traditions. The process of self-exploration through techniques that shift one's consciousness, such as meditation and visualization, is similar across the diverse forms of Neopaganism. Neopagan religious practices are flexible and can be personalized to fit individual needs. This is in part because of how Neopagans understand the relationship between human and divine. Starhawk, for example, teaches that the goddess who guides human beings dwells in the earth and in the world all around. According to her view, the goddess looks at "each of us unique and natural as a snowflake, each of us her own star, her Child, her lover, her beloved, her Self" (Starhawk, 1979, p. 29). This belief, commonly echoed by other Neopagans, is that the self has all the necessary resources for spiritual advancement and that the divine is within as well as without. It is this view that, in part, accounts for the diversity of religious identities among Neopagans.

Neopagan beliefs and practices highlight the centrality of the relationship between humans and nature. An important element of Neopagan theology is the belief in immanence, the idea that divinity permeates the world and runs through other humans, the earth, and all living beings. For some Neopagans, divine power is personified by a great goddess or the planet Gaia, and for others divinity is polytheistic—assorted deities are available to help and teach humans. They may be seen as spirits or gods and goddesses representing the forces of nature or anthropomorphized into archetypes that represent particular aspects of human personality, such as the "wild man" or the "trickster." Neopagans are likely to reject monotheistic understandings of deity, except for those who worship one great goddess or remain nominally Christian or Jewish and believe in one god. Deities are typically identified with forces of nature—the earth goddess Gaia is one example—and the four elements—earth, air, water, and fire—are almost always invoked in Neopagan rituals. Another popular Neopagan deity is the god Pan, who emerged as an archetype in mid-twentieth-century Britain and was incorporated into the magical subculture in the form of a "horned god," paired with a goddess derived from Artemis and other Greek deities. Many Neopagans continue to interact with the god and goddess, while others have returned to Pan in his Greek form. Morning Glory Zell, a Neopagan elder and representative of the Church of All Worlds, explains in her article "Pan" that "our word pantheism is derived from that idea, that all Nature is God and that God is all Nature" (Zell, 1994, p. 13).

Neopagans enjoy intimate and highly personalized relationships with spiritual beings. They frequently make contact with the spirit world or another level of reality and communicate with deities through home altars and group rituals. Spiritual beings are approached for help with everyday concerns, like finding jobs and lovers, as well as more generally for spiritual growth and global healing. Neopagans assert that their spirituality is based on experience and a direct relationship with deities. Images of deities are gateways to an experience of other realities, and meditating on them is meant to transport the meditator into another state of consciousness or onto the "astral" plane, an unseen dimension of reality. Because Neopaganism is decentralized and has no founding text or teacher, participants vary greatly in how they understand their interactions with the gods and spirits. Spiritual beings can be images that "take you someplace" or friendly guides leading seekers on spiritual journeys, but what they have in common is being accessible to humans rather than distant.

The Internet has played an important role in popularizing Neopagan traditions and making them accessible to seekers everywhere. Websites for Neopagan organizations abound and are designed to guide the uninitiated to information on the strange religion they heard about in the news. The website of the Covenant of the Goddess, a national ecumenical Neopagan organization, includes resources for teenagers, families, and solitary practitioners as well as schedules of events taking place throughout the country. Websites for Neopagan communities like Circle Sanctuary and the Church of All Worlds have similar content, with the addition of resources on religious freedom and religious persecution, such as Circle's Lady Liberty League. Neopagan Internet discussions have been in existence since the early 1990s, a reflection of the disproportionate technoliteracy among Neopagans. Such groups remain one of the important ways that Neopagans, especially young Neopagans, stay in contact with others who share their spiritual concerns.

Most Neopagans believe in reincarnation (rebirth—the continuity of the soul through many lives) and karma (derived from the Hindu belief that the condition to which each soul is reborn is the result of good or bad actions performed in previous lives), and they look to past lives to help them understand the present. In order to heal wounds from the past and past lives and to live more fully in the present, some Neopagans engage in holistic healing practices, such as herbal therapies, aura cleansing, psychic healing, and massage and other types of body work. Healing practices tend to be focused on cleansing and purifying the self and healing old and new physical and emotional wounds. The goal of these practices is to usher in a more peaceful, tolerant, healthy, and spiritually enlightened society. They consult astrologers and tarot cards, the I ching (a type of Chinese divination), and other divinatory techniques for guidance in life choices and to further self-knowledge. They appropriate the spiritual riches of other religious cultures, including Tibetan, Hindu, Taoist, Buddhist, Egyptian, Native-American, and even some Christian beliefs and practices. They put statuettes of the Buddha or Hindu and Egyptian deities on their home altars alongside pentacles, candles, crystals, and goddess figurines. In these ways Neopagans attempt to synthesize new religious identities from the old and the new, drawing from tradition as well as the imagination.

See Also

Wicca.

Bibliography

Adler, Margot. Drawing down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today (1979). Boston, 1986. The National Public Radio reporter's journalistic account of a wide variety of Neopagan organizations. A general introduction to people, organizations, and central issues of belief and practice in Neopaganism

Buckland, Raymond. Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft. St. Paul, Minn., 1986. A how- to book for Witches and Neopagans by one of the important founders of Witchcraft in the United States. The book includes directions for setting up altars, making ritual tools, and conducting ritual practices.

Gardner, Gerald B. Witchcraft Today. London, 1954. A founding document for contemporary Witchcraft that describes Gardner's knowledge of a folk religion of the English countryside that venerated nature and worshipped a god and a goddess.

Griffin, Wendy, ed. Daughters of the Goddess: Studies of Healing, Identity, and Empowerment. Walnut Creek, Calif., 2000. This edited volume includes essays by both scholars and participants on a variety of Neopagan and feminist spiritual practices.

Harvey, Graham. Contemporary Paganism: Listening People, Speaking Earth. New York, 1997. A scholarly overview of Neopagan beliefs and practices with a focus on Neopaganism in Great Britain.

Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford, and New York, 1999. An exhaustive history of the origins, leading figures, beliefs, and practices of Neopaganism from 1800 to the late 1990s.

Luhrmann, T. M. Persuasions of the Witch's Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England. Cambridge, Mass., 1989. A psychological anthropologist reports on her experiences as a participant-observer with an emphasis on psychological explanations for magical beliefs.

Magliocco, Sabina. Neo-Pagan Sacred Art and Altars: Making Things Whole. Jackson, Miss., 2001. In this book the folklorist Magliocco describes the role of the arts in Neopagan ritual life and showcases photographs of a wide range of Neopagan altars and artwork.

Pike, Sarah M. Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community. Berkeley, Calif., 2001. An ethnography of Neopagan rituals and festivals, including discussion of rituals, self-identity, sacred space, and conflicts between Neopagans and other religious cultures.

Salomonsen, Jone. Enchanted Feminism: Ritual, Gender, and Divinity among the Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco. London and New York, 2002. The Norwegian theologian Salomonsen focuses on the theology, feminist ideals, and ritual life of one important Neopagan organization.

Starhawk. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. San Francisco, 1979. A description of the basic beliefs and practices of a feminist version of Witchcraft by the Neopagan leader and social activist Starhawk. One of the first Neopagan books to achieve widespread popularity and to function as a kind of sacred text for many women and men discovering Neopaganism for the first time.

Zell, Morning Glory. "Pan." Green Egg 27 (1994): 12–13. An essay by one of the leaders of the Neopagan organization the Church of All Worlds that explores the deep connection Neopagans feel between divinity and nature.

Sarah M. Pike (2005)