Witching Culture (2004)

Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America is a folkloric and anthropological study of the Wiccan and wider Pagan community in the United States. It was written by the American anthropologist and folklorist Sabina Magliocco of California State University, Northridge and first published in 2004 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. It was released as a part of a series of academic books titled 'Contemporary Ethnography', edited by the anthropologists Kirin Narayan of the University of Wisconsin and Paul Stoller of West Chester University.

Magliocco became interested in studying the American Pagan movement in the mid-1990s, following the culmination of her fieldwork research in a Sicilian village. From 1995 through to 1997, she began studying the Pagan community in the San Francisco Bay Area, joining a Wiccan group, the Coven Trismegiston, which was led by the high priest Don Frew and high priestess Anna Korn. Becoming involved with the faith, Magliocco noted that she no longer remained an objective outsider, but became an active participant after experiencing altered states of consciousness during several Pagan rituals. In 2002 she published her first book on the subject, Neo-pagan Sacred Art and Altars: Making Things Work, which was followed by the more general Witching Culture two years later.

Witching Culture provides an anthropological study of the Wiccan and wider Pagan community in the U.S., with a particular emphasis on the role that folklore has within the movement; in this it looks both at how Pagans have adopted pre-existing folklore and how unique Pagan folklore actually develops within the community. It deals with the influence of folkloristic on the early development of Wicca, in particular the influence of figures like Sir James Frazer, Charles Leland and Margaret Murray.

The reviews published in specialist academic journals were predominantly positive, with James R. Lewis and Jacqueline Simpson being particularly praiseworthy, although some reviewers opined that Magliocco's openly Pagan beliefs had some negative repercussions for the study.

Background

Paganism and Wicca in the United States

Contemporary Paganism, or Neo-Paganism, is a wide variety of modern religious movements influenced by the various pagan beliefs of pre-modern Europe. The religion of Pagan Witchcraft, or Wicca, was developed in England during the first half of the 20th century and is one of several Pagan religions. The figure at the forefront of Wicca's early development was the English occultist Gerald Gardner (1884–1964), the author of Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959) and the founder of a tradition known as Gardnerian Wicca. Gardnerian Wicca revolved around the veneration of both a Horned God and a Mother Goddess, the celebration of eight seasonally-based festivals in a Wheel of the Year and the practice of magical rituals in groups known as covens. Gardnerianism was subsequently brought to the U.S. in the early 1960s by an English initiate, Raymond Buckland (1934–2017), and his then-wife Rosemary, who together founded a coven in Long Island.

In the U.S., new variants of Wicca developed, including Dianic Wicca, a tradition founded in the 1970s that was influenced by second wave feminism, emphasized female-only covens, and rejected the veneration of the Horned God. One initiate of both the Dianic and Gardnerian traditions was a woman known as Starhawk (1951–) who went on to found her own tradition, Reclaiming Wicca, as well as publishing The Spiral Dance: a Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979), a book that helped spread Wicca throughout the U.S.

Academic fieldwork into Paganism

Prior to Magliocco's work, multiple American researchers working in the field of Pagan studies had separately published investigations of the Pagan community in both the United States and the United Kingdom. The first of these had been the practicing Wiccan, journalist and political activist Margot Adler in her Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today, first published by Viking Press in 1979. A second study was produced by the anthropologist Tanya M. Luhrmann in her Persuasions of the Witches' Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (1989), in which she focused on both a Wiccan coven and several ceremonial magic orders that were then operating in London. This was followed by the sociologist Loretta Orion's Never Again the Burning Times: Paganism Revisited (1995), which focused on Pagan communities on the American East Coast and Midwest. 1997 then saw the publication of Witchcraft and Paganism in Australia, authored by the anthropologist Lynne Hume. Next came the work of the American sociologist Helen A. Berger with her A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft in the United States (1999). Then there was Jone Salomonsen's study of the Reclaiming tradition in San Francisco, Enchanted Feminism: The Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco (2002).

Magliocco and her research

Magliocco became interested in Paganism in the mid-1990s, intending to explore "the confluence of ritual, festival, gender and politics – the subject of my earlier research in Italy – in a new context". Initially she was interested in Paganism as a "folk revival, in issues surrounding the use of folklore from academic sources, cultural appropriation, and the construction of authenticity in the invention of rituals" rather than in any actual spiritual capacity. In February 1995, Magliocco attended the first Pantheacon conference, a meeting of practicing Pagans and academics held at a hotel in San Jose, California. It was at the conference that she took part in a ritual led by members of the Reclaiming Wiccan tradition, later characterizing it as "my first powerfully affecting ritual experience in a Neo-Pagan context".