Sabina Magliocco’s Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America is an intriguing examination of the Neo-Pagan movement in the United States. Magliocco has taken on a daunting task, for Neo-Paganism’s amorphous boundaries, diversity in practice, and diffusion across space make difficult a complete rendering. However, there is a growing body of literature that seeks to do just that. With Witching Culture, Magliocco adds to and builds upon the corpus by weaving the discourse of Folklore into the developing discourse of Pagan Studies—an academic discipline already established in the United Kingdom and whose emergence in the United States appears immanent.
Magliocco brings her personal experience to the academic table—she is a long-time member of Coven Trismegiston, a group practicing a Gardnerian tradition of Witchcraft in Northern California. Magliocco confronts the tacit question of whether or not she has “gone native” by likening the situation to being asked in her childhood if she was more American or Italian: “this question would always stump me, because it was perfectly obvious that I was both, and that being a part of one culture did not exclude belonging to the other” (15). Magliocco perceives her affiliation to be advantageous to quality scholarship, positing that her complete and committed engagement with the group affords her a unique perspective.
Magliocco centers her analysis of Neo-Pagan culture on the construction of Neo-Pagan identity and the individual and historical impulses behind that construction. Folklore is essential to this process, as elements of traditional expressive culture are the building blocks of the ideology and practices of the movement, and Magliocco sees Neo-Paganism as “the most important folk revival movement since the folk music revival of the 1950’s and 1960’s” (7). Throughout Witching Culture, Magliocco delineates how and why Neo-Pagans use folklore to establish identity and to create and authenticate “new religious culture.”
In Part One, Magliocco examines Neo-Paganism as a folk revival, describing the movement as the most recent surfacing of a submerged “Western magical tradition” for which she then constructs an historical continuity back to classical antiquity, linking the past to present practice. Magliocco also examines Neo-Paganism as a process of “folklore reclamation”—her term for the seeking out and embracing of traditions stigmatized or marginalized by the dominant culture in order to re-contextualize and re-define the elements of these traditions into symbols of power, pride, and “a reconstructed identity consciously opposed to the dominant culture”(8). Moreover, Magliocco claims that “the emergence of Neo-Paganism parallels the study of folklore and its construction of authenticity” (25). Magliocco links Neo-Paganism to the discipline of Folklore and traces their inter-development from mutual beginnings in the Enlightenment up to the present, particularly noting themes and sensibilities which converged with Romanticism and the backlash against “urbanization, industrialization, and the disenchantment of the world” (56).
Part Two is devoted to an examination of magic as a concept and as a practice. Here, Magliocco is at her best. Magliocco explains how magic is conceived within the Neo-Pagan community—the definition of magic, how it works, its ethics and essence. She describes magic as an art form, a creative and aesthetic activity “through which the logic of the imagination finds expression” (97). Folkloric traditions speak to the Neo-Pagan imagination, and Magliocco explicates how myth and folk narrative are used to create the content, structure, and aesthetics of Neo-Pagan ritual magic. Magliocco’s translation of the esoteric into the practical is excellent. Her language is accessible, and she provides an understanding of magic as an activity that is at once sacred and pragmatic, personal and political, a force we can all access—and perhaps do—though recognizing it by a different name. Magliocco’s provocative thesis is an important contribution to the often stilted and distanced discourse of magic.
The final third of the book moves out of the ritual space and into the contextual environment, going deeper into the manifestations and implications of the construction of Neo-Pagan identity. Magliocco asserts that Neo-Pagans use folklore in an effort to re-enchant the world and to return to a pre-Enlightenment worldview more closely aligned with nature, a worldview they believe is to be found in the cultures of others. Much like early anthropologists and folklorists who sought out cultural authenticity in the peasantry, the “primitive,” and colonized peoples, Neo-Pagans seek out and use traditional expressive culture, construing folklore as a “seal of authenticity” for their practices (217). Through the construction of traditions culled from the traditions of other groups, “Neo-Pagans have crafted a history for themselves that specifically links them to the marginalized and oppressed” (187).
This crafted history leads Magliocco to address the accusations of cultural appropriation made against Neo-Paganism by culture groups from whom Neo-Pagans “borrow” traditions, to use the word Magliocco prefers. Magliocco articulates the complaints of groups, such as Native Americans, who perceive the borrowing of their traditions to be not only cultural theft but also a form of colonialism. She answers these complaints through a variety of Neo-Pagan perspectives, revealing the complex and diverse nature of Neo-Pagan thought about the practice of cultural appropriation, a practice without which Neo-Paganism would not and could not exist.
Broad rather than intimate, Witching Culture serves well as an introductory text to Neo-Paganism, for scholars and laypeople alike. Magliocco brings together interesting and integral information on the history, practice, and context of Neo-Paganism. She adds to the existing body of scholarship a provocative aesthetic and performative interpretation of the construction and expression of Neo-Pagan identity in the United States. Most importantly, Sabina Magliocco inserts the personal voice of the practitioner of magic into academic discourse, a voice often hushed, if present at all, in discussions of religion and magic. The inclusion of the voice of the practitioner is imperative—it must be articulated and attended to if scholars are to move toward more fruitful discussion and deeper understanding of modern magical communities.
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[Review length: 966 words • Review posted on August 14, 2006]