Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America

Folklore, August, 2005 by Jacqueline Simpson

Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America. By Sabina Magliocco. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2004. 280 pp. $55.00/36.00 [pounds sterling] (hbk), $19.95/13.00 [pounds sterling] (pbk). ISBN 0-8122-3803-6 (hbk), ISBN 0-8122-1879-5 (pbk)

Dr Magliocco is both an Associate Professor of Anthropology and an initiate of the Coven Trismegiston (a Gardnerian Wiccan group in California). To those who ask whether she studies modern Paganism as an insider or an outsider, she replies (p. 7) that this is like asking her whether she feels "really" American or Italian--the answer being equally "neither" or "both," all identity being a "shifting, negotiated, contextual construction." Her explicitly dual viewpoint enables her to produce a richly nuanced and illuminating study.

She sees Neo-Paganism as "the most important folk revival movement since the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s" (p. 7), highly eclectic in its cultural borrowings from many periods and places, but always concerned to create links to a past that is imagined as "a more spiritually authentic time." However, she is well aware that the operative word here is "imagined'--her analysis of the work of Leland, Murray, and Gardner (pp. 45-54) makes quite clear the flimsy basis of their theories, and her account of the influences that shaped Wicca and other branches of modern Paganism is much the same as Ronald Hutton's. Gardner's role remains controversial; if the "New Forest Coven" did exist, which is possible although unproven, he may have been trying to reconstruct their fragmentary rituals into a fuller and more archaic form by applying survivalist theories learned from Murray and Frazer. Professor Magliocco found that most of today's Pagans and Witches are well informed about these historical issues, and accept that their two crucial sacred narratives--of their Paleolithic origins, and of immense persecutions in the Burning Times--are powerfully emotional myths rather than historical facts (pp. 188-94).

The bulk of the book consists of a fascinating analysis of the many ways in which modern American Pagans have adopted and adapted elements of European folk practice to fit the Gardnerian framework of their rituals and spells, besides eclectically worshipping deities from many archaic cultures. They draw on fairy tales, myths, and ballads as magical narratives of spiritual transformation; they live by a cycle of sacred time, and often lay out part of their homes as shrines and sacred spaces. Since many are well read in folklore theory and anthropology, they make conscious use of the principles of Van Gennep and Turner in devising rituals. In most cases, they have learnt their folklore from works of earlier scholars. One striking instance concerns the Padstow Obby Oss; Alan Lomax's 1953 film of this seasonal celebration has been used in devising an elaborate public May Day ritual by Wiccan groups in San Francisco. But there are also cases where the folklore is drawn directly from family traditions, as in an Italian--American form of witchcraft, stregheria, which gives high value to divinations and charms against illness or the evil eye brought over by earlier generations of immigrants. There is debate as to whether one can only practice a magic that is in some sense "in one's blood," or whether it is legitimate to borrow elements from a quite different culture; for example, that of Native Americans, who may well be offended by such appropriation.

Magliocco also describes how the Pagan movement itself can be studied from an ethnological/folkloristic point of view. Its members construct their identity as a counterculture, despite misunderstanding and sometimes serious victimisation from certain segments of American society; they proclaim this identity by details of costume, jewellery, and home decoration; they express differences between their own subgroups by in-jokes ("How many Gardnerians does it take to change a light bulb?"--"Sorry, that's a Third Degree secret").

This is a very informative and well-researched study, and a most interesting read.

Jacqueline Simpson, The Folklore Society