TikTok Covens and QAnon Shamans: A Reading List on Neo-Paganism

From the Rights of Nature motion to technological work advancing interspecies communication, I’m fascinated by new animist reimaginings of outdated beliefs within the company and intelligence of nature. However this is only one thread of an even bigger story: Historic pagan concepts at the moment are serving to individuals navigate modern neoliberal crises. It’s a narrative that options trendy characters, from web witches to the shamanic avatar of the US Capitol riot—however one which started way back.

In 380 AD, the Edict of Thessalonica made Christianity the official faith of the Roman Empire. From this second, the Latin phrase paganus—which means rural individual—turned a pejorative for anyone working towards a non-Christian faith.

Extra particularly, non secular scholar Michael York argues that whereas paganism is extremely polymorphous, the time period unites geographically and culturally numerous non secular traditions that share definitive options: animism, or the conviction that nature accommodates spirits and the divine; polytheism, or the worship of many gods, together with feminine gods; and a perception in magic, or the supernatural.

This studying record focuses on a subset of pagan traditions typically labeled neo-pagan: the array of up to date non secular and non secular practices that recreate, reimagine, or explicitly draw upon the pre-Christian-Rome pagan religions of historical Europe. This consists of witchcraft, Wicca (a syncretic faith invented within the Twentieth century), Celtic Druidry, Germanic Heathenry, Greek Hellenism, Norse Odinism, and extra.

Christianity is in speedy decline within the West (together with within the US and UK). However neo-paganism is rising. US pagans are anticipated to triple to round three million by 2050, and 74,000 individuals recognized as pagan within the 2021 UK census (up 30 p.c since 2011). Furthermore, paganism authority Ronald Hutton thinks official figures are doubtless under-estimates, given the non-public nature of a lot neo-pagan apply.

What explains this improve? The items under determine quite a few drivers. Nature-connected spirituality holds apparent enchantment in an age of environmental disaster. Extra usually, the failure of Western establishments (notably neoliberal governments, capitalist organizations, and Christian church buildings) to meaningfully tackle financial stagnation, local weather change, and social inequality has fostered disillusionment and openness to political and non secular options. From the feminist self-expression of witchcraft to the conspirituality fuelling QAnon, neo-pagan-inflected considering seemingly provides company and perception into what social theorist Theodor Adorno referred to as any “consciousness famished for fact.”

The importance of this pagan palimpsest revealing itself will depend on who you again on the non secular battleground. Some proponents see in neo-pagan animism the opportunity of an ecological re-enchantment within the face of environmental catastrophe and even the seeds of an ecological utopia. Others worry the potential for brand new types of dogmatism and subjugation. Certainly, some do wield neo-paganism in favor of such subjugation, arguing for fascistic futures rooted in mythic pagan pasts. These competing visions are integral to the non secular realignments underway within the West, and the way these modifications are being leveraged for political ends.

Youngsters of the Wicker Man (Edward Millar and John Semley, The Baffler, July 2019)

This Edward Millar and John Semley essay neatly frames the strain between utopian and dystopian neo-pagan prospects by discussing the traditional 1973 folk-horror movie The Wicker Man (spoilers forward). Utilizing the movie as a microcosm, Millar and Semley make a nuanced and essential case for the ability of ambivalence—in neo-pagan people horror and in life. They convincingly present how horror and attract can coexist, shapeshift with social context, and germinate not on neatly opposing sides of a debate, however within the gaps and relationships between these sides.

When conservative Christian policeman Neil Howie arrives on the Scottish island of Summerisle to research a lacking lady, he discovers a neo-Celtic neighborhood below the charismatic sway of Lord Summerisle. The locals thwart Howie’s investigation because the movie darkens, constructing to an incendiary climax through which Howie is burned alive as a human sacrifice in an enormous wicker man. 

Millar and Semley notice that The Wicker Man’s neo-pagan “concepts and imagery” have refracted by way of modern horror, “tapping into fears about manipulation, xenophobia, urban-rural divides, crowds gone mad, post-truth epistemology, and a lurking sense that private company is illusory.” However Summerisle’s pagans—reveling, celebrating, pranking—usually are not straightforwardly cautionary. “In the perfect movies of folks horror’s authentic cycle,” they write, “the choice perception system is equally horrific and alluring—stirring within the viewer a productive, and unsettling, sense of ambivalence.”

Crucially, Millar and Semley additionally discover how the ambivalence The Wicker Man evokes has shifted with social change. They situate the movie in a folk-horror cycle starting in 1968: a yr marking the beginning of the tip of the widespread religion in collectivist ’60s counterculture. Over the intervening a long time of damaging individualism, has the cautionary notice since shifted within the neo-pagans’ favor? Millar and Semley suspect so. Howie’s conventional, more and more determined appeals actually appear to ring hollower given right this moment’s discourse-chamber acoustics.

However ambiguity stays. “In contrast to most horror,” Millar and Semley write, “through which an interloping monster is both destroyed (to be able to purge a risk to a longtime order) or in any other case integrated into that order, people horror operates by implicating the viewer within the dissolution and destruction of that order.” Herein lies the horrific chance that neo-paganism may metabolize helpful scapegoats like Howie into new types of subjugation:

The horror latent in people horror, then as now, just isn’t an abject worry of pagans or free-loving hippies or straight-up Satanists. It’s the unsettling information that the individuals are typically all too prepared to commerce one type of energy and subjugation for an aesthetically completely different manifestation of those self same situations, if solely to revive religion in energy itself.

Witchcraft is probably essentially the most distinguished neo-pagan apply right this moment (although not all witches determine as neo-pagan). Social media abounds with ritual and spellcasting, with #WitchTok movies having amassed some 65 billion views. Movie star witches like Kate Tomas have additional elevated witchcraft’s pop-culture pedigree. There’s even a 4,900-member #BindTrump Fb group aiming to thwart Trump with spellcraft. Bosker explains:

Over the previous few years, witchcraft, lengthy considered with suspicion and even hostility, has transmuted right into a mainstream phenomenon. The coven is the brand new squad: there are sea witches, metropolis witches, cottage witches, kitchen witches, and influencer witches, who share recipes for moon water or dreamy photographs of altars bathed in candlelight.

Bosker places this revival in historic context: “Within the US, mainstream curiosity in witches has often waned however principally waxed, often in tandem with the rise of feminism and the plummeting of belief in institution concepts,” she writes. However whereas not unprecedented, every revival holds a mirror to society. Bosker’s piece takes a curious, empathetic, and discerning have a look at the most recent reflection, through which waning belief serves because the backdrop and Juliet Diaz as the topic.

One profile can’t definitively seize trendy witchcraft’s range—additionally a characteristic of Wicca and different neo-pagan traditions—however Bosker skillfully traces its salient prospects and issues. It’s this range that gives many witches an inclusive, self-expressive, reclamatory freedom, typically in distinction to the prescriptions of patriarchal, monotheistic religions. Bosker writes:

The newest witch renaissance coincides with a rising fascination with astrology, crystals, and tarot, which, like magic, practitioners take into account methods to faucet into unseen, unconventional sources of energy—and which may be particularly interesting for individuals who really feel disenfranchised or who’ve grown weary of attempting to enact change by working throughout the system.

Bosker doesn’t draw back from the ensuing pressure between authenticity and appropriation, in Diaz or witchcraft usually. Witchcraft’s therapeutic and expressive nature is all too interesting to the appetites of liberal capitalism. Diaz, as Bosker notes, “sells anointing oils and ‘intention infused’ physique merchandise in her on-line retailer, instructs greater than 8,900 witches enrolled in her on-line college, and leads witchy workshops.” Such skepticism is all the time warranted inside our financial system. Bosker’s achievement right here is balancing that with an open-minded method to the chances of what we name magic and the ability of girls reclaiming the apply of witchcraft.

“The Anthropocene is the cataclysmic results of civilization’s persevering with depaganization,” Simon asserts on this paean to the novel prospects of neo-paganism. His essay is a name again to pagan polytheism, animism, and enchantment with nature. Past these particular proposals, it’s additionally a heartfelt try—the sort we want extra of—to deal with Western tradition’s disaster of objective (dare I say spirituality).

Whereas Christianity is complicit in fostering ecological collapse (God grants people “dominion over the fish of the ocean, and over the fowl of the air, and over each dwelling factor that moveth upon the earth” in Genesis 1:28), Simon argues that “radical paganism can reply with the unity of all individuals and their sacred obligations to one another and the planet.” He continues:

In the present day, the place a disaster of religion manifests in these cursed siblings of meaningless nihilism and fervent fundamentalism, and humanity’s relationship to nature is so inequitable that our financial system, know-how and trade threatens ecological apocalypse, how helpful wouldn’t it be to have a pagan theology, a brand new expression of divinity and the sacred commensurate with our present ruptures and crises?

Simon muses on what a neo-pagan canon may appear to be. Leavening pagan philosophy with thinkers starting from Baruch Spinoza to Walt Whitman, his thought-provoking strategies assist present that neo-paganism needn’t characterize both a regression to a mythic previous or a type of naive romanticism:

What it seeks to do isn’t to fake that the one genuine existence resides in a stone cottage among the many bucolic groves however somewhat to raise all matter, wherever it’s discovered. Central Park is as worthy a spot for an altar as Delphi. God is not only within the woods and seas, however in concrete and glass as properly.

“I take into account myself a connoisseur of good lunatics,” Graeme Wooden writes early on this profile of 1 such lunatic: Costin Alamariu, greatest often called the net persona Bronze Age Pervert (BAP). BAP advocates an aggressively elitist, bigoted type of neo-pagan politics drawing on muscular historical Greek militarism. Wooden relays a few of BAP’s floridly offensive preachings to assist illustrate his views on, for instance, the fashionable liberal state: 

Any individual of expertise or intelligence is floor down by this technique, by life below the thumb of the empowered outdated matriarchs and the conceptual dildoes they use to clobber the heads of younger males.

Wooden’s private relationship with pre-BAP Alamariu enlivens his portrait, refusing the reader permission to compartmentalize BAP merely as an abstracted avatar. He additionally makes use of emotional juxtaposition—humor and horror, right here—to disarming and disquieting impact. His profile mutates from absurd to terrifying, particularly within the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection, because it finds BAPism’s dormant reputation. BAP’s 2018 e-book Bronze Age Mindset was at one level among the many hottest 150 books on all of Amazon. And Wooden interviews not simply consultants testifying to the foreign money of BAPist concepts, however proud BAPists strolling Washington’s halls of energy.

In the end, Wooden leaves us with an alarming case research of how neo-pagan imagery and concepts are getting used to buttress a virulent far-right ideology presenting a brand new risk to complacent liberal democracy:

‘There’s a degree of self-loathing, chronic-masturbating anger on the market amongst adolescent and early-20s fucked-up males,’ one Republican operative instructed me. To them the world is dry, purposeless, and designed for the flourishing of anybody however them. Conservatism within the outdated manner—not Bronze Age outdated, however Reagan outdated—doesn’t fulfill them.

This piece is a transcription of (most of) a dialog additionally recorded in a video. It feels becoming to characteristic an impassioned oral studying on this record as a nod to the unique modality of pagan communication. Whereas paganism isn’t as soon as talked about, the piece is a superb instance of how we’d rekindle the cultural animality and animism that underpins neo-pagan considering. It presents essential challenges to dominant cultural assumptions about faith, weirdness, and progress.

The dialog can also be a superb introduction to 2 thinkers—and the motley motion they characterize—on the coronary heart of labor to construct a slower, extra reciprocal, extra entangled society that takes neo-pagan apply severely. David Abram is a thinker whose work facilities across the query: “Can we discover methods of talking that decision us again into rapport and reciprocity with the opposite beings, the opposite shapes and types of this world?” Dougald Hine is the co-founder of the Darkish Mountain Mission: a gathering place for individuals trying, within the face of local weather catastrophe, for a spot of deeper hope that solely exists on the far facet of what the 2 name a “gate of grief.” Hine says:

One of many phrases from the manifesto which I’ve held onto most is once we say, ‘The top of the world as we all know it isn’t the tip of the world, full cease.’ And I’d add to that, that the tip of the world as we all know it’s also the tip of a manner of figuring out the world. No matter occurs, to the extent that we’re nonetheless going to be right here, we’re going to stay by way of the tip of quite a lot of the certainties that characterised the methods of figuring out the world which have served us for the previous few lifetimes. And that’s not a utopian purpose, that’s one thing that’s going to occur whether or not or not we handle to do something about local weather change.

The dialog is a stirring name for reanimated senses, a re-enchanted relationship with nature, and an openness to non-human organisms as “ambiguous biosphere of overlapping companies, not quantifiable objects.” Abram and Hine don’t see these neo-pagan-inflected qualities as a panacea however as essential elements in any antidote to the overconfident abstractions of Enlightenment scientism. As Abram places it: “These animals, crops, and landforms are our actual neighbours, the oldsters with whom we have to be working towards actual neighborhood, if we wish to be dwelling properly in anyplace.”

Sam Firman is a contract author and editor based mostly within the UK. He writes a e-newsletter about how we relate to our environments, and the way this may assist construct higher programs.

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens