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>> 1 Introduction Four-year-old Oliver is at his first SpiralScouts meeting, and he is obsessed with the apple that is just out of his reach. Last night, his mother, Carolyn, told him about SpiralScouts—that it was a scouting group kind of like the Boy Scouts, but for children whose families were Pagan. Oliver is not sure what a Pagan is, but he loves to talk about “growing his magic,” and his mother is trying to raise him in a vaguely earth-based, religiously tolerant, “spiritual-but-not-religious” home. She told him that he would learn about magic at this meeting and that he would have fun, but Oliver has found that neither of these things happened, and now he is tired, bored, and hungry. He was confused by the adults who lit candles for no apparent reason at the beginning of the meeting and by the pledge that the older children repeated after the circle leader. When he was unsure about how to complete the first activity, a craft that required the scouts to gather in the circle leader’s crowded dining room and cut coffee filters into snowflake shapes, the other circle leader took Oliver’s coffee filter and safety scissors and made Oliver’s snowflake himself. As the leader explained that the scouts were going to learn about nutrition, Oliver spotted a basket of apples on the counter and asked his mother for one. Already embarrassed by Oliver’s earlier comments in front of the group (“You said this would be fun, but it’s boring!”), his mother said no. As 2 > 3 amount of money). Derek asked Oliver for his e-mail address, looked surprised when Oliver didn’t have one, and advised him, “Get yourself a Hotmail address or something, and send me an e-mail and I’ll e-mail you a bunch of recipes.” In addition to Oliver’s shoes and toy sword, Derek’s e-mail address, written on the back of Oliver’s copy of the food pyramid, was left behind during Oliver and his mother’s loud—but carefully ignored—exit from their first and last SpiralScouts meeting. This book examines the interactions between contemporary Pagan adults and children as they construct, inhabit, and negotiate understandings of childhood, adulthood, and the religious imagination. Although contemporary North American Pagan adults and children tend to emerge from a predominantly middle-class environment, Pagan adults’ understandings of the religious and social worlds of childhood, relationships between parents and children, and memories and reconstructions of their own religious childhoods depart—sometimes radically—from those of mainstream Americans of majority religions. This book suggests that contemporary American Pagans draw on rich, diverse, mythologized understandings of their religion’s history to construct a theoretical understanding of childhood as a realm of wonder, fantasy, and religious wisdom that adults frequently attempt to re-inhabit, through the experiences of their own children and through idealized presentations of themselves as “overgrown children” who retain contact with these magical childhood worlds. In many ways, Pagan adults construct a religious and relational tension in which they attempt to remain ideologically childlike while seeing chronological children as the bearers of an inherent religious wisdom . In many ways, Pagan adults displace Pagan children from the realm of childhood. The ways in which they do so both reflect and challenge mainstream patterns and understandings of parenting, childhood, and religious imaginations in the United States. Pagans, Families, Values Pagans Pagans remain a numerical minority in the United States, although they maintain a significant and steadily increasing presence. This presence , however, is decidedly difficult to quantify. The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), a telephone poll of over 50,000 4 > 5 the spontaneity and creativity of religious expression.”3 Like Weber, Émile Durkheim’s work maintained a sense of the exceptionalism of magic among contemporary religions. Durkheim’s assertion that “there is no Church of magic” reflects a similar understanding of magic as a private act rather than the “collective effervescence” that characterizes religion. Contemporary Paganism challenges this skepticism about the possibility of a magical community that is also a moral community of the sort that Durkheim considers “religious” and potentially offers a way to reconceptualize the possibility of a magical moral community. Rather than the solitary “magic society” Durkheim described, contemporary Paganism responds to the challenge of raising new generations by attempting to forge the “durable ties that make them members of a single moral body.”4 The moral and imaginative world of...

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