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  • Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture
  • Janet L. Langlois
Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture. By Bill Ellis. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004. Pp. xii + 271, acknowledgments, preface, notes, bibliography, index.)

Early in his Lucifer Ascending, Bill Ellis asks if folklore studies can provide “a reasoned middle ground” in debates about the existence and nature of the supernatural, especially of the demonic. He asks whether folkloristics can mediate between the positive beliefs of those he calls occultists and anti-occult crusaders, on the one hand, and the negative beliefs of debunkers, on the other (p. 26). Those questions, and his positive answer to them, are the fulcrum on which the structure of the book balances, a sequel of sorts to his earlier Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media (University Press of Kentucky, 2000). In each of Lucifer Ascending’s ten chapters, Ellis works through different answers to that dialectic impasse, framing his scholarly discussions of the place of folk traditions within the debates about “magic” in the broadest sense with references to the Harry Potter books, the phenomenally successful series by J. K. Rowling about a boy who, in fairy-tale style, rises from despised child to mage.

In chapter 1, “Wizards vs. Muggles: A Long-Standing Debate,” Ellis sets the stage by comparing the receptions of the first Harry Potter book (and its Onion parody) by fundamentalist Christian reviewers (who expressed concern that the book opens dangerous portals to the occult for its young readers) with that of other reviewers, including preteen, teen, and adult readers, who value it as fantasy literature. His “reasoned middle ground” includes his premise that folk traditions of magic and witchcraft are “by no means fictional,” in the sense that such traditions have existed and do exist and that they may be seen as efficacious by participants on a practical level and by folklorists on symbolic or psychological levels at least (pp. 8–11).

Ellis then explores related debates about witchcraft (chapter 2), black books and chain letters (chapter 3), Satanic Bibles (chapter 4), lucky rabbit’s foot charms (chapter 5), legend tripping in forbidden graveyards (chapter 6), young women’s divinatory rituals of table setting and mirror gazing (chapter 7), Ouija board use (chapter 8), and revivals of spiritualism in deliverance ministries (chapter 9), before he concludes and sums up his findings (chapter 10). Ellis presents these folk traditions of magic and witchcraft as functioning to give participants some power, symbolic and temporary, in a mythic realm distinct from organized religion and from everyday life. He concludes that this “mythic realm,” a liminal space like that of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, mediates between the extreme positions offered by opposing groups in the recurring debates about the existential nature of the occult.

One of Ellis’s strengths is his willingness to give serious consideration to the position of fundamentalist anti-occult crusaders who are too often dismissed—even by researchers who are sympathetic to other cultural and religious belief systems outside of the United States. (I see Michael Shermer’s back-cover endorsement of Lucifer Ascending, “This is first class myth [End Page 228] busting,” as a misreading of the book’s more subtle intent.) Other strengths include Ellis’s examination of the hidden racial implications of the occult nature of the lucky rabbit’s foot. He builds a case for seeing the use of the rabbit’s foot as fetish “as one of many traditions arising from the ambiguous social and political relationships between Black and White cultures in the mid-twentieth century” not always recognized by its users (p. 92). He also examines gender implications of children’s games, sometimes trivialized in other studies (see chapter 7, “Table-Setting and Mirror-Gazing,” pp. 142–73, in particular).

The book’s weaknesses are those of other sequels. Its argument is not as tight as that of Raising the Devil, based as that book was on a specific complex of legends and activities surrounding the Satanist scare of the 1970s and 1980s. Some of the arguments for and reconstructions of “authentic” folk traditions in the present text...

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