Neo-Paganism for Teens

Neo-Pagan religions are among the fastest growing faiths in North America today, particularly among young people. Since the 1990s, an increasing number of literary and media texts aimed at teenagers have depicted Neo-Pagan religions not as primitive eccentricities or Satanism in disguise, but as viable spiritual paths, appealing especially to young people with environmentalist and feminist leanings. Alongside the mainstreaming of the Internet, interest in Neo-Pagan religions has become even more widespread. Teenaged religious seekers, who may not have had access to practising worship groups or to bookstores that sell relevant materials, suddenly have become a visible contingent in the general Neo-Pagan scene.

The best-known Neo-Pagan religion today, the one most commonly represented in texts for teens, is Wicca, a duotheistic, nature-based tradition of religious witchcraft that was created in Great Britain by Gerald Gardner in the 1940s. The most comprehensive history of Wicca and its many offshoots is Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon, which articulates how Wicca shifted from a hierarchical, coven-based system to a more accessible and more solitary religious practice. The latter form of Wicca is the one that teenagers are likely to encounter. Television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed depict smart, savvy, capable young women whose Wiccan beliefs empower them to defeat the forces of evil, and films such as The Craft attempt to frame Wiccan practice in terms of its internal religious ethics. Neo-Paganism for a teen audience is not just found in fantasy media, however, but also in a number of non-fiction how-to books designed to introduce young seekers to the basics of Neo-Pagan faiths—but again, the focus is primarily upon Wicca. Silver RavenWolf’s Teen Witch was the first such text, but hardly the last: more recently, Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard (2004) and Companion for the Apprentice Wizard (2006), both by well-known Neo-Pagan author Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, even promise to teach young fans about the real magical traditions behind J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books.

There have been several scholarly forays into teens and Neo-Paganism, including a few essays in Lorne L. Dawson and Douglas E. Cowan’s excellent collection Religion Online, which addresses young people and Neo-Pagan religions. Hannah E. Johnston and Peg Aloi’s The New Generation Witches is the first book devoted exclusively to the topic, and the collection includes not just academic studies of teen Neo-Pagan practices but also the voices of young Neo-Pagans themselves. Likewise, while there have been numerous discussions of Pagan and Neo-Pagan themes in texts for young people, Peter Bramwell’s Pagan Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction is the first book-length literary study that is grounded in scholarship on historical as well as contemporary Pagan belief systems. In addition, this essay discusses Caroline Rennie Pattison’s The Law of Three and Blair Drawson and Anne Marie Drawson’s Witches in the Kitchen, which are recent Canadian texts aimed at young readers who are curious about Wicca.

Before going further, some clarification of terms is necessary because the definitions of Paganism and Neo-Paganism are quite nebulous, as Johnston and Aloi note in the introduction to their book (4–5). Most of us are familiar with historical religions typically labeled “Pagan,” such as the religious traditions of ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt, but what does the term “Pagan” mean in reference to modern religious...