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>> 181 Conclusion Building Fairy Houses At a summer solstice campout for the SpiralScouts of Silverling Circle, one of the craft activities in a very full weekend called on the scouts to make “fairy houses.” These houses were intended to provide the local fairies with shelter, but the craft needed very little explanation; scouts and parents alike seemed immediately to understand both the purpose and the need for these structures. Working with moss, bark, grass, and twigs they collected from the campgrounds, the adults and children set to work creating suitable lodgings for the fairy folk. While the children spread thick layers of glue on bark and pipe cleaners, the adult leaders and parents constructed elaborate structures with rounded walls and dozens of twigs painstakingly tied together with twine, and some of the adults worked on their houses long after the children had moved on to other activities. A six-year-old boy wondered aloud if they should go into the woods to find the fairy houses that were already there and copy them. Another six-year-old scoffed, “There aren’t any fairy houses in the woods. Only animals live there, and they can’t make them.” One of the leaders told the scouts that if they concentrated, they would be able to hear the fairies tell them what they wanted their houses to houses to look like. They should listen to the fairies, she reminded them, because “these houses aren’t for you—they’re for the fairies.” 182 > 183 interactions between Pagan adults and children provide the context for the formation of Pagan religious and imaginative worlds based on magic, fantasy, and complicated relationships between adults and children . In much the same way that Pagan adults construct religious and spiritual worlds that value childlike attitudes and behaviors and legitimize their refusal to “grow up,” the religious and imaginative worlds of Pagan children are very often an adult endeavor. Adults shape the religious , moral, communal, and imaginative worlds of Pagan children to serve the needs of chronological children as well as their own ideals of children and childhood. Pagan religious childhood—much like Pagan identity and Pagan religious life—is shaped both in opposition to conventional societal expectations and in hopes of normalizing and legitimizing Paganism within the context of larger society. Pagan childhood and the Pagan religious imaginary are constructed in a way that sets them both in conflict and in conformity with broader American culture . Pagans fashion themselves as exceptional Americans producing a new kind of American childhood—one rich with fantasy, imagination, supernatural presence, and the (possibly overemphasized) spiritual capabilities of children. In many ways, Pagan parents seem to be engaged in shaping new ways of being religious in the United States. At the same time, Pagan understandings of childhood, adulthood, and moral and religious communities reveal a longing to participate in organizations and communities not unlike those of more mainstream religious traditions. This ambivalence is a recurrent theme in contemporary Pagan interactions with larger American culture. In Imagining Religion, Jonathan Z. Smith contends that apologetic, historical, and demographic reasons are not sufficient for a scholar of religion’s interest in data. Smith explains what he considers a legitimate basis for comparison (in this case, of Judaism): Rather, it is because of the peculiar position of Judaism within the larger framework of the imagining of western religion: close, yet distant; similar , yet strange; “occidental,” yet “oriental”; commonplace, yet exotic. This tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar . . . has enormous cognitive power. It invites, it requires comparison. Judaism is foreign enough for comparison and interpretation to be necessary; it is close enough for comparison and interpretation to be possible.2 184 > 185 impulses meet desires for tradition and interconnectedness, and the urge toward collective identity battles with ideals of personal autonomy. Pike observes: Pagans constantly negotiate between the authority of the self and requirements for community life. The assumption that governs writing about contemporary moral life, namely that personalized religion necessarily means that each self is in its “own moral universe,” neglects to consider the importance of relational factors to contemporary moral agents.8 This tension between a personal spirituality and a collective morality is a central issue for contemporary Paganism. Is there a Pagan way of being in the world that extends beyond the individual, or is the Pagan religious imaginary so personalized as to be meaningless to the formation of religious community, religious tradition, or religious heritage ? In many ways, this tension is central to...

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