Pagan Family Values: Childhood and the Religious Imagination in Contemporary American Paganism

Notes

>> 197 Notes Notes to the Introduction 1. ARIS records a phenomenal growth rate for Wicca (not including other Pagan traditions) of 1,575% between 1990 and 2001, or a doubling of adherents every two years. Of course, these numbers may indicate increasingly higher levels of selfreporting among American Pagans or greater familiarity with the religion based on television and movies during this time. The 2008 version of ARIS included Pagans in the category of “other religions,” making it more difficult to determine an accurate estimate or growth rate among Pagans. See the Pluralism Project, “Statistics by Tradition,” n.d., http://pluralism.org/resources/statistics/tradition. php#Paganism (accessed February 26, 2009). See also Barry A. Kosmin, Egon Mayer, and Ariela Keysar, “American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS)” (The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 2001); B. A. Robinson, “How Many Wiccans Are There in the U.S.?” Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance , May 20, 2003, http://www.religioustolerance.org/wic_nbr.htm (accessed December 1, 2007). 2. Helen A. Berger, A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft in the United States (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), xiv; Helen A. Berger, Evan A. Leach, and Leigh S. Shaffer, Voices from the Pagan Census: A National Survey of Witches and Neo-Pagans in the United States (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 34, 50. 3. Helen A. Berger, “The Routinization of Spontaneity,” Sociology of Religion 56, no. 1 (1995): 50. 4. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1915), 44. 5. For comprehensive accounts of the history of contemporary Paganism, see Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986); Ronald Hutton , “Paganism and Polemic: The Debate over the Origins of Modern Pagan Witchcraft,” Folklore 111, no. 1 (2000): 103–117; Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 198 > 199 20. A Pagan author observes of these two moral codes, “The first is law, the second law enforcement.” See Cory Ellen Gatrall, “Conscience and Consciousness,” Public Square: The Meaning of Existence, May 25, 2009, http://www.patheos.com/ Explore/Additional-Resources/Conscience-and-Consciousness.html (accessed July 1, 2009). 21. For more on sources of and opposition to some of the more controversial practices of contemporary Paganism, see Joy Dixon, “Sexology and the Occult: Sexuality and Subjectivity in Theosophy’s New Age,” in Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader, ed. Elizabeth A. Castelli (New York: Palgrave, 1997), 288–309; Mary Jo Neitz, “Defining and Sanctioning Sexual Deviance in Contemporary Witchcraft,” in Sex, Lies, and Sanctity, ed. Mary Jo Neitz and David G. Bromley (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1995), 223–235; Joanne Pearson, “Inappropriate Sexuality? Sex Magic, S/M, and Wicca (or ‘Whipping Harry Potter’s Arse!’),” Theology and Sexuality : The Journal of the Institute for the Study of Christianity and Sexuality 11, no. 2 (2005): 31–42. 22. Susan Ridgely Bales, When I Was a Child: Children’s Interpretations of First Communion (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 58–59. 23. Douglas E. Cowan, Cyberhenge: Modern Pagans on the Internet (New York: Routledge , 2004), x. 24. Jess, e-mail communication, January 17, 2007. 25. Like many large Pagan events, the CMA holds festivals twice a year, at Beltane (in April or May) and at Samhain (in October), two of the major points on the Pagan Wheel of the Year. Notes to Chapter 1 1. For more on the nature religion aspects of contemporary Paganism, see Catherine Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Dennis D. Carpenter, “Emergent Nature Spirituality: An Examination of the Major Spiritual Contours of the Contemporary Pagan Worldview,” in Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft, ed. James R. Lewis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 35–72; Chas S. Clifton, Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006); Chas Clifton and Graham Harvey, eds., The Paganism Reader (London New York: Routledge, 2004); Joanne Pearson, Richard H. Roberts, and Geoffrey Samuel, Nature Religion Today: Paganism in the Modern World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998); Michael York, Pagan Theology : Paganism as a World Religion (New York: New York University Press, 2003). 2. A small (but vocal) number of my informants explained the origins of contemporary Wicca to me this way—for example, as a mystery religion...