Drawing Down the Moon (69 page)

How do you define Pagan studies? Fritz Muntean, now editor emeritus and reviews editor at
The Pomegranate,
defines Pagan studies as being about “modern (capital
P
) Paganism as opposed to Classical studies which would deal with historical (small
p
) paganism.” He says it would be a subcategory of the study of New Religious Movements, and would include sociology of religion, the study of texts, and the study of the evolution of myth.

Clifton says in the 1980s many of the scholars who studied Paganism were outsiders who tended to be patronizing. He cites Tanya Lurhmann's
Persuasions of the Witch's Craft,
and articles by George Kirkpatrick at San Diego State University.

But Fritz Muntean notes that by the mid 1990s, many scholars of religion were attracted to studying Paganism and thought such a study important. He observed that: “Scholars of religion are interested in the study of New Religious Movements for the same reason physicists study the Big Bang. Everybody knows that whatever their own religion might now be, at one point in time it too was a New Religious Movement, and whatever scholars can learn about religions that are starting up now can, or may, be useful in understanding the processes by which the other, older religions began.” Muntean says there was another reason for scholarly interest in Neo-Paganism—very few religions survive the death of their founder. But Wicca and Paganism are thriving, many decades after Gerald Gardner's death. This is also true for Mormonism, for example, and Christian Science.

Discussions of Pagan religions have always taken place at the American Academy of Religion's (AAR) annual meeting, during panels on New Religious Movements, on Religion and the Environment, on Women and Religion, and in other religious disciplines. But, starting in 1995, various researchers interested in Pagan studies began to have unofficial meetings prior to the AAR's annual convention. The next year, Clifton agreed to set up the Nature Religion (Natrel) listserve, which, he says, has been hugely important in creating an international community of scholars over the past decade. Non-official meetings before the official AAR annual convention continued for a number of years. And in 2001, there was an entire day of unofficial programming devoted to Paganism.

In 1997, the small group of scholars decided to apply to be a formal AAR program unit—a “consultation,” the lowest of several grades, which lasts for three years and then is reviewed to see if it is making a worthwhile contribution. The proposal was rejected, and non-official meetings continued. That changed in 2005. The Consultation on Contemporary Pagan Studies was held at the 2005 AAR convention. The field is beginning to take off.

Pagans have also been more active in interfaith efforts, which has helped Pagans and Pagan scholars gain more respect. Selena Fox, of Circle Sanctuary, says, “Paganism has been getting positive press not only in the United States, but internationally. Part of this shift has come from Pagan participation in international interfaith conferences, including the Parliament of the World's Religions.” This has led, she says, to Paganism increasingly being understood and depicted as a world religion. Muntean notes that one of the things that eased his own way into academia was that he started back to school the year after the Parliament of the World's Religions took place in Chicago. Almost all the faculty in his department had attended, and they were apparently delighted to find a genuine representative of modern Paganism among their students. From that time on, he says, Pagan speakers were welcome at many seemingly unlikely venues, including Catholic colleges and seminaries.

Besides entering academia, another significant and related development is that many Pagans have entered ministerial programs and seminaries. While it is hard to know how many have entered such programs, over the years many women, in particular, who were interested in women's spirituality entered theological institutes, including Harvard Divinity School, the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, and various Unitarian Universalist seminaries, like Star King in California. While some of these programs were more ministerial than academic, it is clearly another form of seeking and obtaining official credentials.

There has also been a growth in Pagan seminaries, and although they vary in quality and very few are yet accredited, that too is changing. One seminary, Cherry Hill, in Massachusetts, has begun serious professional training programs for Pagan ministers—creating courses in, for example, pastoral counseling and prison ministry.

But returning to purely academic as opposed to professional courses of training, Fritz Muntean says that many of the grassroots writers who began sending their essays to
The Pomegranate
are now working their way through graduate school. And
The Pomegranate
now has an academic publisher and is a fully peer-reviewed journal. All the writers and all the reviewers are working academics. Muntean believes the Pagans in the academy (and not everyone in Pagan studies is a practicing Pagan) are doing quite well, if you look at how young most of them still are, and the number of books being published.

British historian Ronald Hutton paints a less rosy picture of Pagan studies in England. Most departments ignore the field and Pagan studies have had little influence on disciplines like history, archeology, and literary criticism. “In Britain,” he writes, academics that study Paganism are “few and found mainly in the least prestigious and well-funded institutions, and in fixed-term temporary posts.” He says Pagan studies “have not managed to establish a presence as more than a marginal, and expendable, aspect of theology and religious studies.” He says things are even worse in Australia.

Chas Clifton says there are no teaching jobs in Pagan studies, and that it's worse in the United States than in the United Kingdom. To begin with, he says, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam dominate the teaching of religion, followed by the study of Asian religions. Then there is the problem that no one knows how many Pagans there really are, and the U.S. census doesn't ask for religious information. The Canadian and Australian census do collect that kind of information. Thirdly, although courses in Paganism are popular at colleges, there is no perception that teaching these courses is necessary. Fourth, he argues that scholars who are writing about Paganism often made their mark in another field: Ron Hutton specialized in seventeenth-century history, for example. “We have the journal, we have conferences, we are gradually developing quite a number of books—even an introductory Pagan studies textbook,” Clifton says, “but there is not yet a larger feeling that the subject matter is vitally important. 9/11 did wonders for Islamic studies,” he adds wryly, “but I would not want some Witches to fly an airplane into an office building, so I suppose that we will just have to be patient and keep chipping away.” But Muntean argues that many of these problems are simply due to the newness of the field, the youth of many of the scholars involved, and the problems in the United States of creating an educated citizenry.

When the second edition of
Drawing Down the Moon
was published in 1986, there was a new section on Shamanism. There had begun to be serious exploration of techniques of ecstasy, and some groups were even calling themselves Shamanic Wicca or Wiccan Shamanism. EarthSpirit, Circle, and other groups were using the word to describe some of their practices. Over the years, some people within Paganism had studied with Michael Harner, who created the term “core shamanism” to explain the techniques of journeying to other worlds that could be seen across many cultures.

The word
shaman
is one of those words, like
witch,
that means something different to everybody. The term itself comes from a word used by the Tungus people of Eastern Siberia. But as Michael Harner once put it, the word can be defined as a method to open a door and enter a different reality. A shaman is someone who enters an altered state of consciousness and goes on a journey in order to gather knowledge from a different reality. The knowledge depends on a deep connection with nature—with the spirits of plants and animals. The methods used to enter this altered state depend on the culture. Some cultures use drugs; more cultures use drumming and ecstatic dancing. What many Wicca traditions call the eightfold paths of power—chanting, dancing, trance, wine, and sexuality among others—is another way of talking about methods to enter altered states. As you will see in the section “Pagan Festivals Today,” drumming, dancing and, in one case, exhaustion, are the main methods modern Pagans are using to access ecstatic states.

Since the second edition of
Drawing Down the Moon,
Chas Clifton has written a very useful book that explores the connections between Witchcraft and Shamanism,
Witchcraft Today: Witchcraft and Shamanism,
²⁷
and he notes that Mircea Eliade, in his noted book
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy,
used the word “ecstasy” in its original Greek sense: to be driven out of one's senses, and he concluded that the ecstatic experience was a fundamental part of the human condition. Writes Clifton:

In our society, the most common encounter with ecstasy for millions of Americans today comes at rock concerts. In the 1960s, many encountered the psychedelic movement. In the 1970s and 1980s, some people encountered ecstatic experiences through Rainbow gatherings or ceremonies at the largely white Bear Tribe. Which brings up one of the problems that Clifton and others have noted. Shamans were tied into their communities, and one continuing question is: What community are modern shamans serving? In some cases, in the Pagan community, it is fairly clear. There are Pagans that are blending European Pagan symbolism—the wheel of the year, the elements, the deities with animism and ecstatic techniques. Many years ago, in an article in
Circle Network News,
Selena Fox wrote about her own path that—at the time—she called Wiccan Shamanism, but now calls Circle Craft.

Many have debunked Carlos Castaneda's “Don Juan” novels, which popularized shamanism for millions of people. And many have observed that throughout the New Age movement, there have been scores of people claiming to be shamans with no training, and certainly no community. Others have cried that all of this is cultural exploitation of native peoples. More than twenty years ago, Brandy Williams, in an article in the
Georgian Newsletter,
a journal of the Georgian Wiccan tradition, wrote that too many Pagans were going off to the mountains for a weekend and then making portentous statements about their visions:

A few Pagans have gone even further and suggested that anyone not from a genuine tribal culture does not have the training or background. But one of the problems with this argument is that many indigenous cultures are not intact. Michael Harner has given workshops to people from tribal cultures that felt many of their own traditions and teachings had been lost and that they would gain knowledge from recent scholarship.