Ritual observations of the Witches' Sabbat and Cornish May Day celebrations are alive and well in the San Francisco Bay Area, the heart of America's counter-culture, sexual revolution, gay marriage movement, and modern primitive subculture. At one and the same time both inventive and backward-looking, Neo-Pagans create new rituals out of the materials they find at hand: a Vodou priestess who lives on the other side of town, British witchcraft books of the 1940s, Grimm Brothers fairy tales, Sir James Frazer's
Golden bough and above all, their own imaginations and experiences. Magliocco provides nuanced accounts of Neo-Pagan reclamation of pre-Christian European cultures and convincingly demonstrates that this community does not take myth, legend, folklore, and ritual activity at face value, but remakes them through the forge of experience.
Witching culture, her second book on Neo-Paganism, describes the kind of folk revival in which Neo-Pagans participate as 'folklore reclamation', a process by which contemporary Americans claim the labels of 'Pagan' and 'Witch' as 'emblems of identity'. This book is as much about folklore as a dynamic process rather than a received body of stories and practices as it is about Neo-Paganism, and thus should appeal to scholars of new religions, folklorists, and anthropologists alike.
Witching culture is divided into three parts: 'Roots and branches', which describes the origins of Neo-Paganism, especially in nineteenth-century Romanticism; 'Religious experiences', which includes discussions of ritual and the meanings of magic among Neo-Pagans as well as the significance of religious ecstasy in ritual; and 'Beyond experience: religion and identity', in which Magliocco explores notions of authenticity, hybridity, oppositionality, and ethnic identity within the Neo-Pagan context and as they relate to broader culture contestation over these issues. Most chapters open with an excerpt from Magliocco's field notes, establishing the intimate tone and attention to detail that characterize the book. Where other studies of contemporary Paganism are painted in broad swathes (Harvey,
Contemporary Paganism, 1997; Pike,
New Age and Neo-pagan religions in America, 2004; York,
Pagan theology: Paganism as a world religion, 2005), hers is populated by individuals and their stories, giving her readers direct access to the lived experience of 'folklore reclaimers'.
If there is a consistent focus in the book, it is the creative uses of ritual among Witches and Neo-Pagans in rites of passage, especially initiation; year-cycle rites, especially seasonal ones; rites of crisis, often focused on healing; and rites of possession. Students of ritual from all disciplines will find much to learn from Magliocco's accounts of religious ecstasy, drugs, and sex in ritual, and the range of ritual styles from sedate Neo-Pagan 'high church' to ecstatic 'Pentecostal Witches'. The rites Magliocco describes provide important evidence for her argument that beliefs emerge from experience, that ultimately experience is the measure of all things and 'the single rubric that unites Neo-Pagan and Witchen groups' (p. 97).
What makes her discussion of ecstatic ritual experience particularly compelling is that it is one of the places in the book where the author most successfully draws on her own experience to illuminate her ethnographic data. Building on the theoretical work of ethnographers such as Ruth Behar and Renato Rosaldo, Magliocco turns to her own experience of things 'extraordinary' to reflect on and open up her Neo-Pagan material and make it more accessible. In order to deepen the reader's understanding of religious ecstasy, she conveys the life-changing impact of ecstasy among Neo-Pagans she interviewed through the lens of her own encounter with ecstasy in ritual. Yet she never allows her own experiences to efface her informants' stories and lives.
Magliocco critiques the debate over emic versus etic perspectives, especially the tendency to essentialize notions of insider and outsider into categories that do not capture the experiences of real people who slip in and out of these categories all the time. While most of the book is characterized by a delicate balance between critical insider and sympathetic outsider, the issue of cultural borrowing is one of the few instances in which Magliocco chooses sides. She has clearly come to share the belief of many of her informants in the 'oneness of all sacred manifestations' (p. 194) when in the last sentence of the book she quotes a line from a popular Neo-Pagan song that reads, 'the heart is the only nation'. This final refrain seems to position her clearly in the insider's camp, a position which she has denied all along in her insistence that identity is never one thing or another, but always shaped by specific contexts.
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