Contemporary Paganism emerged in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s as a new religious movement, although practitioners understood themselves to be participating in a witchcraft tradition extending back into medieval—if not prehistoric—times.
In recent decades, Pagan Studies has emerged through a plethora of sophisticated anthropological, sociological, and historical studies, and this new three-volume collection from Routledge’s Critical Concepts in Religious Studies series brings together the best foundational and cutting-edge scholarship in one ‘mini library’.
Volume I addresses the emergence of Paganism as a religion. It collects scholarly analyses of the historical evolution of Paganism, and is organized under topics including debates of historical accuracy, influences on the development of Paganism, and the process of routinization in the religion. The second volume addresses the importance of environmentalism in contemporary Paganism, including work on how Pagans think about the natural world, environmental ethics, and related political activism. The final volume addresses the importance of gender issues and feminism in contemporary Paganism, and collects the best research on topics including immanence, embodiment, self-image, and sexuality.
Paganism is fully indexed and has a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.
Volume I: History and Development
1. Aiden Kelly, ‘Inventing Witchcraft’, Iron Mountain: A Journal of Magical Religion, 1, 1 (Summer 1984), 19–30.
2. James W. Baker, ‘White Witches: Historic Fact and Romantic Fantasy’, in James R. Lewis (ed.), Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft (SUNY, 1996), pp. 171–92.
3. Ronald Hutton, ‘The Roots of Modern Paganism’, in Charlotte Hardman and Graham Harvey (eds.), Paganism Today: Wiccans, Druids, the Goddess and Ancient Earth Traditions for the Twenty-First Century (Thorsons, 1996), pp. 3–15.
4. Catherine Noble, ‘From Fact to Fallacy: The Evolution of Margaret Alice Murray’s Witch-Cult’, The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 7.1, 2005, 5–26.
5. Jennifer Hallett, ‘Wandering Dreams and Social Marches: Varieties of Paganism in Late Victorian and Edwardian England’, The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 8.2, 2006, 161–83.
6. Sabina Magliocco, ‘The Study of Folklore and the Reclamation of Paganism’, Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 23–56.
7. David Waldron, ‘Post-Modernism and Witchcraft Histories’, The Pomegranate: A New Journal of Neopagan Thought, 15, 2001, 36–44.
8. John Michael Greer, ‘Myth, History, and Pagan Origins’, The Pomegranate: A New Journal of Neopagan Thought, 9, 1999, 44–50.
9. Ronald Hutton, ‘Gerald Gardner’, Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 205–40.
10. Chas Clifton, ‘How the Ravens Came to the Lake: Wicca’s Birth and Atlantic Passage’, Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), pp. 11–35.
11. Michael York, ‘Defining Paganism’, The Pomegranate: A New Journal of Neopagan Thought, 11, 2000, 4–9.
12. Jo Pearson, ‘Demarcating the Field: Paganism, Wicca and Witchcraft’, Diskus, 6, 2000.
13. Sarah M. Pike, ‘Rationalizing the Margins: A Review of Legitimation and Ethnographic Practice in Scholarly Research on Neo-Paganism’, in James R. Lewis (ed.), Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft (SUNY, 1996), pp. 353–72.
14. Douglas Cowan, ‘Online Solitaries and Cybercovens: (Re-)Inventing the Modern Pagan Path’, Cyberhenge: Modern Pagans on the Internet (Routledge, 2005), pp. 81–118.
15. Helen Berger, ‘The Routinization of Creativity’, A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft in the United States (University of South Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 100–22.
16. Síân Lee MacDonald Reid, ‘"The Craft as a Religion": Disorganized Religion: An Exploration of the Neopagan Craft in Canada’ (doctoral thesis, Carleton University, Ottawa, 2001), pp. 161–219.
17. Laura Wildman-Hanlon, ‘Children of Converts: Generational Retention in the Neo-Pagan New Religious Movement’ (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, 2006).
Volume II: Ecology
18. Graham Harvey, ‘Ecology’, Contemporary Paganism: Listening People, Speaking Earth (New York University Press, 1997), pp. 126–42.
19. Gus diZerega, ‘Spirit, Land, and Home: Paganism and the Earth’ (www.dizerega.com).
20. Vivianne Crowley, ‘Wicca as Nature Religion’, in Joanne Pearson, Richard H. Roberts, and Geoffrey Samuel (eds.), Nature Religion Today: Paganism in the Modern World (Edinburgh University Press, 1998), pp. 170–9.
21. Chas Clifton, ‘Calling it Nature Religion’, Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), pp. 37–70.
22. Douglas Ezzy, ‘Popular Witchcraft and Environmentalism’, The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 8.1, 2006.
23. Marion Bowman, ‘Nature, the Natural and Pagan Identity’, Diskus, 6, 2000.
24. Jenny Blain, ‘Contested Meanings: Earth-Religion Practitioners and the Everyday’, The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 12, 2000, 15–25.
25. Adrian Harris, ‘Sacred Ecology’, in Graham Harvey and Charlotte Hardman (eds.), Paganism Today: Wiccans, Druids, the Goddess and Ancient Earth Traditions for the Twenty-First Century (Thorsons, 1996), pp. 149–56.
26. Ieuan Jones, ‘Song of the Car, Song of the Cinema: Questioning "Semi-Orthodox" Pagan Rhetoric about "Nature"’, The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 8.1, 2006.
27. Andy Letcher, ‘"Gaia Told Me to Do it": Resistance and the Idea of Nature Within Contemporary British Eco-Paganism’, EcoTheology, 8, 2003, 61–84.
28. Regina Smith Oboler, ‘Nature Religion as a Cultural System? Sources of Environmentalist Action and Rhetoric in a Contemporary Pagan Community’, The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 6.1, 2004, 86–106.
29. Adrian Ivakhiv, ‘Nature and Ethnicity in East European Paganism: An Environmental Ethic of the Religious Right?’, The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 7.2, 2005, 194–225.
30. Kathryn Rountree, ‘Goddess Spirituality and Nature in Aotearoa New Zealand’, The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 7.2, 2005, 141–56.
31. Chris Klassen, ‘The Goddess and/as the Cyborg: Nature and Technology in Feminist Witchcraft’, The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 7.2, 2005, 173–93.
32. Douglas Ezzy, ‘Geographical Ontology: Levinas, Sacred Landscapes and Cities’, The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 6.1, 2004, 19–33.
33. Barbara Jane Davy, ‘Being at Home in Nature: A Levinasian Approach to Pagan Environmental Ethics’, The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 7.2, 2005, 157–72.
Volume III: Gender and Feminism
34. Nikki Bado-Fralick, ‘Changing the Face of the Sacred: Women Who Walk the Path of the Goddess’, Explorations, 8.1, 1989, 5–14.
35. Asphodel Long, ‘The Goddess Movement in Britain Today’, Feminist Theology, 5, 1994, 11–39.
36. Kathryn Rountree, ‘Feminists and Witches’, Embracing the Witch and the Goddess: Feminist Ritual-Makers in New Zealand (Routledge, 2004), pp. 33–49.
37. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, ‘From the Devil’s Gateway to the Goddess Within: The Image of the Witch in Neopaganism’, in Ria Kloppenborg and Wouter J. Hanegraaff (eds.), Female Stereotypes in Religious Traditions (Brill, 1995), pp. 213–19, 233–42.
38. Diane Purkiss, ‘A Holocaust of One’s Own: The Myth of the Burning Times’, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (Routledge, 1996), pp. 7–29.
39. Carol Christ, ‘The Meaning of the Goddess’, Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality (Addison-Wesley, 1997), pp. 89–112.
40. Jone Salomonsen, ‘Women’s Mysteries: Creating a Female Symbolic Order’, Enchanted Feminism: The Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco (Routledge, 2002), pp. 214–47.
41. Susan Greenwood, ‘Feminist Witchcraft: A Transformatory Politics’, in Wendy Griffin (ed.), Daughters of the Goddess: Studies of Healing, Identity and Empowerment (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), pp. 136–50.
42. Wendy Griffin, ‘The Embodied Goddess: Feminist Witchcraft and Female Divinity’, Sociology of Religion, 56, 1, 1995, 35–49.
43. Lucie Marie-Mai DuFresne, ‘Mother and Goddess: The Ideological Force of Symbols’, Canadian Women’s Studies, 17, 1, 1997.
44. Chris Klassen, ‘The Infertile Goddess: Challenge to Maternal Imagery in Feminist Witchcraft’, Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, 7, 1, 45–51, 2005.
45. Kristy Coleman, ‘Why "God" as "She" Provokes Us: Semiotically Speaking: The Significance of the Divine Feminine’, The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 7.2, 2005, 173–93.
46. Ruth Mantin, ‘Thealogies in Process: Re-searching and Theorizing Spiritualities, Subjectivities, and Goddess-talk’, in Jenny Blain, Douglas Ezzy, and Graham Harvey (eds.), Researching Paganisms (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), pp. 147–70.
47. Paul Thomas, ‘Re-Imagining Inanna: The Gendered Reappropriation of the Ancient Goddess in Modern Goddess Worship’, The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 6.1, 2004, 53–69.
48. Sarah M. Pike, ‘Serious Playing with the Self: Gender and Eroticism at the Festival Fire’, Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community (University of California Press, 2001), pp. 182–217.
49. Jenny Blain and Robert Wallis, ‘Men and "Women’s Magic": Contested Narratives of Gender, Seidr, and "Ergi"’, The Pomegranate: A New Journal of Neopagan Thought, 9, 1999, 4–16.
50. Phillip Shallcrass, ‘A Priest of the Goddess’, in Joanne Pearson, Richard H. Roberts, and Geoffrey Samuel (eds.), Nature Religion Today: Paganism in the Modern World (Edinburgh University Press, 1998), pp. 157–69.
Biography
Barbara Jane Davy holds a Ph.D. in religion from Concordia University, Montreal. She has been engaged in the academic study of Paganism for more than ten years, and has written articles on Paganism, shamanism, and nature religion that have been published in refereed journals and encyclopedias. She has taught at Concordia University and Carleton University, and is past-president of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada. She has been an active member of the Nature Religion Scholars Network (now the Pagan Studies consultation within the American Academy of Religion) since 1997. She is the author of Introduction to Pagan Studies (2006), and has also published in the areas of ritual studies, environmental ethics and the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.
