This panel, assembled in conversation with Thomas A. Tweed’s understanding of religion from the perspective of movement and place, expands, challenges, and redefines some mainstream interpretations of Pagan practices and spaces. The session engages debates around the purchase of rural land by folkish Heathens, Wiccan redefinitions of ritual practices in hyperspace, and the role of magic in Puritan piety through the analysis of New England tombstones.The papers focus on researching religion through the lens of materiality—offering salient insights both within and beyond the study of Paganisms.
Folkish Heathens—those that view their religion as only for white people--are purchasing land in rural areas in the United States. Some of these communities have almost no minorities living in them. However, at least one of these is a majority African American community and another has a sizable African American population. The hofs (Heathen churches) and community centers are part of folkish heathens’ larger racial, gender and immigration agendas. This paper explores the response of both the communities in which these lands are embedded and of other inclusive Heathens to these purchases by folkish Heathens.
While “cybercovens” have been a feature of eclectic Wiccan practice, they have not been the norm in Traditional initiatory Wicca. During the Covid pandemic, however, many Traditional Wiccan covens responded to members’ needs for spiritual and social interaction by creating innovative hybrid rituals with in-person and online elements. This paper utilizes two recent psychological frameworks for theorizing about ritual experience to analyze qualitative interviews with practitioners in such groups. The interviews explore practitioners’ motivations for performing hybrid rituals, the adaptations made to create emotional intensity, social connection, and other significant psychological features of Wiccan ritual, the extent to which such rituals were deemed efficacious and fulfilled members’ psychological needs, and whether the innovations have had lasting effects on subsequent practice. The paper examines the applicability and value of the psychological frameworks for the analysis of Wiccan ritual and discusses implications for future research on the psychology of ritual.
For the supposedly iconophobic Puritans, colonial New England tombstones served as a posthumous canvas, which only in death, were they granted a form of religious imagery. The graven images carved onto the early Puritan headstones illuminate theological evidence that reflects ideological shifts in time. However, unexpectedly magical musings mark a delineation between the common academic, literary perception of the Puritans and the archaeological remains from ordinary life which paint a more superstitious portrait. Based upon the historical usage of magical symbols, and in conjunction with Puritan theology, daisy wheels and pagan water deities were carved onto 17th and 18th century New England tombstones as a source of apotropaic magic against witches, the devil, and all evils of the New World. Even before the witchcraft accusations of Salem and Essex County, colonists participated in the very same occult practices for which they had condemned and demonized their neighbors.