The Steering Committee continues to be interested in juxtaposing onsite ethnographic (re)enactments and online netnographic engagements in Contemporary Paganisms. Online Goddess communities work to create synergistic aesthetic and emotive polarities as imago deae empowerments alongside onsite communities’ relational ontologies with Other-Than-Human Persons in the service of wholistic healing. Cognitive immersion as hegemonic judges in witch trial courts reinforce stereotypes of Others as well, yet the common building blocks of heuristic relationality retain a protean power to undermine materialism, yet perhaps at the cost of historical appropriation. This session seeks to place these online communities and their cultural productions in relief with onsite communities of tourists and practitioners to locate functions of both conjunctions and disjunctions.
This paper is an analytical comparative study of young women on TikTok who adhere to goddess aesthetics and devotion to make meaning of their gender, sexuality, traumas, and self-image. By using the examples of Aphrodite, who represents the “light” side of the Divine Feminine, and Hekate, who represents the “dark” side of the Divine Feminine, we see that young women in the United States are making meaning of what they consider to be distinctively feminine traits, and using that as a means of empowerment, regardless of the colors, symbols, and themes they choose to adhere to. This paper is a digital ethnography that employs religious aesthetic and feminist theories from a lived religion perspective.
*Cry Witch!* is one of Colonial Williamsburg’s (the living history museum) most popular programs. It depicts Virginia’s best-known witch trial, the 1706 trial of Grace Sherwood. In the show, reenactors portray key characters including Sherwood and witnesses, and audience members play the jury. At the end of the hour-long performance (which includes outlandish testimonies and a woman dragged out screaming), tourists take Sherwood’s fate into their hands, and they almost always vote to condemn her of the crime of witchcraft. To better understand how self-identified witches receive this play, I interviewed 10 in the Williamsburg area to hear their opinions. In this work, I show that fantastical representations of witch trials affect present-day witches by reinforcing negative stereotypes of how women deemed evil should be punished. I also find that witch trials are not taken as seriously as other American wrongs because of how absurd they sound to modern audiences.
Grounded in ongoing ethnographic and archival research, this presentation offers reflections on the Eponian Faerie Faith, an eclectic, nature-oriented form of contemporary Paganism that developed during the 1980s in the American Southeast. The key formulator of the Faerie Faith, Lady Epona (the late Dr. Patricia Zook, 1951-2016), combined initiatory structures drawn from Dianic Witchcraft with elements of Celtic and American New Thought philosophies (especially the work of Max Freedom Long) to offer practitioners a "shamanistic" path for personal development. While numerically small, the Eponian Faerie Faith stands as a fascinating case study for exploring the ways that new religious movements appeal to and/or invent tradition to legitimize their practices.
The “homecoming narrative” is commonly used as a description of shifts in identity within Pagan community but has been critiqued in cross-religious comparative work on conversion. My broader work explores how people develop a sense of Druidic identity within a tradition that has no authoritative texts or leaders but does have shared cultural models for understanding and acting within a relational world. In this paper, I focus specifically on the experiences that drive Druids to seek new meanings outside their religions of upbringing, how this leads to discovering Druidry, and how Druidic identity is deepened through ongoing spiritual and practical experiences. Using autoethnography, interview data, and text analysis, I examine American Druidry considering theoretical approaches drawn from ethnoecology, cognitive anthropology, and organizational anthropology in order to shed light on ways we can better understand the development of identity and community within new decentralized nature-centered religions.