Neo-Pagan Sacred Art and Altars: Making Things Whole

Neo-Pagan Sacred Art and Altars: Making Things Whole. By Sabina Magliocco. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Pp. xii + 76, preface, notes, bibliography, photographs. $40.00 cloth, $18.00 paper)

Sabina Magliocco's empathic narrative discloses the secretive and often misunderstood world of Neo-Paganism through a close look at its material culture-its shrines, masks, and body adornments. She shows ways in which practitioners and artists ascribe personal meanings to an array of mythological images, including animals, Mother Earth, and maiden goddesses, giving material form to their own individual religious and political outlooks. A fast-growing religion in the United States, Neo-Paganism covers a range of groups broadly encompassing revival Witchcraft (Wiccan) and revival Paganism (non-Wiccan). Although some sects (or "traditions") follow a particular ethnic, philosophical, political, or regional lore, or emulate the spirituality of Afro-Caribbeans or Native Americans, Neo-Pagans and Witches on the whole see themselves as the offspring of European pagan magical traditions-some ancient, dating back to the Roman Empire, some later (Renaissance Neoplatonism), and others quite recent (nineteenth-century syncretism) (2). An initial Neo-Pagan bond to the myth of a matriarchal golden age has by now been critiqued within the movement, but some practitioners continue to view feminism and environmentalism as the moral basis for their religious and political ideologies (3).

The book begins with a framing vignette in which Magliocco candidly relates her own physical experiences upon entering the world of Witches and Pagans; in her view, folk aesthetics provides the best lens through which to gain insight into Neo-Pagan culture and its politics, and so her project is to draw attention to Neo-Pagan material culture (x-xi). The chapters that follow are organized straightforwardly. The first, "Neo-Paganism and Sacred Art," offers the lay reader a succinct introduction to the movement's values and esthetics. The second chapter, "Altars," details the making of various altars and their components, and the third, "Costumes," features jewelry, body modification, ritual dress and undress, and masks. The author's descriptions of various ritual objects and body adornments are often accompanied by the words of their creators (and are suitably enriched by several dozen color plates and halftones). The main argument of the book is that for Neo-Pagans, ritual and art, far more than being merely connected, are one and the same thing-inseparable. The artistic nature of their rituals explains their beliefs, and vice versa. "For most Pagans, it is the creative process itself which is the core of religious experience; it matters little whether the artist is a beginner or has a lifetime of experience" (xi); all practitioners are artisans or "artists of some sort" (x).

Another important point is that Neo-Pagan art and religious belief are explicitly oppositional to dominant American culture, especially as elaborated by a puritanical Christian ethos that has historically viewed the corporeal realm as sinful. "Part of the process of identity creation implies embracing exactly those stereotypes that are excluded from the dominant paradigm: in this case, Romantic notions of the natural, the feminine, the primitive, the corporeal, and the wild. These qualities are recast as positive, a necessary corrective to the excesses of Calvinism, capitalism, and progressivism" (2-3). A puzzling complication of this claim, in my opinion, is that Neo-Pagan culture emerges from the dominant middle class. Magliocco notes that of roughly a hundred thousand Pagans and Witches in the United States today, most are to be found in urban areas and university towns within the intellectual middle class. Practitioners are more educated and more engaged than the average: there are dozens of annual Pagan and Wiccan festivals, a hundred or more Pagan and Wiccan periodicals, over twenty thousand Pagan and Wiccan websites (4). It is therefore important to look critically at the pool of symbols that Neo-Pagans draw upon because these symbols reflect the group's cultural capital and its intentionality.

The historian of religions, Mircea Eliade (1976:5), situated the 1960's search for the earth-mother, tree-mother and so on within a "cultural fashion," a nostalgia of Western intellectuals, that had flourished between 1900 and 1920. Magliocco in her book has projected an artistic, not a socio-historical, profile of today's Pagans, yet the tropes they use, and the romanticized assumptions they make about the iconography they appropriate, suggest that their religious and political outlook may possibly recreate a "cultural fashion," in the spirit of the earlier movements discussed by Eliade, that is defined by the practitioners' sense of entitlement to and ownership of ancient cultures. Great effort is invested in this book in description of objects and body adornments, their sources, their material aspects, and their symbolism. Little is devoted to discussing either the high value tacitly placed by this group upon ancient Western religious icons and myths or the group's uninterrogated sense of entitlement in "borrowing" (69) and folklorizing them anew. Why are well-known symbols of Western heritage essential to the meaning-making tradition of this group and to the construction of the oppositional culture it evinces? Especially with regard to the broader question of the production of tradition or, specifically, of sacred art by extremely self-conscious individualist artist-practitioners, addressing these issues from historical and class perspectives, not solely from a formal perspective, is critical.