Witching Culture | Folklore & Neo-Paganism in America

Description Witching Culture | Folklore & Neo-Paganism in America takes the reader into the heart of one of the fastest-growing religious movements in North America. Revealing the fundamental disciplines of anthropology and folklore to the early development of Neo-Paganism and the revival of witchcraft. Magliocco examines the roots that this religious movement has in a Western spiritual tradition of mysticism disavowed by the Enlightenment. Reclaiming discarded practices and beliefs. Creating religions more in keeping with their personal experience of the world as sacred and filled with meaning. Neo-Pagan religions focus on experience, rather than belief, and many contemporary practitioners have had mystical experiences. They seek a context that normalizes them and creates in them new spiritual dimensions that involve change in ordinary consciousness. Magliocco analyzes magical practices and rituals as art forms that reanimate the cosmos and stimulate the imagination of its practitioners. Rituals that are put together using materials from a variety of cultural and historical sources. Witching Culture is the first ethnography of this religious movement to focus specifically on the role of anthropology and folklore in its formation, on experiences that are central to its practice, and on what it reveals about identity and belief in twenty-first-century North America. University of Pennsylvania Press ✢ 2004 Vintage ~ Paperback