Man. Woman. Birth. Death. Infinity.

As a Maine Woods girl growing up in the television age of the
60s, what I liked most about BEN CASEY were those five little
words, summing up, to my young mind, the Dr. Zorban, black-and-white,
glorious mystery of our existence. I haven’t changed much. The
main issues, for me, are still identity, community, and the making
of meaning in the face of my own mortality. But then, this is
not only my story.

Searching for something kindred to hold on to, we more or less
all struggle with these issues-forging our adult selves, our adult
relationships, and our adult world views along the boundaries
of childhood disillusionment with the way things are. Usually
the face we fashion is something far less compatible-a counterpoint
in uneasy truce with, even hostile opposition to, the spouses
we marry, the children we bear, the people we thought we knew,
the parents we bury. This story perhaps exemplifies the Neopagan
of Sarah M. Pike’s study, Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves.
Their personal histories are almost invariably accounts "of
childhood experiences and past traumas," lives rife with
perceptions of parental betrayal, played out against the backdrop
of that betrayal. Appropriating memories of childhood (the accuracy
of which is questionable) and religious idioms from ancient traditions,
theirs is, ironically, a search for a "real self," and
through their cultural borrowing, a "personalized" religion.

Truth be told, this tendency to personalize religion in the wake
of a disestablishment of existing religious institutions is not
unique to the Neopagans, but is an ages-old human phenomenon.
It is a recurring theme in history, and requires an understanding
that at the foundation of the phenomenon, there are clear ties
between tenuous social conditions, loss of faith in traditional
societal–whether familial or religious–values, and a psychology
of profound despair.

In the wake of such loss, there has been, at critical junctures,
periods of a collective rise in consciousness for extra-institutional,
personal renewal, a rethinking and revamping of societal and religious
traditions. At the crux of this lay a psychological dualism; caught
in what is perceived to be an "evil" world–an unhappy
often hostile world that has no place for us — we seek ways of
release out of the existential morass via transcendence. Whether
this transcendence is exemplified in a revival of mystery religion,
as it was for Mithraists or Renaissance Platonists, or Nature
religion as it was for 19th-century Romantics, it makes no difference.
In the late 1960s, for people from all walks of life, anything
non-Western and pre-Christian — in a word, Pagan — emerged as the
identity of the day. Thus, the Neopagan festival self, replete
with magical Wiccan recipes for immortality, Burning Man festivals,
and Lilith Fairs, became "what works" in the pilgrimage
to transcending history and finding the "true" self.
It became the newest version of the ritualized bridging of the
gap between the suffering One, and an inscrutable, unreachable
Other, whomever that Other is perceived to be.

Thing is, how can one find one’s "true" self by appropriating
religious idioms and ancient traditions from cultures all over
the world, with which one has no personal connection? There is
an inevitable distortion of history, personal and cultural. Although
Neopagans may incorporate this "dressing up" under the
heading of "serious playing with the self," Native American
critics of the Neopagan movement have succinctly called this "cultural
strip-mining" (p. 134), claiming that "cultural borrowers
are necessarily inauthentic and deluded" (p. 134), because
there is, in most cases, no direct relationship with the communities
they are borrowing from. Given this, are we to think of Neopagans
as marginal spiritual rebels with a taste for the exotic and rose-colored
world of magical thinking and make-believe? Or do they, in their
zeal to creatively reinvent themselves, genuinely "shape
borrowed practices into meaningful religious identities"
(p. 126) for themselves?

What we do know is that loss of faith occasions disestablishment,
and given this, Sarah M. Pike’s Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves
is an informative, ethnographic exposé of Neopagan identity
and community, an "inside view of the thrills, difficulties,
and conflicting nuances of these ad hoc communities" as they
struggle "toward the possible establishment of more permanent
institutions" (Michael York, book-cover review).©

© 2002 Melanie Mineo



Melanie Mineo lives on Long Island, NY.
She teaches philosophy at Dowling College, and also works as a
consultant and a philosophical counselor.

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