Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's just past midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. With certain exceptions, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note:  Any question or comment received after then will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. (I've been getting an increasing number of people trying to post after these are closed, so will have to draw a harder line than before.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says. 

The picture?  I'm working my way through photos of my lineage, focusing on the teachers whose work has influenced me and the teachers who influenced them in turn. I'm currently tracing my Martinist lineage.  That's rendered complex by the Martinist tradition that one does not name one's initiator, so we'll have to go back via slightly less evasive routes. Last week's honoree, Jean Bricaud, received the headship of the Martinist Order from this man, Henri-Charles Detre, who wrote under the pseudonym Teder. Detre was active in a great many occult circles in early twentieth century France; he was the head of the Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose+Croix (Cabalistic Order of the Rose+Cross), headed several esoteric Masonic rites, and was also the chief of the French branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) back in its pre-Crowley days. He headed the Martinist Order for only two years, from the death of Papus in 1916 to his own death in 1918.

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I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

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With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***

Comments

[booklover1973]

Since upthreads there is a discussion about why Druidry managed to quietly survive the ca. 300 years since its emergence, my question today is why the Neopagan movement has had such a colorful rise and fall during the last decades? And, presumably, Neopaganmis didn't cease to exist, instead it merely retreated to small subcultures, is this correct?

[ecosophia]

That's a complex story. Until the 1970s Wicca was a small and fairly quiet initiatory tradition that required a great deal of work from prospective members. What happened in the 1970s is that a number of people figured out how to create a Wicca Lite that involved a lot less hard work and would be much more appealing to the pop culture of the time. That launched the modern Neopagan movement on its way. Like every form of pop-culture occultism -- Theosophy and Spiritualism are two good examples -- it attracted a lot of people, ballooned in size and influence, got watered down even further, and finally got supplanted by other fads. Now it's on its way back down to small subcultures; it's not quite there yet but the writing's on the wall. If things follow the usual pattern, we'll go through thirty or forty years in which political fads are more popular than spiritual fads before the next pop-culture occultism gets going.

[(Anonymous)]

Could you explain how you define the term "Neopagan"? I always took it to mean simply "modern pagan," as in non-Christian earth-based spirituality. So it would include Wicca but many other practices too. But you seem to mean specific groups or types of practice when you use it. And it seems like a pejorative term.

Thanks.

[ecosophia]

I don't mean it as a pejorative term, merely as a descriptive term. The usage I have in mind was introduced by the late Isaac Bonewits, who differentiated Paleopagan (i.e., ancient pagan), Mesopagan (i.e., new or revived pagan traditions dating from before the second half of the 20th century), and Neopagan (i.e., new or revived pagan traditions dating from Bonewits's own time). Though he had a polemic purpose in all this, and used "Mesopagan" as a term of abuse, he wasn't wrong that there's a distinction; the late 20th century revival and reinvention of paganism had its own very distinctive character, distinct from Mesopagan traditions such as the 18th- and 19th-century Druid Revival.

[jprussell]

Our host has written in more detail on this topic a few times, if you want to dig in a little more:

https://www.ecosophia.net/blogs-and-essays/the-well-of-galabes/the-twilight-of-the-neopagan-era/
https://www.ecosophia.net/blogs-and-essays/the-well-of-galabes/a-wind-that-tastes-of-ashes/
https://www.ecosophia.net/an-older-tradition/

The very short version is that from the 80s through the 00s, a lot of folks started calling themselves "Neopagans" and having Neopagan festivals and what have you. While initially meant to just be a term for "folks who are pagan today and haven't always been," the scene developed its own flavor, as scenes will do. Most folks who embraced the term leaned towards an eclectic approach, and since it was an alternative spirituality scene that made one of its selling points how different from Christianity it was, it tended to skew politically liberal. The political side of things really took off in the teens (like everywhere else), and so prominent neopagan folks and organizations began to take explicit stances on political issues and to expect members to agree on those issues and so forth. The term "neopagan" came to more and more refer to those folks who remained a part of this scene and continued to identify this way, and to a lesser degree, "pagan" has that coloring, at least in the US.

A related, but slightly distinct point is that some folks did/do identify as neopagan who do not believe in the actual reality of the Gods - they see them as archetypes or useful shared images or the like (this is sometimes called "soft polytheism," but that term can also mean other things). Due to its big-tent ethos, the neopagan scene tended to welcome these folks. Since they have an explicitly materialist viewpoint, they often don't get along as well with those polytheists for whom the actual reality of the Gods called upon is important.

Many polytheists who either never were a part of the neopagan scene, or else otherwise felt distinct from it, took a look at the way the scene was going and decided they didn't want to use the label. Many heathens, for example, don't think of themselves as neopagans and don't like being lumped in with the folks who do use the label these days, even though most do fit the letter of Bonewits's definition.