Là-Bas and Déjà Vu: Notes on the Twilight of Neopaganism

[ecosophia]

For some time I've been watching, with wry amusement, the antics of a certain subset of Neopagan witches who have apparently decided to embrace the Christian notion of what witches are, i.e., evil. These are the folks who have been posting long earnest essays online insisting that witches have to curse people and do other forms of nasty magic, since after all that's their heritage, and it's justified at least sometimes, and real power means the power to harm, etc. etc. Me, I'm an old-fashioned occultist and not any kind of witch, so what witches do is really no business of mine -- not my circus, not my monkeys -- but as my academic background is in the history of ideas, I'm intrigued to watch this particular remake of a familiar pattern. 

A few days ago one of the Neopagan witches just mentioned, one who's sufficiently on board with the idea of witches being evil that she's embraced the term "banefolk" for herself and those who agree with her, posted a lengthy diatribe on her blog that denounced Neopagan witches for being, well, evil. Specifically, she accused them of making up traditions and then lying about their origins, of making money off witchcraft, and of various kinds of sexual improprieties -- all of which, in her eyes, are apparently sins far more serious than (say) using magic to hurt people. 

There are plenty of things that could be said about the diatribe in question. It's amusing, for example, that she starts out by denouncing the habit of equating "pagan" with "Wiccan" and then goes and does exactly that, treating habits and teachings specific to modern American eclectic witchcraft (such as the "Thirteen Principles of Neopagan Belief") as though they're common not only to all Neopagan traditions, but to unrelated phenomena such as the Druid Revival and chaos magic (!). Still, the thing that struck me most was a powerful sense of déjà vu. 

I don't know how many of my readers are familiar with the French author J.-K. Huysmans, a very popular literary figure at the turn of the last century, or with his most notorious novel, Là-Bas. (Down There is the usual English translation, though it's very rough; the French idiom "là-bas" is pretty much untranslatable.) It's a novel about Satanism -- specifically, the fashionable Satanism that became wildly popular in French occult and countercultural circles at the end of the 19th century. The viewpoint character, Durtal, disgusted by the banality and crassness of modern life, lets himself be drawn by the mysterious Mme. Chantelouve into Paris' devil-worshiping underground, attends a black mass, and then tears himself away from Satanism to return to the Catholic faith of his childhood.

Là-Bas once had a lurid reputation, though it's frankly pretty tame by modern standards; the thing that often gets mislaid by modern readers is that it's a profoundly Christian book, and it accepts as a basic truth the orthodox Christian attitude toward occultism -- essentially, that if it's serious it's devil worship, and if it's not devil worship it's just play-acting and dress-up games. The Paris occult scene at the time Huysmans was writing was large, active, and those people who weren't playing at Satanism were by and large involved in serious work; the Martinist tradition and the modern alchemical revival are just two of the things that were getting under way then and there; but you won't learn that from Huysmans. 

What's more, Huysmans spoke for a significant movement in the counterculture of his time. There really was a big Satanist scene in late 19th century Paris; last I checked, most biographers of Huysmans agree that he probably based the black mass in his novel on one he actually attended. That movement had a predictable outcome, too, one that W.B. Yeats wrote about in his visionary essay Per Amica Silentia Lunae. In his early visits to France, he recalled, "one met everywhere young men of letters who talked of magic." Fast forward a few decades, and that had changed: "It was no longer the soul, self-moving and self-teaching -- the magical soul -- but Mother France and Mother Church." 

Satanism was the intermediate step between those two conditions, and it's easy to see why. If you embrace the idea that Christian orthodoxy is right about the nature of occultism, it's a very short step to embracing the idea that Christian orthodoxy is right, period. Once people got tired of the fringe benefits of being evil -- in turn of the century France, those mostly involved plenty of cheap sex and the opportunity to shock people, more or less the same as today -- they could then go through a fine melodramatic repentance, renounce their sinful ways, and be welcomed into a community of people who were eager to give them lots of attention and encouragement. This they accordingly did. 

It's far from the only time that's happened. Some of my readers are old enough to remember the twilight of the hippie scene at the end of the 1960s. Peace and love and brotherhood got chucked overboard by a significant faction of hippies, who took up in its place the kind of evil-hippie image made permanently famous by the late and unlamented Charles Manson. This was followed, after an interval of a few years, by the transformation of a great many hippies into "the Jesus People," and after another brief interval most of the latter ditched their countercultural values and settled down to get jobs and raise families as ordinary Christian Americans. 

I'm pretty sure that's what's going on in this case, too. Countercultures die when their members give up their own independent value judgments about the counterculture, and accept the (usually hostile or dismissive) judgments of the mainstream culture from which they previously distanced themselves. Now that a significant fraction of the Neopagan scene seems to be embracing the notion that witches are evil, and a few early adopters (like the author of the essay cited above) are generalizing from that to denounce the whole movement for its sins, I don't think we'll have long to wait before the current trickle of defections from Neopaganism turns into a flood. Conservative Christian denominations, on the off chance that this post of mine comes to their attention, might want to brace themselves for the arrival of a great many loudly repentant sinners in the years immediately ahead. 

Comments

Re: Hmm... I can't see a backlash wave, either

[ecosophia]

Many thanks for the data point. I get the impression that you run with fairly serious witches, though; a lot of what I expect to see, in terms of the flight to Christianity, will be among the "cultural pagans," the folks who are mostly there for the parties and the dress-up game aspects.

Re: Hmm... I can't see a backlash wave, either

[deborah_bender]

I generally agree with you that a lot of neopaganism is a cultural fad that is past its peak. (I'm hedging my statement because "neopaganism" is a broad category with fuzzy boundaries.) You deserve credit for being AFAIK the first close observer to say this, back when others expected the exponential growth of the 1970s-80s to keep going. I'm a veteran of several counter-cultural scenes and they all have folks who are mostly there for the parties and the dress-up games.

I'm tentatively in disagreement about the future of Wicca. I believe Wicca is on its way to becoming a world religion.

I got involved with the Wiccan community just at the time when Wicca was transitioning from a little-known secretive cult to a popular religious movement. Sociologists of religion and other religious scholars began to take notice of Wicca in the late 1970s. They correctly pegged Wicca as a New Religious Movement. For awhile they did not know how to study it properly because they lumped Wicca in with cults that had charismatic leaders (like Bhagwan Rajneesh) and authoritarian tendencies, and that was the wrong model. The academics have had time to figure that out and their current research is more sophisticated.

I think the rapid rise in popularity of Wicca was both transient and a fluke. Initially it was propelled by the Dionysian tendencies and interest in exotic religions of the late Sixties. Wicca then got a huge boost in the Seventies from the ecology movement and the feminist movement, because it was at that time the only religion in the English speaking world that said nature is sacred and had normative female leadership. This led for a time to a tremendous influx of seekers, disproportionally women.

Wicca, with its selective closed-cell organization and its focus on psychic development, wasn't very well suited to accommodate these crowds of interested people. Americans, being "If you don't like the news, go out and make your own," sort of people (to quote Scoop Nisker), met the demand with popularized forms of Wicca which did not require joining a close-knit group, spending a lot of money, or committing to a study program.

(to be continued)

Re: Hmm... I can't see a backlash wave, either

[deborah_bender]

Pop Wicca does not meet my personal spiritual and religious needs. IMO it lacks spiritual depth and intellectual rigor. It has had varying degrees of success in forming communities and keeping them integrated, one of the essential social functions of religions. Popular Wicca has not developed institutions that outlast the death of their founders.

It has done one thing really well. It has released a bunch of Wiccan memes into popular culture. The memes have spread throughout the English-speaking world and are getting translated into the major European languages. In the process, the memes are shedding many of their associations with the culture, landscape and history of the British Isles, which a world religion needs to do. For example, The Wheel of the Year; the idea of "energy" as a synonym for "spell"; magic for positive purposes; the basic ritual operations of casting a circle, invoking the four directions/elements, grounding and centering; direct, unmediated contact with the Divine available to every human being; the Goddess; polytheism in general; physical pleasure being good in itself and a way to connect with the Goddess.

These memes turn out to be pretty portable. People who have never heard of Gerald Gardner can make sense of them. They are beginning to syncretize with the popular religions and spirituality of the cultures they enter. We might be seeing the earliest stages of Wicca naturalizing into different manifestations in different parts of the world.

Re: Hmm... I can't see a backlash wave, either

[ecosophia]

I think it's possible that contemporary eclectic Neopaganism is the first tentative draft of an enduring religious presence in North America and elsewhere in the English-speaking world. It's fairly common for major religious movements to take shape that way: you have the spread of a new religious sensibility, accompanied by certain concepts and practices; various trial runs, so to speak, get launched; eventually some combination of insight and luck launches one or more of these into the big time, the way that Christianity emerged out of the background of new religious movements in the Hellenistic world or Buddhism out of the equivalent scene in India. The ability of Neopaganism to survive the gathering downturn will be a good test of its potential along those lines.

Re: Hmm... I can't see a backlash wave, either

[deborah_bender]

I agree with you on all points. The shape of fourth century Christianity could not have been predicted from first century Christianity. Don Frew said a few years ago that a scholar of Christianity had remarked to him that Wicca was recapitulating the development of early Christianity, but at a very speeded-up pace.

Re: Hmm... I can't see a backlash wave, either

[avalonautumn]

Thanks for this! I tend to see what you see, though I was of the generation that came of age just as Wicca et all was getting hugely POPular: late 80s/early 90s. I knew I wanted to pursue something like this since the age of 5 and a couple of visionary experiences then (1975.) That pop culture caught up to me was a weird experience, but I enjoyed it as much as I was dismayed by it.

But yes, I think it will morph and transition, not so much die. Your thoughts and observations are much like those of Neopagan elders I've befriended regarding theses matters.