lesbian persona, helping entrants interpret (or reinterpret) their lives. Fourth, it furnishes an avenue for political activity.[1]
These dynamics are fairly typical of the profiles of Pagans more generally. Dennis Carpenter, for example, reviews the same research outputs by discussing the processes whereby individuals become Pagans.[2] Both Lynch and Adler describe similar processes whereby people read occult texts which confirm prior mystical experiences and which then attract them to the Pagan community.[3] In the event, research participants gave numerous reasons for their involvement. Most common was the centrality of feminine divinity, although the need for individual spiritual expression and the reverence for nature were also commonly emphasized by respondents. These findings chime with studies of Contemporary Paganisms more generally.[4]
Constructing Goddesses: Constructing Gender
Goddesses were often allied to respondents’ constructions of nature. However, this is not the essentialized identification of women with nature and men with culture one has seen in connection to Merchant’s work or in mainstream thealogy. Although female divinity – and by extension the participants’ conceptualizations of nature – was most commonly seen as nurturing and expressive, it also possessed what might be viewed as more traditionally masculine traits within Western culture. That is, goddesses universally possessed physical strength and aggression. Think of Athena, Kali or the Morrígan from Irish mythology. Similarly, nature was seen ubiquitously as both fecund and nurturing – ‘traditionally’ female qualities – but also ‘red in tooth and claw’.
By contrast, human culture, and patriarchy specifically, was seen as the cause of a host of spiritual, moral and ecological problems. Dogmatic uses of rationality and bureaucratization – associated by respondents with the masculine psyche – were almost universally viewed, respectively, to ‘close off the mind’ to spiritual experiences and to ‘intuitive thought’, and to atomize society and curb individual liberty. This had two corollaries: firstly, the political orientation of respondents was almost universally
- ↑ Ibid, 87-8, cited and adapted by Helen A. Berger, A Community of Witches, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press 1999, 68.
- ↑ Carpenter, ‘Practitioners of Paganism and Wiccan Spirituality’
- ↑ Frederick R. Lynch, ‘Toward a Theory of Conversion and Commitment to the Occult’ in American Behavioral Scientist 20 (1977), 887-908; Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon, Boston: Beacon 1986.
- ↑ For example, Carpenter, ‘Practitioners of Paganism and Wiccan Spirituality’, 397.
