Given this perceived gap in scholarship, this article aims to outline constructions of religious masculinity within Paganisms more generally, and the discourses and practices of the MGM more specifically. In particular, I was interested to discover more about the existential and liturgical influences of female deity within the MGM, especially how this impacted upon its discourses of gender equality and sexuality. The article begins with a personal encounter with one pagan man, ‘John’. In the Spring of 2003, after using a snowballing approach to individuals involved in Goddess Spirituality, I received a phone call from him, and after several follow-up conversations he eventually invited me to his Wiltshire home in the rural south of England that summer. Following the outline of this encounter, the article proceeds to see how this fits into the feminization of divinity and the spiritual idiom that is characteristic of mainstream Paganisms.
John
A long taxi ride took me from the railway station to John’s home, a cottage of pale stone, golden in the evening sun, located at the head of a wooded valley where he lived alone. John turned out to be a slight bearded man in a loose white shirt and charcoal tweed bracelet in his early fifties with intense dark eyes which flashed in the twilight matched by a tangled thatch of black hair slightly greying at the temple. He ushered me into a snug stone-walled sitting room where we chatted at length about his life, religious practice and my research interests.
John was remarkably open with details of his life given our brief
acquaintance. He explained that he had been married, but had been
widowed in his late twenties. He had met his wife at university where they
had been drawn together by a mutual interest in meditation and
spirituality. He detailed their deep emotional bond, especially their sexual
bond. Sex featured high among his topics of conversation and it quickly
became apparent that sexual practices were central to John’s spiritual
practices.[1] Eventually their personal ritualization of sexual acts led to their
mutual exploration of Pagan witchcraft. John was quick to point out that he
- ↑ The role of such intimate confession is often underemphasized in research into men and religion. Note Björn Krondorfer, Male Confessions: Intimate Revelations and the Religious Imagination, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2010, as a refreshing exception to this.
