Customer Reviews

Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community

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This is a great book. Pike spent years attending pagan festivals around the country, and she brings to her analysis the skills of a compassionate and sympathetic ethnographer and a critical scholar of religion. Her descriptions of pagan festivals are detailed, vivid and compelling; she opens this world up to readers who may not be familiar with it--and I am certain that pagans will recognize their culture in her careful account. Pike takes readers deep into the heart of pagan festivals, showing how participants create and inhabit their religious world using varied imaginative idioms, rituals, body work, and so on. Pike is also sensitive to the historical roots of this religious world, and offers helpful discussions of the traditions of alternative religions in American religious history. This is an exciting and engaging book, recommended for scholars and general readers, for anyone who wants to learn something about this important religious culture in the US beyond the distortions and hysteria with which it is too often treated.

This is the first academic ethnography on magic that has actually been objective in it's portrayal of Paganism. In other words, the author doesn't get caught up in letting her experiences overshadow the importance of actually describing and observing the pagan culture (unlike Magliocco and Greenwood).

Her assessment of pagan culture is fairly balanced. She notes both the positive and negatives aspects of the culture and does so in a positive manner, avoiding any hint of cennsure or judgement. She's simply presenting the facts. Granted this doesn't mean there isn't some subjectivity on her part. Obviously she chose the pagan community because there was a gap in research there and she wants to get tenure, but even with that bias she does a credible job of presenting the pagan community and specifically the festival environment.

At the time this book was published in 2001, Sarah M. Pike was Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at CSU Chico. She has also written New Age and Neopagan Religions in America (Columbia Contemporary American Religion Series).

She wrote in the Preface to this book, "This is a study of a new religious movement defining and creating itself in the second half of the twentieth century. It is about the festivals that Neopagans hold to celebrate their communities and to experiment with personal religious identities... In this work I explore the ways in which festival space both expresses and shapes the religious yearnings of participants who are searching for spiritual intensity and utopian community."

Here are some additional quotations from the book:

"Some Pagans also claim Spiritualism as part of their ritual lineage to legitimate their own medium-like practices." (Pg. 15)
"'Pagan Standard Time' takes over at festivals, indicating that events will take place eventually, but often not at the hour when they are scheduled." (Pg. 26)
"For most Neopagans, death is not the end of life but the beginning of another life in the cycle of reincarnation." (Pg. 60-62)
"Around the campfire others agreed that their festival friends are more of a family than the blood relatives with whom they cannot share their Neo-pagan identities." (Pg. 83)
"Neopagans ... are often polytheists. The Neopagan world is inclusive of many spirits, ancestors, and gods and goddesses who live side by side." (Pg. 97)
"By keeping their religious identities to themselves and holding their festivals at isolated sites, Neopagans make their religious practices even more fascinating to outsiders. By the very act of hiding what they are doing, they draw attention to themselves." (Pg. 100)
"New Agers are superficial and pursue worry-free knowledge, say Neopagans. They profess to follow Native American paths, but unlike Neopagans who attend festivals to get closer to nature, New Agers hypocritically avoid any real contact with the natural world." (Pg. 145)

Very well researched.
I actually picked this book up at Borders while I was perusing the "New Age/Pagan" book section for new titles and noticed that a picture of a friend of mine was in it! So I bought it.. later I found some good information regarding transformational festivals that some friends of mine organize (Lumensgate).

The author respectifully presented the material and provided pretty good insight into the current Pagan movement in all of its diversity.

Highly recommended.

A very look at how the modern Pagan festival movement is creating personal identity in the Neopagan movement. The author did her research at fests in the Midwest, mainly Pagan Spirit Gathering and Starwood, and obviously enjoyed herself. She speaks glowingly of the power fo key moments at the fests, and examines how Pagans are contructing 'magical identities' in the midst of the modern world. Interesting sociological study.

Sarah Pike does a great job of revealing the secret inside world of the neopagan community. While I was interested in Neopaganism before reading this, I find myself even more intrigued by this new age trend. I would suggest this book to anyone, especially those who are mislead by pagan sterotypes... Great read!

I am forced to wonder whether or not the Pagan people Pike interviewed were aware of the marginalizing tone of her work before she interviewed them. For example, in the chapter entitled "Blood That Matters: Neopagan (sic) Borrowing," she accuses Neo-Pagan people of abdicating their responsibility to the cultures whose traditions they borrow in a section of the chapter entitled "Cultural Strip-Mining." In addition, she does this after mentioning several Neo-Pagan people by name, which unfortunately links these people directly to her accusations. No reasonable human being would volunteer to be insulted in this way, so it must be concluded that Pike deliberately misrepresented her intentions to the Pagan community in order to gain their trust.

In the same chapter she says, "Neopagan (sic) ways of knowing are not what academic scholars of ancient or non-Western cultures would call "scholarship," though Neopagans (sic) themselves use this term." Again, she makes this accusation after making reference to specific Pagans by name.

Finally, there are pictures of Pagan people in various states of undress and pictures of Pagan shrines in this text. Strict rules govern the use of cameras at Pagan festivals; those who wish to take pictures must provide reasonable assurances that the subject of the photo will be respected according to whatever conditions the subject lays down. Clearly Pike has violated the spirit and/or the language of whatever provisions her subjects gave her by marginalizing their faith in her work.

As both a Neo-Pagan and a traditional scholar (B.A. in Celtic Studies/Anthropology at University of Toronto, M.A. in English Literature at University of Maine), I am mortified both as a scholar and a person of faith at the betrayal of trust Pike has visited upon my community. It is as if she walked into our community with promises of guns and whiskey or tetanus vaccinations, and took from us our dignity in the grand old anthropological style.