I wonder if the Grauniad's reporting on paganism is as full of holes as its account of the C of E

[tree_and_leaf]

Paganism becoming mainstream (or at least less marginal).

Anyway, I found the article interesting, portraying as it does a kind of spirituality I don't know much about, though my instinctive reaction to the headline "We're all pagans now" is to say, speak for yourself, and to raise a slightly weary eyebrow at the theory that paganism was less mainstream ten years ago because that was before the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter portrayed pagan spirituality in a positive light.† Um....

† I wouldn't dream of trying to argue that you can only enjoy LotR, or indeed find that it has spiritual/ theological resonance, if you're a catholic Christian, because that's obvious balls, but it's no more a pagan propaedeutic than it is an allegory about the Bomb. On the other hand, as I have observed when the Grauniad is writing about religious traditions which are my own, i.e. Anglicanism, they are pretty good at leaping to wrong conclusions based on half-understood observations of the situation (such as their persistent assumption that if you're an Anglo-Catholic, you're against the ordination of women).

Comments

[phnelt]

It's interesting that the article mentions LOTR and HP because, even though this book is less popular than LOTR and less recent than HP, I always thought the Mists of Avalon did more to convert people to paganism than anything else in the history of ever. I back this up with my personal anecdote of when I was a teenager. I belong to a church of religious exploration and general shenanigans and so I followed my then girlfriend into the church basement for the pagan chalice circle/coven that was held there. On the first day, the high priestess/chair/mediator held up a copy of the Mists of Avalon and was all: if you're here for this, you probably won't enjoy circle/coven; please recall that the mists of avalon is a work of fiction and here we only do solid magic. She then gave people a moment to leave and several actually did.

[aedifica]

IMHO (as a Wiccan and a morris dancer) they were doing all right til partway through the part about morris, with its "arcane elements such as the spiral." I started rolling my eyes at that point, and when I'd gotten through an entire paragraph about "wicca" (I don't think the same author would have written "christianity") I stopped reading.

[tree_and_leaf]

Well, it's the Guardian, you can't draw any conclusion from their spelling, but the bit about morris dancing did strike me as implausible, not to say untrue.

If it's any consolation, I've rarely read a news-and-features piece in the Guardian on Christianity that didn't make me head-desk on some level.

[aedifica]

What I remember reading of the morris stuff was actually true, it was the attitude that made me roll my eyes.

[sashajwolf]

I've been to a few Pagan Prides and at different points on my spiritual journey practised Wicca and Asatru, and I've stayed in touch with some of my contacts from those years. Fwiw, I don't like the "it would be wise not to get in the way" comment, which seems designed to add a frisson of threat to what is in fact a very joyful event that never seemed to attract any confrontation the times I attended. Likewise the description of Jeanette Ellis, with added body image issues. And the "passing tests and obeying priests" thing is overstated - "tests" tend to be largely symbolic, and most pagans IME are far too much individualists to obey anyone much. Leaders who get too captivated by the authority of titles like "High Priestess" don't tend to last, from what I've seen.

The idea that Harry Potter has anything to do with paganism is frankly ludicrous and usually only seriously espoused by the most rabid sort of fundamentalist Christians. Magic is shown as a tool that can be used positively or negatively, but its concept of what magic actually is descends from mainstream medieval and Renaissance literature, as far as I can see, and therefore has more to do with Christianity than anything else (sometimes Classical paganism as mediated through Christianity). I didn't recognise anything neopagan in the books.

LotR probably does resonate with pagans, but that's simply because Tolkien was a scholar of periods when paganism was still historically active in Europe and made use of that knowledge in his worldbuilding. I don't think it's anything more than a resonance. Lewis resonates in a similar way for some pagans for the same reason, although his Christian allegory is more obtrusive, which spoils the reading experience for a lot of them.

On the plus side, with Pagan Pride, OBOD, the Pagan Federation and Ron Hutton, the author does seem to have made an effort to talk to some of the more respected names and organisations. The information he got from OBOD and PF is slightly skewed - Asatruar, for instance, would not necessarily agree that there is a divine force inherent in nature or that nature is to be revered - but that's a known issue between Asatruar and neopagan umbrella groups, and not something I'd expect a newbie to pick up on immediately. And he does at least recognise that witchcraft, Wicca and paganism are not identical.