Never Again the Burning Times: Paganism Revived

by Loretta Orion

Book Overview

A fascinating scholarly look at witchcraft in American society! Why do some individuals in American society resort to the magical beliefs and practices of the occult while the majority do not?... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0881338354
• ISBN13: 9780881338355
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Waveland Press
• Length: 322 Pages
• Weight: 1.01 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A solid ethnography, perhaps lacking in scholarly skepticism

This is an ethnography of modern American Neopaganism. It's balanced pretty equally between festival culture (EarthSpirit in Massachusetts and circle farm in Wisconsin) and coven culture. The author was initiated into the Minoan tradition in the course of her research, a tradition that splits from Gardnerian craft over its practice of having single-gender covens. The book is burdened with an overly technical but not particularly enlightening introduction using anthropologist Clifford Geertz's definition of religion. This seemed like residue from the book in its dissertation form. After that it opens with an extensive history section. I felt like Orion was a little credulous about the "official" history of British witchcraft -- for example, she was pretty unquestioning about the fact that Gardner was initiated into a pre-existing coven. This is followed by a long description of Gardnerian witchcraft, which was well-written and enjoyable. Next the author charts the connections with what she calls the western spiritual tradition, focusing on Giordano Bruno. She makes a strong argument for witchcraft being a revival of a submerged spiritual thread within Western religion, although I think she relies too heavily on a few sources. In the rest of the book, the author makes a number of unique and fairly interesting arguments. 1. Witchcraft -is- creativity. Witches are practicing a spiritual art form. (She gives good evidence for this from her field work, but from my personal experiences with witches, I could go either way on this. Some covens are definitely -not- interested in being creative -- they're interested in preserving their traditions unchanged, and they're not all that interested in culture reform either.) 2. Witchcraft is a countercultural reform movement in the tradition of the Rosicrucian brotherhood, and is focused, among other things, on healing (spiritual healing, physical healing, earth healing). 3. Witches are defined/define themselves by what mainstream culture is not. 4. Witches are the opposite of modern doctors. In contrast to the doctor-patient relationship, where the patient is passive and the means of healing highly technological, the alternative healer operates on an equal basis with the person needing healing in an attempt to empower the person to heal themselves. 5. Revived shamanism is an extremely important component of American Neopaganism. Orion closes with a discussion of the rapid growth of Neopaganism, and the debate over the need for professional clergy. This is a solid ethnography, mainly weakened by the fact that, even though it was published in 1995, most of the field work is from the mid-1980s. A lot changed between then and 1995, and it's been another ten years since then! The book does a good job of situating witchcraft in the history of earlier reform movements, though, and it does it without trying to argue that earlier mystical Christian reformers were "witches" or thought of themselves as "pagan" (as I

Interesting But Not Easy Reading

Ms. Orion has written a book that, at times, reads more like a Physics Textbook. However, if you can get through the first three chapters, there really is some very interesting information within the following pages (especially her questionnaire results). For the person who has already chosen neopaganism as a lifestyle, I would recommend it for reading. For those in the "still curious" category, perhaps you will want to start elsewhere.

Excellent analysis

The researcher does an excellent job of examining the type of individuals attracted to the neopagan movement and why more mainstream religions have lost their appeal to them. Especially useful was the exact resemblances and differences between neopagans and fundamentalists, which will doubtless raise a few eybrows.

Preaching to the pagan choir, with a view of who witches a

Ms. Orion presents the results of a survey taken at a number of differant gatherings of modern witches. She makes little or no attempt to be objective, presenting only a possitive view. she does however offer some answers to questions few think to ask,(such as "what do most witches do for a living?") An interesting book for the already converted.