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Touching the Divine: Recent Research on

Neo-Paganism and Neo-Shamanism
T. M. Luhrmann
Published online: 13 Jun 2012.

To cite this article: T. M. Luhrmann (2012) Touching the Divine: Recent Research on Neo-Paganism
and Neo-Shamanism, Reviews in Anthropology, 41:2, 136-150, DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2012.680425
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Reviews in Anthropology, 41:136150, 2012

Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0093-8157 print=1556-3014 online
DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2012.680425

Touching the Divine: Recent Research on

Neo-Paganism and Neo-Shamanism

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T. M. LUHRMANN
Berger, Helen A., ed. 2005. Witchcraft and Magic: Contemporary North America.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Magliocco, Sabina. 2004. Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Waldron, David. 2008. The Sign of the Witch: Modernity and the Pagan Revival.
Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
Wallis, Robert J. 2003. Shamans=Neo-Shamans: Ecstasy, Alternative Archaeologies
and Contemporary Paganism. London: Routledge.

Why do religions that are in some sense invented out of the western
scholarship on shamanism and paganism have such a hold on the
western imagination? This article reviews four recent contributions
to the literature on neo-paganism and neo-shamanism. As exemplified in the books under review, these religions have three basic
characteristicsmagical realism, playfulness, and experientalismwhich are not unique to them, but shared by many modern
faiths. The article argues that these are not primitive throw-backs
but ways of responding to the doubt and skepticism of a modern
pluralistic age.
KEYWORDS

magic, paganism, religion, shamanism

Address correspondence to T. M. Luhrmann, Department of Anthropology, Building 50,

Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. E-mail: luhrmann@stanford.edu
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INTRODUCTION
The sheer joy in the practice of modern paganismwitchcraft, Goddess
worship, shamanism, and their kith and kinis one of the striking findings
of ethnographic research. These ritualists genuinely love the world they have
entered. They revel in its archeological details and its folkloric, historical
byways. What drives the love? Paganism is about magic, which, as Sir George
James Frazer described it, is about influencing the world at a distance. Those
who practice it usually believe that there are forces in the world unknown by
secular science, and that these powers can be directed by the mind. But one
rarely gets the sense, reading these books and their scholarly cousins, that it
is the power per se that grabs people. Instead, they are drawn by the idea of
the magicthat there is an ancient magic in the earth itself that we humans
can know and feel but not fully master, and that the earth itself is alive and
responsive. That at any rate is the account given by Luhrmann (1989) and by
Adler (1986), Harvey and Hardman (1995), Pearson, Roberts, and Samuel
(1998), Eller (1993), Hanegraff (1996), Berger (1999), Orion (1994), Pike
(2001), and others.
A.S. Byatt (2003) once criticized an early book of J.K. Rowlings by
saying that it was not numinous like the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. By this
she meant a real sense of mystery, powerful forces, dangerous creatures
in dark forests . . . we feel we are being put back in touch with earlier parts
of our culture, when supernatural and inhuman creatures from whom
we thought we learned our sense of good and evil inhabited a world
we did not feel we controlled. Modern magic delivers to those who practice
it a sense that the world is more alive than they once knew, brimming with
miraculous possibility. There is a kind child-like wonder in these practices
that intermingles joy with a sense of human loss and pain. Tolkien described
the consolation of fairy-stories as a sudden and miraculous grace . . . It does
not deny the existence . . . of sorrow and failure; the possibility of these is
necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence,
if you will) universal defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting
glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief
(1986:689). Something of this emotional quality lingers in all pagan practices
(most pagans are devoted Tolkien fans). They are attempts to make the
fairytale magic seem real.
The remarkable thing is that the emotional quality of this childlike
wonder and fairtytale romance is also a powerful current in evangelical
Christianity. This is perhaps not a connection that participants in either form
of spirituality would welcome. It is true nonetheless, if the observer looks
past the evident differences. The form of theologically conservative Christianity that attracts the lions share of followers in the United Statesabout 23
percent of the general population, according to the Pew Forumimagines

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God as interacting personally and individually with his worshippers. People

seek to experience God vividly, intimately, and immediately. They practice
daydream-like interactions with God, and they feel giddy in the presence
of a power far greater and older than they are. They love to pray and to learn
to experience God as responding to them. When that happens, they talk
about their world as feeling more alive. They walk to work, and imagine
themselves as one of Jesus disciplines in Palestine. They talk to God about
everything and anything. This comment was posted on Facebook by a
woman who had just learned to have this intensely vivid back-and-forth.
Jesus is turning my world upside down! I used to think that being a
Christian meant going to church, trying to squeeze in 30 minutes of
quiet time"or Jesus time a day, and claiming his name so that I can
say, Yeah, Im a Christian. But Jesus didnt die for that. He didnt die
so that we could be religious. He died so that religion would dieso that
false worship would die! He didnt die so that I could spend 30 minutes a
day with himhe died so that I could spend 24 hours a day with him. He
died so that I could wake up thinking about himso that I could dance
with him in the shower in the morningso that I can be in his presence
when I eat my cheese gritsso that I can ask him what brand of shampoo
I should buyso that I can turn the volume off of my cell phone so that I
can talk aloud to him on the bus without anyone noticing that Im talking
to an invisible manso that I can watch my James Bond movies with
himso that we can play practical jokes togetherso that I can go to
sleep thinking about him - so that I can enjoy the silly, funny times as well
as the intense moments of life with himso that I am NEVER alone. He
didnt die so that I could pray how I am told to pray, and stand in church
when I am told to stand, and raise my hands when everyone else did. That
all has its place, but he didnt die for that. He died so that I can scream at
the enemy in the middle of worship so that I can jump up or down or lie
on my faceso that I can do laps around the room or do the worm down
the middle of the chapel if I so please! He didnt die so that we could be
religious. He died so that we could rebuke religion and embrace relationship! This is what I want! THIS is what I love!

Its fun, its silly, its lets-pretend, but its real. A worshipper needs to
be encouraged to have such giggly, intimate gossips with God. The prayer
literature that encourages them talks about experiencing the romance, by
which authors mean learning to experience yourself with God in a fairytale-like story that you learn to treat as real, despite your awareness that it
is not true in an ordinary waynot until Christ returns and the world as
we know it is gone (Luhrmann 2012).
I suggest here that what these religions share is an attempt to make real
what these practitioners fear may not be real, and that both of them spring
from the same impulse: to allow people to experience the supernatural as

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real despite the awareness that other, sensible people presume that it is not.
The claim is that this style of religiosity emerges in secular societiessocieties in which, as in the United States, most people might claim to believe in
God, but in which atheism in a real social possibility and in which the social
presumption is that religious belief is a personal choice. To use Charles Taylors famous definition, when we talk about a secular society, we are describing a change which takes us from a society in which it was virtually
impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others (2007:3; see also Asad
2003). A person may have always been able to harbour doubt, but now in
a secular society is possible to doubt the entire supernatural system and be
socially recognized as legitimately holding that doubt.
I further suggest that one of the main achievements of the anthropology of modern paganism is that it teaches us that spiritualities formed
under these conditions have distinct qualities. Other religions also have
these qualitiesevangelical Christianity, Chabad Judaism, and so forth
but the accretion of history and tradition can make these elements more
difficult to discern. As a spirituality that came of age only in a secular
age, paganism displays these qualities clearly. (Not all modern shamans,
nor all modern anthropologists of modern shamans, are willing to treat
westerners who practice shamanism as practising a new religion. Without
getting sidetracked in the argument, I would point out that when a young
man in San Francisco decides to be a shaman, buys the appropriate books,
takes the appropriate courses, and journeys in his bedroom, he is doing
something different from a young shaman among the Tungu.)
First, they use a style best described as magical realism. The term
came into existence to describe a literary style in which the magical blends
seamlessly into the mundane. Yet the style presumes that the reader distinguishes between them, and that the act of reading the blend transforms
the readers relationship to the real. These spiritualities are magically real
because they treat the supernatural as mundanely present and leave ambiguous the relationship between the merely asserted and the really real.
Participants speak sentences like The Goddess told me to do a ritual in
Ireland, and they often leave uncertain the ontological status of the claim
of being told.
Second, they are playful. There is a just try or lets pretend quality
that presents the practice as epistemologically ambivalent. Play is marked
by a play-stance (a dogs crouch, a childs call of lets pretend) signalling
that what follows is not real. And yet the playful lets-pretend of these spiritualitieslets imagine that the magic is real, lets imagine that Jesus told
me which shampoo to buyis also a serious claim about the nature of the
world. The ritual then becomes suspended between real and unreal. It
demands that the practitioner create a third epistemic space, not materially
real like tables and chairs, but not false like fiction. The playfulness makes

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an in-your-face claim for the importance of suspending disbelief. It is an

explicit response to presumed disbelief.
Third, these spiritualities are experiential. These faiths encourage
people to practice in ways that they feel the supernatural move through their
bodies, and see vividly the divine in their minds eyes. Thus the importance
of trance in many of them, because in those altered states, what one experiences in the minds eye can feel more externally real in the world. Those
moments are powerfully important for practitioners whose social worlds lead
them to look askance at claims to supernatural reality.
Sabina Maglioccos Witching Culture (2004) illustrates these features particularly well. Throughout her book she offers accounts of her
own experience in witchcraft, in which the magical realism of blended reality
is clear:
The core of this ritual is a trance journey in a spirit boat to the Isle of the
Dead . . . Set sail, set sail, the choir chants . . . I see the ship before me: a
wooden vessel with ails the color of blood, creaking and pitching in her
moorings. I step aboard . . . As I walk, I see that in this land I have become
a child again: a girl of seven or eight with long dark hair and skinny legs
sticking out of a white shift . . ., I find myself in the apple orchards of the
goddess, where the trees are at once in bud, blood and fruit. The air is
fragrant with the smell of apple blossoms . . . But now I must say farewell.
The drumbeats are calling me back, back to the land of life. . . . (2004:124)

The presentation is characteristic of the way pagans talk about their

ritual experience. The verbs are active. The pagan sees, hears, smells. Yet
the action takes place solely in the mind. She indicates that to the careful
reader by calling the experience a trance journey. Yet the language and
the story are framed to represent the experience as having taken place in
the world; as an account of an event.
Magliocco is a folklorist and she sets the appeal of magic within its
tradition in folklore, arguably the first professionally trained folklorist to
do so. She argues that paganism is the most important folk revival movement since the folk music movement. Indeed, she describes it as an instance
of folklore reclamation which remakes and renews the symbols and
stories of an abandoned past. Magliocco carried out her research in the
famous Reclaiming coven in San Francisco, lead by the indomitable
Starhawk (Miriam Simos), perhaps the largest, best organized, and politically
most effective of North American pagan communities. Reclaiming prides
itself on its individualism and its fluidity and creativity. Magliocco describes
these pagans as poaching from their past, as choosing the images and
stories in order to use them for their current ends. They give Demeter a
cauldron she never had in Greek mythology. They talk about the burning
times as an example of political repression of the wise woman, even
though historical evidence suggests that any actual burning had little to

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do with the real practice of a hidden, earth-worshipping spirituality. To

Magliocco, this is not so much borrowing as it is a syncretic creativity,
and she clearly sees it as a deliberate, intentional choice that enables the
point of the practice: intense spiritual experience.
In fact, she goes on to call this experience ecstasy and she sees it as
the heart of paganism. She describes powerfulindeed, extraordinary
experiences, and gives them a philosophical and epistemological framework.
It is true that she might quarrel with the argument that we are making here;
she wants to legitimise these practices and so she roots them in the past, not
in the playful present. She makes the claim that magic reclaims traditional
ways of knowing. She treats powerful experiences as another example
of folklore reclamation. When she uses the term in this way, she seems to
be suggesting that the modern pagan experiences are not unlike what the
ancient worshipper of Demeter might have felta hard claim to defend or
to disprove. Yet there is little doubt that trance has been central to psychogenic healing throughout time, and that pagan psychogenic healing revitalizes a practice sometimes lost in modern biomedicine. There is also little
doubt that those powerful experiences become precious, powerful moments
for the pagans who experience them, and that those who practice the rituals
seek to have such experiences. There is little doubt that imagination is central. This is a world in which people get caught up in ideas about power and
lose themselves in rapt attention to arcane symbols. Magliocco captures the
fascination well.
She also captures the play. Witching culture celebrates the exuberance
of pagan writing and pagan commerce, and all its books, cloaks, athames
(magical wands or daggers), and the many objects bought, sold, and owned
in the craft. The book captures the fun and complexity of rituals, the way
pagans create dramas between Persephone and Demeter, or John Dee and
Elizabeth I. It captures the sometimes un-verbalized aesthetics of magical
practice. Rituals should not be too long. They need to hold peoples attention. They must not be too scripted. Invocations have to be understandable.
In this setting, ritual is an art form that has as its primary goal the induction of
altered states of consciousness and people use all their dramatic arts to do so;
and often, they laugh. They conduct intensely serious rituals, and then they
laugh at themselves for being so silly as to imagine that Demeter was really
present. Of course she was; and yet really, the laughter suggests, we are
middle class people standing in a suburban meadow, and we know that what
we have done is make-believe.
Robert Wallis (2003) does not have so light a touch. Shamans=
Neo-Shamans works hard to emphasize the continuity between the shamanic
practice of the past and that in the present. And yet its very characterization
of the way the neo-shaman enacts his or her continuity expresses the emphasis on experience, on magical realism and on play that make these new
religions different. To Wallis, trance is a technique of ecstasy and his book

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focuses on that psychological technique as the unifying thread that links

stone circles to modern practitioners. He is both a shaman and an archaeologist. He describes his approach as autoarchaeology and emphasises that it
allows him to investigate things from the nuanced perspective of someone
familiar with ritual. He believes that modern shamanic experience should
lead us to reinterpret the archaeological record.
That is what the book sets out to do. It begins by describing the three
central literary sources of modern shamanism: Mircea Eliades Shamanism:
Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Michael Harners The Way of the Shaman,
and the books of Carlos Castenada (for example, The Teachings of Don Juan,
1968). Eliades book remains in some ways the most important to modern
shamans, because it asserts so clearly the ancientness and authenticity of
trance practices used by religious experts to aid their community. Eliade
identified the shaman as someone who journeyed between worlds in a community which believed that those worlds existed, and he gave example after
example of the craft. Moreover, while he insisted that true shamans were
found on the Siberian tundra, he also emphasized the role of technique. It
became easy, then, for anthropologists (and non-anthropologists) to identify
other practitioners by the same label if their trance practices seemed
commensurate.
Yet while Eliade provided anthropological authenticity, Castenada and
Harner made modern shamanism possible. Castaneda, of course, was a
prophet of the 1960s. He too promised authenticity, but he also presented
a teacher and his teachings. Those teachings spoke of the transformational
power of drugs and trance. Castenada sold millions of volumes. The ethnography turned out to be fiction, a point the public began to suspect after
his protagonist leapt off a cliff at the end of one volume and flew. Still, the
teacher had laid out a philosophy and a method, and that deeply appealed
to people. Michael Harner made the teachings even more explicit. Harner
had done real, traditional ethnography. But grabbed by the zeitgeist of the
era, he abandoned the sober academy and laid out a step-by-step method
by which modern peoples could become shamans. Harner not only wrote
a teaching manual, but set up schools. One can still find, in the back of
alternative magazines, advertisements for alternative healing by people
called Harner-certified.
Wallis then considers the criticisms that have been leveled at those who
now call themselves shamans (or more properly, neo-shamans to distinguish themselves from those practising an indigenous practice). He identifies four of them: that neo-shamanism universalises and decontextualises
shamanic practices; that it psychologises; that it reproduces the idea of the
primitive; and that it romanticises the idea of the shaman. Rather disarmingly,
Wallis agrees with all these criticisms. Still he argues that, while all these criticisms are justified, Neo-Shamans nevertheless engage in authentic religious
practice and are thus justified in calling themselves shamans.

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Is he right? Is the shamanism of the past and the shamanism of contemporary indigenous people the same stuff as the shamanism that Harner trains
his students to practice? Obviously not, in some ways. Modern shamanism
has all the poaching qualities of modern paganism. Practitioners read the
academic literature, and pick and choose the symbols and practices that
speak to them, within a general expectation of what the practice should look
like. Modern shamanism is always an add-on healing, never the best medical
care available. Modern shamans are always deliberatively choosing a
counter-cultural practice, not following their given tradition. And modern
shamanism uses the imagination with an explicitness not found in traditional
shamanism. As Michael York remarks in another of the four books considered here: Harner has replaced shamanic journeying itself with the
exercise of guided imagery, and what occurs in a Harner workshop or under
the auspices of his Foundation will not be found among any extant tribal
peoples (in Berger 2005:91).
Yet because shamanism has been understoodlargely as the result of
Eliadeas a technique, and because the technique is a matter of manipulating human consciousness in a particular manner, one can make a reasoned
argument that they do have much in common. They share a biology through
the impact of specific practices upon the mind and body. Both modern
shamanism and the shamanisms we know from the ethnographic tradition
involve techniques to put the practitioner in an altered state in which the
attention is focused intensely on what the mind must imagine. Those techniques run the gamut of psychoactive substances, drumming, fasting, chanting,
twirling, and other practices known to disrupt normal attention to the
environment. Anthropologists call that disruption trance. People in trance
seem disconnected from the environment, non-responsive or differently
responsive; they may not remember what they did in the state; they perform
acts, like coal-walking, that suggest that they do not feel pain as they normally
do. In short, something about the ordinary integration of memory, identity,
and awareness has come undone. No one knows exactly what that is.
Clinicians talk about dissociation, which they treat as the result of
trauma; academic psychologists talk about hypnosis, which they see as a
capacity that can be greater or lesser for individuals. The broadest term is
absorption, which refers to the willingness to be caught up in ones imagination and so dis-attend to the everyday surround. Most people have the
capacity to become more engaged in that inner world; both ethnography
and clinical practice suggested that the dis-connection can be trained. At
the heart of the practices we call trance in shamanism, the central technique
is the shifting of attention from external awareness to internal experience,
with an encouragement to experience what is internal imagined as externally
real. All shamanisms share the idea that what happens in what we call the
imagination is not false, but real. Yet this claim is more shocking in a modern
secular society. One of the features that distinguishes modern shamanism

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from any other is that modern shamans have to learn a new theory of mind,
one that violates the expectations of mind in a western, secular society. In
such a society, what happens in the mind is not truea view not shared
in many pre-modern societies, including the European past. Harner must
teach his students that what they imagine is indeed real. That is why
Castenada insisted he could fly.
Wallis has as his target the secular archeologists and government
bureaucrats who do not take neo-shamans seriously. Neo-shamans claim
to be continuing shamanic practices from the past; they seek access to
archaelogical sites in the present. The latter issue has attracted a great deal
of media attention in Britain over the last ten years. Wallis examines the sites
of Stonehenge, Avebury, and Seahenge in more detail while also describing
similar struggles in California and the Southwest of the United States. He sees
these struggles between Neo-Shamans and Neo-Pagans and archaeologists
over access to these sites as a struggle about who gets to define the sacredness of space and festivals. When the English Heritage Association forbids
access to sites for Druidic festivals ostensibly because it is concerned about
damage to the site, they behave as if the rituals are more damaging than
archaelogical digs or construction projects which build a tunnel under the
monument. To whom, he asks, does the sacred belong?
David Waldron could answer (tongue-in-cheek) that the sacred is
English. Indeed, in 1999, Ronald Hutton wrote a wonderfully detailed
historical account of British witchcraftTriumph of the Moon (1999)which
explained the roots of modern British magic through the British response to
romanticism. It is no accident, he pointed out, that the culture which produced Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and J.K. Rowling also gave
birth to the only religion England has ever given the world. The Sign of
the Witch (Waldron 2008) revisits Huttons material, but also sets out to
explain the symbolic importance of witchcraft and paganism to the formation
of the English nation state. Waldrons central argument is that witchcraft and
paganism illustrate the struggle between Enlightenment and Romantic
approaches to modernity. What he shows so clearly is that the witchcraft that
emerges out of secularizing romanticism values the experiential and the
imaginative, and that it interweaves the magical and the real.
Waldron begins with the shifting meaning of the figure of the witch in
England from the 17th to the 19th century. With the split from the continental
Catholic church, Protestantism and loyalty to the king become inextricably
entwined. The theology of obedience made obedience to the king a religious
duty and Catholicism became seen less as a threat to the immortal soul of
English citizens than as a challenge to the kings authority. The witch in this
context came to embody both (Catholic) superstition and that challenge,
especially in the case of divinatory speculation on the length of his reign.
It was only during the witch crazes at the time of the Civil War that more
Catholic demonological considerations took center stage during witchcraft

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accusations. Shortly afterwards not only witchcraft, but belief in witchcraft,

became symbols of anti-government superstitions that were dangerous
because they might legitimate Catholicism. By the 18th century witchcraft
beliefs had become associated with rural and uneducated people and elites
were more concerned with the question of how the madness of the
witchcraft persecutions were possible in the first place. As Waldron points
out, even contemporary attempts at answering this question are usually
mostly concerned with reinforcing the Enlightenment narrative of increasing
education pushing out witchcraft beliefs that were based on ignorance. This
often ignores the important role educated elites played in witchcraft persecution and, Waldron argues, is more effective at shoring up academic
self-esteem than at considering this complex phenomenon in its own right.
Waldron then introduces Romanticism as the source of modern paganism. He points out that, in valuing imagination as equal in importance to reason, and human experience as more central than natural law, Romanticism
puts great stock into everything that the Enlightenment response to modernity
rejected: nature, the primitive, the feminine. Romanticism imagined national
identity as rooted in the past, in old traditions and customs. The old tales
became the ground for ones Englishness. Scholars began to collect the old
stories, in England but also in Germany and elsewhere. The disciplines of
anthropology and folklore emerged from this stew, and so did the roots of
modern paganism. Modern magic began in the late 19th century, part of the
same rustling dissatisfaction with the tensions between science and religion
which produced spiritualism and theosophy; modern witchcraft can only be
documented from the early decades of the 20th century, but many of its
qualities emerge from this earlier discovery of spiritual authority in nature.
Yet modern witchcraft, shamanism, and paganism in all their forms did
not explode until the 1960sthe same period that transformed the religious
landscape for Christianity and other faiths. What is it about the modern era
that invites people to practice such an exuberant, experiential faith? This is
the question raised by Helen Bergers excellent edited volume. Witchcraft
and Magic presents seven chapters that introduce an overview of contemporary religious movements in the United States in which magic plays a central
role. Each in its own way attempts to answer the question. Michael York
(on the New Age) suggests that the emphasis on changing ones consciousness could well be interpreted as magical. Helen Berger (on witchcraft) thinks
that the new individualism and the lure of individual experience pulled
people in. Wendy Griffin (feminist spirituality) attributes the appeal to feminism and the role of women in modern magic. Ysamur Flores-Pena (lucumi)
emphasizes the attraction of syncretic folk traditions. Stuart Wright (on the
Satanism scare) thinks that ideas about satanic ritual abuse became persuasive
to a generation of mothers, entering the work force, who had been raised by
stay-at-home mothers and who were anxious about the welfare of their children in daycare; he also thinks that the presence of magic drew people in

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because it captured their attention. This is a point Tanice Foltz (television)

also makes. Never before have so many witches in movies and television
shows been as attractive, young, and independent. Never before have we
seen such joyful, cheerful appropriation of wands and cauldrons and spells.
Michael Yorks Shamanism and Magic begins to formulate the collective explanation. The chapter returns us to shamanism. York provides a
description of the historical development of the term and briefly describes
traditional Siberian and North American shamanism, and for the most part,
he criticizes modern shamanism. It is not focused on the community. It does
not build upon tradition. It uses techno-shamanismlights, throbbing
music, and drugs. Many of its practitioners have none of the fear that he finds
in the traditional shamanic practice. They are playing at magic, even as they
believe in it, a theme that comes though time and again. Now, York asserts
that neo-shamans do grasp some of what Rudolf Otto describes as the
mysterium tremendum. Yet, if so, they grasp it in living rooms and parks,
not within the swipe of a jaguars claw.
And that is really the point. Yorks commenthis criticism of New Age
shamanism because those shamans do not fearis the key to understanding
the unique features of this modern spirituality and the reason it has become
so compelling. The person who practices modern magic doesnt fear the
jaguars claw or anything else (like dark supernatural forces) because on
some fundamental and basic level, the person knows that the magic may
not be real and so magic can be simply fun. This is not an ontological claim
about magic but an observation about secular modernity. Those who practice
modern magic are acutely aware that other people like themselves do not
believe in magic. They set out to make the magic real in the face of a
presumption of its non-realness. They are not describing an enchanted world
but a re-enchanted one, which is a very different proposition, because the
baselinefor practitionersis non-enchantment. And modern magic
re-enchants the disenchanted world more thoroughly than any other faith
because it is so explicit and upfront about the enchantment. It indulges
peoples yearning for a world other than our own by allowing them to feel
that what they are doing is only play.
But what we see in modern magic we see throughout the American
religious landscape. The shift in the way that Americans have worshipped
God since the 1960s is remarkable. Two-thirds of those we call the baby
boomers stopped going to churches and temples as adults. Half of them
have now returned to religious practice, but not to the mainstream,
hour-long services of their childhood. They have joined churches, temples,
and odd little groups that put intense and personal spiritual experience at
the center of what it is to believe in the divine. Wade Clark Roof famously
called them a generation of seekers. Their generation, moreover, gave birth
to the so-called New Age. Since the 1960s millions of Americans have tried
meditation, bought tarot cards, and learned to use crystals to attune their

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inner energies. By 1996, nearly 40 percent of Americans said that they were
born again, and for many of them evangelical piety meant having a direct,
personal, and vividly felt relationship with their Creator. In 2008 the Pew
Forum found that nearly a quarter of all Americans called themselves charismatic, Pentecostal, attended a Pentecostal church, or spoke in tongues at
least several times a year. Over a quarter said that they had been given a
direct revelation from God (Pew Research Center 2008). The last decades
of the 20th century ushered in charismatic movements in Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, and Islam. There are many explanations for this shift and
many anxieties about its social and political implications (e.g., Crapanzano
2000). But the behavioral consequences are clear: these practices encourage
their followers to experience the divine vividly, immediately, and through
unusual moments of altered awareness. They are intensely experiential. They
treat the supernatural as immediately present, and many of them are
intensely imaginative and incorporate play-like activities.
The story in Europe is less clear, but Europe too has seen a decline of
mainstream church attendance and explosive rise in pagan practice since
the 1960s, and similarly an explosion of charismatic Christianities. One of
the most famous examples of the latter was a phenomenon known as the
Toronto Blessing (Hilborn 2001, Poloma 2003). In the middle 1990s, an evangelical church at the end of an airport runway in Toronto began to report a
sudden renewal, an infusion of the Holy Spirit. There were reports of people
getting drunk in the spirit and experiencing uncontrollable fits of laughter.
Soon there were services six times a week, with an average of 800 worshippers a night and hundreds of people being slain in the spirit and being
healed miraculously of physical illness. Demons emerged, howled, and
jerked their humans back and forth before they were expelled. Curious
Christians began coming from many countries, but the most eager participants came from Britain and they took the revival back into mainstream
Anglican churches. By the end of 1994, some sympathizers estimated that
between 2,000 to 4,000 British congregations embraced what came to be
called the Toronto Blessing (Hilborn 2001). The most dramatic expression
of the revivaland the events which caused the British media to pay attention and which eventually led to the movements declinewas that congregants would become possessed by animals. Newspaper reports described
worshippers as barking and crowing like cockerels, mooing like cows,
pawing the ground like bulls, and, more commonly, roaring like lions
(Hilborn 2001:184). These actions were understood as scripturalEzekiel
1, Revelation 4 and the Book of Micah could be offered as support.
What makes this conception of divinity as vividly present so successful
in a late modern world? Why does it bring people to a spiritual practice and
keep them there? Part of the answer is the intense attention this intimate and
personally real divine demands. In these spiritual enterprises, the way the
divine is imagined insists that someone pays constant attention to his or

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her mind and world, seeking the divine presence, listening for something it
might say. This divinity can comfort, like a friend, and respond directly, like a
friend. God can be a real social relationship for those who make the effort to
experience God in this way. But because that social relationship lacks so
many features of actual human socialityno visible body, no responsive
face, no spoken voicesuch a theology demands constant vigilance from
those who follow it. They must scrutinize their spontaneous thoughts and
their mental images, their perceptions and their feelings, looking for
moments that might be supernatural. They work to build up a model of divinity by interpreting out of their own familiar experience in a way shaped by
the social world of the church and the sacred text, and then they work to
re-orient their own interior emotional responsiveness by matching it to this
representation. Faiths which imagine divinity differently make fewer
demands on attentional habits. But it may be, perhaps, that such a God may
be easier to take for granted. Paradoxically, it may be that this highmaintenance, effortful divinity appeals to so many modern people precisely
because the work demanded makes the divine feel more salient, more real.
At the same time, the practice of this attention produces near-sensory
evidence of the divine. That is the psychological consequence of the type
of practice this kind of faith encourages. As people learn to enter trance, they
sometimes experience the spiritual with their senses. They enter another
world; they smell its apples. Such experiences cannot be willed, and the
more sensory they are, the more rare they become. Those rare moments
can be quite powerful, even transformative.
They also make God of the mind. This way of paying attention shifts the
reality of the divine into a form grasped by the mind, and experienced in the
mind, and that too has consequences. The divine becomes more realyou
saw the wooden vesselbut also more private. God is known through an
interaction no one else can share. When the mind is the place one meets
God, there is an acute sense of the deeply human filter through which God
is known. The more intimately someone comes to feel connected to God in
this style of spirituality, the more sharply he or she feels that God speaks
uniquely to each. Those who seek God in this way come to deeply respect
the way God is different with each person: and with this respect, grows an
understanding that all people reach for God through the thick density of their
own thoughts and feelings. And since each persons mind is private, no person can have full knowledge of any other persons relationship with God.
And so the need to suspend disbelief becomes inherent to the experience of this God. When God is known through the mind, God is always both
immediately present and profoundly cloaked. The insistence on the inevitability of this uncertainty, this cloud of humanness through which humans
reach for God, is a constant theme in this kind of spirituality. When God is
imagined in this way, the skepticism of an outer social world is also an
inevitable part of the inner dawning awareness of the divine. This God is

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vivid and private, protected from the prying skeptics eyes. These experiential spiritualities both make the divine real and allow the divine to be imagined as real in a way that is different from the material reality of tables
and chairs. Is this self-conscious epistemological complexity unique to the
modern era? That is a complicated question (see Taves 1999). But the
epistemological complexity, we suggest, is more important in this era
because skepticism is so present. This not-real-but-more-than-real style of
these vivid modern faiths gives with one hand what it takes with another,
and so protects those who live in a world in which others doubt.
Mark Lilla argues that the transformation of Christian commitment into a
more rational form under the influence of the Enlightenment created the
source of its decline. The stillborn God of the liberal theologians could
never satisfy the messianic longings embedded in biblical faith, so it was
inevitable that this idol would be abandoned in favor of a strong redeeming
God when the crisis came (2007:308). He is clearly right. What the ethnographers of paganism push us to notice is that this God will also be a
re-enchanted one, created as vividly near-magical to protect it from rationalisms critique.

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T. M. LUHRMANN is the Watkins University Professor at Stanford University.
She is the author of Persuasions of the Witchs Craft (Harvard University
Press 1989). Her most recent work is When God Talks Back (Knopf
2012). She is interested in the way people make judgments about what is
real, and the way they come to experience the immaterial as present.