Sex, Death and Witchcraft

A Contemporary Pagan Festival

Douglas Ezzy

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781472533630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Faunalia is a controversial Pagan festival with a reputation for being wild and emotionally intense. It lasts five days, 80 people attend, and the two main rituals run most of the night. In the tantalisingly erotic Baphomet rite, participants encounter a hermaphroditic deity, enter a state of trance and dance naked around a bonfire. In the Underworld rite participants role play their own death, confronting grief and suffering. These rituals are understood as "shadow work" - a Jungian term that refers to practices that creatively engage repressed or hidden aspects of the self. Sex, Death and Witchcraft is a powerful application of relational theory to the study of religion and contemporary culture. It analyses Faunalia's rituals in terms of recent innovations in the sociology of religion and religious studies that focus on relational etiquette, lived religion, embodiment and performance. The sensuous and emotionally intense ritual performances at Faunalia transform both moral orientations and self-understandings. Participants develop an ethical practice that is individualistic, but also relational, and aesthetically mediated. Extensive extracts from interviews describe the rituals in participants' own words. The book combines rich and evocative description of the rituals with careful analysis of the social processes that shape people's experiences at this controversial Pagan festival.

CHAPTER ONE

Soul

Introduction

This chapter examines what it means to live ‘soulfully’. People go to Faunalia because they choose to follow their heart, to live with passion and to be authentic. I use the phrase ‘living with soul’ to describe this sort of life. Living with soul is at the heart of what participants value about Faunalia. From a psychoanalytic perspective Mari Ruti (2006) describes a this-worldly, non-metaphysical understanding of ‘soul’. A life with soul is one that is experienced as worthwhile and emotionally satisfying. A life with soul is something that participants find through rituals. A life with purpose and dignity can be found in many secular activities. However, religious ritual is attractive to many people because it provides practices that enable them to find a life with soul.

A life with soul has three main characteristics. First, it is found in relationships. In soulful relationships people acknowledge and support each other, while recognizing and accepting difference. To examine the relational aspects of soul, this chapter introduces Graham Harvey’s (2013) conception of religion as an etiquette of relationships, and Jessica Benjamin’s (1988) psychoanalytic discussion of mutual recognition in erotic relationships. Second, a life with soul is facilitated through ritual practices, in performances, in doing, acting and dancing. Here the chapter develops Benjamin’s (1998) concept of ‘acting’ as half-conscious performances, and Carl Einstein’s (Pan 2001) understanding of ritual as aesthetically mediated performances and relations. Third, a life with soul draws on symbolic resources such as myths and shared cultural understandings. The culture of contemporary Witchcraft and Paganism are the dominant symbolic resources utilized at Faunalia. Later chapters discuss Pagan culture in detail, along with other symbolic resources utilized by participants at Faunalia.

The term ‘soul’ is preferable to ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose’ because ‘soul’ points to the emotional, aesthetic and moral aspects of life, which are the focus of this book. ‘Meaning’ suggests cognition and belief, which are not central issues for the Pagan rituals discussed in the book. ‘Purpose’ suggests a teleological orientation towards the future, which, while important, is not central to the participants at Faunalia. Charles Taylor (1989: 33), following Ricoeur (1985) and MacIntyre (1981), argues that the self is more than either cognitively framed understandings or strategic abilities. A sense of self is linked to notions of ‘the good’. I use ‘soul’ in a sociological and non-metaphysical way to indicate this moral dimension of self-understandings. It has some similarities to Grace Jantzen’s (1998) concept of ‘flourishing’, although I am less concerned with the gendered nature of this experience, and to live a life with soul is also to know suffering. I do not discuss whether a soul is a thing that continues on after life, although many Pagans believe in an afterlife. Rather, in this book ‘soul’ describes a way of living this life.

Rituals play key roles in creating lives with soul. Think of funerals. Sometimes these rituals are powerful and we come away feeling transformed and with a sense that something important has happened. Yes, it is sad to farewell a loved one, and perhaps the tears flow freely, but it feels ‘right’. The grief is honoured, the person remembered and life without them is just a little more bearable. The ritual performance changes something in us at an emotional level. It also changes the way we relate, both to the deceased person, and to other people who share our grief. If the ritual has ‘worked’ and been done well, it changes these things for the better. Rituals help us find a life with soul.

The reason people attend Faunalia is to find better ways of living soulfully. Yes, the rituals are confronting, but it is not the desire to confront death, or the thrill of dancing naked with 80 people around a bonfire that primarily motivates participation in the festival. This chapter explains how Phoebe, Sauvage and Lewis find soulful lives through their participation in Faunalia. The pursuit of soulful lives is central to Faunalia.

The rituals at Faunalia provide a window into contemporary society. They cast in sharp relief the features of our lives that cheat us of soul. Soulful lives are discovered in many places: loving relationships, all night dance parties, gardening and sometimes in religious communities in all their variety. This book examines just what it is that makes these activities important, and why we need them if we are to experience our lives as meaningful and worthwhile.

Soul: Phoebe

Phoebe is married to Matthew who is an agnostic. Early in her marriage to Matthew she attended a Spiritualist church for four months. Matthew was uncomfortable with this and following the birth of Phoebe’s third child, she put religion ‘on the backburner’. Her decision to become involved in Paganism came some time later, approximately nine years prior to our interview. It began with a phone call to the owner of a Pagan bookshop she found in the phone directory:

Phoebe: For the first five years [after Matthew and I were married] I chose to take on the role as mother and housekeeper and all of that. I enjoyed it. It is a part of my nature that I enjoy very much. But I was dying spiritually. I would sit where you are now and Matthew would be there, and I would not know what I had just watched. I could be there with him for hours and just zone out. Nothing around me satisfied me or fed me internally anymore. Yes, my kids did. Yes, the moments with Matthew did. But that was on a very different level. The best way of putting it is my soul was dying. They are the words he actually used when he came in one evening and just looked at me, and I was just blank. There was no life. I became quite robotic. He just looked over at me and said: ‘Your soul is dying. Go do what it is that you need to do’. And, Doug, I was out that door! [laughs.]

Phoebe talked to the Pagan bookshop owner for two hours on the phone. He gave her the phone number of a person who was running a Wiccan coven. Phoebe became heavily involved with the Wiccan group for nearly two years. Participation in the coven: ‘gave me confidence, I found my voice. That to me is a very, very big positive.’ She left that group prior to the creation of Faunalia. When I asked Phoebe to describe the overall influence of Faunalia, she replied:

Phoebe: I think it has changed me. [When I speak,] I am heard because I am actually using my voice. I am not as intimidated with people, whereas I used to be. It has given me a lot more confidence to stand up. The amount of friends and heart connections that I have made with people has been enormous.

Phoebe felt that her soul was dying. The restoration of that soul through participation in contemporary Witchcraft has two main, and tightly interwoven, consequences: self-confidence and relationships. The rituals of contemporary Witchcraft, and Faunalia in particular, make both these possible. Contemporary Paganisms are primarily religions of practice, not overly concerned with theology (Hume 1997). Phoebe does not focus on trying to explain her religion philosophically. Rather, she focuses on the ritual experiences and relationship with deity. She feels that she is valued as a creative agent within the context of emotionally satisfying relationships.

Phoebe’s observations about her soul dying point to something that many contemporary social commentators have described. As Mari Ruti (2006) puts it:

One of the most persistently recurring themes of twentieth century theory . . . is the idea that there is something about the assaultive fragmenting and numbing quality of life in post-industrial Western societies that devastates human interiority in a manner that leaves us psychically crippled – that ‘cheats us of soul’. (Ruti 2006: 73)

Ruti (2006: 20) is not using soul in a religious sense. Rather, soul refers to the person’s attempt to find her or his ‘place and purpose in the world’ through reflexively and creatively working with symbolic resources from contemporary culture. Ruti’s psychoanalytically informed definition of soul points to the importance of creative agency, but needs supplementing to embrace the religious ritual practices that are important to Phoebe.

‘Religion’ as practiced at Faunalia is primarily about rituals and relationships, not belief. Religion has often been defined as belief in God, or some variation on this that retains an emphasis on cognition and otherworldly transcendence. Perhaps it is because they are not overly concerned about such beliefs that many participants at Faunalia do not think of themselves as engaged in religion. Graham Harvey (2005, 2013) persuasively argues that such a conception of religion is misguided, drawing on the work of Vásquez (2011), Latour (2010) and Ingold (2011). For Harvey, religion is to be found ‘elsewhere’ in the practice of ritual and the etiquette of relationships to other-than-human persons. At the heart of religion as practiced at Faunalia is the development of an etiquette of relationships with other participants and with deities such as Baphomet. In this book I use a definition of religion that combines Harvey’s emphasis on practice and relationships with Ruti’s discussion of reflexivity and symbolic resources:

Religion is a set of ritual practices that engage symbolic resources to provide an etiquette for relationships and an emotional and cognitive sense of self-worth and purpose.

I argue that religious ritual practices are foundational and make possible, or engage, particular types of meanings and values (Bell 1992). As Catherine Bell (1997: 82) notes: ‘the study of ritual as practice has meant a basic shift from looking at activity as the expression of cultural patterns to looking at it as that which makes and harbors such patterns.’ In other words, rituals and practices are not only expressions of beliefs and ideas. Rather, beliefs and ideas can also be outworkings of rituals and practices. This definition of religion is consistent with that given by those closely engaged with ritual studies. Grimes (2000: 70), for example, says: ‘By spirituality I intend practiced attentiveness aimed at nurturing a sense of the interdependence of all beings sacred and all things ordinary . . . and by religion I mean spirituality sustained as a tradition or organized into an institution.’ Similarly, Driver (1991: 97) notes the primacy of actions such as ‘invoking, addressing, affecting, manipulating’ in the interweaving of action and symbols in ritual: ‘the ritual is not in the service of the symbols, but the other way round.’

This definition moves away from an emphasis on belief as the foundation of religion, an emphasis that probably derives from Protestant Christianity. In some senses, religious belief could be understood as a particular form of religious practice. This issue is discussed extensively and thoroughly by Harvey (2013): ‘To understand believing as something done within Christianity we have to stop theorizing belief as connected to postulation, ideas, interiority, subjectivity. Rather, we have to think of believing as another kind of relational activity’ (Harvey 2013: 124). Harvey here points to one of the key aspects of ritual practices that I focus on in this book: the relational etiquette facilitated by rituals.

The development of an etiquette of relationships is central to lives with soul. Mature and confident selves form by ‘becoming more active and sovereign’ within relationships (Benjamin 1988: 18). Jessica Benjamin’s (1988, 1998) feminist psychoanalytic theory provides a sophisticated analysis of relational etiquette and ethics, mainly in the context of erotic relationships. She argues that ethics develop in the practice of relationships. Ethics is not something individuals discover on their own, by themselves. Ethics is discovered in relationships. Much contemporary thought suggests that maturation is a process of making ourselves independent and autonomous, incorrectly suggesting that we ‘grow out of relationships’. Rather, Benjamin draws on psychoanalysis and sociological theory to emphasize the inter-subjective foundations of our lives. We mature as people through growing into relationships. A life with soul is found in relationships.

The relationships found in religious ritual practices reflect broader cultural forms and political structures (Arnal and McCutcheon 2013, Asad 1993, 2003). The rituals at Faunalia reflect participants’ attempts to resist a broader culture that is afraid of suffering and sadness (Alexander 2012, Ahmed 2010, Horowitz and Wakefield 2007), and ambivalent about sexual desire (Irigaray 2001, Benjamin 1998). While religious practice at Faunalia is individualized, it also engages in a sophisticated attempt to resist and transform some central aspects of Western culture.

Ronald Grimes (2000: 3) argues that ‘without rites that engage our imaginations, communities, and bodies, we lose touch with the rhythms of the human life course’. Grimes’ point about life-course transitions such as weddings and funerals can be extended to other aspects of being human. Rituals bring humans into somatic and imagined relationship to the world in which we live. Rituals facilitate the transition from single to married, or from alive to deceased, and provide an important function in smoothing these transitions. Rituals also allow individuals to discover a sense of their place in the world, their ability to act in it and the etiquette of relational morality that links them to other humans and to the other-than-human world.

Mythology enables ‘us to live more intensely’ within the world, as Karen Armstrong (2005: 3) so beautifully puts it: ‘In mythology we entertain a hypothesis, bring it to life by means of ritual, act upon it, contemplate its effect upon our lives, and discover that we have achieved new insight into the disturbing puzzle of our world’ (Armstrong 2005: 10). While I disagree with Armstrong’s apparent privileging of belief over ritual, she makes an excellent point. Those who dismiss religion as ‘opting out’ (Armstrong 2005: 3), or like Walter Benjamin consider religions to be ‘archaic constructs that need to be replaced by rational critique’ (Pan 2001: 9), miss the importance and complexity of the religious experience. Some religions may involve ‘opting out’ and others may be archaic and could benefit from a greater consideration of rational analysis, but to characterize all of religious experience in this way ignores the significance of religion as it is described by those who know it intimately.

Religion is attractive because it allows people to live in the world in healthy and soulful ways. This is a central argument of this book. This is one of the most common reasons people give for participating in religion. A life experienced as soulful appears to be an outcome of religious practices. This does not mean that a soulful life can only be found in religion. There are various secular ways of living that seem equally capable of producing lives with soul – Ruti’s (2006) psychoanalytic practice is one of them. My point is simply that one of the main reasons people choose to live religious lives is that they find them rewarding, meaningful and emotionally satisfying.

Religion, and religious ritual, can also be oppressive and destructive. This is a product of the particular form of relational etiquette that is constructed in the ritual and religious culture. Jessica Benjamin argues that domination and oppression in erotic relationships are a product of: ‘a breakdown in the necessary tension between self-assertion and mutual recognition that allows self and other to meet as sovereign equals’ (Benjamin 1988: 12). Benjamin’s central concept is that of mutual recognition, which she describes as ‘the necessity of recognizing as well as being recognized by the other’ (Benjamin 1988: 23). The concept of mutual recognition is discussed in greater detail throughout the book. A similar process operates in religion, where oppression and exploitation develop as a result of the breakdown of respect, and the failure to allow participants to engage in relationships as agents and equals. Rituals that entail mutual recognition involve both self-assertion, and the recognition of others in their own right. Oppression and domination are not related to the truth or falsity of religious beliefs, rather they are a product of the relational etiquette and practices of ritual participants.

Weddings are rituals that change the status of relationships. These ritually mediated relationships involve a process of mutual recognition. Participating in weddings helps make sense of a changed relationship; they help people find an etiquette for their new relationship status. Weddings mark the commitment of two people to share their lives in relationship. The marrying couple make their vows in which they commit to care for each other, and at the same time honour and respect their differences. They engage in mutual recognition. Weddings do not always create relationships of respect, self-confidence and resilience. There are patriarchal overtones still found in some weddings, for example, in the use of the word ‘obey’ in vows some women make to their husband. At this point I simply want to highlight that for many people marriage is a ritual that helps them live a life with soul because through participation in the ritual the couple reinforces an etiquette of relating that involves respect and mutual recognition.

Religious practices allow people to ‘work’ with the aspects of themselves that shape moral orientations, both towards themselves and others. The religious ‘technology’ of ritual is morally neutral, it can be used for good or evil, to create respect or domination. One of the primary consequences of participation in religious ritual is that it shapes people’s moral orientations and self-understandings. This is a Durkheimian (1976) point, developed particularly in his later work (Shilling and Mellor 1998). The moral consequences of participation in the rituals at Faunalia are discussed in detail in Chapters Four and Six.

Contemporary religious ritual can be understood sociologically as a social technology for transforming people’s self-understandings and their morality of relational etiquette. It is also more than this. In particular, for many religious practitioners, the reality of relationships with spiritual beings and deity are central. The rediscovery of a life with soul is made possible through the performances of religious ritual. Faunalia provides an example of this process. The Pagan rituals of Faunalia produce intoxicating emotional states that transform not only people...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Introduction
• 1   Soul
• 2   Ritual
• 3   Death
• 4   Shadow
• 5   Baphomet
• 6   Ethics
• 7   Religion
• Conclusion
• Methodological Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index