When we left our conservative Christian denomination back in 2007, the whole world felt open to us. A lot of ideas and experiences had sparked our interest, but it had been difficult to truly explore them under the watchful gaze of those who filled the pews. We had already pushed the envelope for some time, such as when we traveled to a nearby city to attend PFLAG meetings, as well as movie nights featuring documentaries and foreign films. Although we knew it was ridiculous that activities like this were suspect, we also knew being careful was no joke. The social-controlling power of the telephone prayer-tree, for instance, was very real. Those spindly tentacles, whatever the intention, often fueled the town’s gossip. Finding ourselves free of that, we could finally try on any number of ideas, practices, and communities for size.
This included exploring several traditions that fell under the vague umbrella of earth-based spiritualities. I first studied neopaganism and witchcraft while living in the San Francisco bay area in the 1990s, and I felt especially interested in the neopagan vision of activist spirituality. More personally, I was drawn to these spiritual traditions that honored the natural world. There wasn’t much emphasis on nature in my childhood denomination beyond being taught that humans were created by God to take dominion of the earth, and this included destroying it for profit. Encountering traditions where belonging to and caring for creation was the basis of spirituality, rather than something that required a heated argument to justify, was refreshing. I also felt a profound relief in studying traditions that were not as invested in patriarchal and heterosexual norms. While I eventually settled into Buddhist and Quaker circles, I still feel at home with those pagan commitments to cultivating creativity and love in resistance to the more hierarchical and oppressive religions of most of our childhoods.
An Astronomical Return
Today, most of my friends either identify with atheism or earth-based spiritualities, and sometimes both. This isn’t a coincidence. Earth-based spiritualities are often a potent reminder of the tension between oppressed people and their oppressors, and especially of the possibility of power existing outside of acceptable, socially approved channels. As Vanessa Angélica Villarreal has explained:
“Witches are feared because oppressed people with power are feared. For centuries, African, Indigenous, feminist, and folk spiritualities have suffered violent persecution and suppression for the mere accusation of ‘witchcraft.’ In the American spiritual lexicon, the witch is an amalgam of deep-seated misogyny and racism. A projection of all that is hated—sexually liberated, unmarried, aging, queer, asexual, embittered, racialized, primitive—she embodies the demonic, immoral forces that seek to tempt and take vengeance on the righteous. The witch is both the silenced, disbelieved, accused survivor and a terrifying threat to white male power—a symbolic identity that deeply resonates with women and marginalized people … .” (https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/commodification-witchcraft-sephora )
How much growth this resonance has led to, especially during the last fifty years, is difficult to measure. To begin, earth-based spiritualities and paganism are umbrella terms that gather together a great diversity of beliefs and cultural systems. The American Humanist Association has listed at least nine major branches of paganism, each of which has several distinct forms. To take two examples, Neopaganism includes “Wicca -- in its many forms; neo-Shamanism; neo-Druidism; Asatru and other forms of Norse neo-paganism; neoNative American practices; the range of practices labeled ‘Women's Spirituality.’” While Meso-paganism includes cultures that have “been influenced by a conquering culture but has been able to maintain an independence of religious practice, e.g., many Native American nations.” (https://americanhumanist.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/paganism.pdf ) Although many people have identified some common values and beliefs, such as believing in the sacredness of nature, the diversity still makes it unrealistic to generalize about a single, unified movement.
This also poses challenges when it comes to demographics. Surveys may lump anyone not affiliated with a mainstream religion into an “Other” category, and only recently has it become more common to differentiate between different earth-based spiritualities. The information we do have indicates a steady and dramatic increase in practitioners. To take one tradition as an example of this growth, Trinity College in Connecticut conducted three large surveys representing the continental USA. In 1990, the study estimated there were 8,000 Wiccans. By 2008, that number had grown to 340,000. In 2014, the Pew Research Center estimated that as many as 1.5 million people in the USA identified as Wiccan or Pagan. (https://qz.com/quartzy/1411909/the-explosive-growth-of-witches-wiccans-and-pagans-in-the-us/ ) As Carmen Fowler LaBerge tweeted in 2018, this would mean that there were then more Wiccans than members of the Presbyterian Church (USA).
Other indicators can be found in popular culture. For example, it’s estimated that psychic services are worth more than $2 billion dollars in the USA alone. And social media has witnessed a huge spike in content related to magic and witchcraft - by October 2021, #witchtok had over 19.8 billion views. Hopefully, we’ll continue to get more reliable demographic data in the years ahead. But, for now, what we know is that more and more people are finding meaning and support in these practices and communities. And this is no small thing, especially in light of the persecution that has historically targeted them.
Growing Pains
However, this rapid growth is a double-edged sword. As we’ve been emphasizing throughout these reflections on demythologizing religion, no spiritual or religious tradition is immune to human limitations or the potential for violence and oppression. So it is important to acknowledge that the rapid rise in popularity has brought with it a similar rise in awareness and criticism of earth-based spiritualities and their communities. One important example of this is, to use Sarah Lyons’ phrase, the “co-mingling of racism and Paganism” among White supremacists around the world.
The decentralized nature of many pagan movements, which has been a wonderful opportunity to cultivate healthier relationships, has also made it easier for extremists, especially White supremacists, to co-opt some pagan traditions. In the USA, the National Socialist Movement is trading in the swastika for the Othala rune. And White supremacist pagans have been on prominent public display at far-right rallies and online, drawing people in with Odinist calls for “Faith, Family, and Folk.” Like all racism, these developments are horrible and horrifying. Gratefully, among those fighting back is the broader pagan community. For example, Lyons reported that:
“They’ve formed advocacy groups like Heathens United Against Racism (HUAR) and The Asatru Community (TAC). These groups have banded together in public pronouncements: In August 2016, 43 Pagan organizations signed Declaration 127, a public renunciation of any Heathenry that promotes hatred or discrimination. Since then, that number has grown to more than 180 organizations in over 20 countries. And in 2017 TAC created 'The Shieldwall,' a manifesto compelling Heathens around the world to ‘denounce all those abusing [the Heathen] faith to spread hatred and negativity.’” (https://www.vice.com/en/article/59kq93/racists-are-threatening-to-take-over-paganism )
So on the one hand, you have many oppressed communities finally finding, not just greater acceptance, but also real opportunities to heal historical traumas, resist systemic injustice, build community and careers, and deepen and create empowering practices. But our social context is complicated, and the results of this growth are mixed. We live in a society built around exploitation that leads to widespread alienation and poor health, both physical and mental. It is also built around selling and consuming goods as the focus of life and often as a substitute for addressing injustice. To complicate things further, our society is currently mired in disinformation, lacking in critical thinking skills, and vulnerable to manipulation. This makes spiritualities that speak to that alienation and needed empowerment an ideal target for extremism, as well as commercial commodification and exploitation. This is obviously not limited to earth-based traditions, but it is perhaps the biggest challenge these communities now face.
Spirituality for Sale
In fact, the rapid rise of earth-based spiritualities has probably made it both more tempting and easier to package and sell for a profit. This nothing new. Since at least the 1960s, we’ve witnessed the commercialization of a hodgepodge of New Age spiritualities. But it has been complicated by the fact that its consumers have often been from white, upper-middle class families. As Villarreal pointed out,
“As a result, Indigenous, Asian, and Black spiritualities, long subjugated as witchcraft, became associated with the ‘eclectic’ practice of white witches. Today, Instagram is filled with feeds selling ritual items from culturally distinct traditions—Santeria candles surrounded by crystal grids; palo santo and white sage bundled with citrine; hands in a mudra position framing a tarot spread; a white woman in dancer’s pose with a dreamcatcher hanging from her big toe. … They replicated the existing models of spiritual and cultural theft in order to capture demand in a lucrative, trending market, demanding access to every culture’s sacred tools without regard for their history.” (op cit)
This commodification cannot be separated from the histories of colonization, issues of cultural appropriation, and our current social alienation. In Villarreal’s words, “Modern witchcraft’s fuzzy spiritual landscape recklessly grabs language and tools from different traditions meant to cope with the brutalities of empire, and reinscribes these materials with rootless woo.” (ibid) This recklessness is also driven by money, from earnest solo practitioners trying to find a meaningful way to pay their bills to frauds jumping on the bandwagon to the mass production of trinkets. And while mass production does lower the cost for the curious to give a practice a try, it also confuses and conflates unique cultures and histories. For many people, earth-based spiritualities are not even a spirituality; they are an aesthetic.
For example, in the “Meditation, Mindfulness, and Spirituality Shop” at Gwyneth Paltrow’s company, goop, you can buy “The goop Medicine Bag,” a collection of eight crystals “to encourage clarity, serenity, courage, creative power, and emotional strength.” It includes instructions for balancing your chakras, “benefit[ting] from their energies,” cleansing them in sage or cool water, and charging them in moonlight. But even if these vague spiritual benefits do not appeal, you should still buy the crystals. As the website encourages us: “Not of the spirit set? Test this set as a pretty addition to your workspace or vanity.”
Cultural Appropriation
In sum, reclaiming ancestral traditions and practices has been empowering and healing for many people who belong to historically oppressed communities. Meanwhile, commercializing earth-based spiritualities in particular has further harmed those same communities and encouraged people to reduce spirituality to consumption and cultural appropriation. As Jess Joho and Morgan Sung pointed out in their article on “How to be a witch without stealing other people's cultures” -
“Both the past and present of witchcraft owes quite literally everything to the most oppressed groups in American history. If New Age witchcraft isn’t grounded in finally starting to do better by them, then who is modern witchcraft actually for and what does it serve instead?” (https://mashable.com/article/witchtok-problematic-witch-cultural-appropriation )
Naturalistic Paganism
I’ve prioritized issues like these because I believe they are the most pressing and important ones facing earth-based spiritualities and communities. But there is another perspective that I would like to include today that is most relevant to me personally. Back in 2007, when the world finally felt open and we felt free, we heard a radio program about the rise of witchcraft in the USA that included an interview with a scientist who was also a witch. In naturalistic paganism, he explained, rituals became an opportunity for awareness, to focus the mind and choose actions with intention. Magic operated in the psychological realm, shifting our perceptions and transforming attitudes. He also speculated about what happened during rituals from a scientific perspective, such as ritually sweeping a circle. I was fascinated by this naturalistic recasting of magic, and it helped me connect with religious naturalism more broadly. The vision is one that I think many people can understand and even appreciate. As expressed in the description of “Naturalistic Paganism” at the Spiritual Naturalist Society:
“While we find little evidence to support most of the metaphysical claims made for deities and magic, we find plenty of evidence for the capacity of Pagan myth, meditation, and ritual to affect psychology. That is why we find Pagan ways powerful. By shaping human minds, they motivate change through human hands.” (https://www.snsociety.org/naturalistic-paganism/ )
This translates into a practice that views deities through the lenses of metaphor, poetry, and psychology, “and not as causal agents external to and independent of the individual.” Magic shifts from “manipulating ‘energies’ to produce effects with no known physical causal relation to the individual” to transforming your own understanding, psychology, and relationships in ways make change around you possible. Practices and beliefs are grounded in personal experience and understood through “accurate history, and mainstream scientific evidence.” And the emphasis on living responsibly resonates with many of us:
“On the one hand, naturalism grounded in scientific evidence offers a means of intellectual responsibility. Through it, we cultivate right relationship to objective reality. / On the other hand, Paganism offers a means for taking responsibility for one’s subjective experience and behavior. Through it, we cultivate right relationship to subjective reality. / Altogether, ours is a path rich with truth, meaning, and responsibility.” (ibid)
Taking time to understand earth-based spiritualities will be increasingly important, for several reasons. Even if you aren’t personally interested, you are increasingly likely to know someone who is. And you are also increasingly likely to encounter somebody looking to sell you culturally appropriated goods packaged up in a spiritual way. The more we understand these diverse traditions, the wiser we can be in supporting people that are actively making the world a better place, especially in solidarity with oppressed communities, while avoiding the consumer fads and psychological traps that trick us into helping extremists, frauds, and profiteers. Most significantly, earth-based spiritualities can provide us with correctives for our alienation from the natural world while also helping us understand and ultimately dismantle oppressive systems. And that is a vision that all of us can embrace.
