Abstract
Some historians credit Gardner with the inauguration of a new and performance-rich current of esoteric spirituality that began to bloom and diversify in the 1960s. This twentieth-century current of esotericism bore many connections to ideas and practices that thrived during the Occult Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it also moved in new directions and exhibited even more diversity of religious form and content than had the other movements of the Occult Revival. After Wicca appeared, there emerged many new groups of ceremonial magicians and esoteric philosophers, such as witches, Druids, neo-shamans, and goddess-worshippers.1 By the 1970s, many of these new esoteric groups and movements were being categorized under the now-familiar label of “neo-paganism.”
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Joanne E. Pearson, “Neopaganism,” in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 828.
Ronald Hutton, Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 247.
Hutton, Triumph of the Moon, 247.; see also John Symonds, The Great Beast: The Life and Magick of Aleister Crowley (1954; reprint, Frogmore, UK: Mayflower, 1973).
J. L. Bracelin, Gerald Gardner: Witch (London: Octagon Press, 1960), 172; see also Hutton, 247.
Margaret Adler, Drawing Down the Moon, 2nd ed. (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1986), 179; see also Hutton, Triumph of the Moon, 345.
Zsuzsana Budapest, The Grandmother of Time (San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1989), 168.
Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Religion of the Great Goddess (San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1979).
Elizabeth Puttick, Women in New Religions: In Search of Community, Sexuality, and Spiritual Power (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 2.
Aidan Kelly, Crafting the Art of Magic (St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 1991), ix.
Shahrukh Husain, The Goddess: Power, Sexuality, and the Feminine Divine (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003), 151.
Robert S. Ellwood, Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 188.
Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double (1958; reprint, New York: Grove Press, 1985), 49–50.
Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 13.
Allison P. Coudert, “Alchemy IV: 16th–18th Century,” in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 46.
Lance Gharavi, Western Esotericism in Russian Silver Age Drama: Aleksandr Blok’s The Rose and the Cross (Saint Paul, MN: New Grail, 2008), 4.
Copyright information
© 2014 Edmund B. Lingan
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lingan, E.B. (2014). The Neo-Paganism Performance Current. In: The Theatre of the Occult Revival. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137448613_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137448613_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-49727-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-44861-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Theatre & Performance CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)