Magic and Witchery in the Modern West: Celebrating the Twentieth Anniversary of 'The Triumph of the Moon' ed. by Shai Feraro and Ethan Doyle White

Abstract

Reviewed by: Magic and Witchery in the Modern West: Celebrating the Twentieth Anniversary of 'The Triumph of the Moon' ed. by Shai Feraro and Ethan Doyle White Michael Ostling Ronald Hutton, magic, witchcraft, Paganism, Wicca, Thelema, Reclaiming, the Sabbatic Craft, the Typhonian Tradition, Museum of Witchcraft in Cornwall shai feraro and ethan doyle white, eds. Magic and Witchery in the Modern West: Celebrating the Twentieth Anniversary of 'The Triumph of the Moon.' New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Pp. xiv + 259. Before the publication of Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon in 1999, the study of modern magical traditions was a marginal and marginalized affair. White and Feraro's introduction to this festschrift emphasizes the high price Hutton initially paid for "paving the way" (v) for the scholarly treatment of Witchcraft today. Although he was already an established historian when he turned his attention to contemporary Paganism, Hutton's "career stalled" for almost a decade: he was passed over for grants and promotions, and some colleagues wrote him off as a crank (8). As Hutton reminds [End Page 273] us in his Afterword to the present volume, Witchcraft remains counter-cultural twenty years later (251), but the study of Witchcraft has become respectable, largely through Hutton's own unassailably rigorous erudition and good will. Pagan studies has flourished over the last two decades, and now enjoys its own journal (The Pomegranate), its own international conferences, its own schools and schisms and controversies, all signs of a healthy and growing field of research. Many of the foundational figures of this interdiscipline share the pages of Magic and Witchery, together with several up-and-coming researchers. The result is a rich, occasionally cantankerous, always provocative babble of voices, which collectively indicate the vigor, and the diversity, of Pagan studies today. The contributors to this volume approach their subject from a variety of methodological backgrounds: religious studies, anthropology, history, folklore, even psychology. Yet the ten chapters are perhaps best analyzed into two modes of inquiry. The first, which I will call "genealogical" (with reference less to Foucault than to the American Kennel Club), produces intricate concatenations of interconnected "lineages" or "traditions"—Gardnerian Wicca, Thelema, Reclaiming, and the OTO of course, but also the Sabbatic Craft, the Typhonian Tradition, the Nameless Faith of the Witchblood—often with memberships never larger than a dozen and the lifespan of a mayfly. This mode veers toward fandom, and seldom convinces the outsider reader to care about the genealogical interconnections so minutely delineated. When the discussion turns toward the question of when and by what chain of influence a given Pagan thinker first encountered a particular line of Aleister Crowley's poetry, I tend to drift. A second, comparative mode of inquiry is more promising, and involves connecting modern Paganism to wider issues of social, intellectual, and cultural history. Three themes, in particular, emerge across the chapters: tradition and creativity, gender and sexuality, and Pagan relations with the natural world. In what follows, I will review the chapters according to these themes, rather than according to their ordering in the book. Since modern Paganisms are more obviously invented traditions than is true of more established (but no less invented) traditions such as Judaism or Christianity, every chapter examines the theme of Pagan creativity at least to some extent, but some take this creativity as their focus. Léon A. van Gulik (Chapter 8) finds that Wiccan ritual strikes an unusual balance between routine and contingency, working to "routinize the erratic" in ways that allow for endless inventiveness within stable constraints (169). However, his theoretical account of ritual creativity, complete with a multi-axial diagram worthy of Agrippa, obscures rather than clarifies how this process unfolds. [End Page 274] By contrast, Ethan Doyle White's case study of the Luciferan occultist Andrew D. Chumbley (Chapter 10) shows ritual creativity in action. Chumbley emerges as a ritual performance artist at play with various forms of esoteric drag—now a Vodou priest, now the Peacock Angel of Yezidism, now Jesus Christ crowned with thorns. Despite great efforts in the genealogical mode, Doyle White doesn't manage to disentangle Chumbley's multiple, overlapping, inconsistent self-mythologizations; moreover, such a disentangling would...