Neo-Pagan Sacred Art and Altars: Making Things Whole

Neo-Pagan Sacred Art and Altars: Making Things Whole. By Sabina Magliocco. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Pp. xii + 76, preface, notes, bibliography, photographs. $40.00 cloth, $18.00 paper) Sabina Magliocco's empathic narrative discloses the secretive and often misunderstood world of Neo-Paganism through a close look at its material culture-its shrines, masks, and body adornments. She shows ways in which practitioners and artists ascribe personal meanings to an array of mythological images, including animals, Mother Earth, and maiden goddesses, giving material form to their own individual religious and political outlooks. A fast-growing religion in the United States, Neo-Paganism covers a range of groups broadly encompassing revival Witchcraft (Wiccan) and revival Paganism (non-Wiccan). Although some sects (or "traditions") follow a particular ethnic, philosophical, political, or regional lore, or emulate the spirituality of Afro-Caribbeans or Native Americans, Neo-Pagans and Witches on the whole see themselves as the offspring of European pagan magical traditions-some ancient, dating back to the Roman Empire, some later (Renaissance Neoplatonism), and others quite recent (nineteenth-century syncretism) (2). An initial Neo-Pagan bond to the myth of a matriarchal golden age has by now been critiqued within the movement, but some practitioners continue to view feminism and environmentalism as the moral basis for their religious and political ideologies (3). The book begins with a framing vignette in which Magliocco candidly relates her own physical experiences upon entering the world of Witches and Pagans; in her view, folk aesthetics provides the best lens through which to gain insight into Neo-Pagan culture and its politics, and so her project is to draw attention to Neo-Pagan material culture (x-xi). The chapters that follow are organized straightforwardly. The first, "Neo-Paganism and Sacred Art," offers the lay reader a succinct introduction to the movement's values and esthetics. The second chapter, "Altars," details the making of various altars and their components, and the third, "Costumes," features jewelry, body modification, ritual dress and undress, and masks. The author's descriptions of various ritual objects and body adornments are often accompanied by the words of their creators (and are suitably enriched by several dozen color plates and halftones). The main argument of the book is that for Neo-Pagans, ritual and art, far more than being merely connected, are one and the same thing-inseparable. The artistic nature of their rituals explains their beliefs, and vice versa. "For most Pagans, it is the creative process itself which is the core of religious experience; it matters little whether the artist is a beginner or has a lifetime of experience" (xi); all practitioners are artisans or "artists of some sort" (x). Another important point is that Neo-Pagan art and religious belief are explicitly oppositional to dominant American culture, especially as elaborated by a puritanical Christian ethos that has historically viewed the corporeal realm as sinful. "Part of the process of identity creation implies embracing exactly those stereotypes that are excluded from the dominant paradigm: in this case, Romantic notions of the natural, the feminine, the primitive, the corporeal, and the wild. …