Today I'm
talking with Dr. Nevill Drury, a man who requires no
introduction for those acquainted with the contemporary Pagan and
esoteric scenes. The author of over sixty books dealing
with all manner of subjects, from the artwork of contemporary
Indigenous Australian communities to practical Neo-Shamanism, his
works have been translated into eighteen languages and counting. Born
in England, he has spent most of his life in Australia, receiving his
BA from the University of Sydney in 1968, after which he briefly
became a high school teacher before moving on to work in government
administration, publishing and television. He also turned his hand to
writing, resulting in his copious oeuvre. Nevill worked in the
Australian book publishing industry from 1976-2000, also obtaining
his MA honours degree in anthropology from Macquarie University in
1980. After briefly returning to high school teaching in 2004 he
began researching his PhD on the esoteric beliefs and practices of
Rosaleen Norton in 2006 while still based in various country high
schools. He received his doctorate from the University of Newcastle,
New South Wales, in 2008. Since then, he has published prolifically
in peer-reviewed, academic journals and anthologies, and produced his
own books and edited volumes dealing with the Western Esoteric
Traditions. I ask him about the journey he took to get to where
he is now, his latest projects, and the perils of publishing.
EDW: You have the distinction of having been born in Hastings, Southern England, in 1947, which I am sure you are aware was the very same town and year which witnessed the death of Aleister Crowley, the infamous “Great Beast” and founder of Thelema. Aged nine you moved all the way to Australia, where you have lived since, something which I can only imagine must have been a significant transition in your life. Did you feel that the environment of Australia affected your spiritual beliefs in any way, and how did you first come to develop your interest in the esoteric ?
Nevill Drury |
ND: I
grew up in a family that had a Theosophical orientation.
My father had been an officer in the Indian Army during World War Two
and was deeply interested in Eastern mysticism and the 'perennial
tradition', and my grandmother had several books by Madame
Blavatsky, Annie
Besant and C.W.
Leadbeater –
some of which later found their way onto our bookshelves in
Australia. These books were part of the spiritual culture of my
family, although I myself was never especially drawn to Theosophy per
se and
found the notions of ‘root races’ and discarnate Mahatmas quite
ridiculous. As a family we migrated to Sydney in 1957 when I was nine
years old and when I was still a teenager I came across The
Dawn of Magic by Louis
Pauwels and Jacques
Bergier.
I found this book inspirational, although I realize now that it
contains many errors and is, in fact, quite unreliable. Nevertheless
it was the first time I had heard of the Hermetic
Order of the Golden Dawn and
the mystical fiction of the Welsh novelist Arthur
Machen –
and that, by itself, offered a pathway into the Western Esoteric
Tradition. In 1968, at Sydney University, I met Stephen Skinner and
he introduced me to the study of the Kabbalah. After we wrote our
first book together – The
Search for Abraxas,
published in London in 1972 –Stephen moved to Britain and became
well known in London esoteric circles – he now lives in Singapore
and we have kept in touch over the years. At University we were both
attracted to the emergent international counterculture and, I think,
were deeply influenced by it. Stephen was much more attracted to
Aleister Crowley than I was, however, and I should point out that
although I was born in Hastings in 1947 I am definitely not Crowley’s
reincarnation – he died in December that year, and I was born in
October!
EDW:
You are well known for your work in popularising and propagating
Neo-Shamanic, or Western Shamanic ideas in such books as The
Shaman and the Magician (1982), Elements of
Shamanism (1989) and Sacred Encounters (2003)
and you have also written a work of mythic fiction – The
Shaman’s Quest (2004 / 2012). How did you first get
involved in this particular spiritual practice and furthermore, what
made you decide to start writing about it for a wider audience? What
do you see as the benefits of shamanistic practices for people living
in the Western world today, and how do you respond to critics who
oppose the “appropriation” of shamanic practices from indigenous
communities for Western usage ?
ND: During
the 1970s several of my friends pushed me towards the sort of
ceremonial magical practices associated with figures like Aleister
Crowley, Israel
Regardie and Gareth
Knight but
although I appreciated their appeal, I am not really a ritualist and
this approach didn’t work for me. For as long as I can remember I
have been attracted to visionary states of awareness and the study of
altered states of consciousness, and like many of my friends I had
some transformative experiences in the late 1960s and 1970s using
psychedelics. In 1980 I completed my Masters (honours) thesis at
Macquarie University on shamanic aspects of modern Western magic,
focusing especially on such magical techniques as ‘rising in the
planes’ using the Kabbalistic Tree Life and the apparent parallel
between visionary Western magic and states of trance in classical
shamanism. American anthropologist Dr
Michael Harner was
the external reader for my Masters thesis and he recommended
publication – that’s how The
Shaman and the Magician came
into existence, although I think I have written much better books
since. I met Michael for the first time in person in 1980 at a
Transpersonal conference in Melbourne and attended a workshop on
shamanic drumming. I found his neo-shamanic techniques really
effective and I continued this work on a regular basis with a small
group of friends, for several years. Basically, we drummed for each
other, made use of Michael’s visualizations (described in his
book The
Way of the Shaman),
and wrote down our experiences after each session. I published my
diary in a small book called Vision
Quest,
released by Prism Press in 1984.
![]() | |||||
Drury's most recent work on shamanism |
Living
at the time in a large modern city, I viewed the neo-shamanic
visionary experience as an adjunct to creativity and psychosomatic
healing and I still see it in those terms now. After all, Michael
Harner’s approach in neo-shamanism was to present the core
experiential concepts of indigenous shamanism to a modern Western
audience and there were no illusions or deceptions around that.
Personally I think the whole notion of appropriation has been greatly
overstated – after all, can’t we learn from the traditions of
other cultures? And I understand that members of some indigenous
groups – specifically the Sami and Inuit – approached Michael
Harner to ask for help in restoring shamanic awareness in their
respective cultures after sacred knowledge was lost as a result of
Christian missionary activity and European colonization. So these
sharing processes can flow in both directions. It seems to me that
the scholars who object to Michael Harner’s trans-cultural approach
have mostly been post-modern deconstructionists who are obsessed with
the supposedly unique characteristics of specific ‘shamanisms’ (a
dreadful term, in my opinion) and who have lost the ability to think
universally. I have little time for them and find both their academic
pedantry and their convoluted writing totally boring and unhelpful. I
have to admit that for many years, as you say, I was something of a
populariser of shamanic themes but I see nothing wrong in writing for
a general audience – you reach more people that way. My
introductory overview book The
Elements of Shamanism is
a case in point. In terms of sales it sold over 30,000 copies and was
published in ten languages. It remains one of my most successful
books. My more recent fictional work – The
Shaman’s Quest –
is also aimed at the general reader, and I think it is one of my best
books. It describes the experiences of four shamans, from North,
East, South and West, who journey towards the mythical ‘centre of
the world’ where a transformational healing process takes place.
EDW:
Although not directly related to your scholarship or to the esoteric,
I can't help but notice that you were an undergraduate at the
University of Sydney in 1968, the year of the famous international
student protests, something that resonates with my experiences in the
2010 student protests here in Britain. Did you experience any of the
"Spirit
of '68"
over in Sydney at the time ?
ND: I
was at Sydney University in from 1966 through to 1969 and it was a
great time to be a university student. It was a period of political
protests and wonderful parties. I wasn’t a student radical at the
time although I remember several of my friends and I being involved
in a large political rally against the visiting USA president, Lyndon
B. Johnson and
the State premier, Robert
Askin,
who wanted to go ‘all the way with LBJ’ in the Vietnam
War.
I was totally opposed to national conscription and regarded
Australia’s attempts to prop up the corrupt regime in South Vietnam
as totally misplaced. Fortunately for me, I wasn’t called up for
military service.
EDW:
For the documentary that you produced on The Occult
Experience (1985), you met with and filmed some of the
world's most significant figures then active in the Western Esoteric
scene, including senior English Wiccans Alex Sanders, Janet Farrar
and Stewart Farrar, the American Pagan Margot Adler, and Swiss artist
H.R. Giger. Looking back on it now, what was this remarkable
experience like ?
ND: This
was a wonderful experience for me and came on the back of a
television series on holistic health that I presented on ABC-TV in
the early 1980s. I was approached by Sydney-based documentary-maker
Frank Heimans to plan a 90-minute television programme on occult
beliefs and practices around the world and Frank managed to raise
$350,000 to finance it, which at the time was quite a lot of money.
We filmed in Perth, Western Australia, where there were several
Wiccan covens and also in the Yanchep caves north of Perth where a
group of local enthusiasts carried out rituals based on ancient
Egyptian magic – that made for some spectacular visual imagery. We
also filmed a group of Sydney-based Christian fundamentalists
‘casting out demons’. However some of the most spectacular
sequences took place overseas. We filmed well known American
witch Selena
Fox and
her close associates conducting a ritual in the snow in Wisconsin; a
wonderful, spontaneous ceremonial gathering of radical feminist
Goddess worshippers in Oakland, California – including interviews
with Z.
Budapest and Luisah
Teish –
and a meeting with Dr Michael Aquino and his wife Lilith, key members
of the Left-Hand path Temple
of Set in
San Francisco. We also filmed a shamanic workshop with Michael
Harner and
conducted an interview with Margot
Adler in
New York in the ritual space at the back of Herman
Slater’s
Magickal Childe bookshop. In Europe we visited visionary artist H.R.
Giger at
home in Zurich amidst his remarkable, hellish paintings. We also
filmed an initiatory sequence with Janet and Stewart
Farrar at
their coven in Drogheda, north of Dublin, and visited the founders of
the Fellowship
of Isis at
their Jacobite castle in Clonegal. Later we conducted an interview
with Alex
Sanders at
home in Bexhill, Sussex and filmed him invoking an Aztec deity – a
somewhat surprising variant on Wicca! – where he nearly set his
pants alight with the flaming torches he was holding.
(Note
to Ronald
Hutton who
tried to establish Sanders’ birth-date and writes about it in The
Triumph of the Moon:
Sanders told me he had frequently lied about his age in the past,
understating it by ten years. He was born in 1916, not 1926, and his
aged semi-naked body seemed to confirm this fact during filming.)
American pagan scholar Chas
S. Clifton,
who appears not to have realised that the documentary was financed by
a commercial television channel that in turn influenced the final
film-edit, has described The
Occult Experience on
his blog-site as ‘thunderingly pretentious and … basically
content-free’ but I feel this is both untrue and unfair: after all,
many key esoteric figures feature in the film – they speak for
themselves and often have very interesting things to say. The
documentary won a Bronze Award in the 1985 International Film and
Television Festival in New York, so someone must have liked it.
Readers of Albion Calling can decide for themselves: it is freely
available on my website: www.nevilldrury.com
EDW:
You're probably the world's foremost authority on Rosaleen
Norton (1917–1979),
Australia's homegrown Pagan Witch and infamous occult artist, having
first published a biography of her titled Pan's
Daughter (1988)
before devoting your PhD research to her, resulting in the expanded
volume Homage
to Pan (2003);
a book that I very much enjoyed and would not hesitate to recommend.
How did you first begin your investigations into this intriguing
character, and what is it about Norton's work that fascinates you
personally ? You also have another book out, Dark
Spirits (2012),
comparing Norton's work with that of London occult artist Austin
Osman Spare (1886–1956),
whose work is definitely seeing a resurgence of interest, at least in
Britain; what is it about his work that appeals ?
ND: I
became interested in Austin Spare and Rosaleen Norton (Roie, as she
liked to be known) in the 1970s. Both of them fascinated me because
they were extraordinary visionary artists whose imagery was deeply
grounded in the Western Esoteric tradition. Roie was always more
accessible to me because she lived in Australia. I first met her in
Sydney’s inner-city suburb of Kings Cross in 1977, while
researching my book Inner
Visions: Explorations in Magical Consciousness.
At the time Roie was living like a recluse in a dark basement flat at
the end of a long corridor in an old building in Roslyn Gardens, just
down from the centre of Kings Cross in the direction of Rushcutters
Bay. She was somewhat frail but still extremely mentally alert, with
expressive eyes and a hearty laugh. We talked at that meeting about
the god-forms Roie encountered in trance, about her view that Pan was
alive in the ‘back-to-Nature’ movement supported by the
counterculture, and we also discussed her strong personal bond with
animals. Roie told me that she believed most animals had much more
integrity than human beings and she also felt that cats, especially,
could operate both in the world of normal waking consciousness and in
the inner psychic world at the same time. Roie was very much an
adventurer – a free spirit – and she liked to fly through the
worlds opened to her by her imagination. Her art, of course,
reflected this.
![]() |
Drury's most thorough biography of Norton. |
Like
Rosaleen Norton, Austin Spare was also an outsider who was
substantially misunderstood by the public at large. My first contact
with Spare’s visionary art came about in 1970, while I was working
as a secondary school teacher in rural New South Wales. In the
somewhat isolated country town of West Wyalong, 300 miles west of
Sydney, I happened upon the first edition of a new part-work magazine
titled Man,
Myth and Magic and
was immediately struck by its dramatic cover – which featured a
painting of a supernatural entity by Austin Spare. Keen to find out
more about this unfamiliar visionary artist I decided to research his
background. At this stage there was no substantial information on him
of any kind, with the exception of a very brief introductory essay
by Kenneth and
Steffi Grant, published in 1961 as one of the Carfax Monographs.
In
1971, having abandoned my brief career as a school-teacher to live
instead in London, I obtained a reader’s ticket to the British
Museum and was able to read Spare’s self-published books
first-hand. As a young man Spare had won a scholarship to the Royal
College of Art but his brilliant skills as a figurative artist would
soon be overshadowed by his eccentric exploration of visionary trance
states, sorcery and sigil magic. His major self-published works
– Earth
Inferno (1905), A
Book of Satyrs (1907)
and The
Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): the Psychology of Ecstasy (1909-1913)
– were clearly not the work of a conventional artist and it was
understandable, while also very regrettable, that his creative genius
had not been acknowledged in any of the major British art histories.
![]() | |||||
Drury's Dark Spirits (2012). |
Excited
by the scope of Spare’s vision, I decided to seek out London
publishers who might be interested in his art and ideas, and I
eventually found my way to the office of occult publisher Neville
Spearman Armstrong in Whitfield Street, not far from the Museum.
Armstrong’s publishing company, Neville Spearman, was associated at
the time with well-known occult writers like Francis
King,
Trevor Ravenscroft and Erika
Cheetham and
included publications on modern Western magic, the prophecies of
Nostradamus, paranormal research and alchemy. I wasn’t really
surprised that Neville Armstrong quickly warmed to the idea of a book
describing the magical imagery of Austin Spare but it was equally
clear that such a book would also have to be much broader in scope. I
returned to Australia and after co-opting Stephen Skinner as my
co-author we decided together to produce a book that would explore
some of the major themes in the Western esoteric tradition and the
philosophies and cosmologies underpinning them. The resulting
volume, The
Search for Abraxas (1972),
included a substantial overview essay on Austin Spare and presented a
concise profile of an artist-magician who was largely unknown among
devotees of modern Western magic at that time. I think Spare is a
major figure in the 20th century Western magical revival and one of
its most original thinkers. He has also been acknowledged as a key
influence on contemporary Chaos magick.
EDW:
Although for years you have probably been better known for your work
on practical esotericism and also for your books on magic and
shamanism designed for a popular audience, in recent years you have
brought out a number of tomes through academic publishing houses that
are aimed at a more scholarly readership. What lay behind this
decision to give up your job teaching high school kids about English
and History, study for a PhD, and embrace the world of academia again
?
ND: Some
time around 2006, when I was still teaching in rural New South Wales,
I found out that Pan’s
Daughter was
a featured text in a Pagan Studies course that Dr
Marguerite Johnson was
teaching at the University of Newcastle. It occurred to me that maybe
I could use my existing research on Rosaleen Norton and work it up
into a PhD dissertation at Newcastle with Marguerite as my
supervisor. That’s how it turned out. The university allowed me to
work on my own, away from the campus – I was teaching in the rural
town of Leeton at the time – and I completed the PhD in a little
less than two years. I think the benefit of the extra study was that
it helped me tighten my writing style and document references more
specifically than I had in most of my general books. As a result, I
think my most recent publications are among my best.
EDW:
You are also known as an important figure in the wider popularisation
of artwork produced in Australia, particularly that made by people
from indigenous Australian communities. It's not an area that I know
much about, although I have attended lectures and public talks on the
archaeological study of Australian rock art, which I would assume
often carries with it a cultural connection to the contemporary
paintings. How did you first become involved in this fascinating
area, and have you been involved in wider academic and/or esoteric
engagement with the continent's Native peoples ?
ND: For
most of my professional life I worked in the Australian book industry
– initially as an editor for the local Australian branches of the
American publishing houses Harper & Row and Doubleday. In 1981,
together with book publisher Geoffrey King and graphic designer Judy
Hungerford, I co-founded a publishing company dedicated specifically
to Australian contemporary art. At the time Bay Books, an imprint
owned by Rupert
Murdoch,
was the only major competition. However, Bay Books covered only the
major artists – figures like Ian
Fairweather, Brett
Whiteley and Sid
Nolan –
and there was vast scope to publish the works of significant
mid-career artists across the country. This is what we did –
initially as limited editions and from 1985 onwards as standard
hardcover publications. It soon became obvious, given that we were
marketing our publications to schools as well as art collectors, that
we should also publish significant Aboriginal artists. We released
the first scholarly monograph on an Aboriginal artist – Dr
Vivien Johnson’s Art
of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri –
in 1994, and followed it with publications on Michael
Jagamara Nelson, Emily
Kngwarreye and Gordon
Bennett as
well as books on the Aboriginal art of the Utopia and Balgo
communities and a reference book on artists of the Western Desert. I
visited the artists at Balgo in remote Western Australia, and Utopia,
north-east of Alice Springs, and found this a very enriching
experience. I would have liked to publish a major work on Rover
Thomas –
one of the true greats in Aboriginal art – but was unable to get
this project off the ground.
EDW:
One of your most recent works is Pathways
in Modern Western Magic,
an edited volume published by Concrescent Press, one of a number of
new esoteric publishers to have appeared on the block in recent
years. Last year I interviewed one of the contributors to the
anthology, Dr. Dave Evans, while it also includes contributions from
such notables as James R. Lewis, Nikki Bado, Thomas Karlsson, Lynne
Hume, Robert J. Wallis, Amy Hale and Jenny Blain on topics as
disparate as the Dragon Rouge, technoshamanism and emic approaches to
fieldwork among magical communities. You of course also provide two
essays in the volume, on the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and
Thelemic sex magic respectively. I'd be interested in knowing how
this particular project came together, and what role you see for
volumes like this – filled with peer-reviewed contributions by
academics but not produced through a conventional academic publisher
– in the fields of Pagan and Esoteric Studies ? Do you see it as a
part of the wider academic dissatisfaction with traditional avenues
of publication ?

ND: In
2009 I signed a contract with the Dutch scholarly publisher Brill for
a multi-authored volume titled A
Handbook of Modern Western Magic and
the well-known Swedish academic Henrik
Bogdan was
brought in as co-editor. In addition to the authors you have just
mentioned we were also hoping to attract chapters from scholars like
Gregory Tillett (writing on ‘Modern Western magic and Theosophy’),
Susan Johnston Graf (‘Yeats, creativity and magic’), Thomas Hakl
(‘The Fraternitas Saturni’), Jesper Petersen (‘Contemporary
Satanic spirituality’), Kennet Granholm (‘Ophidian magick in the
Scandinavian Dragon Rouge’), Carole
M. Cusack ‘The
Discordians’ ) and Stephen Skinner (‘Magical evocation and
Goetia’). Henrik also committed to writing a chapter titled ‘Ritual
initiations and spiritual transformation in modern esotericism’.
You can imagine my surprise – and, frankly, anger – when the
editorial board rejected the majority of chapters in the submitted
anthology. Evidently several of the chapters were insufficiently
post-modern and ‘etic’, lacked a critical analytical edge, or
were simply ‘unsuitable’ (too ‘emic’). Several of the authors
whose work was rejected had published in the past with university
presses and a few even with Brill itself. Following a suggestion
from Dr
Amy Hale that
a new American imprint, Concrescent
Press,
might be interested in publishing the anthology I wrote to all of the
contributors and explained the situation. Some authors whom I have
listed above wrote back and said that their university contracts
precluded them from publishing with little-known publishers but many
were willing to go ahead and publish with the small independent
Californian publishing house. (Interestingly, the publisher at
Concrescent is Sam
Webster,
who is currently studying under Ronald Hutton at the University of
Bristol – so there is an Anglo-American connection.)
At
Concrescent Press the manuscripts were peer-reviewed by a selection
of American academics and a new anthology assembled. I felt that the
revised selection was still reasonably coherent but there were a
couple of obvious gaps so I requested a chapter on the Dragon Rouge
from the Order’s founder, Thomas
Karlsson,
a chapter on cybermagic from LibuÅ¡e MartÃnková, a Czech researcher
whom I contacted via the Internet, and an ‘insider’ account of
the Temple of Set from former High Priest, Don Webb. Concrescent
Press published Pathways
in Modern Western Magic in
September 2012 and naturally I hope it goes well for them. I am sure
this new press will attract a range of academic submissions in the
future. The focus of Concrescent Press is on esoteric studies and the
Western magical traditions.
EDW:
In your introductory piece to Pathways
in Modern Western Magic,
you emphasise the importance of emic, or “insider” perspectives
in the study of contemporary esotericism, and I'd be interested to
hear if you had any thoughts on the recent attack on the
over-reliance on emic approaches within Pagan Studies made by Danish
Religious Studies scholar Markus
Altena Davidsen in
his 2012 paper published in the Method
and Theory in the Study of Religion journal
? His critique primarily hinged on another edited volume that you had
contributed to, the hefty Handbook
of Contemporary Paganism (Brill,
2008), and this whole debate looks set to become a bit of a
theoretical battleground in ensuing years.
ND: I have just
read Markus Davidsen’s critique of ‘pagan scholarship’ – with
all his references to the alleged shortcomings associated with
so-called ‘insider perspectives’ – and I have to say I find his
approach totally misguided. After all, where do authentic religious
and magical experiences actually originate? The answer can be found
by exploring the psyches, or ‘consciousness’ of the practitioners
and devotees themselves. If we move beyond the analysis of belief
systems to the actual essence of religion and magic we often find
ourselves entering a domain characterised by profoundly
transformative spiritual experiences. These are experiences
associated with altered states of consciousness, not intellectual
conceptual frameworks imposed by theoreticians at a distance. So is
it not indeed fortunate that there are several notable
practitioner-academics who are able to apply their scholarly
knowledge in defining, describing and referencing these experiences?
Isn’t that what ‘religious studies’ is fundamentally about?
Davidsen’s insistence that religious studies as an academic
discipline has to be defined by imposed theoretical frameworks and
scientific perspectives seems to me to miss the point entirely. Here
is a scholar who sounds like he is more in love with the footnote
than the main narrative.
By way of
contrast, as I made clear in my Introduction to Pathways in
Modern Western Magic, I am all in favour of emically-oriented
scholarly discourse and I think it is deeply insulting to describe it
as ‘ignorant’. It comes as no surprise that many of the etically
oriented publications that Davidsen is obviously in awe of so
frequently come across as jargon-bound, ponderously analytical, and
sterile. So often these publications are for scholars writing simply
for their colleagues and, in my opinion, they are ultimately of
little lasting value. As for my own chapter in the Brill Handbook
of Contemporary Paganism, I have to no desire whatever to follow
Davidsen’s advice and engage in ‘minimal reinterpretation’ in
order to make it ‘commensurable with the critical-naturalist
paradigm’ – as a historian (my PhD is in Humanities) 1 have
simply presented the material as accurately and lucidly as I can, and
I am sure many other writers contributing to the anthology would feel
the same way.
EDW:
Also of note are two other recent publications of yours. The
first, Stealing
Fire From Heaven: The Rise of Modern Western Magic (2011)
has been brought out by the prestigious Oxford University Press, and
offers a scholarly overview and introduction to this particular area
that I'm sure will prove to be of great utility to students and
established scholars in coming years. The second is a volume you have
co-authored with Dr
Lynne Hume titled The
Varieties of Magical Experience which
has just been published in the United States by Praeger. Aside from
these, are there any more academic projects on the horizon that we
should be keeping our eyes out for ?

EDW:
And lastly, because of the many divergent views that arise, I like to
ask all of my interviewees where they see the academic fields of
Pagan and Esoteric Studies going in the next fifty years or so ? Do
you share the concerns of another Australian Pagan Studies scholar
whom I have interviewed, Caroline Tully, that there is a serious
problem arising between academics involved in these fields and
anti-intellectual elements within the wider esoteric community ?
ND: I
don’t regard the division you mention – between scholars and
anti-intellectual practitioners – as the main problem, although I
acknowledge that it is somewhat problematical. I think the biggest
issue we face is that some scholars will become increasingly
fascinated by cross-referencing each other’s jargon – ‘occulture’
is one term that comes to mind – while forgetting that magic and
religion are ultimately experiential in nature and should be treated
as such.
EDW: Thank you for taking the time out to undertake this interview Nevill, and I wish you all the best in future!