An Interview with Jimmy Elwing and Aren Roukema

Today here at Albion Calling I am interviewing two young scholars of Western esotericism, Jimmy Elwing and Aren Roukema, who are the masterminds behind the new open access peer-reviewed journal, Correspondences: An Online Journal for the Academic Study of Western Esotericism. We discuss their academic backgrounds and their role in the development of the journal, alongside their thoughts on what open access publishing has to offer scholarship.

Jimmy Elwing (left) and Aren Roukema (right)

[EDW] Both of you are currently engrossed in your rMA postgraduate studies at the University of Amsterdam’s Center for History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents, one of the world’s few academic departments devoted to the study of Western esotericism. What made the two of you decide to move to the Netherlands and study there; was the decision influenced by your personal backgrounds or undergraduate research?

[JE] When I conducted my undergraduate studies at the University of Gothenburg, I had the opportunity of having Henrik Bogdan as lecturer and supervisor, and it was largely he who made me aware of the academic study of Western esotericism. Having taken an introductory course in Western esotericism, as well as a tutorial on Renaissance esotericism, I decided to dedicate my BA thesis to the subject—and I really enjoyed doing so. When conducting my undergraduate research I realised that there is so much left to be done in the field, and when I discussed this with Henrik he recommended me to increase my knowledge of the field by applying for the MA programme at the Center for History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents. I applied, got accepted, and moved to Amsterdam—and the rest is history.

[AR] For me the decision to study at the University of Amsterdam was personal. I am a Dutch citizen, but I grew up in Canada and had always wanted to live in the Netherlands. I knew about the Center but I hadn’t really planned to focus on Western esotericism, since my knowledge of the field was comprised of whatever I had gleaned from reading Umberto Eco and Dan Brown. However, I was interested in learning more so I took a course with Wouter Hanegraaff. His ideas on the importance of esoteric currents to Western history and culture were very convincing so I decided to further immerse myself.

[EDW] You’re both involved in the wider study of western esotericism, but my readers might be interested in learning precisely what areas of this fascinating topic you are focusing in on? What research projects are you working on at the moment, and will any of it see publication any time soon?

[JE] I have a wide array of interests within the field. In the past I have been doing research on sexuality and esotericism, more specifically on Ida Craddock and nineteenth century spiritualism, looking at issues of gender, sexuality and feminism in the study of Western esotericism. My current research is on contemporary forms of witchcraft, more specifically on what is commonly referred to—at least by some practitioners—as “traditional” or “modern traditional witchcraft.” My research into contemporary witchcraft is largely based on questions of how practitioners construct the history of their witch-cult and what strategies—political, rhetorical, polemical, etcetera—are used for legitimising one’s own religious or “magical” identity and tradition. This also ties in to other, broader questions concerning theoretical discussions in the study of Western esotericism.

[AR] I am actually a Literature scholar at heart, so everything I’m working on involves the exploration of esoteric contexts in literature, usually in its English and either Victorian or early twentieth century forms. Right now I’m finishing up M.A. research on Charles Williams, and I’m also interested in Yeats and Bulwer-Lytton. Following my MA I’ll be doing PhD research on the roots of Science Fiction in modern occultism.

[EDW] Considering the fact that you were undoubtedly very busy with your postgraduate research – having to ensure that essays and presentations were produced to deadline, and that all essential readings were done – what made you decide to add to your already extensive workload and create Correspondences? How did it all begin?

[JE and AR] When we met in the MA programme at the University of Amsterdam, we realised that we not only shared an interest in researching Western esotericism, but that we also had common ideas and opinions on academic knowledge culture and open access publishing. Since we both have been involved with a few student magazines in the past, we also felt a need for a platform in which scholars of all levels (non-affiliated, BA, MA, PhD, Dr.) can publish their peer-reviewed research and have it read not only within academia but also by the broader public. And that’s how it all began.

[EDW] For the journal you managed to assemble an impressive selection of international scholars to fill the ranks of your editorial board, among them Henrik Bogdan, Amy Hale, and Boaz Huss. Were they all on board from the very beginning, or was it a long, difficult process to get them all to sign up?

[JE and AR] We are very happy to have such excellent scholars on our editorial board. Most of them joined up at the beginning as there was a real enthusiasm for an open access journal in the field. Peter Forshaw and Egil Asprem deserve special credit for their levels of enthusiasm and encouragement about the idea and were very helpful in getting everything set up.

[EDW] Why did you choose the title of Correspondences? Was it a clear choice or were you also keen on any other potential titles?

[JE and AR] We came up with a few ideas but Correspondences was always the pretty clear favourite. It definitely won out over Stuff my Prof Says and We’re Doing This Cause the Aliens Told Us To. We just liked the double entendre—the name captures our focus on creating an open forum for discussion surrounding issues related to the field of Western esotericism, and of course the doctrine of correspondences between above and below is an important aspect of many “esoteric” philosophies.

[EDW] Correspondences is part of a wider trend toward the creation of free-to-read, online peer reviewed journals not under the control of profit-driven publishing houses. As part of this, the contributors get to keep the copyright to their own work, rather than sign it over it to the publishing company. I think that this is a really great step for the diversification of academia, putting some of the publishing power back into the hands of academics. Were you both supporters of this wider movement prior to Correspondences, and what effect do you think it could have in the academic world?

[JE and AR] We have both been supporters of the potential of web-based communication for addressing limitations created by particular power structures in, for example, the music industry or the journalism industry. However, these are examples of areas of society where attempts to rejig existing power structures to allow more control by artists or news providers, and greater, more diverse access for consumers, seem to be running a little ragged. We hope that in academia the situation will be somewhat different, but with the ever growing sway of the neo-liberal university it isn’t hard to see a lot of challenges ahead. Open access publishing successfully circumvents the limitations placed on both the speed of publication and the personal control of research, but like other “industries” that have gone before it, the knowledge economy has a lot of other power structures within that will continue to prefer older publishing models, and that have little to do with who is actually behind the publication of journals. Journal ranking systems, for example, are very important to scholars of all levels who need to advance in their careers. It takes a brave scholar indeed to ignore the opportunity to publish in a high ranking journal (most of which are still produced by publishing companies) and publish in a lower ranked open access journal instead.

[EDW] Shortly after the first issue of Correspondences went public, the two of you headed up to Gothenburg, Sweden for the fourth conference of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE). What was the reception to Correspondences that you encountered both at ESSWE like, and does it differ from the reception that you have received more generally? Are you pleased with that response, and is there anything you intend to change as a result?

[JE and AR] The reception has been excellent. We wouldn’t say there has been any difference between the enthusiastic response we’ve received generally and what we heard at the conference. It was great to have the opportunity to make it to Gothenburg and join in such a large forum of discussion on a wide variety of topics and issues related to Western Esotericism. Many of the authors featured in the first issue and almost all of the Editorial Board members were there as well, so we got to swap a lot of ideas for future issues.

[EDW] What is in store for the future of Correspondences? Have you already begun thinking about issue 1(2)? Do you see it as something that you will continue editing indefinitely, or do you think that it will have a more limited lifespan, like the Journal for the Academic Study of Magic that the late Dave Evans and Alison Butler ran from 2002 to 2010?

[JE and AR] We have a lot of plans for the future, but we do not want to say too much before they are finalised. Currently we are working on the next issue of Correspondences and we have received some really interesting articles that we hope will make it to the winter issue. As for our future as editors—that rumour about our divinatory powers turned out to be unsubstantiated. However, in our “best laid plans” we both plan to work with it for a long time and are also currently looking into the possibility of hiring a Review Editor.

[EDW] It seems to me that the academic study of Western esotericism is blossoming at the moment. Not only are there peer-reviewed outlets like Aries and Correspondences up and running, but big, established companies like Oxford University Press are releasing increasing numbers of texts on occultism, and both the University of Amsterdam and University of Exeter have departments offering postgraduate courses on the subject. This being the case, I’d be interested to hear where you thought that the field was headed over the coming decades? Do you see it as constantly growing in size and influence, or do you think it has just about peaked at its maximum capacity? Considering the recent austerity spending cuts that have hit Western universities, do you think it possible that the field might even decline?

[JE and AR] It’s hard to predict, of course. If we had to guess, we’d say that even if the field of Western esotericism doesn’t continue to grow, the amount of research being done in other fields will. We believe that the research that has been done in the last few decades will promote renewed interest in esoteric ideas, movements, and figures in fields such as literature, history, religious studies, history of science, etcetera. The theoretical work which has attempted to highlight the importance to Western history and culture of figures, movements, and ideas that have previously been rejected as esoteric will be, and has already been, particularly influential, as this gives scholars a better framework with which to approach esoteric material. Look at the field of Literature for example. Scholars have been attempting to tackle the relationship of writers such as Blake and Yeats to esotericism for decades—centuries in Blake’s case. However, with some of the new models that have been developed in order to identify what esotericism is and how it should be approached in academic research, Literature scholars can look at these two figures in a clearer light.

[EDW] Jimmy and Aren, thank you for talking with Albion Calling. I look forward to the next issue of Correspondences.

In Memoriam: Dr. Dave Evans

It is with a heavy heart that I announce the passing of Dr. Dave Evans, a historian who carried out pioneering work in documenting various facets of the British occult milieu since 1947. A practising magician as well as a scholar, Dave was the author of both Aleister Crowley and the 20th Century Synthesis of Magic (2001) and The History of British Magick After Crowley (2007), the latter based on doctoral research that he undertook at Bristol University under Professor Ronald Hutton.

Dr Evans was also the co-editor of Ten Years of Triumph of the Moon (2009), editor of The Enduring Problems with Prophecy (2012), and author of articles and chapters in a range of both academic and popular outlets. He was also the mastermind behind the Academic Study of Magic list-serve, and with Dr Alison Butler was responsible for creating the Journal for the Academic Study of Magic; these ventures have helped bring together scholars interested in Western esotericism, witchcraft, and allied areas in constructive dialogue.

Dr Evans was a down-to-earth and funny guy. He was very much straight talking, always willing to give a forthright answer or honest opinion, which was probably part of what made him so endearing to his friends. He kindly gave an interview with me here at Albion Calling last December, in which he reflected on his life and work; reading it back now gives an added poignancy to many of his comments. I hope that the interview acts as something of a tribute to him and encourages future readership for his work.

Having been diagnosed with a terminal illness earlier this summer, Dave decided to live out his last days amongst the beautiful scenery of New Zealand.

An Interview with Brian Hoggard

After what seems too lengthy an absence here at Albion Calling, I’m back with another interview in my ongoing series of discussions with academics devoted to the study of religion, ritual, and magic. This week we have Worcester-based archaeologist Brian Hoggard, one of the foremost researchers into the archaeology of British folk magic, a fascinating subject to which he devoted a chapter in Owen Davies and Willem de Blecourt’s important edited volume Beyond the Witch Trials: Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment Europe (Oxford University Press, 2004). Hoggard is currently preparing his latest project, Apotropaios, a monograph on apotropaic and counter-witchcraft material concealed within the home, which looks set to represent a major contribution to the field. We talk about his research and the role that archaeology can play in the study of folk magic.

[EDW] So Brian, thanks for talking to Albion Calling today; the first question I’d like to ask is how you first decided to pursue archaeology, and what was the academic trajectory that led you to the position that you are at now?

[BH] During my late teens and early twenties I developed a strong interest in local places and wanted to understand the stories behind them. This led to me studying local history, archaeology, architecture and folklore. It also led to me returning to college and then going on to University where I originally intended to study archaeology. I’d started writing a book about Bredon Hill [in Worcestershire] by then however so needed to remain in the area and at that time the best local choice was to do a history degree. Luckily for me the history of witchcraft was part of my module choices and I focused on that in my dissertation too.  When I came across Ralph Merrifield’s book [The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic] it seemed that my background subjects were perfectly suited to doing an in-depth study of ritual objects from the early modern period so I began studying at that point (back in 1999).

Objects concealed behind a fireplace in Pershore, Worcestershire

[EDW] You’re one of very few archaeologists to have actually devoted your attentions to folk magic in the British archaeological record. Off the top of my head, I can only think of the late Ralph Merrifield, author of The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic (1987), who really devoted considerable attention to the subject. What made you pursue this research interest, and have you found it easy pursuing such a neglected topic? Do you feel that there have been naysayers within the archaeological community who are sceptical of this sort of research?

[BH] I’ve always had an interest in alternative beliefs and practices so stumbling across Merrifield’s book was a joy. Having just studied witchcraft from the history perspective and discovered that none of the historians in that field had included any archaeology at all it was clear to me that more work was needed.  One of the advantages of studying an area like this is that every new bit of information feels like an exciting discovery because it’s more than likely not been recorded or written about before. There is some work out there on this topic but it tends to be very find-specific rather than looking at the broader subject area.  I haven’t come across many naysayers but the nature of these finds is that they are incidental within building archaeology so often appear as footnotes rather than the subject of papers in themselves.

[EDW] Early modern and modern British folk magic has been examined by several historians (Keith Thomas, Owen Davies etc), so I wondered if you had taken an interdisciplinary approach by looking at the archaeological material in tandem with historical documentation? Do the two sources match up, or are you finding things in the archaeology that the historians just aren’t picking up on?

[BH] The aim is to be as interdisciplinary as is needed to properly understand the finds.  Most of the objects were intentionally concealed and appear to have been deliberately not mentioned in contemporary documents so as not to draw attention to them so often the only evidence is the material evidence. Certainly a good number of practices were written about which helps provide a context for these other, more private, practices.  Occasionally a find will tie up with some local history, for example, a witch-bottle from Essex was accurately dated and this clearly tied-in with the terminal ill-health of a former occupant of the house.  No mention was ever made of any witch-bottles but the evidence was there in the hearth and the history of the occupants was well known.

A witch bottle that contained hair, pins, and urine, placed beneath
the hearth of a cottage in Felmersham, Bedfordshire

[EDW] Occultism and magical practices are widespread in contemporary Britain, in many cases having little or nothing to do with traditional vernacular practices of healing and counter-witchcraft, but I’d be very interested if you had had experiences with individuals who do perform older forms of spell-casting and related practices?

[BH] I regularly receive correspondence from contemporary witches and pagans. Some are Wiccan but many are independent and claim to be descended from and trained by other witches.  Pretty much all of them know about witch-bottles but have their own variations of the recipe.  Written charms are the only other find-type that they tend to speak to me about and, again, modern versions are very different to the ones recovered from old buildings.  One or two witches have claimed to have a book which has been handed down through their family which contain all kinds of magic, herbalism and astrology - thus far none have been prepared to share but they do have a strong code of conduct about that.

[EDW] You have appeared on television on numerous occasions; could you tell us a bit about your views on the role that documentaries can play in encouraging greater public awareness of archaeology and folk magic?

[BH] I think documentaries can be a really good way of outlining the topic for people and giving them the chance to see the objects. It’s rare that they go into any great depth on the subject (which is a shame!) but maybe one day a proper documentary series will be created which explores the objects and the theories about them more fully. Certainly they’ve been very useful for me in drawing attention to my research and encouraging people to report objects to me through my website and definitely they’ve had a role in spreading awareness amongst heritage professionals too.

A dried cat found in the thatch of a building in Eckington, Worcestershire

[EDW] Your new project, which you are currently in the process of raising funds for, is called Apotropaios – it’s a book drawing on your many years of research into objects concealed in houses, among them shoes, dead cats, and witch bottles. It looks set to be a really important milestone in the study of these items. Could you tell us more about this, and your decision to self-publish?

[BH] Apotropaios is the Greek root of the word apotropaic which means ‘evil-averting.’  I’ve been studying the topic since 1999 but with one thing and another I’ve never had the time to get around to publishing it.  I’ve decided that my book needs to be really well illustrated and that self-publishing is the best way to achieve that.  I am also really keen to have substantial appendices in the back of the book which will be useful for future researchers of the topic. I’m just not sure I’d be able to find a publisher who would be prepared to illustrate it to that degree or include all the data.  The plan is to publish something that will be a genuine resource for future scholars and to finally get all my thoughts out into the public domain.

[EDW] And lastly, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on what you see as the future for the archaeology of ritual and magic here in Britain?

[BH] There’s still a lot of scope for study here.  Although I have done the largest survey on the house protection topic thus far I am well aware that it is nowhere near exhaustive.  Detailed regional studies (perhaps on a county basis) are needed and indeed more individual case studies. There is so much of this archaeology out there and it needs mapping to demonstrate the extent and duration of these beliefs and practices. It’s an exciting area with huge room for more study.

EDW: Thank you Brian, and good luck with Apotropaios. For those who would like to donate to Brian’s project, and enable him to publish the book to the desired standard, you can visit his Kickstarter link here. But be quick, as the fundraising campaign ends on 16 August 2013; that’s just ten days away!

Upcoming conference: “Popular Antiquities: Folklore and Archaeology" (12-13 October 2013)

I have had the honour of being invited to co-organise this year’s “Popular Antiquities: Folklore and Archaeology” conference, alongside UCL PhD candidate Tina Paphitis and the Folklore Society’s Dr. Caroline Oates. Scheduled to take place at the UCL Institute of Archaeology in Central London on Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 October, it looks set to be a fascinating event, and I’d welcome any of my readers to grab a ticket and come along for the weekend. Unfortunately entry isn’t free, but we are offering concessions for those who are unwaged or students, as well as those who are already members of The Folklore Society. We of course will be providing lunch, refreshments, and wine!

This will be the third year that this event has been held, and the second which has seen it run as a collaboration between UCL and The Folklore Society. We have some great speakers lines up, including some big names in the field of folkloristics like Jeremy Harte, who will be rounding off Saturday with a discussion of “Moral Megaliths.” If this conference looks like the sort of thing that would interest you, grab your ticket here. I hope to see some of you there.

An Interview with Dr. Christine Hoff Kraemer

After two months’ absence, I’m back here at Albion Calling with the latest in my ongoing series of interviews with academics operating in the study of ritual, religion, and magic. Today we talk with Dr. Christine Hoff Kraemer of Cherry Hill Seminary, an American Pagan theologian/thealogian and religious studies scholar who received her doctoral dissertation from Boston University in 2008. Having a research interest in the interplay between religion, minority sexualities and popular culture, namely cinema and comic books, she has seen her work published in a series of peer-reviewed outlets, and is responsible for both a recently-released monograph, Seeking the Mystery: An Introduction to Pagan Theologies, as well as the edited volume Graven Images: Religion in Comics and Graphic Novels, co-edited with A. David Lewis. We discuss Alan Moore, the pitfalls of academia, and the growth of contemporary Pagan theology.

[EDW] Hello Christine, and welcome to Albion Calling. The first question that I’d like to ask is how you got involved with Religious Studies, and what attracted you to academia in the first place? Was it always a burning ambition of yours or was it one of those things that just seemed to have a will of its own?

[CHK] I was in love with the academy when I was in college. I published my first peer-reviewed article shortly after finishing my undergraduate degree, and then I took a year and a half off school. I spent my entire “break” desperate to get back into school as soon as possible; I was working for a church and often ended up in the minister’s office devouring books of theology. I considered seminary, but in the end I found an interdisciplinary program in Religion and Literature that would allow me to continue the literary and media criticism I’d studied as an undergrad. I had a vision of myself becoming a professor, teaching, having a family, and being able to serve as a leader in my religious community.

To be honest, I think much of the encouragement I got from teachers and clergy about becoming a professor came from their experiences of the academy twenty to thirty years before. I was about halfway through my PhD when I fully understood that, not only was the academic job market a disaster, but many of my professors were living unhappy, overcommitted, highly stressed lives. I’d thought I was signing up for a stable career of teaching and reading great literature, with enough flexibility to also pursue my own research and still have a spiritual and social life. It became clear to me that a professorship was no longer a job, but an all-consuming lifestyle that didn’t necessarily leave time for family, friends, or religious community.

I am thankful that my primary advisor, an ordained Episcopal priest, understood that there was more to life than the academy and encouraged me to find work that I loved. As a result, although I maintain a relationship with academia through publishing, presenting at conferences, and teaching at an alternative academic institution (Cherry Hill Seminary, an online contemporary Pagan seminary), I haven’t felt tied to my identity as an academic. Today, I work as a nonprofit consultant and as Managing Editor of the Pagan Channel at Patheos.com. Patheos has a great model for interfaith public religious education, and I’m thrilled to be part of it.

Many of the readers here have probably seen the flood of articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education and elsewhere announcing the end of tenure and decrying the way graduate students and new PhDs are emerging unprepared to make a living. Happily, the American Academy of Religion (AAR) has been responsive to these concerns; last fall, I was able to get funding to bring Dr. Amy Hale to Boston, where she presented on alternative academic careers in the humanities and social sciences. Amy is a Celticist who has made a career of online teaching and consulting while also continuing to do research. The workshop was so well-received that we were invited to repeat it at the national AAR conference. The need for this kind of re-envisioning of the academic life is enormous.

Rather than mourning the end of tenure, I’m more interested in looking ahead toward alternative models of higher education. I think that online and hybrid learning environments (partially online, partially in person) are going to be essential to the academy of the twenty-first century, as will instructors that have real-world experience in their fields. I don’t think there’s any way we can return to an academy based on tenured professorships, but I do think that universities could recognize the special expertise of adjunct instructors who are working in their fields outside the academy and compensate them appropriately.

[EDW] In 2008 you completed your doctorate in Religious and Theological Studies at Boston University with a thesis titled “The Erotic Fringe: Sexual Minorities and Religion in Contemporary American Literature and Film.” Could you tell us more about this project? You’ve since published papers on sexual minorities and religion in The Pomegranate and the Religion Compass; is it an area of research that you'd like to get back to in the future?

[CHK] Thanks so much for the interest in my dissertation! Some of the chapters have been published or are forthcoming as articles; “Contemporary Paganism, Utopian Reading Communities, and Sacred Nonmonogamy: The Religious Impact of Heinlein’s and Starhawk’s Fiction” appeared in The Pomegranate in 2011, for instance. I’m also happy to send the entire dissertation to anyone who contacts me.

The dissertation project emerged organically out of projects I’d pursued during graduate school. As a literary and media critic, I saw my task as spotlighting and giving context to popular works with important social, religious, or political messages, especially those that hadn’t yet received much scholarly attention (Angels in America was the only one of the works I treated that had significant existing criticism). Sexual minorities, gender identity, the erotic as a theological concept, and hybrid media forms were all recurring issues in the works I found myself writing about. It was in looking for the threads of connection between them that I discovered my research question.

I haven’t really stopped writing about religion and sexual minorities since, although in my recent work, I’ve been approaching the subject through the discipline of theology rather than through religious studies. I’ve just turned in a book manuscript entitled Eros and Touch from a Pagan Perspective: Divided for Love’s Sake to my editor at Routledge—quite the labor of love! I’m grateful to Routledge for taking it on, because Eros and Touch is a risky book, not least because it’s interdisciplinary and so doesn’t fit neatly into existing marketing categories.

In many ways, Eros and Touch came out of my dissertation project and its aftermath. I was reading a great deal of Christian and post-Christian queer theology, as well as writings from sexual minority advocates (LGBT writers, but also BDSM practitioners, polyamorists, and others). The two groups had a great deal of theological overlap, but as far as I could tell, relatively little awareness of each other’s existence. There were a few exceptions, though, notably Marcella Althaus-Reid, a queer Christian liberation theologian who argues that because of their marginalized status, sexual minorities have special insight into social power structures around sexuality and the erotic. (The idea that marginalized groups have a critical role to play in social reform is a key idea in liberation theology.) I admired the focus of queer Christian writers on social justice issues, but most didn’t go as far as the Pagan community tends to in affirming pleasure as a holy birthright. I wanted to add a Pagan voice to the theological conversation, and I wanted to talk openly about the sexual minority groups that many queer Christian theologians didn’t seem willing to discuss, perhaps because they are so controversial.

The final piece of the puzzle came when I pursued training as a massage therapist and was exposed to both spiritual and clinical writing about bodywork. The personal and social impact of touch deprivation came fully into focus for me. In America and the UK, people are socialized to touch others very little, to the extent where touch between students and between teachers and students is nearly forbidden in many public schools. Yet we have clinical studies showing that touch deprivation causes developmental problems, degrades mental and physical health, and encourages violent behavior.

Eros and Touch brings together writings from contemporary Pagan leaders, progressive Christian and Goddess theologians, advocates for the queer and BDSM communities, and therapeutic bodyworkers to present the erotic as a divinely transformative force for social change. I define “the erotic” as intimate, fully embodied, pleasurable contact that can include the sexual, but which also includes many nonsexual forms of contract. My purpose is to propose a system of social and personal ethics, grounded in Pagan liturgy and myth but hopefully accessible to other progressive religious people, that emphasizes the importance of consensual, pleasurable touch for human spiritual and physical health.

Although I’ve written essays and one previous book where I identify myself as a Pagan and a practitioner of religious witchcraft, Eros and Touch is by far the most personal piece I’ve written. In my work as a religious studies scholar and literary critic, I’ve always written in a relatively objective voice and assumed an audience with no particular set of religious commitments. This book is written specifically for a theologically progressive interfaith audience with interests in Pagan studies, body theology, or LGBT/sexual minority issues. I will be praying that it finds its intended audience!

[EDW] Your first published book was an edited volume co-produced with A. David Lewis, Graven Images: Religion in Comics and Graphic Novels (Continuum, 2010), itself based on an earlier conference that the two of you ran. How did this project get off the ground, and was your interest in comic books/graphic novels been something you’ve brought from your personal life into academia? There’s still something of a stigma attached to the medium in the Anglo-American world, a sense that comics can never be “real literature”; did you face any sort of dismissal or belittlement toward your conference?

[CHK] I discovered comics through a college roommate, who directed me to some of the most sophisticated comics works then available and gave me free access to his extensive collection. I mentioned before that one of my missions in the academy is to bring scholarly attention to works and subject matter that haven’t been extensively studied, so I was a comics fan for about five minutes before I started doing writing and research on them!

Dave Lewis is a comics writer as well as a scholar. We met and become friends through the Religion and Literature program at BU, and he was the one to come up with the idea of doing a religion and comics conference. Since I already had significant experience organizing events and had comics as an ongoing research interest, I was happy to join the project. The weekend had good attendance and attracted undergraduates and some members of the public as well as academics; we were especially happy to be able to feature a keynote address and a panel featuring comics creators, in addition to the scholarly papers. Afterward, it seemed natural to develop the conference proceedings into a book. Two publishers were interested immediately, and we ended up signing with Continuum.

I think I started doing comics scholarship right at a tipping point—after two decades of articles in the New York Times Magazine and other publications extolling how comics are a real, sophisticated art form now, academics seem to have gotten the memo. There’s quite a bit of comics scholarship available today, and I think the field is developing nicely [EDW: see such peer-reviewed outlets as the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, European Comic Art and ImageText]. It’s probably where film studies was in the middle of the twentieth century.

[EDW] You’ve now published two research pieces on Promethea, the comic series by Alan Moore in which he explored his own personal occult beliefs through the framework of the Qabalah. One was co-written with J. Lawton Winslade and is included in the aforementioned Graven Images volume; the other appears in the edited volume on Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore (McFarland, 2012). I’ve long been a big fan of Moore’s work, and think Promethea is one of my favourite of his series – I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to tell him so when I ran into him quite by chance in London’s Atlantis Bookshop one afternoon. When did you develop an interest in Moore’s work and what is it about Promethea specifically that inspired you to conduct research on it?

[CHK] Oh, that’s a good story! I was writing my undergraduate thesis on twentieth-century representations of apocalypse, and I’d already chosen Moore’s Watchmen as one of my pieces (it was one of the first comics that my helpful comics fan roommate gave me to read). I decided that if I was going to write on comics, I ought to have the experience of following a comic series month to month. I headed to my local comics shop and saw the cover of Promethea #4 from across the room—without even getting close enough to see what it was called or who the creator was, knew I had to have it. When I saw it had been written by Moore, I was thrilled; and when it turned out that the main character was a college student writing her senior thesis on comics, it seemed positively meant to be!

A few years later, I wrote Moore a fan letter, telling him a bit about myself, my religious leanings, and my academic studies. A month passed, and then a mysterious package from the UK arrived, containing a stack of Moore’s ritual theater CDs, an unpublished article on chaos magick, two copies of Promethea Vol. 2 (one signed for me to keep, one to lend out), and a warm and encouraging note. I was floored!

Alan Moore’s being an extremely sweet man, though, isn’t why I keep writing about his work. Although Moore’s work has getting a fair bit of scholarly attention over the past ten years, I notice that many comics scholars either don’t take his spiritual philosophy seriously (preferring instead to focus on his politics) or simply don’t have the background to understand and interpret it. Religion and theology represent a gap in Moore scholarship that I can easily fill.

Promethea continues to be one of my favorite works of his, not because it’s the best-written of his works, but because it’s so experimental in both form and content. I think it goes over many readers’ heads, at least initially, so I appreciate opportunities to provide context for it. Additionally, many Pagans and ceremonial magicians have embraced Promethea as a primer for learning about Western esotericism. Religious education has been a major function of the comics form for decades, if not centuries (if one uses a broad definition of “comics”), so it’s fascinating to look at how the form being used in service of a non-mainstream spirituality.

[EDW] Your latest book, Seeking the Mystery: An Introduction to Pagan Theologies, has just been published as an eBook by Patheos Press and released to a positive reception online. Could you tell us a little more about this new project of yours; how did it come about and what are your hopes for it?

[CHK] Many Pagans are hostile to the idea of theology, either because they understand it as a purely Christian construct that focuses on belief rather than practice, or because they fear that written theologies will cause Paganism to become dogmatic and rigid. Neither of these is the case.

I wrote the book for two different purposes. First, I wanted to help Pagans develop a theological vocabulary to describe their beliefs and attitudes, while making it clear that Paganism has theologies (not one theology) and that it is normal for an individual’s theology to evolve over the course of her life. I’m hoping that the book will prepare Pagans to read semi-academic and academic theologies and discuss them in their communities. To me, the ability to have sophisticated intellectual frameworks with which to describe our practices is part of the process of becoming a sustainable religious movement—and it also equips Pagans to communicate effectively in interfaith situations.

The book’s secondary audience is readers who know something about theology but little about Pagans. Most Americans approach religion from the point of view of belief, and while belief isn’t the focus of Paganism, Pagans do have important beliefs about why their practices are effective and worthwhile. Since the first question non-Pagan readers tend to ask people of other religions is, “What do you believe about X?”, the book indulges that impulse while leading them to understand that belief is only one small aspect of most contemporary Pagan traditions.

The book includes discussion questions and exercises for individuals and groups, so I especially hope that Pagan training groups and interfaith study circles will find it useful.

[EDW] You now teach Theology and Religious History at Cherry Hill Seminary, a Pagan institution that offers Master of Divinities degrees which is, I believe, the first of its kind in the U.S. How did you come to take up this job, and what do you see as your role within it? Would you agree that that the Seminary plays a role in the growing institutionalisation and routinization of the American Pagan community? Furthermore, what place do you feel that the Seminary serves in the Pagan community and in American society as a whole?

[CHK] I was initially recruited for Cherry Hill by Macha NightMare, who I knew through AAR. After coming on as an instructor and developing two of the core Master’s classes, I served as chair of Theology and Religious History for two years and assisted with the development of the Master’s program. I’m back to teaching core Master’s classes in Theology and Contemporary Global Paganisms now, along with the occasional 4-week community education class.

I do think the seminary is moving the Pagan community toward institutionalization, and I also believe that institutionalization is an inevitable process. The Pagan community keeps growing, and with it, so does the demand for clergy services—weddings and funerals, counseling, prison ministry, hospital ministry, more. We owe it to ourselves and each other to have well-trained clergy to provide those services to their communities.

At the same time, I have mixed feelings about the institutionalization process. I believe the Pagan movement needs skilled clergy to thrive, and that we won’t be able to sustain those clergy if we can’t find a way to pay them—and that almost certainly means creating organizations of some kind. I’ve witnessed far too many cases of volunteer burnout to think that we can be survive indefinitely with volunteer leadership. On the other hand, Pagans need to think carefully about how to structure the organizations we create, especially when it comes to power relationships. I don’t want to see the volunteer leaders who built Pagan traditions pushed aside by newly paid, professional clergy; instead, I’d like to see organizations that retain a great deal of power in the hands of volunteers and use collaborative decision-making processes. I’m not against hierarchical organizations, but I’d like to see Pagans creating dynamic hierarchies in which power does not rest permanently with one person or one small group. If Pagans can learn from existing groups that operate without traditional hierarchies—the Society of Friends (Quakers) is just one such group—perhaps we can avoid perpetuating the kinds of rigid religious institutions that many Pagans left their birth religions to escape.

[EDW] It’s a question which I have asked my last three interviewees, but I would be very interested to hear your take on it. How do you see the academic field of Pagan Studies progressing over the next fifty years or so, and what role do you believe institutions like Cherry Hill will play in that, particularly in the context of Markus Altena Davidsen’s criticism that Pagan Studies is already too heavily dominated by practising Pagans?

[CHK] Well, with regard to Davidsen, I’m not sure his complaint is that the field is dominated by insiders so much as that he objects to a Pagan studies that isn’t primarily scientific and theoretically oriented. Davidsen actually names a number of scholars who are also practitioners as successfully producing the kind of scientific work he admires, although I’m not sure he’s aware of their religious commitments. Regarding his criticism overall, I think he does have a point that much of Pagan studies scholarship has been very descriptive. I think that’s normal for a young field, although if his barb drives scholars to become more critical and analytical in their approach to the material, that’s probably a good thing.

My research leanings are in theology right now, though, and theology is inherently an insider discourse, as opposed to religious studies, which has a range of participant-observer approaches. I’d like to think that Pagan theology will have a place in the Pagan studies in the future, just as Christian theology has a place within the academy now. I also sympathize with what Nikki Bado said at the last meeting of the AAR: that for scholars of religion, “insider” and “outsider” are slippery categories. If I am a Pagan and I study Christians, am I an outsider because I do not practice their religion? Am I an insider because I was raised in a Christian church, or an insider because like them, I am a theist? To me, the question of how to deal with one’s personal religious commitments when doing religious studies scholarship is a complicated question to which there are no easy answers (indeed, the excellent book Researching Paganisms is largely devoted to debating it).

At Cherry Hill, we are primarily educating clergy and community leaders, not religious studies scholars. But I think the way Cherry Hill cultivates a distinctively Pagan intellectual culture is valuable and should have a place in Pagan studies, even if we may need to draw stronger distinctions between work intended to be constructive/theological vs. work that is meant to be analytical/scientific. Theology and religious studies are different disciplines, and I myself prefer not to blur them too badly. That being said, I’m thrilled at the constructive scholarship my students at Cherry Hill are doing, the way they’re engaging history and religious studies to bring rigor to their theology and to enrich the liturgy and lore of their traditions.

In the next fifty years, I’d like to see a strengthening and clarifying of different approaches in Pagan studies—not a casting-aside of what Davidsen calls the “religionist” approach, but far greater clarity about the methods we’re using and why. I personally appreciate the approaches that Davidsen calls “scientific,” I would love to see more scholarship in that vein as well as more development of distinctively Pagan theological discourses. I’m a big fan of Constance Wise’s Hidden Circles in the Web, for example – it is genuinely a theological work, not an attempt to approach theology through sociology or history, as other works of Pagan studies have.

Thanks very much, Ethan, for the opportunity to be interviewed. It’s been a pleasure.

[EDW] And thank you Christine for giving us this wonderful interview. We look forward to the publication of Eros and Touch and hope that it is a resounding success.

An Interview with Dr. Nevill Drury

Today I’m interviewing Dr. Nevill Drury, a man who requires little introduction for those acquainted with the contemporary Pagan and occult scenes. The author of over sixty books dealing with a diverse array of topics, from the artwork of Indigenous Australians to practical Neo-Shamanism, his work has been translated into eighteen languages and counting. Born in England, he has spent most of his life in Australia, where he received his BA from the University of Sydney in 1968. As well as being a writer, his varied career has seen him work in high schools, government administration, television, and (from 1976 to 2000) in the publishing industry. He obtained his MA honours degree in anthropology from Macquarie University in 1980 and a PhD, based on his research into the occult beliefs and practices of the artist Rosaleen Norton, from the University of Newcastle, New South Wales in 2008. Since then, he has published prolifically in peer-reviewed outlets and produced several books and edited volumes on 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. 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 esotericism?

[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 get involved in this spiritual practice and 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 adoption of shamanic practices from indigenous communities by Westerners?

[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.

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 esotericism, I notice that you were an undergraduate at the University of Sydney in 1968, the year of the famous international student protests. Did you experience any of the “Spirit of 68” 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 most prominent figures then active in occult circles, 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 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 occult artist, having first published a biography of her titled Pan’s Daughter (1988) and then produced a PhD on her, resulting in the expanded  volume Homage to Pan (2003). 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.

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.

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 volumes 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. 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 several new esoteric publishers to have appeared in recent years. Last year I interviewed one of the contributors to the anthology, Dr. Dave Evans; Pathways also includes contributions from scholars like 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 learning how this project came together, and what role you see for volumes like this – filled with peer-reviewed contributions by academics but not published by a conventional academic press – 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 Libuše Martínková, 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 introduction 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 criticism of the over-reliance on emic approaches within Pagan Studies made by Danish Religious Studies scholar Markus Altena Davidsen in the Method and Theory in the Study of Religion journal? His critique primarily focused on another edited volume that you 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) I 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 Oxford University Press and offers a scholarly overview and introduction to this particular area. The second, a volume you have co-authored with Dr Lynne Hume titled The Varieties of Magical Experience, 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?

[ND] I have no plans right now for any new publications on the scale of these two books. Stealing Fire from Heaven was my attempt at a concise historical overview of the modern magical revival, commencing effectively with the hugely influential late-19th century Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and continuing through to present times. In the case of The Varieties of Magical Experience, I thought it would be a good idea to produce a book that in a sense was a counterpart to William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience although I didn’t feel I could do this all by myself. So I invited Professor Lynne Hume from the University of Queensland to be my co-author. Lynne is an anthropologist and has also studied paganism in some detail, so she wrote the chapters on indigenous magic, sensory awareness and Wicca and I wrote the others. We have never met in person but we managed to work well together on this project. I have to concede that this book is strongly emic and inevitably some scholars won’t like it for that reason. However two of the academics who provided endorsements for the book jacket (both of them scholars I have never met personally) have described it as a ‘classic’ – so that’s a good start.

[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 wider esoteric communities?

[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, Dr Drury, and I wish you all the best in future!