An Interview with Dr. Amy Hale

Today’s interview is with Dr Amy Hale, an anthropologist and folklorist based in Atlanta, Georgia who has published on a range of topics since the early 2000s, including modern Celtic identity in Cornwall, esoteric intersections with right-wing politics, and the overlap between esotericism and art. Her recent book, Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully (Strange Attractor, 2020), represents the most in-depth study of the eponymous English artist and occultist who made Cornwall her home and is a must-read for anyone interested in that area. She is also the co-chair of the Contemporary Pagan Studies Section of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and sits on the editorial board of both Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism and the Black Mirror Research Network. We talk about Colquhoun, the growing body of research on occultism and the arts, and the place of the “independent scholar” in academia. 

[EDW] Your PhD thesis in Folklore and Mythology, which you completed at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1998, was devoted to modern Celtic identity in Cornwall, a county (and, in some views, a nation) in the southwest of Britain. What was it about Cornwall that attracted your interest and brought you all the way over the Atlantic to conduct research?

[AH] People are surprised to discover that my interest in Cornwall is not the result of having any Cornish ancestry. I don’t have any that I know of.  My interest started out as a series of intellectual and theoretical questions which eventually transitioned into an emotional connection. I had been interested in modern Celtic identities since high school. A lot of people interested in Celtic culture and history are drawn to the romance of the mythology and imagined pagan (and Pagan) pasts, but that was never my thing except for very briefly as a teen. I wanted to explore the core of what makes people so obsessed with the idea of “The Celts”, although I wasn’t sure what that meant or where my journey might take me.

I majored in Anthropology as an undergraduate and for my BA thesis I conducted independent research in Galway, Ireland looking at how Irish mythology was informing contemporary Irish identities on the eve of the coalescing of the European Union (this was 1989-90).  It was during this time that I realized that the stories so often told about the continuity and spread of Celtic peoples since the Bronze Age were fiction.  The reality of the idea of the Celts is fragmented, modern and in many ways the result of a mix of colonialism and efforts at cultural taxonomies that frequently served political interests.

In 1994 I did exploratory fieldwork toward my PhD in Cornwall, staying with Cornish language speakers and cultural activists. Cornwall was a site of interest for me because there is still so much (mainly external) dissention about Cornwall’s Celtic identity and the legitimacy of Cornish ethnicity.  I was utterly blown away and very moved by the complexity of the cultural and political situation there. Likely because I’m an American I get a very different picture of the Cornish/English cultural dynamic that is invisible to many English people in particular.  I ended up moving over in 1995 and stayed until 2001, finishing my PhD in 1998 and eventually working as Lecturer in Contemporary Celtic Studies for the Institute of Cornish Studies at the University of Exeter.

My interest continues to be in the political and economic circumstances under which Celtic identities coalesce, change, and develop. I still see Celtic cultures through the lens of the dynamics of colonialism and economic and cultural marginalization, and that is the context which informs my research. In my view Cornwall is still the most interesting place to explore the dynamic terrains of modern Celtic culture.  It is never boring, and I don’t think I will ever not have a connection with Cornwall and the Cornish people.  

[EDW] You have also been one of the comparatively few scholars to have published research on modern Druidry, having an article on the subject in the Cornish Studies journal. Was Druidry part of the main theme of your thesis or a side-project that spun out of it?

[AH] Druidry has never been a primary subject of interest for me, but in the study of the development of modern Celtic identities you can’t escape Druids, as Ronald Hutton’s work so clearly shows. It’s really unavoidable. Druids are the blank slate upon which all sorts of Celtic fantasies can be projected, whether it’s the idea of an ancient pre-Christian priesthood of a nature-based religion, the politicized symbol of the shared cultural substrate of an imagined once unified Britain, or the missing link between a nativist, homegrown British Paganism and Christianity. Modern Druidic organizations, both spiritual and cultural, (by which I mean the Gorseddau of Wales, Cornwall and Brittany) have become important points of focus and networking for modern Celtic identities.  This can take the form of promoting the use of Celtic language in the case of the Gorseddau, or the way in which many spiritual Druids focus on environmentalism, which has been widely believed to be a “Celtic” value. Even though these organizations differ widely in their aims, we can still compare them and see how people variously understand the idea of a Celtic cultural legacy.   

[EDW] During the 2000s, you were involved in the Journal for the Academic Study of Magic (JASM), which had been co-founded by Alison Butler and Dave Evans [interviewed here back in 2012] and which was one of the first peer-reviewed journals to focus on esotericism and related topics. You contributed to the second volume and then co-edited the fifth (and final) edition of the journal; how did you get involved in this project? What was it like working on British esotericism when there really was little institutional framework for supporting such research topics?

[AH] In many ways I think my work with JASM helped to realign my career more toward the study of esotericism and away from a professional alignment with Celtic Studies, which in the US is a rather limiting and restrictive field mostly focused on medieval literature and philology.  I became involved when the late Dave Evans, who was a close friend at the time, was having trouble managing the editorship.  I offered to help, and Susan Johnston Graf and I took over the editing duties for the final edition.  JASM was a very ambitious project, working to include scholarship on modern practice as well as including an empirical and historical approach, which at the time characterized much of the European scholarship on the esoteric.  I am sad that it couldn’t be sustained and I think there could be a lot of promise in another journal project of this kind, although Correspondences comes close. [The founding editors of Correspondences were interviewed here in 2013].  JASM also generated a lively research network for a while and the online discussion used to be very vibrant when there were fewer opportunities for that sort of interaction.  Although it still technically exists as a mailing list, it has become greatly diminished.

I would really love to see more institutional support in the UK for solid academic work on esotericism and Pagan topics. It’s not that it isn’t out there, but there is no journal or organization that reflects British approaches in the way that I feel JASM did.  I have always believed that British scholarship is quite creative and innovative and, in many ways, pushes boundaries that American programs just don’t. Some of the approaches you find in British universities, Cultural Studies for example, would lend themselves well to the study of esotericism.  A solid British institutional presence would genuinely enrich the field. I know this likely sounds odd coming from an American scholar, but I still feel that the UK in many ways remains my scholarly and professional home base.

[EDW] Where does your interest in modern Paganism and occultism come from? Was this an interest you had had since childhood or something that emerged while you were engaged in your PhD research?

[AH] It was absolutely an interest from my youth but I had never anticipated that it would become such a central part of my wider research profile.  But as I noted with Druidry, you can’t really look closely at modern Celtic identities and not end up dealing with Paganism and the occult.

Sure, I was a weird kid and interested in witchcraft at a very young age. I had friends, but like many young people who are drawn to esoteric topics, I was certainly an eccentric child and I spent much of my free time seeking out wooded areas on my bike, having imaginative adventures. I discovered the occult in high school when I started leveraging my eccentricities to more productive social ends.  I was a walking cliché, with wild blonde Stevie Nicks hair, listening to a ridiculous amount of Led Zeppelin. My mom bought me [Aleister] Crowley’s Magick in Theory and Practice when I was 16. I don’t think she knew what she was buying, to be honest but she wanted to support my interests. I was raised in a very confirmed and explicitly atheist household, but my parents were also tolerant, inquisitive, and smart. They provided a critical framework for me around religion and spirituality that I retain to this day.

This was around the same time that I started becoming obsessed with all things romantically Celtic, and I got a hold of some esoteric Arthuriana from the 19th and early 20th century which was republished in the mid-1980s. Those became a huge focus of interest at the time. In fact, I still have a huge soft spot for the all the weird contexts of esoteric Arthuriana and would love to do a major project on it one day. I didn’t focus on Paganism academically in my undergraduate curriculum to any degree, but it so deeply intersects with some of the ways that historical ideas of the Celts have informed modern Cornwall that Paganism became an integral part of my PhD research. As time went on, Paganism and the occult became more strongly featured in my work in general. Now I’m the Co-Chair of the Contemporary Pagan Studies section of the American Academy of Religion, but I suspect that is less because of my research history and more because I am a sucker with some slick administrative talents.

[EDW] Your new book, Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully (Strange Attractor, 2020) explores the Surrealist artist and occultist who spent much of her life in Cornwall. Can you tell us a little about who she was and how you came to be fascinated by her story?

[AH] Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) was a Surrealist artist and occultist, and I firmly believe she was one of the most prolific and engaged woman occult practitioners of the 20th century.  She was a visual artist whose archives contain over 5000 paintings and drawings. She was a novelist, essayist and poet who wrote early Earth Mysteries style travelogues on sacred sites in Cornwall and Ireland in the 1950s.  She moved to Cornwall part time in the 1940s, full time in 1959, and Cornwall was a central part of her own engagement with her own romantic Celtic Spirituality.  Unusually, though, she also had a great deal of respect for Cornish culture and the Cornish language, and while she was not really a Cornish activist she advocated for some level of autonomy for Cornwall and the preservation of Cornish culture.

Studying Colquhoun was a natural for me as her work and interests were a perfect intersection of my own.  She is emblematic of the spiritual seeker who comes to Cornwall for spiritual reasons, but she also had a nascent understanding of the political sensibilities that drive ethnic Celtic political movements. A lot of this was likely inspired in her by the work of W. B. Yeats who shared these conceptual traits in his life and work.  The complexity of her work is utterly boggling and she still keeps me busy.

[EDW] There seems to have been a growth in interest in the connections between art and occultism over the past decade, a topic that you have explored in several of your publications. What do you see as the importance of this area of research and what potential does it offer?

[AH] I think the strong focus on art that we have seen in scholarship about the occult in the past decade or so has helped to provide an accessible introduction to scholarship about esotericism.  Art is tangible. It provides a way to demonstrate how esoteric and occult principles are used in a way that people can see and maybe even have a personal response to. In a way literature provides similar points of discussion. What is changing is that in the past decade we are seeing a movement away from a discussion of esoteric symbolism in the arts to the role of practice and worldview of the artist.  Scholars are no longer fixated on tracing the freaky social networks and “weird” interests of the artist, which was a dominant approach in the past.  We are now looking at how their art becomes a vehicle for spiritual practice, and how esoteric ideas shape and inform a wider body of work. Art becomes a way to discuss practice without jumping straight into ritual, which frankly some scholars still find a challenge to talk about. It’s been a safe gateway subject and as such a very popular topic. Also, let’s be honest, the occult has produced a lot of art and literature! Not all of it is great, but some certainly is.

I do have some concern, though, that the topic is in danger of being played out. There have been a lot of books and conferences devoted to it and I think that while there will always be productive inquiry in this area, as a field I’d like to see us branch out a bit. I’d love to see more focus on topics like place and space, aesthetic and style, intersections with science and medicine and yes, ritual.  Having said that, I am still finding interesting and productive angles in my work with contemporary artists especially in terms of performance, space and reception, which feature in some upcoming publications.

[EDW] Another of the topics that you have published on is the intersection of the modern Pagan and Earth Mysteries milieus with right-wing politics, especially in forms that have been influenced by Traditionalism. How did you come to pursue this line of enquiry and what has been the response from within the Pagan and esoteric communities?

[AH] Again, this focus emerged from the double headed beast that is the study of contemporary Celtic identities. A huge core of my work is about how people construct and perform their identities in various contexts, and this led me early on in my graduate career into a deep dive into the relationship between folklore and nationalism, which as many people know, isn’t the prettiest of tales. Nativist spiritualities ride the ethnonationalism line pretty tightly, so the right-wing element has always been a historical feature of them. Ithell Colquhoun was a Traditionalist, as was W.B. Yeats, and these two were hardly alone in their understanding and embrace of ethnicized spiritual identity.  However, Traditionalism as a discrete and historical philosophical movement is still not particularly well known.  I suggest Mark Sedgwick’s Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century for a good introduction.

During my early research into Colquhoun, I noticed similar right-wing, nativist tendencies in both the writings of John Michell and in a lot of the rhetoric around the Archangel Michael in British New Age and Earth Mysteries culture and I wrote articles on both those topics. A decade ago, a lot of people thought I was making a mountain out of a molehill, and some people got genuinely upset with my research into John Michell and the way he has been claimed and refashioned by the radical right. I lost friends over that one. But the political landscape has changed so much since then, that people are now very hungry to understand what the relationship between Paganism, occultism and the radical right is, and how it got that way. The seeds have been there all along, but because a lot of Pagans, especially in the US, see themselves as progressive they are deeply unsettled by right-wing applications of their values. In fact, many of these values are just as legitimately emblematic of conservative values, such as environmental preservation or a love of folk culture. While I know the nature of my research interests in nativist- inspired spiritualities will always have me encountering the radical right to some degree, it’s a topic that I need to take a break from every now and then. Working with contemporary artists has proved to be a restorative balm for the soul because the political research is pretty dark.

[EDW] You operate as an independent scholar and have run classes helping PhD students consider options other than professional academia. What do you see as the role of the independent scholar in research, especially when it comes to the study of modern Paganism and occultism?

[AH] Permit me to jump on my soapbox a minute about the phrase “independent scholar”. I’m still not really comfortable with the term.   In academic circles it generally means someone is non-affiliated with an academic institution, but not having an academic affiliation comes with its own problems when operating in academic settings. It carries a stigma. We all know it, and no one likes to talk about it. People quietly wonder what is wrong with you. Independent scholars are extremely under supported. I can’t apply for major grants.  I can’t be a research lead. I struggle for access to research libraries and academic publications.  For many people conferences are outside their reach. Some colleagues won’t consider you for collaboration. For people seeking academic jobs it’s almost impossible to stay competitive.

I taught for 15 years, and when I became a higher ed consultant I had to drop all my affiliations as a condition of the job. Then I retired from that job to focus on my writing and now I’m truly an “independent scholar” because I’m not anything else, but I’m not sure this is the best label for everyone.  I believe strongly that we should be encouraging people to pursue other careers outside academia while still being part of scholarly conversations and production if they so choose, and people should be supported in this choice.  If those non-academic careers remain invisible to the scholarly community because people are labelled as “independent scholars” it doesn’t help to support or legitimize other career paths, which is something we all need to be doing. Not everyone wants to be part of the professoriate or work in a university.

I think it would be great if our academically employed colleagues would help create better conditions for non-affiliated scholars to feel valued, and support greater access to research collections and professional libraries.  It would also be great if more institutions would allow the non-affiliated to apply for grants!  In small and marginal fields like Pagan Studies, Celtic Studies or the study of esotericism, there may well be even more scholars without an academic home who would benefit from collegiality and support. While I would like to say that independent scholars can have a role of providing critique or innovation because they are not constrained by the needs of academic production, I think for many this is not the case because they don’t have the luxury to work outside such a rigidly defined system or to take chances with their work.

Jumping down off the soapbox, though, those of us who are genuinely comfortable as scholars not working within academic institutions do have enormous potential to become public scholars, take on creative projects, and be innovative in the research questions we take on. I want people to read my work! I can write about what I like for whatever publishers I choose and my work is more creative than it has ever been.  I personally am very happy with where I am at this stage in my career, but I also admit I’m very privileged. 

[EDW] Have you got any projects on the horizon that we should be keeping an eye out for?

[AH] Absolutely!  I am quite thrilled about a collection coming out with Palgrave that I edited, Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses. No publication date yet, but likely late 2021, early 2022. I have a piece on the occult performance art of Barry William Hale coming out in a summer edition of the journal Correspondences, which I’m pretty excited about. I’m also working on an edition of Ithell Colquhoun’s magical essays, and returning to a big work on Cornwall. There’s a lot going on and I’m pretty excited about it.

[EDW] Dr Hale, thank you for taking part in this interview; I look forward to reading your future endeavours!

An Interview with Dr. Manon Hedenborg White

Today, I am interviewing Dr Manon Hedenborg White, a postdoctoral researcher at Södertörn University in Sweden. Dr Hedenborg White is a specialist in the study of Thelema, the religion founded by famous occultist Aleister Crowley, on the subject of which she has written an important recent monograph, The Eloquent Blood: The Goddess Babalon and the Construction of Femininities in Western Esotericism (Oxford University Press, 2020). She has also co-edited special issues of both The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies and Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism and contributed chapters to volumes including Magic and Witchery in the Modern West and Controversial New Religions. We discuss her new book, the Mexican folk saint Santa Muerte, and the increasing scholarly attention being paid to gender within esotericism.

[EDW] Thelema is not a particularly well-known religion, even among scholars of new religious movements, and Aleister Crowley himself is often misunderstood and even demonised. For that reason, could you give readers a very basic introduction to what Thelema is.

[MHW] Thelema (Greek for “will”) is the religion founded in 1904 by Aleister Crowley. Its foundational document is The Book of the Law (or Liber AL vel Legis), a text Crowley held was dictated to him by a discarnate being named Aiwass. The central maxim of Thelema is “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” and the related “Love is the law, love under will”. Rather than an injunction to follow each impulsive whim or desire, this refers to what Crowley described as the “true Will” — the unique purpose of each life, which it is incumbent on each individual to discover and fulfil. The Book of the Law (and Crowley’s later interpretations thereof) suggests a dialectical ontology, centring on the generative coupling of the goddess Nuit, representing limitless space, and her consort Hadit, the infinitely condensed life-force of each individual. Their ecstatic union generates Ra-Hoor-Khuit, a manifestation of the Egyptian god Horus. This is important as The Book of the Law also heralds the advent of a new age in the spiritual evolution of humanity (with Crowley as its prophet), which Crowley later identified as the Aeon of Horus, and which he believed would be characterised by radical social transformation, the union of the spiritual and material, and a focus on individual liberation.

Crowley’s system of Magick combined ceremonial magic in the style of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn with yogic techniques he learned while travelling in India, Ceylon, and Burma. After joining the initiatory fraternity Ordo Templi Orientis and being made head of its British section in 1912, Crowley also began experimenting systematically with sexual magic, and came to view sexuality as a supremely potent magical force. Crowley has frequently been demonised due to his advocacy of sexual freedom – and not least the fact that he was openly bisexual – as well as his liberal use of drugs and engagement with various forms of social and religious transgression. Of course, many of the ideas he espoused relating to sexual liberalism and individual self-development are much more mainstream today, so I think it’s fair to say that Crowley was ahead of his time in many ways.

[EDW] Where does your interest in occultism come from? Is this something that you’ve had from childhood/young adulthood or did it develop while you were at university?

[MHW] I’ve held this interest since childhood, though it took many years for it to take form. When I was very young, my grandfather used to read to me from a children’s book of Greek mythology, which I adored. When playing make-believe with my friends, I’d adopt the names of Greek goddesses or mythological women like Ariadne and Atalanta. When I was five or six years old, my father introduced me to his Thoth Tarot deck (the tarot deck co-created by Crowley and the artist Frieda Harris), which we used to play around with and draw cards from. Growing up, I was fascinated by “fringe” religious movements and belief systems, and was attracted to occultism, but didn’t have a context for it at all — none of my friends held similar interests, so I mostly explored magical worlds in fiction and films (though I briefly ran a secret society of my own – the Order of the Mistletoe – complete with degrees and initiatory pledges, which I recruited my siblings into). I devoured anything I could find that pertained to witches, vampires, demons, secret societies, arcane rites, or ancient paganisms, and wrote short stories and spin-offs to my favourite novels. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History exerted a huge fascination, as did Marion Z. Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, and anything related to ancient Egypt.

I was also fascinated by stories about pacts with the Devil, watching Polanski’s The Ninth Gate in my teens. It became (and remains) an instant favourite. Like many people in my field (or so I’ve heard), I remember thinking that being an occult “book detective” (like the film’s protagonist, played by Johnny Depp) would be a dream gig! But it wasn’t until I began attending university that I realised this was something I could seriously pursue, and which could even turn into a profession. I studied social anthropology during my first semester, but quickly moved on to history of religions as this seemed to be the way to go if one wanted to pursue PhD studies around an esoteric topic (which I decided halfway into my first semester at university that I wanted to do). Though Lucifer hasn’t materialised before me on any of my research trips (at least not yet), my teenage self would have been over the moon to learn that she would get to sift through arcane manuscripts and study magical rituals for a living. 

[EDW] Related to the previous question, what led you to choose the specific PhD topic that you pursued? Did the topic shift over the course of your research?

[MHW] From the outset of my academic studies, I was interested in the nexus of (Western) esotericism, gender, and sexuality. One of my earliest undergraduate papers focused on a comparison between the Virgin Mary and the Thelemic goddess Babalon, who appears in Crowley’s visionary record of 1909 and is inspired by his favourable re-interpretation of the Whore of Babylon from the Book of Revelation. This project subsequently turned into my first independently authored peer-review article (published in Swedish in the journal Aura in 2011), and – gradually – into a PhD project proposal on the changing construction of femininities and feminine sexuality in the discourse around the goddess Babalon from Crowley until today. I was fascinated by the way in which a biblical antagonist could be reshaped as an emblem of divine femininity in the early-twentieth century, and – especially – the ways in which it seemed to challenge pervasive notions of femininity and feminine sexuality in wider society around that time. In the early twentieth century, even feminists mostly tended to focus their political efforts in the area of sexuality on protecting women from sexual harm and damage — and won crucial political victories in doing so. But there were few who actively and unapologetically celebrated female sexual desire – and especially outside of a monogamous, heteronormative context – so it was quite a radical move for Crowley and his followers at this time to envision the divine feminine in the form of the whore goddess Babalon, celebrating the free expression of sexuality in all its forms, for all genders. I wanted to understand what this symbolic reconfiguration meant for the understanding of femininity and women’s roles, and how it evolved over the twentieth century and up until today in the interface with feminist and queer thought (which have impacted the contemporary occult landscape in many ways). The end result – my dissertation – remained relatively faithful to the original idea in terms of topic and materials, though my theoretical framework evolved considerably, and came to incorporate theorisation on femininities, femme, and sex radical feminist perspectives that I hadn’t considered to begin with. One of my PhD supervisors, Professor Ulrika Dahl (Uppsala University), is a trailblazer in the field of critical femininity studies and was instrumental to bringing these tools to my awareness. The work of feminist theorists such as Luce Irigaray, Mimi Schippers, Rosi Braidotti, Ann Cvetkovich, and Ulrika herself has been absolutely indispensable to me in learning to think about femininities – in the plural – beyond rigid binaries of essentialism/constructivism, both as symbolic constructs and modes of being that are not predetermined either by a specific biological morphology nor by heterosexuality.

[EDW] As part of your research you’ve placed quite an emphasis on Thelemites other than Crowley, including those whose most significant work took place after Crowley’s death (Jack Parsons, Marjorie Cameron, Kenneth Grant etc). Although there are others who have done this (namely Martin P. Starr and Henrik Bogdan), academic discussion has primarily focused on Crowley himself rather than on his followers. Where do you think scholarship stands when it comes to Thelema beyond Crowley?

[MHW] The study of (Western) esotericism is still fairly young in an academic context, so of course there are still a lot of gaps in what has been researched. I mean, we still lack solid, academic biographies for many of the foundational figures of modern occultism, not to mention their disciples! Within the last few decades, there have been major advances in the study of Crowley and Thelema, but of course there is still work to be done, not least in terms of situating the ideas of Crowley and the other Thelemites within their historical, cultural, and social contexts. Crowley is such a colourful character, whose oeuvre and life story are so rich with possibilities for scholarly exploration that he sometimes tends to overshadow those around him. But of course, religious or esoteric movements are rarely the sole creation of a singular individual. I think there is something to be said for viewing early Thelema not solely as Crowley’s invention, but as the product of a social milieu wherein others participated and made meaningful contributions. Martin P. Starr’s The Unknown God: Wilfred T. Smith and the Thelemites (Teitan Press, 2003) is a great example of this, as is Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism (eds. Henrik Bogdan and Martin P. Starr, Oxford University Press, 2012), which also shows how Crowley’s ideas have been developed in later forms of esotericism. Going forward, I hope to see more of this, in addition to sociological and ethnographic scholarship on Thelema (as well as other forms of esotericism) in a contemporary context, showing how Thelemic practices and beliefs have evolved over time in the interface with other forms of esotericism as well as social and political movements.

[EDW] Your thesis combined historical analysis with ethnographic work among contemporary Thelemites, especially in the United States; if I understand correctly, that makes you one of the first scholars to publish research based on ethnographic work among Thelemites. How were you received among these Thelemites and subsequently how have Thelemites (and other Crowley-oriented occultists) responded to the publication of The Eloquent Blood?

[MHW] My experience doing fieldwork among contemporary Thelemites was overwhelmingly positive. My interlocutors were a very well-spoken, easy-going crowd, with a great sense of humour and a genuine interest in academic research on their tradition. I am tremendously grateful for their time and input, and not least the help I received in accessing unpublished archival sources, which has been invaluable to me. Many of those I got to know during my fieldwork remain my good friends. I am also very happy to say that the general response to my book from the Thelemic community and beyond has been very positive: many Thelemite readers (as well as other esoteric practitioners) have reached out to me with positive feedback, and I frequently receive speaking invitations from various branches of the Thelemic community.

Of course, there have also been critical comments: for some readers, mere mention of words such as “gender”, “feminism”, or “Judith Butler” seems to provoke indignation. Conversely, I have also been accused of being anti-feminist as I am seen as defending a “stereotypical” or passive femininity. It’s true — things like lipstick, high heels, garters, and sexual availability do figure in many (but of course not all) esotericists’ rituals, artistic renditions, and imaginings of Babalon. I don’t see this as inherently problematic or oppressive to women, and I take seriously the ways in which such aesthetic styles and practices entail both receptivity and agency. Moreover, I don’t view it as my job as a scholar to rate or judge esoteric movements or practitioners according to my own personal standards of empowerment or liberation. To some, this reads as a betrayal of feminist ideals. I think this is telling — as I address in the book, femininity has often been seen as a problem, even within many feminist circles; as an artificial, debilitating mask that women must discard in pursuit of liberation. As a scholar, I find such readings of femininity too simplistic. Firstly, viewing femininity as something exclusively performed for the benefit of the male gaze marginalises queer feminine desire, and secondly, I feel it is important to consider the ways in which all gendered expressions are, to some extent, culturally constructed. Thirdly, vulnerability and restriction (as some conventionally “feminine” aesthetic styles may certainly connote!) do not preclude agency, and I am inspired by femme and sex radical theorists in this regard. I find these reader responses interesting, as they indicate how femininity is still a tender spot, something that incites disdain as well as desire. But most of all, I am happy to see all kinds of responses to the book as it means it is being read — this, to me, is the most gratifying thing of all.

[EDW] One of the most striking features of The Eloquent Blood is that it draws from theoretical perspectives rooted in critical theory, feminist philosophy, and related currents of thought. Although various historical works on Spiritualism and Theosophy have certainly been informed by women’s studies, generally speaking these theoretical approaches are not something we see a lot of in the study of esotericism; do you think that these sorts of approaches are going to have a much greater impact on the field going forward and what do you feel they are bringing to the table?

[MHW] It is difficult for me to answer this question succinctly as I think critical theory and gender and queer studies have tremendous potential for the study of esotericism. These paradigms have been essential to my development as a scholar, and my manner of thinking and asking questions about the topics that I study is completely informed by a critical approach to established categories and binaries. Gender and feminist theory allows us to think about very concrete things like: why were Theosophy and Spiritualism attractive to many first-wave feminists, while contemporary Satanism has tended to attract a higher number of men? How and why did early-modern alchemy function as a forum in which women alchemists were able to construct theories about gender that could challenge official notions of men’s and women’s social roles? What are the historical inspirations for the idea of gender as a polarity, as seen in the writings of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century writers on sexual magic, and what were the implications of these ideas? And why are young LGBTQ folks today turning towards – and creatively reformulating – currents and practices like astrology, witchcraft, and tarot? These, and countless other examples, demonstrate how questions of gender are not peripheral to the study of esotericism, but are central to the ways in which esoteric currents have taken form and developed over time.

The academic study of esotericism has often overlooked gender, resulting in frequent obscuration of the experiences and contributions of women and gender-nonconforming persons, but also to esoteric masculinities being under-examined. There has been much excellent research aimed at addressing this imbalance, especially in recent decades, and there will certainly be more — I am particularly looking forward to Professor Christine Ferguson (University of Stirling) and Dr. Tanya Cheadle’s (University of Glasgow) forthcoming special issue for Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism on “Masculinities, Sexualities, and Esotericism”. However, I often find that gender is still viewed as supplementary or “add-on” knowledge within the study of esotericism; as something that is primarily of relevance to those who are particularly interested in women, rather than something with the potential to challenge the way we think about esoteric currents, groups, and thinkers at a general and conceptual level. Given the historical marginalisation of women and femininities from hegemonic institutions of knowledge production and scientific rationality, the notion of esotericism as “rejected knowledge” (as pioneered by Wouter J. Hanegraaff) could productively be engaged from perspectives of gender. Conversely, a gender perspective can also highlight how esoteric epistemologies, while in some sense rejected from these institutions, have also reproduced hegemonic logics that have subordinated women, people of colour, and gender and sexual minorities. It is also interesting to note that historically, the marginalisation of Platonic worldviews coincident with the advent of Western modernity also paralleled with a gradual transition from a hierarchical model of gender to a model of biological, sexual dimorphism and complementarity. Thus, knowledge of the ways in which esotericism has developed in relation to the cultural mainstream also helps us understand changing notions of gender.

[EDW] You’ve just edited a special edition of Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism devoted to “Rethinking Aleister Crowley and Thelema.” Could you tell us a bit more about this?

[MHW] As noted, Crowley has attracted serious scholarly attention in the last few decades, but much fertile soil remains for scholarly interventions contextualising his ideas and those of his followers historically and culturally. With this special issue, I wanted to bring together a selection of essays that approach the study of Crowley and/or Thelema in novel ways. Christian Giudice (independent scholar) explores Crowley’s early poetry, proposing a re-evaluation of the British occultist as a genuine representative of British Decadence. Henrik Bogdan (University of Gothenburg) analyses the concept of God in Crowley’s magical writings, situating the latter within contemporary tensions of modernity, disenchantment, and disillusionment with organised religion. Matthew Fletcher (University of Bristol) examines Crowley’s The Book of Thoth (1944), linking Crowley’s decision to change the names of several tarot trumps to his wish to rid the tarot of Christian influences in favour of the tenets of Thelema. Deja Whitehouse (University of Bristol) traces Frieda, Lady Harris’s relationship with Crowley’s Thelema, thus providing new context for the collaborative relationship that birthed the Thoth Tarot. Finally, my own article explores the role of Crowley’s lover and disciple Leah Hirsig (1883–1975) through a Weberian lens, proposing an addition to Weber’s tripartite typology of authority in the form of “proximal authority” — authority ascribed to or enacted by a person based on their real or perceived closeness to a leader. It is my hope that the publication of this special issue will give rise to new discussions and approaches, and inspire further revisitation of familiar topics in novel ways.

[EDW] With Fredrik Gregorius, you also have an article in the journal Religions, looking at the uses of the Mexican folk saint Santa Muerte within the Anglo-American occult milieu. It’s a fascinating topic; how did you come to pursue it?

[MHW] This has been a fascination of mine for some time. It started while I was travelling in the U.S. in 2012. Visiting botánicas (stores selling religious goods, medicinal herbs, oils, perfumes, incenses, et cetera), especially in California and Texas, I increasingly came across statues and paraphernalia depicting a robed, Grim Reaper-esque figure — the Mexican folk saint Santa Muerte (literally “Saint Death” or “Holy Death”). Looking into the origins of this figure brought me to read R. Andrew Chesnut’s Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint (Oxford University Press, 2012), from which I learned that Santa Muerte is seen as an extremely powerful and non-judgmental miracle worker. Traditionally something of a patroness for marginalised or disenfranchised people in Mexico – women, the working classes, LGBTQ people, and sex workers, as well as for people involved in both sides of the drug war – she has become increasingly popular on both sides of the Mexico–U.S. border. Doing fieldwork among occult practitioners in the U.S., I came across Santa Muerte statues in the homes and ritual spaces of many of my interlocutors. I’ve also had the opportunity to visit and attend services in shrines to Santa Muerte in the U.S. and Mexico, including what is likely the most famous one — the Santa Muerte shrine in Tepito, Mexico City. I find the cult of Santa Muerte to be a fascinating example of lived religion and the ways in which it can function as a site of resistance, and it’s something I would love to research further at some point. Sadly, my current Spanish skills aren’t sufficient to do fieldwork in Mexico, but maybe someday?

[EDW] With Professor Christine Ferguson of the University of Stirling you launched the Esotericism, Gender, and Sexuality Network (ESOGEN) as part of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE) in 2019. Could you tell us more about the launch of this group and what you see as its role within the study of esotericism?

[MHW] Affiliated with the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism, ESOGEN is a thematic network that aims to bring together research efforts around the nexus of esotericism, gender, and sexuality, and organise funding bids, conferences, and panels around these topics, and promote inter-disciplinary dialogue between scholars and students. Our inaugural event will be ESOGEN Symposium, an international one-day Zoom conference organised in collaboration with the Center for History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents, taking place on April 16 this year. This event will feature paper presentations from around 20 MA and PhD students, as well as a keynote lecture by Christine. We will also be hosting a panel discussion at the next ESSWE conference (taking place in Cork, and scheduled for 2022) around the topic of Western esotericism, gender, and the creative arts.

[EDW] You are presently engaged in a postdoctoral project at Södertörn University on the subject of “Power through Closeness? Female Authority and Agency in a Male-Led New Religion” as part of which you were looking at Thelemite women Leah Hirsig, Jane Wolfe, and Marjorie Cameron. Can you tell us more about this new project?

[MHW] In a sense, the purpose of this project has been two-fold. Firstly, it has aimed to analyse 20th-century Thelema through the perspective of some of the women who were essential to its development: the Swiss-American music teacher Leah Hirsig (1883–1975), who was Crowley’s lover and disciple in the early 1920s, and co-founded his Abbey of Thelema at Cefalù, Sicily; the American silent film actress Jane Wolfe (1875–1958), who studied under Crowley at Cefalù and was integral to the establishment of Thelema in the U.S. in the 1930s and 1940s; and the artist, poet, and avant-garde icon Marjorie Cameron (1922–1995). To that end, I have been working with archival sources, mostly unpublished: diaries, letters, ritual descriptions, visionary records, and so on, in order to understand these women’s lives and esoteric practices at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and alternative religiosity. Secondly, the project utilises these women’s roles in Thelema as a starting point for an investigation of female religious authority. To that end, I’ve been drawing on scholarship on women in new religious movements more broadly, and have proposed an addition to Max Weber’s tripartite categorisation of authority: proximal authority, which I define as authority ascribed to or enacted by a person based on their real or perceived closeness to a leader. My hypothesis is that the category of proximal authority is particularly productive for understanding how women (and other potentially marginalised groups) navigate authority via close relationships, and in a future project I will be developing this terminology based on a broader range of case studies.

[EDW] Are there any new projects of yours in the pipeline that we should keep our eyes out for?

[MHW] Right now, I am involved in two book projects, both of which focus on women in 20th-century Thelema. With Dr. Christian Giudice, I am co-editing a volume entitled Women of Thelema, to be published by Kamuret Press, comprising a selection of historical essays on some of the most important women in the Thelemic tradition. With Professor Henrik Bogdan, I am working on an annotated edition of the magical diaries of Leah Hirsig, 1923–1925, which has been accepted for publication by Oxford University Press. This will be the first academic, annotated, and complete edition of Hirsig’s diaries from a crucial period of her life and magical career, and will feature a selection of contemporary letters as well as previously unpublished photographs.

[EDW] Dr Hedenborg White, thank you for this insight into your ongoing research. I wish you all the best for the future.

An Interview with Dr. Jennifer Snook

This week I have the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Jennifer Snook, a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Grinnell College in Iowa. Dr Snook is one of the foremost scholars of Heathenry, a modern Pagan religion inspired by the pre-Christian traditions of linguistically Germanic communities, of which she is also a practitioner. Her monograph, American Heathens: The Politics of Identity in a Pagan Religious Movement (Temple University Press, 2015), is one of the most important scholarly studies of this new religious movement. We discuss her role as a practitioner-scholar, the polarised politics of the Heathen community, and areas of the subject in need of further research. 

[EDW] When it comes to forms of modern Paganism, Heathenry is smaller and not so well known as Wicca. For the benefit of those readers who may not be familiar with it, could you explain what Heathenry is?

[JS] Heathenry is an umbrella term for the milieu of Germanic Paganisms. It’s what some scholars have referred to as a “reconstructionist” Paganism, as practitioners are inspired by the Eddas and Sagas as well as the archaeology, folklore, histories and religious beliefs of the people of pre-Christian Northern Europe. Many Heathens try to approximate “authentic” historical reconstruction, based upon their perception of the beliefs and practices of Old Norse religion, and some prefer to use that material as inspiration for spiritual or ritual innovations. Heathenry has actually grown in the past few years thanks to Marvel’s Thor movies, and shows like History Channel’s The Vikings, which romanticises and cobbles together bits of history and fantasy about ancient Heathens – as well as games like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. “Vikings” in the media get people interested in the lore and history and ultimately some of these fans find their way to Heathenry, once they realize that there are people for whom these stories are sacred.

[EDW] In American Heathens, you are quite open about being a practitioner of Heathenry yourself, having been introduced to modern Paganism through Teen Wicca in the mid-1990s. What drew you to this alternative religious practice and how do you feel it has informed your research on the subject?

[JS] Like most Gen-X Heathens, I came through Wicca because it was the most accessible and popular form of Paganism, and it was a hot topic in the 1990s primarily due to how it tapped into the anxieties of people still freaking out from the Satanic Panic of the 80s and early 90s. Up until that time, I channeled my deep nerdiness and interest in witchcraft, German myths and legends, and swords and sorcery into Norse-Flavored Wicca. Then once day in 1998, I sat down at my computer, dialed into Compuserve, and found an article on the internet called “The Pentagram and The Hammer,” which articulated the differences between Wicca and Heathenry, or “Ásatrú” as it’s sometimes called. I hadn’t heard that there was a particular name, set of practices, and Germanic-history-focused Paganism before, and it struck me as a revelation. It became part of my identity. When I began my work years later, I was pretty clear that it wasn’t just an academic exercise, but that Heathens were the audience for my work. I wanted them to feel seen, and not simply observed. I wanted to do it in a way that would both protect, and challenge, the Heathen community that I was a part of.

[EDW] You earned your PhD from the University of Colorado-Boulder in 2008; how much does American Heathens draw upon your PhD research and what led you to conduct this particular project to begin with?

[JS] American Heathens hangs upon the skeleton of my dissertation. I started my fieldwork in 2002 when I got to Boulder, but continued fieldwork until 2014 when I turned in my book manuscript. So there are years of fieldwork and interviews included in my book that were not yet completed when I graduated – and a major revising of my theoretical framework, plus the addition of a few new chapters. The entire idea for this project came out of my pre-existing interest in contemporary Paganism, my own immersion in it, and the realization that many ethnographers conduct auto-ethnographic work, studying sites in which they are already situated. So I logged on to the internet and found myself a Heathen. We met at a coffee shop and he invited me to join him at a blot (Heathen ritual) with some Boulder / Denver area Heathens – and the research began spontaneously.

Over the years, I realized how I’d really stumbled into something not just intellectually curious about the construction of a new religious movement, but also a microcosm of American hierarchical power dynamics that played itself out in gender, race, identities, and political labelling. When Heathens spoke about how “Heathen” something was, I understood – as a sociologist – that they were producing and sharing in an entire system of meaning around that label. In the field, when I watched American Heathens playing “Viking Games” like “capture the wench,” while chatting with Heathen women about how they imagined themselves as Valkyries or Shield Maidens, I understood that there was a gendered nature to their relationship with Heathenry. The hypermasculine “Viking” stereotype and “warrior” ethos was the other side of the gendered coin, influencing all genders’ performance of Heathenry, and this seemed notable. Right away, I understood that Heathenry also held an appeal to white nationalists at the same time that many anti-racist white people experienced a sacralized connection to Old Norse religion and lore as a marker of ethnic identification. There were so many interesting sociological questions coming out of these rather immediate observations that the project snowballed.

[EDW] How did you find that your work was received, both during your research and after publication? Did you feel that sociologists of religion and scholars in other fields were interested? American Heathens explored topics like gender and race, and perhaps because of this there have been Folkish Heathens* who have responded negatively to it, regarding it as being too motivated by left-wing thought; how do you respond to that kind of reception?
[* = Folkish Heathenry is a wing of the religion that generally argues that Heathen practice should be restricted to members of a putative Northern European/Germanic/Nordic racial group. Typically it is characterised as being politically right-wing to far-right.]

[JS] During my research people were often very supportive, and often very aloof. Heathenry has no shortage of people saying that they are “doing research,” or “writing a book.” Heathens expect this – they joke about how Heathenry is “the religion with homework,” and so my work wasn’t particularly interesting to them, save a select few. And other scholars have found my work valuable, particularly those interested in new religious movements, subculture, or Heathenry’s link to white nationalism, and there are an increasing number of scholars interested in Heathenry.

In regards to my response to the criticisms of Folkish Heathens – I generally don’t respond. Sociology as a field is criticised by the right-wing in general, on principle – as are any disciplines whose line of work demands a critical engagement with structures of power and are therefore labelled “left-wing.” These politics bear themselves out daily in the labelling of “liberals,” or “feminists,” or other-such “political opponents” of those on the Right. My work is in the mix – and let’s be clear – the subtitle of my book is “The Politics of Identity…” so the book is situated firmly in sociological literature and self-consciously and explicitly about the impact of political labeling in the process of meaning-making, boundary maintenance and identity construction among Heathens.

[EDW] Back in 2019, you spent some time here in Britain. Did you have much contact with British Heathens and if so, did you note any particular differences between the British and American Heathen communities?

[JS] I was living in London from August-December of 2019 and during that time, had the opportunity to meet and spend some time with the folks of AUK (Ásatrú UK) up in Bedford at an Air BnB weekend-retreat. Then I met back up with a couple of those AUK Heathens in London at their regularly-scheduled pub meet-up. The differences are largely cultural – because UK Heathens were born and live on the land that they imagine their pre-Christian Heathen ancestors inhabited, there is a certain cultural and historical continuity that U.S. Heathens do not have. The Neolithic sites that you and I visited together have deep spiritual significance to Heathens (and other Pagans), because they imagine their pagan forebears at those same sites thousands of years ago. So they have a different relationship to the land and their own history than Americans do. In addition to this big difference, I noticed a lot of similarities. The AUK contains members that have had a lot of experience in The Troth [a U.S.-based Heathen organisation] and others who are similarly inspired, and so much of their ritual form and practice mirrors what I had already seen a thousand times in the U.S. It was very familiar, and the conversations were the same - about the antics of Folkish Heathens in the UK, about anti-racist activism and outreach, in addition to conversations about personal ritual and practice, gods and land spirits. I am friends with many of these people on social media and we are all still in touch, in whatever ephemeral way that people online stay in touch, and they still help me with my work when I have questions.

[EDW] While there had been earlier work by the likes of Mattias Gardell, Jeffrey Kaplan, and Jenny Blain, this had tended to focus on narrow topics such as white nationalist Heathenry or seiðr, and it was really only in the 2010s that we saw the growth of academic publications focusing on what we might call ‘mainstream’ elements of Heathenry. Your work obviously has played a major role in that, followed up by other publications by scholars like Jefferson Calico. This being the case, where do you think the academic study of Heathenry stands at present and what areas do you believe could do with greater academic treatment?

[JS] A lot of scholarship continues to focus on the white supremacy problem in Heathenry, as mass-shooters and insurrectionists in the U.S. appropriate Nordic symbols and the public begins to ask questions and scholars have to answer them. This is unavoidable. I’d like to see an update on my work on the role of social media and popular culture in shaping newcomers to Heathenry, as their discursive online community shapes and influences growth. It would be nice to see a sociological treatment of the political divisions that have widened the chasm between left and right leaning Heathens since Trump’s campaign in 2015. These things matter because new religious movements are realms of meaning that shift with the fluidity of cultural and political change. I think the most useful work on Heathenry will take into account the political roots of the meaning and interpretation of lore or ritual, moving beyond descriptive accounts. Few, if any, scholars have engaged deeply with the increasing popularity and significance of the god Loki to nonbinary and LGBTQ+ Heathens – I would be excited to see that done. And of course there’s a growing gaggle of Academic Heathens and Paganisms scholars brainstorming how to recover Heathenry from the clutches of growing white nationalism and white supremacy, and so more public-facing sociology and scholarly outreach is urgent.

[EDW] Are you continuing your research on Heathenry or have you moved on to a different project? Do you have any forthcoming projects that we should be keeping an eye out for?

[JS] I have considered a variety of other field sites, but my presence among Heathens and interaction with other scholars of Paganism keeps me firmly embedded in the thought-world of Heathenry. I have three projects going right now. The first project is an old project, a data set from a questionnaire that I was just wrapping up when we returned back from London and stumbled right into a pandemic that shut down the world – and our College data lab. The analysis of this data is in the works and sure to birth more projects. The second topic is a documentation of the rise of Inclusive Heathenry in the U.S. and Europe in direct response to the increase in right-wing activity. How this branch of Heathenry came about in this political, historical and cultural moment is another example of how new religious movements are creatures of their time and place. It challenges the image that Heathens are primarily Folkish, right-leaning straight guys – because they get all the media. The third project I’m thinking about is how Heathens imagine Place – as so many of them idealize, make reference to, visit, think about, and find places in Northern Europe sacred, or at least significant, in their imagining of their pre-Christian forebears. This connection between place and identity is not a new field of scholarship, but connecting all of the Heathen pieces to it – about ethnicity, race, ancestry, belonging, peoplehood, sacrality, land – is particularly interesting to me in the American context in which U.S. Heathens do not live on, and were not born on, the lands from which Heathenry comes. As an additional piece to that, I’m curious about how American Heathens conceptualize indigeneity – and not just in the sense that Folkish Heathens have appropriated “indigenous” identity and politics as a shield against political criticism – but in the sense that Heathens conceptualize, honor, and practice intentional ritual to connect with the land spirits and indigenous heritage of the tribal lands upon which they are situated.

[EDW] Dr Snook, many thanks for this insight into your work. I look forward to your future projects.

An Interview with Dr David G. Robertson

From 2012 to 2015 I ran a series of interviews here at Albion Calling with scholars (both professional and independent) who worked on topics pertaining to what might best be termed ‘alternative’ religions. Now, in collaboration with the World Religions and Spirituality Project (WRSP) run by the Virginia Commonwealth University, I’m relaunching this series in the hope of interviewing more scholars engaged in research on this fascinating topic. First up I am fortunate to have with me Dr David G. Robertson, Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University here in the UK. I’ve been really interested in Dr Robertson’s work since reading his fascinating first monograph, UFOs, Conspiracy Theories and the New Age: Millennial Conspiracism. He has since moved on to produce a forthcoming work on the concept of “Gnosticism” and has taken on the helm as co-editor of the journal Implicit Religion, becoming one of the foremost voices arguing for the critical study of religion here in the UK. Many readers will however know him best as the co-creator of the Religious Studies Project, the podcasts of which have interested many of us over the past decade.

[EDW] Your PhD thesis, and then your first book – UFOs, Conspiracy Theories and the New Age: Millennial Conspiracism (Bloomsbury, 2016) – dealt with the place of conspiracy theories and UFOs in the New Age milieu of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Many readers may not understand why UFOs and conspiracy theories are being studied by a scholar of religion; how would you explain this project to them?

[DGR] The fact that it’s not obviously religion is part of the point. Religion is a hugely contested category, and the more you look into it, the less clear it becomes. It is in things that are on the edges of the category where the processes by which the category is maintained become most clear. And the point is not for me to ask is this religion or not, but to think about why others classify certain things as “religion” and not other things? Is religion “belief in supernatural agencies”? Is it a community who hold a similar worldview? Is it a set of ideas about transcendence? Each of those applies to UFOs and conspiracy theories as well as to things we usually identify as religions. These questions – and the processes of the politics of knowledge they reveal – are what makes this project interesting from a scholarly perspective.

But funnily enough, it showed me that the approach of Religious Studies – which uses ideas and methods from history, sociology and anthropology – is applicable more widely than simply those groups we can usually classify as “World Religions”. It allows you to bridge sociological models and individual beliefs and practices in ways which are vital to understanding contemporary worldviews – including religions, but also conspiracies, ideologies, and any other case where identities, belief and social structures interact.

[EDW] You talk a little bit about your background in the prologue to your monograph, where you describe yourself as “a lifelong atheist,” but I’d be interested to learn more about what got you interested in religion, Ufology, and conspiracism to start with? What led you to decide that this was the PhD topic you wanted to pursue?

[DGR] I always found interesting ideas interesting, even if I never really had any kind of religion or ideology of my own. It’s really that simple. As I approached thirty, I realised that maybe I should be working with ideas, and decided to go to university to train my ability to think. I initially considered philosophy, but I eventually took Religious Studies, focusing on the New Testament and Koine Greek. I loved the historical investigation, but it felt like everything had already been done, and I didn’t fancy spending my career butting heads with the more religiously-motivated scholars. I was getting more and more interested in New Religions anyway.

The specific topic came to me when I came across a reference to David Icke in a book on the history of the New Age movement. Now, being a decade older than most of the other students, I remembered his famous interview on the Wogan show, and I was also aware of his later conspiratorial material too. So I started to wonder how he’d gone from one to the other. I was never primarily interested in UFOs though – they’re the McGuffin of the story. They were a way to focus the huge amount of material into a coherent narrative, and to develop the argument of shared discursive objects (like UFOs) facilitating a transfer of ideas across different areas of the cultic milieu.

[EDW] Your research topic was, I think it’s fair to say, somewhat unusual. How did people receive it? Particularly, I’m wondering how it was received both by your fellow scholars of religion and also by those who espouse the sort of UFO-based and conspiracist beliefs that you were examining?

[DGR] Some examiners and reviewers have certainly been dismissive, even indignant, especially early in my career. Most of the scholars I met were intrigued, however, including some quite conservative people. RS scholars love novel areas of research. Nobody else was really looking at religion and conspiracy (or not that I knew of at that time, at least), so there weren’t special conferences or journals or anything. I had to work in mainstream venues, so I put a lot of effort into the theoretical issues, and how to justify my work within Religious Studies. And of course, I wasn’t getting opportunities to teach on conspiracy theories, it was all Religion 101, so that tightened up my broader knowledge of the discipline, as did starting the Religious Studies Project.

I’ve had largely positive responses from the groups I’ve written about. They thought I treated them fairly and reported things accurately, even if they didn’t always agree with all my conclusions. I put it down to just common decency. I didn’t patronise them, and I made it clear that I wasn’t out to write a hatchet piece. In fact, I stayed in touch with some of them for a while, they were mostly pretty sweet and interesting people. I remember someone saying in a review that I’d misrepresented Whitley Strieber in an encyclopedia entry, and being able to respond “Well, Whitley said I’d done a better job of describing his career in 1500 words than he could”!

[EDW] Since the publication of your monograph, you’ve also brought out the Handbook of Conspiracy Theories and Contemporary Religion (Brill, 2018), co-edited with Asbjørn Dyrendal and Egil Asprem, in which you bring together contributions from a broad range of academics. Where do you think the scholarly study of conspiracy theories is at the moment and where would you like to see it headed?

[DGR] Over the last ten years or so, there’s been a move to seeing conspiracy theories as a global phenomenon, and much more focus on the cultural significance. Much of the work prior to this was more concerned with exposing “wrong thinking”. Clearly, the broader cultural relevance is easier to see in the last five or ten years, and there are many more research projects being funded today than previously, although I do have concerns with the normative character of some of these. Conspiracy theories inherently challenge power – governments as well as academia – and scholarship that legitimises the control of free speech and free enquiry in the name of controlling conspiracy theories is more likely to get funding then that which addresses the systemic reasons that people are less inclined to trust authorities, or the state’s own use of narratives of a conspiratorial Other, for example.

The next step is to begin to conceptualise conspiracy theories as an intrinsic part of the episteme of the Post-Truth world. Do they, as Bruno Latour, Steve Fuller and Erica Lagalisse have suggested, represent a popularised version of critique, and so a “levelling up” sophistication in popular discourse? Perhaps this democratisation of the means of knowledge production is precisely why conspiracy theories threaten the traditional institutions of political and epistemic power, and those who benefit from their hegemony. Why are some irrational beliefs challenged in the public sphere, and others defended?

[EDW] The existence of conspiracy theories has really been brought to mainstream attention since your monograph appeared, especially through the emergence of QAnon, discourses about “fake news,” and conspiracist ideas pertaining to Covid-19. Do you think that there has been a genuine change in either the content or popularity of conspiracy theories in Western countries in the past five years, or is the growing visibility primarily a result of increased media attention?

[DGR] It’s partly a result of media attention, and partly the increasingly polarised relationship between “official” and unofficial knowledge. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard to see how the current QAnon stuff is so substantively different from McCarthyism, or the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s, or beliefs about Jews in the early twentieth century. When I was growing up, the IRA – a religious, political and nationalist movement – were regularly bombing sites in the UK because they thought there was a Royalist Protestant plot against them. Large numbers of people will believe quite extreme things about other groups of people with alarming ease. Religious ideas and supernatural beliefs are held by the majority of people, and they are no more “rational” than conspiracy beliefs, and they can lead to violence too. But the category “conspiracy theory” is relatively recent, not being really in mainstream use until the 1990s. The distrust of institutions has increased steadily since then – as has the gap between rich and poor – and with it the perceived need to protect the institutions they challenge against the barbarians at the gate.

[EDW] You’ve moved your research focus away from conspiracy theories and are now working on a critical history of Gnosticism in the so-called “History of Religions” paradigm, on the subject of which you have a forthcoming book. Could you tell us about this project and what it reveals? Do you feel that “Gnosticism” a term that scholars should be using, or would we be better off abandoning it?

[DGR] The book is a history of how scholars (and others) took a term for heresy in the second century AD, transformed it into a religion in the nineteenth century and then again into an ahistorical religious essence in the twentieth. It’s a really interesting case study in this sort of reification because almost everything we think we know about Gnosticism was already in place before we discovered the Nag Hammadi texts, and even though they challenged what had been hypothesised from the accounts of Church Fathers, those ideas stubbornly persist in Religious Studies (though not in Biblical Studies). The historical narrative should make it clear that if you choose to use the term, you’re not referring to any historical reality, but rather to a narrative about some kind of pure, elite religious knowledge straight out of the Eranos meetings and the phenomenological History of Religions.

[EDW] With Christopher Cotter, you co-edited the volume on After World Religions: Reconstructing Religious Studies, published by Routledge in 2016. Could you tell my readers a little bit more about the concept of “world religions” and why you have joined other scholars in critiquing its utility? If we shift-attention from teaching about the so-called “world religions,” how do you think we can best teach about religion, whether in schools or universities?

[DGR] There are really a lot of problems with thinking about religions through the World Religions paradigm. First, why is it always the same five traditions? If it’s numbers, then why is Judaism there, and not, say, African or Greek traditions? If it’s importance, well, how do we ascertain that? The answer is that the WRP [World Religions Paradigm] presupposes a Protestant Christian model of religion, so religions are ranked on historical proximity to Christianity (so, Judaism) and on similarity – whether or not they have scriptures and priests, or offer a message of salvation, and so on. It also hugely misrepresents the religious lives of adherents – we “know” that Buddhists are pacifists, Catholics believe in transubstantiation and the Vedas are the sacred texts of Hinduism, yet none of these things are true of the majority of adherents to those religions. It oversimplifies the historical and vernacular diversity of traditions to create these monolithic entities, which usually marginalises non-elite voices like women and the poor. And it ignores that people don’t necessarily belong to a single religion in the way we tend to in the West.

The important thing to remember is that the concept of ‘world religions’ – and indeed, ‘religion’ – comes from a particular historical context: colonialism. It’s the equivalent of the Tree of Life with humans as the pinnacle of evolution, except here it’s Christianity as the paragon of religions. The religions of people that the Victorians weren’t interested in ruling or trading with were simply ignored. It’s high time that the way we teach about religion moves past “descriptions of the strange beliefs of foreigners”.

The book is focused on teaching, so there are lots of suggestions in it for how to teach after world religions. My approach is to say to the students, “I’m not going to tell you what religion is – I’m going to help you to see all the different ways that people understand it, and for you to get better at seeing which one is at play at any given circumstance.” Then we can take some examples chosen to show when these different models come into dispute – like yoga being banned in schools in Alabama, or whether racist nationalist Christians are “really” Christians, or whatever. This gives them a really useful toolkit for thinking about people, wordviews and societies, not just a set of inaccurate “facts” about some religions.

[EDW] With Carmen Becker you co-edit the peer-reviewed journal Implicit Religion. This isn’t a term that will be widely understood outside certain academic circles, so can you explain what you mean by the term “implicit religion” and what you see as the journal’s aims?

[DGR] “Implicit religion” is the name of the journal, and no more. We inherited it when we inherited the journal from Edward Bailey. Implicit Religion was his thing, the idea that anything that people found profoundly meaningful was essentially religious, whether they thought so or not. It has some fans, but was never widely used in RS, and I certainly had no interest in it. When he died, Equinox wanted to reinvent the journal as a critical religion journal, and approached me because of my work with the Religious Studies Project. We recently added the subtitle, Journal for the Critical Study of Religion, to make it clearer that it’s really a different journal.

Carmen and I want to focus on cases on the borders of the category, where the ideas of what religion is – implicit or explicit – come into play. So we’ve had issues on how religion is conceptualised in the law, in nationalism, in Alcoholics Anonymous, features on how scholars study non-religion and Scientology, and a retrospective on Timothy Fitzgerald’s The Ideology of Religious Studies. We’ve built an incredible editorial board which brings together the best critical scholars from Europe and North America. I’d urge anyone who’d be interested in contributing to get in touch with me.

[EDW] You are also a co-founder of the Religious Studies Project, which is a really excellent website on which you feature recorded interviews with scholars working on the study of religion. What led you to establish this site, how did it get off the ground, and what do you see its role within the field?

[DGR] Chris [Christopher B. Cotter] and I were graduate students together at Edinburgh. We’d been hanging out, and one night I suggested we could record a few seminars and put them out as a podcast. The idea developed, and we recorded our first interviews at the BASR [British Association for the Study of Religion] conference in 2011. That was ten years and about four hundred episodes ago. Now it’s a whole international team, we’re a registered charity and we’re expecting to hit a million downloads this autumn.

The aim was to demystify Religious Studies a bit, presenting ideas in an accessible way and in a natural, conversational style. But we also wanted to embed the whole think in the critical paradigm, always bringing it back to broader theoretical issues about the category “religion”. It’s funny to think of a whole generation of scholars coming up having listened to the RSP, but if it means that they have internalised some of the critical approach, it will have been worth it.

[EDW] We are seeing a decline in the popularity of most humanities subjects at the undergraduate level, at least in Britain, and that probably doesn’t bode well for the study of religion as an academic field. How is the field faring, and what do you think are its prospects for the future? Do you think its future health will necessitate greater reliance on independent scholars and on academics working in other (arguably institutionally stronger) disciplines like history and anthropology?

[DGR] The humanities have been hit hard in the UK through the neoliberalisation of higher education (the introduction of student fees) and the financial crash of 2008, which led to research funding cuts. Religious Studies was always a small subject, but it isn’t faring too badly, in fact – though this isn’t too clear from the way the figures are counted (Philosophy, Religion and Ethics courses, for example, are actually growing, but aren’t counted part of Theology and Religious Studies by UCAS). Moreover, the WRP has meant that departments have been increasingly staffed by area specialists, further weakening the disciplinary identity. So we are still vulnerable.

Religious Studies has two major issues to overcome, however, if it is to thrive as an academic subject. We lack institutional power, because almost every RS department is controlled by religiously-motivated scholars, as are all the bodies who make decisions at policy level or funding research. For such people, RS is at best “the other religions”, or at worst an atheist upstart out to undermine them. This brings me to the second point: we have failed to make the case publicly or institutionally for the unique contribution and value of the social-scientific non-confessional study of religion. If we cannot do so, then we cannot hope to move the public discourse on religion forward. I personally think that the two are related – we cannot hope to make the case so long as we are shackled to those in whose interest it is that we don’t. Either RS has to start cutting ties and work to establish itself among the social sciences, or we should move into sociology and anthropology departments and stop shoring up theology departments with the student numbers and interdisciplinary potential we bring.

[EDW] Are there any other projects of yours that we should be keeping an eye out for?

[DGR] If you like melodic prog rock, you might like to check out my new album at https://zenarchy.bandcamp.com/releases.

[EDW] Many thanks for this insight into your work, Dr Robertson, and I wish you all the best for the future.

This interview is also available at the World Religions and Spirituality Project website (https://wrldrels.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Wessinger-Edit.-Robertson-interview2.pdf).

From David Bowie to UKIP: My 2019 Roundup

The past year has been a busy one, during which I completed my PhD on the archaeological and historical evidence for the religious uses of watery places in early medieval England. It is hoped that this research will see publication in the coming years, alongside other smaller projects that I have been undertaking on the early medieval period and its reception in subsequent centuries.

2019 also saw the publication of my second book, an edited volume put together with the Israeli historian and scholar of religion Shai Feraro (who I interviewed here back in 2014). The volume is titled Magic and Witchery in the Modern West: Celebrating the Twentieth Anniversary of ‘The Triumph of the Moon’. As its title suggests, it has been put out in honour of The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, Professor Ronald Hutton’s ground-breaking work on Wiccan history that first appeared in 1999 (but which has just been re-released in a newly revised edition by Oxford University Press). Hutton has been kind enough to produce an afterword to the edited volume, which also contains chapters on modern witchcraft and related topics by Feraro, Hugh B. Urban, Helen Cornish, Jenny Butler, Sabina Magliocco, Sarah M. Pike, Léon A. van Gulik, Manon Hedenborg White, and Chas S. Clifton. My own contribution, “Navigating the Crooked Path: Andrew D. Chumbley and the Sabbatic Craft,” represents the first scholarly biography of Chumbley, an influential figure in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century occult scene and one of the foremost figures in the “Traditional Witchcraft” milieu. The book has been published by Palgrave Macmillan as part of their series on Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic. Like many academic volumes, it isn’t exactly cheap, but those interested in buying a copy can keep an eye out for the publisher’s next sale.

I have also had two of my articles published in peer-reviewed journals over the past year. One of these, titled ““One Magical Movement from Kether to Malkuth”: Occultism in the Work of David Bowie,” has appeared in volume seven of Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism, an excellent open-access publication that allows anyone to read its online contents for free. The article offers the first scholarly appraisal of how Bowie drew upon forms of occultism in creating his music. As a Bowie fan, I have long been interested in this side of his oeuvre, a topic that clearly intrigues many others given the considerable amount of online speculation about it. A conference held in the summer of 2018 at Goldsmiths, University of London, “Decadence, Magic(k) and the Occult,” permitted me the opportunity to delve deeper into this subject, resulting in the Correspondences article.

The second of these two articles explores another theme that interests me, the intersections of religion, heritage, and politics. Specifically, the article focuses on the contrasting attitudes toward Christianity and Islam within the UK Independence Party (UKIP), the right-wing group whose successes at the ballot box paved the way for Brexit. Titled “Christianity, Islam, and the UK Independence Party: Religion and British Identity in the Discourse of Right-Wing Populists,” the article appears in the sixty-first volume of the Journal of Church and State, published by Oxford University Press.

I have also continued my work as a book reviewer for various journals, including Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture, and the American Academy of Religion’s Reading Religion website, on whose editorial board I continue to sit. For the latter I have reviewed books on fairies, early medieval rituals, the material evidence for counter-witchcraft, and the paranormal in popular culture over the course of 2019. All of these are available online for free, for anyone who might take an interest in such topics.