An Interview with Professor Emeritus Robert Mathiesen

Today here at Albion Calling, I am interviewing Dr. Robert Mathiesen, an American medievalist, Slavist, and historian of Western esotericism. Now Professor Emeritus at Brown University, Rhode Island, where he has worked since 1967, in recent years Dr. Mathiesen has turned his attention to both the textual evidence for witchcraft in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States, as well as the work of folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland, who himself played a significant role in the development of contemporary Pagan Witchcraft. We talk about Mathiesen’s life, research, and thoughts about the future of research on these topics.

Professor Mathiesen and his wife

[EDW] You obtained your bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, and then your PhD from Columbia University, New York for a dissertation titled “The Inflectional Morphology of the Synodal Church Slavonic Verb,” in 1974. Your interest at the time was in Slavic linguistics and philology, and it would be interesting to learn how you first became involved in such a subject, which I’d imagine was complicated by the fact that Eastern Europe was then on the other side of the Iron Curtain?

[RM] That’s a long, strange story. I was always greatly interested in dead languages and old writing systems, and also I had a talent for mathematics and the hard sciences. This led me to my first esoteric teacher outside of my own family, Clesson Hopkins Harvey (1925-2012), who was teaching physics at Berkeley High School. He had a degree in physical chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley, but his parents had been members of Katherine Tingley’s branch of the Theosophical Society at Point Loma, in San Diego, California, and he had passed through the excellent school system that the Society operated at Point Loma, rather than through the California public school system. He knew how to read Old-Kingdom Egyptian hieroglyphics as well as Classical Tibetan, and he ran an after-school club for students at that school who wanted to learn how to read Egyptian hieroglyphics. He and I became quite friendly, and eventually I spent many happy hours in his apartment translating some of the Pyramid Texts under his direction and hearing his esoteric commentary on them. He also had many fascinating stories to tell about his own occult adventures. I had already studied Latin and German in high school, but Old Egyptian was my first language that did not use the Latin alphabet.

I also had good friends at Berkeley High School whose families had fled Russia after the Bolsheviks seized power. Because of them I wanted to learn Russian also, and I began to study that language at the University, as well as several other languages. I soon learned that my friends’ church, the Russian Orthodox Church, used as its liturgical language a much older form of Slavic, written in a beautiful and complicated black-letter alphabet. This liturgical language was called Church Slavonic. As it happened, the University also had a course on its oldest variety, Old Church Slavonic, which was offered by a brilliant linguist and superb teacher, Francis J. Whitfield (1916-1996). I took that course, and I became fascinated with Slavic historical linguistics and philology. And so off I went to graduate school, almost on a whim, to pursue that interest. Columbia University seemed the best place to do so (and they offered me financial aid), although it had the serious drawback of being in New York City, which was far too noisy and intense a place for an introvert like myself.

More generally, the whole question of ritual or sacral languages also seemed to me worth pursuing academically. Why is there a tendency, even in non-literate cultures, to use a special, archaic form of language in religious and magical ritual? What effect does the use of such a language naturally have on the consciousness of the participants in that ritual? (And can we tease out the psychological or neurological bases of these effects?)

As for the Iron Curtain, it wasn’t too much of a problem for me, really. The Soviet regime had largely suppressed scholarship in all the fields that most interested me, and it limited access to the primary sources on which such scholarship is based, so I had little reason to travel there. Also, like many an introvert, I have never really enjoyed traveling. If, however, there had been such a thing as a time machine, I might have wanted to visit with several scholars from bygone centuries.

[EDW] Although not directly related to your scholarship, it is noteworthy that you were enrolled in the American university system during the era of the growing counterculture, civil rights, and anti-war protests, which attracted international attention. Their legacy lives on today; were you involved in these movements in any way, and did they affect you during your studies?

[RM] I was born nine months after the United States entered World War II, and so I was just a year too old to have encountered these events while I was a student, either at Berkeley or at Columbia. However, I had friends who played a role behind the scenes in exporting the student revolution from Berkeley throughout the United States, and I heard their stories. (The student revolution was not simply a spontaneous nation-wide movement; its spread from Berkeley to other universities was funded and otherwise facilitated by a small group of activists, among whom were one or two of my friends.)

In 1967 I moved to New England and joined the faculty of Brown University (in the state of Rhode Island). Brown was a small and very good college in those days, and its internal governance and administration happened to be very weak and ineffectual during most of the first decade I was there. So the student revolution encountered almost no resistance from on high at Brown. In the absence of any confrontation, cooperation developed easily between students and most of the younger faculty. Thus all that revolutionary energy was channelled into academic reform, resulting in the University’s quite free-wheeling and open “new curriculum” in 1969. It was the perfect permissive environment for an eccentric like me to start his academic career.

Now Brown University has changed almost out of all recognition from those long-ago permissive days. It has transformed itself from an excellent college for undergraduate students into a middle-ranked research university with strong graduate and professional schools. It is now rather tightly governed and administered so as to maximize its own institutional wealth and power and minimize all risk, rather than to advance knowledge for knowledge’s own sake. The old university ideals of Lernfreiheit and Lehrfreiheit (the freedom to learn and the freedom to teach whatever one likes) are very much attenuated at Brown now, at least in comparison to the 1970s. However, as Heraclitus said so long ago, “all things flow.” The current restrictive era, too, may pass.

Professor Mathiesen with is wife and granddaughter

[EDW] In 1967, Brown University employed you as an instructor in Slavic languages, before raising you to the position of Assistant Professor in 1972 and then Professor in 1986. Over that period, you produced a variety of booklets to accompany exhibitions, such as The Ostrih Bible 1580/1–1980/1: A Quadricentennial Exhibition (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1980), Late Medieval Herbals: An Exhibit at the John Hay Library (Committee on Medieval Studies, 1983–84), and The Great Polyglot Bibles: The Impact of Printing on Religion in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (John Carter Brown Library, 1985), alongside numerous journal articles, book chapters and reviews. Your interests moved from Slavic languages to the Middle Ages of Western Europe; what was it that led you to do so, and were Brown happy for you to move into a different field?

[RM] The causes were economic. For all its permissiveness, Brown rightly expected its faculty to teach classes that actually would have students enrolled in them. As the Cold War wound down and government funds for the advanced study of Slavic languages dried up, there was no longer any sustained student demand for courses in Slavic historical linguistics. If I had been an all-around Slavist, I might have started to offer courses in modern Slavic languages and literatures, as my colleagues at other universities found it easy to do. However, despite my advanced degree, I had not prepared myself to be an all-around Slavist, but rather an all-around Medieval philologist and historical linguist with a primary specialization in Eastern Orthodox Slavic lands. And I did have a fair number of Medieval languages, Western as well as Eastern. So I began to offer courses in Medieval Studies, although Brown had no formal department for that field, only a loose network of interested faculty who were housed in a wide variety of departments. In the early 1980s a professor could still shift fields in this way at Brown. It became much more difficult to do that in the 1990s, as formal credentials began to count for much more at Brown than proven competence or expertise.

The methods of historical linguistics, philology, textual criticism, palaeography and codicology are generally the same, no matter what the Medieval languages and texts to which they are applied. So I started offering undergraduate courses on those methods. They proved quite effective at Brown because the University’s libraries had (and have) a variegated collection of Medieval manuscripts, as well as major holdings of incunabula (books printed in the 15th century) and other early-printed books. Also, library policy allowed undergraduate students unrestricted access to all these rare materials, so my courses included a lot of hands-on work with manuscripts and early-printed books. Through these courses, I developed excellent relations with the Special-Collections librarians at Brown and elsewhere, which led to the exhibit catalogues you mentioned.

As a Medievalist, of course, I needed not just a passing familiarity with Christianity, but real expertise in the history and practice of that religion, and particularly in such subjects as Medieval Christian theology, Biblical and patristic studies, liturgics and the computus (that is, liturgical calendar calculations), etc. An uncommon sort of expertise, indeed, for a non-Abrahamic scholar such as myself to have developed!

[EDW] Esotericism and magic appear to have been your primary research interest for several decades now; I’m sure that many of my readers would be interested in learning where this fascination stemmed from. Did you personally come from what you have referred to as an “esoteric family” or is it something that you were initially exposed to in later life?

[RM] Yes, my mother’s family has had esoteric interests from the 1870s or 1880s onward, which came down to me. It was a very narrow line of transmission. My great-great-grandmother was the first ancestor whose esoteric interests I can document (from her scrapbooks and from contemporary publications that mention her). Her only child, my great-grandmother, lived until I was about ten years old, and I knew her house and its contents well. She owned a genuine human skull (an anatomical preparation from the late 1800s), which lived—that was the word we used—in the same box with the old photographs of her own ancestors. (Now I have that skull.) Her curio cabinet held a couple of gazing crystals, an opium pipe and a dried opium poppy seed head, as well as other ancient family relics. Great-grandmother, in turn, also had only one child, my grandmother Zena, who had died before I was born. Grandmother had two children, my mother Edris and my aunt Muriel.

All these five women had esoteric interests, which they pursued in a desultory and somewhat frivolous manner. Their interests appear to have derived from the magical wing of Spiritualism (as exemplified by such figures as Emma Hardinge Britten and possibly Paschal Beverly Randolph) and from the mind-over-matter magic of New Thought and Christian Science (“magic with the serial numbers filed off,” as John Michael Greer and others have called it). Also, they were greatly inspired by the esoteric and occult themes woven into the novels of Marie Corelli, H. Rider Haggard and Sax Rohmer. In addition, great-grandmother’s husband practiced the Delsarte System of gymnastics and physical culture. This had been brought to California by Genevieve Stebbins, who was also involved with the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor and the Church of Light; in her hands the Delsarte System could be applied for esoteric ends. These ancestors of mine took those esoteric ingredients and blended them with California-style Nature Religion, or Pantheism, as popularized by luminaries like Joaquin Miller and John Muir, thus creating their own personal kind of magic and religion. “Magical Pantheism” seems to me to be the best description of the beliefs in which I was raised by my mother.

Some decades ago I passed on a copy of Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon to my mother, who read it with considerable interest, and remarked, “That’s almost exactly what I believe.” (Despite her response, it is important to note that neither she nor any of her ancestors thought of themselves as Witches. Witches, for them, simply did not exist, except as a role one might play at a Hallowe’en party.)

My father’s family, in contrast, had no religious or spiritual interests whatever. My father was a mechanical engineer working in the defense and aerospace industries, and he was an agnostic. His step-father, however, had traveled for some years in his youth with a carnival, where he learned the ways of sharpers and con-artists. Grandfather knew how to judge the fineness of a piece of gold simply by biting it. He could open a safe without knowing its combination, or deal you any hand of cards you cared to name from a new deck that he had never handled. He had met and married my grandmother while they were both working for a local auction-house in Oakland, California, that, along with its legitimate activities, also quietly fenced stolen goods and peddled political influence. She kept the accounts for the whole business (the false books that auditors could inspect anytime, but also the true books that nobody else ever got to see). When I got to know my grandparents, decades later, their former employer had long been dead, and they ran a small auction-house of their own that specialized in intestate estates. Grandmother had had quite enough of shady dealings by that time, so she insisted that their own business was run entirely above-board, without even routine kick-backs and bribes to the Public Administrator (who assigned intestate estates to various auction-houses for conversion into ready money). Consequently, they never prospered, though they no longer had to worry about getting caught out and being sent to prison. That seemed a fair trade-off to my grandmother.

While I was growing up, dinner-table conversations could be uncommonly instructive. My mother might talk about some esoteric phenomenon, my father would come up with an engineer’s explanation for it on scientific principles, and rarely his stepfather might be persuaded to say a little about how the same apparent result could be accomplished by fraud and deception. I could not have asked for a better upbringing!

[EDW] In the 1990s, you began teaching courses titled “Magic in the Middle Ages,” “Women, Magic, and Power 1800–1960,” and “Esoteric Russia” at Brown. What inspired your decision to initiate these courses, and did you face much opposition for teaching such unconventional topics?

[RM] I was one of five faculty who team-taught the course “Introduction to Medieval Studies” here at Brown. I had been doing the first unit, on the chronological and geographical boundaries of the Medieval World, its distinct periods and regions. The other four units were on whatever topics the other four faculty wanted to present that year, with the only proviso that the topics might intrigue students who were taking the course. Eventually I tired of teaching the first unit and traded with a colleague for one of the four free-topic units. That was the first academic year after Richard Kieckhefer’s Magic in the Middle Ages had just been published, and I had just been reading it. So I decided to offer my unit on that topic. Student response to the topic was so strong and so gratifying that I decided to offer a full course under the same title the following academic year (1991/2). I had thought I might draw twenty students at the most. Instead, about 500 appeared in the classroom on the first day, though their number eventually settled down to about 300. I had never taught a class larger than about 20 before, so I had to learn on the fly how to run a very large course. It was not my finest hour! But with practice I got better at teaching large classes.

In the early 1990s about one-fifth of the students in the course self-identified to me as Pagan (or Wiccan or Asatru) or as magic-users of some variety. Brown was still pretty free-wheeling in the early 1990s. Around 1995 our admissions office began to seek out another, more entrepreneurial sort of applicant for admission; after that date many fewer students in my courses self-identified as Pagan or as magical folk.

My other course, “Women, Magic and Power, 1800-1960,” came about almost by accident. I was sitting in my office talking somewhat at random with my UTRA [my undergraduate teaching and research assistant] about the history of alternative magical religions in the USA, and how most of them had been founded and led by women, when my UTRA from the previous year happened to stop by and join the conversation. She was very enthusiastic for Women’s Studies, and her response to the conversation was, “Why haven’t we ever been told about these women in any of our courses on Religious Studies or Women’s Studies at Brown? Are courses taught on them anywhere else?” I said that there weren’t, so far as I knew, probably because faculty in Religious Studies were mostly uncomfortable with taking magic seriously, and faculty in Women’s Studies were, by and large, equally uncomfortable with taking religion seriously, since it played so great a role in upholding patriarchal forms of society.

With that we were off and running . . . The two of them helped me work out a syllabus for the new course, and I was able to offer it for the first time in the academic year 1998/9. (I owe them both a great deal. A huge public thank-you, Kate and Rebecca; you know who you are!)

Before that conversation, my research on women-led magical alternative religions had been nothing more than a personal voyage of discovery. I had been trying to figure out how my mother’s family came to be so very different from other families, so weird and odd even for California and the San Francisco Bay area. My mother’s favorite saying was, “Mathiesens are different!” (No doubt her own mother had told her, “Leathermans are different,” and so on back through the generations of women before her, with a different surname each time.) By that saying she meant that her whole family, past and present, had made a point of being different. The gloss on that old family saying was not only that we were obligated by birth and upbringing to cultivate ways to be different from everyone else in our society, but even ways to be different from one another within our family. Each of us had a duty to find our own way to be different. Also, we weren’t ever to be part of any community, or to give any community our loyalty, or to conform to its norms, or respect it and its laws as anything more than a necessary evil.

There wasn’t any opposition at first to my courses at Brown. I had a reputation as a first-rate scholar. Also, everyone simply took it for granted that I, like any other academic in a major university, could not possibly take either magic or alternative religion seriously. Brown, like all other major universities, was far too respectable! But I never cared about appearances or social conventions, beyond the bare minimum needed not to run afoul of the law, and I never tried to hide my own strong interest in how magic can actually be made to work in the hands of a skilled and knowledgeable magician (or, sometimes, can be made to seem to work). And I talked about these things, outside of class, with any and all interested students.

So there was trouble, eventually. But I had developed my own academic power bases, and I quietly let it be known that, although I didn’t like to fight and didn’t ever want to fight, whenever I had been forced to fight in the past, I had never fought fair, but had always gone for the jugular or hit below the belt with my very first blow. And after thirty years at Brown, I had come to know which other closets had skeletons in them, too. So I was able to keep trouble more or less at bay for a few years, until I was ready to retire on my own terms. I think there might have been a feeling of relief among the administrators when I did retire. If there was, I take it as a high compliment. I was certainly glad to be done with university life forever. At least in my corner of Brown, academic politics since the early 1970s reminded me (as it did many of my colleagues) of Gunther in the snake pit: being able to play one’s harp only slightly mitigated the effects of the venom.

[EDW] Alongside Richard Kieckhefer and Claire Fanger, you were one of the three founders of the Societas Magica, an academic fellowship devoted to the scholarly study of magical beliefs and practices. Can you tell us a little about how this organisation came about, and the reasons that you had for initiating the group? Furthermore, now that the society has been around for almost twenty years, what do you see as its strengths and achievements, and do you have any particular hopes for its future?

[RM] The Societas Magica was conceived within the matrix of the International Congress on Medieval Studies, which meets every year in May at Western Michigan University (in Kalamazoo, Michigan). Its initial purpose was the very modest one of arranging annual sessions devoted to the history of magic, especially Medieval magic, as a part of that Congress.

If memory serves me rightly, the idea of such a society was floated in the course of a casual conversation between the three of us as our paths happened to cross between scheduled sessions. For the most part, it was Claire Fanger who actually carried the ball and ran with it during the early years, together with her friend and colleague Frank F. Klaassen. The two of them dealt with the administration of the Congress every year, launched a newsletter, arranged for the scheduled sessions of papers, and prepared the ground for the Society’s annual meeting (also held at the Congress).

Now, of course, the Societas Magica has become an established institution. I consider myself fortunate to have been present at its birth. But, for reasons of health, I have found it nearly impossible to travel now, so I have not been able to attend any meetings of the society since the early 2000s. Thus I am not very up-to-date on its current activities.

[EDW] In the summer of 2005, you retired to become Professor Emeritus, although have remained actively involved in the academic study of magic. With Andrew Theitic, you have been investigating the texts that lie at the heart of the New England Covens of Traditionalist Witches (NECTW), a tradition of Wicca founded by Gwen Thompson in 1970. Published as The Rede of the Wiccae: Adriana Porter, Gwen Thompson and the Birth of a Tradition of Witchcraft (Olympian Press, 2005), this work has been of real importance in unearthing more about the development of Pagan Witchcraft in the United States. How did this situation come about, and do you have any intention of continuing with any similar research in future?

[RM] Theitic has been my good friend for decades. I first met him through his partner (now deceased), who worked at Brown and audited my course on Magic in the Middle Ages.  Theitic is a natural scholar, and he is also the archivist and historian for the NECTW. He is also Elizabeth Pepper’s literary heir, and he continues to publish The Witches’ Almanac, which Pepper founded with John Wilcock in 1971.

While I was an active professor at a research university, I felt myself constrained not to take any oath of secrecy or confidentiality that would keep me from shedding light on the sources for my research, so I worked with the history of this Tradition exclusively from material that Gwen Thompson herself had published, or that was otherwise not oath-bound. As for future work on Thompson’s family and their esoteric interests, we shall see. Theitic has recently published an article about our collaboration in the latest issue of Michael Howard’s The Cauldron (no. 148), which might be of interest to your readers.

I certainly plan to continue my research on the various kinds of pre-Gardnerian (or non-Gardnerian) Witchcraft in the United States. I am particularly interested in how women devised or invented Witchcrafts of their own, usually as a way to empower themselves, between the years 1860 and 1960. This happened more commonly than one might think. (Something similar was probably happening in the United Kingdom during the same decades.) In general, these women relied on popular books on the history of magic and witchcraft, on fiction about Witches and magicians, and on folklore (both in published form and in living oral tradition), as they invented Witchcrafts for themselves.

The earliest such woman of whom I am aware was the redoubtable Emma Hardinge Britten (1823-1899), one of the founding members of the Theosophical Society, but also a well-known, influential Spiritualist medium and lecturer with a large following on both sides of the Atlantic. Hardinge Britten repeatedly asserted that there was no difference at all between a medium, a magician or practical occultist, and a Witch: all of them had the same rare (usually inborn) special abilities, and all of them drew their power from the same sources. She was also the editor and partial author of two famous (and quite controversial) books published in 1876: Art Magic; or, Mundane, Sub-Mundane and Super-Mundane Spiritism, and Ghost Land; or, Researches into the Mysteries of Occultism. (It is worth noting that Doreen Valiente cites Art Magic in one of her early works, and she clearly learned from it.) In 2001 I published a monograph on Hardinge Britten as a representative of the “magical wing” of Spiritualism, in which this question is explored more fully: The Unseen Worlds of Emma Hardinge Britten: Some Chapters in the History of Western Occultism (Theosophical History, Occasional Papers, volume IX).

Other such women in the United States are, on the whole, less well documented than Hardinge Britten. Many of them worked as solitaries, practicing Witchcrafts of their own invention for their own empowerment, without any thought of handing their Craft down to the next generation. Documented cases include Leslyn Macdonald (1904-1981), who was married to Robert A. Heinlein from 1932 to 1947, and Shirley Jackson (1916-1965), author of the chilling short story, “The Lottery” (1948).

Somewhat less well documented is a circle of women operating as a “coven of witches” within the Order of the Magi, an esoteric order founded by Olney H. Richmond (1844-1920). Most of the little we know about this circle comes to us through a Chicago dealer in occult books, Donald G. Nelson, and from him through John M. Hansen. A second circle of Witches, in northern Michigan, is known only from the reminiscences of the late Marion Kuclo, or “Gundella” (1930-1993), who had been initiated into the circle by a relative of hers when she turned 18. To judge by a number of hints in Kuclo’s published writings, this group of witches had been influenced by the magical wing of Spiritualism.

An old friend and colleague of mine, Aidan A. Kelly, has long been trying to track down various early groups of people who called themselves Witches. Thanks to his work, I am convinced that at least a few other such small, private groups existed in the United States well before the 1950s, as well as a number of solitaries.

[EDW] In recent years, you have contributed to the publication of two books written over a century ago by the American folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland. The first is a reissue of Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (Witches Almanac Ltd, 2010), a seminal work in the development of modern Pagan Witchcraft that was first published in 1899 by David Nutt. The second is a previously unpublished manuscript by Leland, The Witchcraft of Dame Darrel of York (Witches Almanac Ltd, 2011), which purports to be the fictitious grimoire of a witch in medieval England. How did you get involved in these projects, and what is it about Leland that so interests you?

[RM] There are three Leland books, actually. In addition to the two you mention, I contributed a substantial introduction to an earlier edition of Aradia, edited by Mario Pazzoglini and others and published by Doug Brown (Phoenix Publishing, 1998).

Mathiesen has contributed to two published editions of Aradia

I first came to Leland’s Aradia by way of Margaret A. Murray’s claim that some of the women and men executed as Witches had actually been adherents of an underground Pagan religion that had somehow survived in secret throughout the Middle Ages. Such a claim interested me as a Medievalist, so I went looking for evidence.  There was, I soon learned, the body of purportedly early texts that Gerald Gardner had passed on to his initiates. As it happened, large parts of this body of texts had already been published in various books, including two by Janet and Stewart Farrar. It did not take much work to show that these texts, in their published forms, could not possibly be older than around 1930, and that they offered no evidence whatever for any greater antiquity of the religion they described. Aidan Kelly, too, had come to similar conclusions on the basis of the same sort of analysis of roughly the same body of texts, and he had gotten access to some valuable unpublished documents also; and we soon compared results. His original text-critical analysis is of high quality, and I regard him as the academic pioneer in this area of research.

Having easily disposed of Gardner’s Book of Shadows texts as evidence for the antiquity of a presumed Medieval Witch Cult, I went looking for other relevant documents, and soon I found Leland’s Aradia, or The Gospel of the Witches (1899). That posed a very different sort of text-critical problem, which required me to travel to the Library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (in Philadelphia) and the Library of Congress (in Washington, DC). Many of Leland’s own papers have been preserved in these two libraries. I did find evidence there to show how Leland had put together texts from several disparate sources to create the work that he published in 1899.

In the Library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania I was also shown, to my surprise and delight, Leland’s wonderful unpublished jeu d’ésprit, The Witchcraft of Dame Darrel of York. This manuscript is everything that a true Book of Shadows should have been—the myths, magic and secrets of Traditional Witchcraft—but that Gardner’s failed to be. It was a genuine work of art in its appearance, and also in its content, and I was deeply moved as I read it. And, of course, it was definitely not a copy of some earlier, lost book. Rather, it was clearly the product of Leland’s own mind, which was well stocked with the folklore and traditions of magic, and it strongly reflected Leland’s own interests and predilections. I am more proud of this edition than I am of any of my professional academic publications.

[EDW] Having been involved in the field for at least two decades now, it would be interesting to hear your views on the present state of the academic study of magic and esotericism, and on the direction and problems that you feel it might face in the coming decades?

[RM] It seems to me that colleges and universities, at least in the United States, are no longer governed by scholars and scientists, but have fallen into the hands of businessmen and corporate leaders, who give only lip service to traditional educational ideals. At present individual academics can still manage, here and there, to fly under the radar (so to speak) and offer courses in esoteric subjects. But I see very little future for the academic study of magic and esotericism in the United States as an established field during the next few decades, for political and economic reasons, not for scholarly ones. Similarly, I see only a meagre future for a number of well-established fields within the humanities, especially those requiring a mastery of European languages other than English or Spanish.

Further down the road, it is harder to say. I worry that hard times might lie ahead, rather like those predicted by Oswald Spengler in his Decline of the West. There is, I think, a significant possibility that the entire economy of the United States might crash and burn sometime within the next fifty years, and that the country’s inherited political institutions, if they fail to manage so great a crisis, will lose all credibility and legitimacy. In that event, universities and their libraries may well be treated as harshly in the United States as monasteries and their libraries were treated in England during the reign of King Henry VIII. If that is the future we face, then our problem will not be how to ensure that our field of study continues to prosper in the academic world, but how to rescue what we can and keep it safe through a coming new Dark Age.

I do hope I will be proven wrong, that I am worrying needlessly. Time will tell, only time . . .

[EDW] On behalf of all my readers, I offer Dr. Mathiesen a massive thank you for giving this insightful and informative interview to Albion Calling, and wish him all the best in future.

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.