A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft in the United States is a sociological study of the Wiccan and wider Pagan community in the Northeastern United States. It was written by American sociologist Helen A. Berger of the West Chester University of Pennsylvania and first published in 1999 by the University of South Carolina Press. It was released as a part of a series of academic books entitled Studies in Comparative Religion, edited by Frederick M. Denny, a religious studies scholar at the University of Chicago.
Berger became interested in studying the Wiccan and Pagan movement in 1986, when she presented a lecture on the subject at the Boston Public Library. Subsequently, becoming acquainted with members of the New England Pagan community, she undertook fieldwork in both a local Wiccan coven, the Circle of Light, and a wider Pagan organisation, the EarthSpirit Community (ESC). In total, Berger underwent 11 years of fieldwork among the Pagan community. Along with ESC founder Andras Corban Arthen, Berger also undertook a "Pagan Census" survey of the U.S. in the mid-1990s to obtain more data on the country's Pagan community.
A Community of Witches is based on interviews with more than a hundred practicing Wiccans and Pagans, study of the pre-existing literature on the subject and a national survey of the Pagan community in the U.S. In her work, Berger interprets Wicca as a religion of late modernity, as opposed to postmodernity, and subsequently examines it using the theories of sociologists Anthony Giddens and James A. Beckford. Themes covered include Pagan conceptions of the self, the role of covens and the wider Pagan community, the place of children in the movement and the increasing routinization of Wicca through the foundation of organised churches and clergy.
Academic reviewers were mostly positive, but several raised concerns over Berger's incorrect use of terminology. Reviewers noted the study's importance in developing Pagan studies as an academic discipline and helping further the wider sociological investigation into new religious movements in the United States. In the years following the study's publication, Berger continued to investigate the Pagan community, focusing her interest on the popularity of Wicca among teenagers.
Background
Paganism and Wicca in the United States
Contemporary Paganism, also referred to as Neo-Paganism, is an umbrella term used to identify a wide variety of modern religious movements, particularly those influenced by or claiming to be derived from the various pagan beliefs of pre-modern Europe.Carpenter 1996. p. 40.Lewis 2004. p. 13. The religion of Pagan Witchcraft, or Wicca, was developed in England during the first half of the 20th century and is one of several Pagan religions. The figure at the forefront of Wicca's early development was the English occultist Gerald Gardner, the author of Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959) and the founder of a tradition known as Gardnerian Wicca. Gardnerian Wicca revolved around the veneration of both a Horned God and a Mother Goddess, the celebration of eight seasonally-based festivals in a Wheel of the Year and the practice of magical rituals in groups known as covens. Gardnerianism was subsequently brought to the U.S. in the early 1960s by an English initiate, Raymond Buckland, and his then-wife Rosemary, who together founded a coven in Long Island.Hutton 1999 pp. 205–252.Clifton 2006. pp. 24–25 In the U.S., new variants of Wicca developed, including Dianic Wicca, a tradition founded in the 1970s which was influenced by second-wave feminism, emphasized female-only covens, and rejected the veneration of the Horned God. One initiate of both the Dianic and Gardnerian traditions was a woman known as Starhawk who went on to found her own tradition, Reclaiming Wicca. She furthermore published The Spiral Dance: a Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979), a book which helped spread Wicca throughout the U.S.Hutton 1999. pp. 340–351Clifton 2006. pp. 122–123
Academic fieldwork into Wicca
Prior to Berger's work, several American researchers working in the field of Pagan studies had separately published investigations of the Pagan community in the United States and the United Kingdom. The first of these was the practicing Wiccan, journalist and political activist Margot Adler in her Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today, which was first published by Viking Press in 1979.Adler 1979. A second study was produced by the anthropologist Tanya M. Luhrmann in her Persuasions of the Witch's Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (1989), in which she focused on both a Wiccan coven and several ceremonial magic orders that were then operating in London.Luhrmann 1989.
The next academic book to be published based upon fieldwork undertaken in the U.S. Pagan community was Living Witchcraft: A Contemporary American Coven, published by Praeger in 1994. Living Witchcraft had been co-written by three academics, the sociologist Allen Scarboro, psychologist Nancy Campbell and literary critic Shirley Stave, herself a Wiccan practitioner. It was based upon their fieldwork undertaken in the Ravenwood coven of Atlanta, Georgia, over several months across 1990 and 1991.Scarboro, Campbell and Stave 1994. At the same time as Scarboro, Campbell and Stave were undertaking their research, the American anthropologist and practicing Wiccan Loretta Orion was also undertaking an investigation into the Pagan movement in the East Coast and Midwest of the United States. Orion's work was published as Never Again the Burning Times: Paganism Revisited by Waveland Press in 1995, although would be heavily criticized in published reviews written by both Luhrmann and T. O. Beidelman, both of whom were of the opinion that Orion's Pagan beliefs had clouded her critical interpretation.See Orion 1995, and also Beidelman 1995 and Luhrmann 1996. 1997 then saw the publication of Witchcraft and Paganism in Australia, authored by the anthropologist Lynne Hume.Hume 1997.
Berger and her research
Helen Berger, then a lecturer in sociology at the West Chester University of Pennsylvania, had initially become involved in the study of the Pagan movement in preparation for a series of public lectures that she gave at the Boston Public Library in October 1986. Based on the subject of the historical witch trials that took place in New England during the early modern period, she devoted the final lecture in the series to an examination of the contemporary Pagan Witches, or Wiccans, then living in the area. Having yet to perform the sociological investigation that would culminate in A Community of Witches, Berger gained her information for this lecture from the information published in the works of Margot Adler, Starhawk and Marcello Truzzi, and also from a singular interview that she had carried out with a woman who was "peripherally associated" with Paganism. After the lecture, several audience members approached Berger to identify themselves as practicing Wiccans, and it was through them that she came into contact with the New England Pagan community.Berger 1999. pp. xiv–xv. Three of the Wiccans at the lecture invited Berger to "participate as a researcher" as they founded their own coven, the Circle of Light, and she attended their weekly meetings and festival celebrations for the next two years.Berger 1999. p. xv.
At the first open Pagan ritual that she attended, Berger met Andras Corban Arthen, the founder of the EarthSpirit Community (ESC), a Pagan organization open to non-Wiccans which she joined after paying the annual membership fee of $30. Attending many of the ESC's open rituals and festivals, she was introduced to a "diverse group" of Wiccans and other Pagans, and developed a contact base in the community. Berger and Arthen subsequently embarked on a project entitled "The Pagan Census" in an attempt to gain sociological data from the Pagan community across the U.S. Receiving funding from the Faculty Development Fund at West Chester University, Berger was aided in this project by over 15 students who helped her to code and enter data for the survey. Together, Berger and Arthen wrote and distributed their survey through Wiccan and Pagan organizations across the country, as well as in journals, on the internet and at festivals. The duo received over 2000 responses, providing Berger with one of her main sources of information.Berger 1999. pp. xvi–xvii.
Throughout her 11-year period of fieldwork, Berger had to use snowball sampling to retrieve her data on the Pagan community, something that she attributed to the "secrecy of groups and practitioners". She conducted formal interviews with over 40 practicing Pagans, and over 60 others instead were informally interviewed during conversations at Pagan events, following which Berger recorded their responses in her fieldnotes. She participated in rituals with ten different Wiccan covens, two of which were all-female covens, and the other eight of which were mixed-gender in structure, but all of whom assembled in the Northeastern United States.Berger 1999. pp. xv–xvi. Accepting that this regional focus might affect her results, she supplemented her fieldwork by reading literature on Paganism from across the country, concluding that "the differences among groups and practitioners within the United States are less important than the similarities."Berger 1999. p. xvi. Unlike the sociologists Margot Adler and Loretta Orion, both of whom had been or became Pagans whilst studying the movement, Berger stated that she had not joined the religion, thereby remaining an "outsider" throughout her research, but had made many friends within the Pagan community.Berger 1999. p. xvii.
A Community of Witches was a part of a series of books entitled 'Studies in Comparative Religion' that were published by the University of South Carolina Press, and edited by Frederick M. Denny. In Denny's preface to the book, he remarked that it "adds significantly to the steadily growing scholarly literature" on the subject of Wicca and contemporary Paganism, being of "considerable use for our understanding of how other new religious communities are sustaining and developing themselves in the unprecedented rich tapestry of American religious pluralism."Denny in Berger 1999. p. preface.
Synopsis
Starting with a preface in which Berger explains how she first began studying the Wiccan and Pagan community of New England, Berger opens the main part of her book with a description of a Wiccaning which she attended.Berger 1999. pp. 1–3. Proceeding to introduce both the Wiccan religion and her theoretical approach, Berger explains the British sociologist James A. Beckford's approach to the religions of late modernity as well as Anthony Giddens' theoretical approaches to modernism.Berger 1999. pp. 4–12.
In the second chapter, "The Magical Self", Berger examines the ways in which Wiccans in the U.S. understand themselves, looking at sociological ideas about self-identity and utilising them in her analysis of Wiccan rituals that deal with the transformation of the self. She moves on to look at concepts of gender in the Wiccan community, both for men and women and among homosexuals.Berger 1999. pp. 26–46. The third chapter, entitled "The Coven: Perfect Love, Perfect Trust", provides an explanation of the coven system within Wicca, and the ways in which friendships are built and collapse amongst coven members, and the extent to which covens imitate family structures.Berger 1999. pp. 47–64.