Witching Culture Quotes

“Understanding the physiological and neurological features of spiritual experiences should not be interpreted as an attempt to discredit their reality or explain them away. Rather, it demonstrates their physical existence as a fundamental, shared part of human nature. Spiritual experiences cannot be considered irrational, since we have seen that, given their physiological basis, experiencers' descriptions of them are perfectly rational... All human perceptions of material reality can ultimately be documented as chemical reactions in our neurobiology; all our sensations, thoughts, and memories are ultimately reducible to chemistry, yet we feel no need to deny the existence of the material world; it is not less real because our perceptions of it are biologically based... It is not rational to assume that the spiritual reality of core experiences is any less real than the more scientifically documentable material reality.”
― Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America

“Thus the writing of ethnography becomes a magical act, no less than the creation of a ritual, the making of a spell, or the manufacture of a sacred object: the ethnographer is by definition a magician.”
― Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America

“Pagans occupy a very particular niche in the American class hierarchy: while many have the education generally associated with the middle and upper classes, most are in effect part of the working class.”
― Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America

“In The Practice of Everyday Life, French sociologist Michel DeCerteau pioneered the notion of consumers as “textual poachers,” whose consumption of mass culture subtly undermines the uses for which its creators intended it”
― Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America

“As the early inhabitants of Gaul and Britain, and the first victims of British colonial expansion, the Celts became a powerful symbol of cultural survival and identity in Britain.”
― Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America

“Celts”—a linguistic construction based on relationships between Welsh, Breton, and Cornish, which seventeenth-century French historian Paul Yves Perzon first traced to the “Keltoi” of ancient Greek writers”
― Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America

“Iolo gave new interpretations of the Ogham-like script that survived in stone inscriptions from many parts of Britain, and probably dated from the third to fifth centuries C.E. Iolo’s reinterpretation assigned each letter a mystical association and a corresponding tree.”
― Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America

“Wycombe” (pronounced “wickam”) a possible source for the name of Gardner’s group, the Brotherhood of the Wica [sic].”
― Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America

“Ficino also conceived of eros, or love, as the spiritual force that drove the universe (Orion, 1995:86–87). Again, this presages Neo-Pagan and especially Wiccan notions of the polarity between goddess and god, feminine and masculine energies in the universe,”
― Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America

“Through the writings of Aristotle, Ficino reclaimed from Anaximenes, a fourth-century B.C.E. Greek philosopher, the concept of pneuma (“breath” or “spirit”), a substance which he envisioned as constantly in flux and animating everything in the universe.”
― Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America

“The central teaching of the Neoplatonists was the fundamental oneness of everything in the universe. “The One” was imagined as a divine unity that was infinite, perfect, and fundamentally unknowable by humans, given their limitations. From the One emanated a hierarchical set of realities that included the nous, or mind; the world soul; human souls; and the physical world of matter. Each emanation was thought to be a reflection of its predecessor in the hierarchy, so that all emanations existed as aspects of the One.”
― Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America

“While earlier folklorists would have dismissed Neo-Paganism as an example of folklorismus, “invented tradition,” or fakelore, folklorists today are more likely to understand it as part of the process through which traditions are shaped, selected, and reinterpreted by individuals and groups to serve larger social, political, and ideological ends.”
― Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America