University of Vermont
UVM ScholarWorks
Graduate College Dissertations and Theses
Dissertations and Theses
2015
Human-Nature Relationship And Faery Faith In The American
Pagan Subculture
Sarah Goodrich
University of Vermont
Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/graddis
Part of the Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons, and the Social and
Cultural Anthropology Commons
Recommended Citation
Goodrich, Sarah, "Human-Nature Relationship And Faery Faith In The American Pagan Subculture" (2015).
Graduate College Dissertations and Theses. 402.
https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/graddis/402
This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at UVM ScholarWorks. It
has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate College Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of
UVM ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact scholarworks@uvm.edu.
HUMAN-NATURE RELATIONSHIP AND FAERY FAITH
IN THE AMERICAN PAGAN SUBCULTURE
A Thesis Presented
by
Sarah Goodrich
to
The Faculty of the Graduate College
of
The University of Vermont
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of Master of Science
Specializing in Natural Resources
October, 2015
Defense Date: June 4, 2015
Thesis Examination Committee:
Adrian Ivakhiv, Ph.D., Advisor
Catherine A. Paris, Ph.D., Chairperson
Catherine Connor, Ph.D.
Thomas Hudspeth, Ph.D.
Cynthia J. Forehand, Ph.D., Dean of the Graduate College
© Copyright by
Sarah Goodrich
October, 2015
ABSTRACT
Within American religious culture, there is a small but significant and growing
movement that overlaps and interacts with the environmental movement. It’s known by
many names, including Contemporary Paganism, Neo-Paganism, Earth Religion, and
Nature Religion. A few years of observation at Starwood Festival, the largest annual
Pagan gathering in North America, revealed that many individuals who identify as Pagan
(or Wiccan, Druid, animist, or another of the identities that fall under the Pagan umbrella)
include in their spiritual practice engagement with faeries or other nature spirits. My
research employed qualitative methods including participant observation and interviews
to examine the extent to which engagement with faeries and other nature spirits among
Pagan festival attendees affects their relationships with nature and their behaviors in the
natural world. The Pagan understanding of the Earth and all of its inhabitants and
elements as animate or inspirited—as exemplified in the phenomenon of faery faith—
conflates the wellbeing of the Earth and wild nature with the psychological wellbeing of
each individual human, making this worldview highly compatible with the emerging field
of ecopsychology. Drawing on theories of enchantment, consciousness, multiple realities,
imagination, and play, my interpretations of the stories of my informants contribute
additional perspective to the contemporary practice of Paganism as a small but growing
countercultural movement within the dominant Western culture, particularly as it informs
the human-(in)-nature relationship.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION .............................................................................1
REVIEW OF LITERATURE ............................................................5
PAGANISM AS NATURE RELIGION .................................................5
FAERIES AS NATURE SPIRITS ........................................................24
APPROACHES TO STUDYING PAGAN EXPERIENCE OF FAERIES ......32
Imagination, Play, and Multiple Realities ..........................32
Consciousness Studies, Transpersonal
Psychology, and Ecopsychology ...............................51
Enchantment, Disenchantment, and Re-enchantment ........58
METHODOLOGY ............................................................................71
RESULTS ..........................................................................................82
PAGANISM AS NATURE RELIGION .................................................82
FAERIES AS NATURE SPIRITS ........................................................85
DISCUSSION ....................................................................................95
Imagination, Play, and Multiple Realities ..........................95
Consciousness Studies, Transpersonal
Psychology, and Ecopsychology ...............................99
Enchantment, Disenchantment, and Re-enchantment ........102
CONCLUSIONS ...............................................................................106
ii
INTRODUCTION
While attending the annual pan-Pagan gathering Starwood Festival, I have
observed that many festival attendees engage in some way with faeries or other nature
spirits. Through ethnographic field research, I have elucidated how these activities and
proclivities affect people’s relationships with nature and their behaviors in the natural
world. The belief in faeries is a psychological phenomenon that bestows consciousness to
elements of nonhuman nature, making this phenomenon congruent with transpersonal
psychology. The emerging field of ecopsychology, which conflates the wellbeing of the
natural world with the psychological wellbeing of individual humans, provides a
particularly apt framework for understanding the effect of faery faith on the human-
nature relationship.
Contemporary Paganism, also referred to as Neo-Paganism, Earth religion, and
nature religion, is a growing religious movement that places nature prominently in the
spiritual experience. Paganism encompasses a broad array of more specific traditions,
including Wicca, Druidry, Goddess religion, Ásatru, and Animism, among others.
Because Paganism in North America represents an alternative to the dominant Abrahamic
religions, there is some fear among members of the general population who don’t
understand Paganism, as well as fear among Pagans that they will be persecuted or
outcast in their daily lives if their religious affiliation is known (Bowman, 2000). This
climate of fear leads to secretiveness, making it very difficult to know how many Pagans
are currently practicing in the United States and the world. Secretive practice of
1
Paganism is so common that there is a phrase for those individuals who choose not to
share their Pagan identities with people in their daily lives: they are “in the broom
closet.” The Harvard Pluralism Project estimates that there are 200,000-1 million
practicing Pagans in the United States (The Pluralism Project, 2009), and the prominent
Pagan website The Witches’ Voice estimates 1-3 million world-wide (2002).
The largest Pagan gatherings take place at outdoor festivals, and in 2009 I
conducted my field research at the largest pan-Pagan gathering in the United States,
Starwood Festival, attended by 2,500-3,000 people (Association for Consciousness
Exploration, 2009). 2009 was my fourth year attending Starwood Festival, and I had
observed over the previous three years that many festival attendees engage with faeries or
other nature spirits in some way. My research goal was to find out whether this observed
engagement with faeries has any effect on the relationship between practitioners and
nature or the behavior of practitioners vis-à-vis the natural world.
In the context of this investigation, “faeries” can best be described as liminal
human-like creatures of nature. They are liminal in that they are not entirely of this
world, but neither are they entirely of a world apart. They are not human, but they do take
human-like forms and often display human-like behaviors such as language, dancing, and
singing. Faeries by definition have a close affiliation with nature, sometimes
symbolically embodying natural forces or elements (Letcher, 2001, p. 155). I follow
Lewis and Kahn’s (2010) spelling convention and intentionally “differentiate between
‘fairy,’ as in fairy tale or fairy-themed commodity products, and ‘faery,’ a paranormal,
supernatural phenomenon associated with spirits and magical experiences of creatural
2
life” (p. 103). I choose “faery” over “faerie” to avoid any confusion with the Dianic
tradition of “Faerie Faith.” The “faery faith” that I’m examining here simply constitutes
belief in faeries, which occurs in many Pagan traditions. Some authors use spellings
interchangeably, and quoted spellings are preserved. The label faery includes many
liminal human-like creatures of nature known by other names, such as elves, pixies,
gnomes, trolls, nymphs, brownies, sprites, etc. For some Pagans, faeries and
“otherworlds” are as natural as trees and forests, so belief in faeries represents a close
connection with real nature, not an imaginative escape from reality (Harvey, 2006b, p.
48).
The relationships between reality, fantasy, and imagination are central to this
inquiry. My working premise is that people use imagination to construct what we
understand to be reality, so the line between the two becomes blurred, and identifying
whether something is real or imaginary becomes rather unimportant in terms of the role
that it plays in defining one’s worldview. In this study, faeries are understood as an
important and influential phenomenon, and the question of whether they are real and/or
imaginary is considered unanswerable.
My view is that the current proliferation of Paganism, particularly its magical and
imaginal aspects, is a vector for re-enchantment in the enchantment narrative that serves
to tell a history of the West. The basic plotline of this narrative is that ancient cultures
incorporated an enchanted worldview in that people had an appreciation of the
unknowable, a sense of awe and wonder in the face of nature, and a belief that nature is
inspirited. Some combination of scientific rationalism, industrialization, capitalism, and
3
monotheistic world religions has resulted in a disenchantment of the West. Some
scholars, particularly in Pagan circles, are pointing to Contemporary Paganism as one
aspect of a current re-enchantment of Western consciousness.
It is clear to me that Paganism provides a special and venerated place for nature,
but does this translate into more environmentally friendly behavior? How does
environmentalism fit with Paganism? It’s difficult to talk about environmentalism among
Pagans because the Pagan worldview is fundamentally different than the dominant
paradigm: it places human beings within nature as opposed to separate from it. From this
standpoint, all Pagans at least philosophically care for the Earth because there is no
separation between the self and the rest of nature, but this is not necessarily called
environmentalism.
When I was first exploring this topic, I thought my research question would be
“How does engaging with faeries define an environmental ethic among pan-Pagan
festival attendees?” but I found through researching Paganism that this framework
doesn’t really fit. An inquiry framed in terms of relationship with and in the natural world
has proven to be more appropriate and fruitful. As Graham Harvey (2006a) states, “what
Pagans most value might be realising that to be fully human is to adjust or radically
change what now seem like normal relationships and behaviors towards a living world
and lives in that world” (p. 88).
4
REVIEW OF LITERATURE
PAGANISM AS NATURE RELIGION
As defined by Graham Harvey (2006a), “Paganism labels a diverse but cohesive
array of religious activities and affiliations that can also be named ‘nature-centred
spiritualities’ or ‘nature religions’… Pagans are people who identify themselves as
members of a spectrum of nature-celebrating spiritualities” (pp. 84-85). Chas Clifton
(2004) is careful to clarify that while Pagans celebrate nature and see nature as
fundamentally sacred, Pagans are not nature worshippers (p. 336). If this definition of
Paganism seems rather broad, it is. Pagan is an umbrella term that includes people who
identify as “Ásatrú, Druid, Goddess-Feminist, Shaman or Wiccan,” to name the most
common specific Pagan spiritual identities in the West, as well as people who prefer the
general terms ‘Pagan’ or its cognate ‘Heathen’ (Harvey, 2006a, p. 85).
I will not go into the distinctions among various traditions that fall under the
Pagan umbrella; rather I will consider the (few) elements shared by all brands of
Paganism. As Susan Greenwood (2005) says, “unfortunately, for those seeking precise
definitions, nature religion does not embrace one world-view, and it is important to note
from the outset that there is little homogeneity of practice apart from the overarching
need to reconnect with nature” (p. x). Marion Bowman (2000) writes that “while there is
considerable variety within paganism, certain things have the status of ‘common
knowledge’ or received wisdom: pagans respect nature; revere the earth as sacred; are
tolerant; are ‘different.’”
5
Most importantly, the practice of all Paganisms necessarily involves a close
relationship with so-called nature. So what exactly is nature? It is a complex cultural
concept that can scarcely be summed up in language, but Adrian Ivakhiv (2001) has
provided the most complete and poignant description that I’ve seen of the constantly
shifting signifier nature. In broader Western consciousness, he says that nature is “a
categorical stand-in for the nonhuman and non-artifactual world which surrounds and
interpenetrates with human social communities” (p. 36). This broad description seems
fairly accurate for most people in the dominant Western culture, and it would ring true for
many Pagans as well, except that defining nature as nonhuman does not jive with a
common Pagan conception of nature that incorporates humans along with other animals.
The layered collage of significance represented by nature is much more complex than
this, though. Ivakhiv goes on to list several cultural connotations of nature:
nature as a divinely ordained system of norms and rules, rights and obligations; a
book to be read, interpreted, and studied; a motherly female, nurturing and
providing for the needs of her children; a bodylike organism, whose features
mirror those of the human body; a clocklike object or machine, to be studied
dispassionately, taken apart, and manipulated for human benefit; a ruthless and
harsh kingdom, “red in tooth and claw,” from which humans should distance
ourselves through the social contract of civilization; a flourishing web of life; a
storehouse of resources; an Edenic Garden that should be set aside in protected
areas, to be visited periodically for the replenishment of one’s soul; a museum or
theme park for curiosity seekers, or an open-air gymnasium for trials of
masculinity; a cybernetic system or data bank of circulating information; a spirit
or divinity, or a locus for the residence of many spirits; and an avenging angel,
6
capriciously and unpredictably meting out its inhuman justice to a humanity that
has transgressed its natural order (pp. 36-37)
Even this extensive and descriptive list of images represented by the word nature does
not come close to exhausting the cultural significance of the term.
The meaning of nature is not much simpler among Pagans broadly. As Graham
Harvey (2006a) says, “what Pagans actually mean by ‘nature’ varies as much as what
their neighbours might mean” (p. 85). Expressed more fully by Marion Bowman (2000),
“depending on what brand of paganism people subscribe to, what past they seek to
recapture, or what future they hope to create, ideas concerning both nature and
appropriate or natural behaviour must vary.” Despite the understanding that there are
likely no absolutes that apply to all Pagans, I will venture to summarize the most
prevalent ways in which Pagan conceptions of nature tend to differ from those in the
general population: the espoused (though not always practiced) belief that humans are a
part of nature, rather than separate from it; the conviction that nature is sacred; and the
understanding among many Pagans that nature has consciousness. These elements are
expressed in various combinations, as illustrated by the well-known Wiccan elder
Starhawk’s insight that “to Witches, as to other people who live close to nature, all
things—plants, animals, stones, and stars—are alive, are on some level conscious beings.
All things are divine, are manifestations of the Goddess” (Harvey, 2006a, p. 86). This
Pagan viewpoint combines the belief in the consciousness as well as the sacredness of
nature.
7
Starhawk’s mention of “the Goddess” in the preceding passage refers to an
anthropomorphism and deification of the Earth as a whole. This “consciousness of Earth
as a living (not merely lived in) planet” (Harvey, 2006a, p. 87) is alternately referred to as
the Goddess, Gaia, or Mother Earth, among other names. Whether or not the Earth is
anthropomorphized in the various practices of Paganism, Adrian Ivakhiv (2001) explains
that “proponents of contemporary earth spirituality understand the divine or sacred to be
immanent within the natural world, not transcendent and separate from it, and speak of
the Earth itself as being an embodiment, if not the embodiment, of divinity” (p. 8).
Pagans tend to view nature as fundamentally balanced, with contrasting elements
reminiscent of the yin yang concept.
Paganism emphasizes both the beauty of nature and the fact that it is ‘red in tooth
and claw’. Inspired by the polarities of the natural world, Pagan thinking
incorporates spring and autumn, life and death, light and darkness—the dark
being understood, not as evil, but, like the winter and the night, simply a
necessary feature of the natural world (Partridge, 2004, p. 79).
While the dualisms manifest in nature are emphasized, a defining feature of Paganism is
that it “transcends the Western dualisms of mind and body, matter and spirit, people and
nature, visible and invisible, ideas and experience” (Shaw, 2004, p. 134).
All Paganisms are either polytheist or pantheist, or some combination of the two
(Taylor, 2002, p. 32). Polytheism is the belief in many gods, as opposed to the unitary
divinity, or “One True God,” in monotheism. Various forms of Paganism regard a great
variety of gods and goddesses (Carpenter, 1996, pp. 55-56), often particular to a tradition
8
rooted in a certain place, such as the Norse tradition of Ásatru. Some brands of Paganism,
including Ásatru, worship a pantheon of Gods and Goddesses (York, 2003, p. 61), who
are often embodiments or archetypal representations of natural elements, such as
air/wind, water, earth, fire, etc. (Carpenter, 1996, pp. 55-56). Graham Harvey (2006a)
identifies an “entanglement of animism and polytheism” (p. 86) that emerges when
animist spirits that exist in elements of nature are perceived as divinity.
Animism and pantheism also overlap, as evidenced by Dennis Carpenter’s (1996)
assertion that “Pagans may be described as animistic in their recognition of all Nature as
alive and imbued with spiritual energy” (p. 69). Pantheism is the belief that the divine
permeates everything in the world, including every person, every being, every grain of
sand, etc. so that everything is sacred (York, 2003, p. 67). While some Pagans are clearly
polytheistic, others focus almost exclusively on “the Goddess” (as embodiment of the
Earth) or a Goddess-God duality, often representing the Earth and the Sun, respectively
(Carpenter, 1996, pp. 56-57). Goddess spiritualities are more pantheist as opposed to
polytheist in that the Goddess is imminent in the Earth, that is the Goddess and the Earth
are one and the same (p. 51).
Polytheism and pantheism are not mutually exclusive; many Pagan belief systems
incorporate both, and animism runs through some manifestations of each. As summarized
by Margot Adler (1986), “Polytheism is grounded in the view that reality (divine or
otherwise) is multiple and diverse. And if one is a pantheist-polytheist, as are many
Neopagans, one might say that all nature is divinity and manifests itself in myriad forms”
(p. 25).
9
Contemporary Paganism has its primary roots in “the ancestral (pre-Christian)
religious traditions of Europe,” which were “re-created in the early to mid-twentieth
century and [are] in continuous evolution and construction since then” (Harvey, 2006a, p.
85). Some Pagans focus on the ancient roots of their spiritual paths, often glorifying the
notion of a “golden age, usually somewhere in Europe, in which people lived in harmony
with nature” (Harvey, 2004, p. 335). Wicca is commonly referred to as “the Old
Religion,” and Celtic traditions are especially venerated among some practitioners
(Clifton 2004, 336). This focus on an ancient Pagan legacy stems from a hunger for
tradition and connection with ancestors, which have largely been lost in the postmodern
world in which people move around the globe and spiritual connection has been co-opted
by recent dogmatic religions and the spiritual substitute of consumerism (Harris, 1996, p.
153). This is nowhere more evident than in the United States, where most everyone has
ancestral roots elsewhere and capitalism is king if not God.
There are spiritual traditions native to the United States, and some American
Pagans borrow from Native American spirituality in forging their spiritual paths, but this
is often viewed as a form of cultural appropriation or even imperialism. It is considerably
more socially accepted for people of European origin to draw from European traditions in
their spiritual practice (Clifton, 2004, p. 337). There is a spectrum in the practice of
various Paganisms, from near complete reliance on reconstruction of ancient traditions to
almost exclusive invention of new religious traditions, and most Pagans fall somewhere
between these two extremes. “Such an awareness of the need to invent as well as borrow
10
and pass on religious tradition is prevalent in the pagan community” (Taylor, 2002, p.
47).
Rather than grounding one’s spiritual practice in traditions of another time and
place that may or may not have been, Clifton (2004) argues for a contemporary Paganism
that is grounded in the biodynamics of place, embracing the true meaning of “nature
religion” (p. 336). Greenwood (2005) explains that “contemporary practitioners of nature
spiritualities have to create meaningful relationships with place; they are not like hunter-
gatherers… Most have no established tradition and so they have to create it” (p. 212).
Clifton (2004) urges practitioners of nature or Earth religion to “learn where you are on
the earth and learn the songs of that place, the song of water and the song of wind” (p.
340) and to draw spiritual beliefs, fulfillment, and traditions from the Earth itself.
Similarly, Barry Patterson (2004) urges a connection with the Genius Loci (spirit of
place) wherever one finds oneself (p. 355).
Nature religions are commonly framed as “spiritualities of connection” (Taylor,
2005, p. 2666): connection of people with nature and with particular places, and
connection among all the living beings on Earth. Greenwood (2005) describes
“connection with the natural world” as “the basis of nature spiritualities,” quoting a well-
known Pagan who said that “for modern people the world has been intentionally deprived
of significance, and so you have to reconnect” (p. 1). “In Western cultures,” she explains,
“nature, the earth, or ‘the environment’ as it is now frequently called, has been
progressively devalued by some dualistic conceptions of the universe that separate
humans from nature.” In response, “practitioners of nature spiritualities overcome this
11
cultural alienation and relate with nature as a living and inspirited cosmos” (p. vii). Andy
Letcher (2001) also alludes to a loss of human-nature connection as an instigator for the
practice of contemporary Paganism, including belief in faeries: “An increasing number of
people feel an ache for the natural world with which, through living in urban
environments, they have lost contact. Belief in a golden age, or even in fairies, is, on
some level, an expression of this sense of loss” (p. 156). As summarized by Carpenter
(1996), “the theme of interconnectedness represents a basic component of the Pagan
worldview and involves the recognition of the fundamental interrelatedness of all beings”
(p. 69).
The spirit-nature connection that is central to Paganism leads most Pagans to
practice their spirituality outdoors in relatively natural settings. The most formal Pagan
gatherings occur at outdoor camping festivals, where attendees often travel great
distances to be in a place and time where Paganism is accepted and celebrated, where
they can be open about their beliefs, and they are not the minority (Pike, 2001, p. 27).
Most devout followers of Abrahamic religions attend formal religious services in the
towns and cities where they live approximately once per week. This is distinctly not the
norm for Pagans, owing to the sense of repression and fear felt by many followers of
magical or Earth religions (Bowman, 2000) as well as the lack of dogma and formal
structure in the disparate belief systems included under the Pagan umbrella.
Pagan festivals generally take place in rural, out-of-the-way locations, during the
warmer seasons, often in conjunction with a Pagan seasonal celebration such as Beltane
(at the spring equinox) or Samhain (at the autumnal equinox) (Pike, 2001, p. 11).
12
Festivals are generally 3-7 days in duration. Formal festival activities include workshops
on topics relevant to Paganism, rituals, sometimes feasts, and very often a ritualized fire
circle characterized by drumming, dancing, trance work, and socializing (pp. 4-5).
Festival life is at once extraordinary and ordinary. In Earthly Bodies, Magical
Selves, Sarah Pike (2001) highlights the magical space afforded to festivals by their
attendees. Festivals are enjoyed in large part because they are separate from the everyday
world, or “mundania” as it is often called by festival goers. By contrasting mundania with
the relative significance and sacredness of the festival, a liminal experience is created.
The festival becomes a space-time where anything goes and anything is possible (p. 20).
A festival organizer describes festival life this way: “It’s a trip to the land of faery, where
for a couple of days you can exist without worrying about the ‘real’ world” (p. 21).
“Real” and “reality” become shape-shifting signifiers in conversations with
festival goers. While “the real world” is often referred to as “mundania,” thoughtful
discourse on the relationships between festival life, mundania, and reality often produce
the conclusion that the festival experience is in many ways much more real than is the
experience of ordinary everyday life. Festival organizer Jeff Rosenbaum believes that
festivals afford people the opportunity to “recapture that sense of being in reality rather
than being asleep and dreaming in this world of illusion” (Pike, 2001, p. 21). Pike
explains how festival life becomes particularly “real” for attendees in comparison with
their daily lives:
Neopagans’ expectations that festivals will be especially “real” point to their
intense dissatisfaction with the everyday world and the depth of their desire for
13
something more. The power of festival space is in the possibility for natural and
supernatural experiences otherwise unavailable. The stronger their rejection of
mundania, the more vivid the festival world becomes for them. They highlight at
festivals what is lacking for them in mundania—religious tolerance, for
instance—in order to focus their desires and energies on making the festival
special. In order to create a “super-real” festival world, Neopagans imbue the
festival space with meanings absent from the workplace and urban landscape (p.
22).
One component of the festival experience that makes it seem more real to some attendees
is a sense of heightened awareness and sharpened senses, owing in part to the newness of
their experiences there (p. 22).
While Pike mostly frames the Pagan festival experience as an extraordinary one,
Graham Harvey’s description frames it as much more ordinary—even “mundane.” In his
book Contemporary Paganism: Listening People, Speaking Earth, Harvey (1997) focuses
on the experience of festival as a returning to the basic natural cycles of daily and
seasonal life, with a Pagan understanding that the mundane is sacred:
[Pagans are] confronted not with the demands and claims of a ‘spiritual’ afterlife
or deity, but with the significance of everyday life on Earth. Birth, growth,
sexuality, fecundity, creativity, death, decay, vitality, beginnings, endings, joy,
sadness, and other mundane, everyday, ordinary affairs are found to be
meaningful and sacred. It would be misleading to see these ‘themes’ or a ‘quest
for meaning’ as the prime focus of the festivals. They are certainly significant, but
Pagans celebrate the festivals with the much simpler understanding that they are
honouring the seasons and the land… They encourage and inculcate an awareness
of being ‘at home’ here and now in the mundane and therefore sacred Earth (p.
126).
14
Harvey’s description of festival life in no way contradicts Pike’s descriptions; they are
clearly describing the same thing. It’s just a matter of how the experience is framed and
how concepts of the mundane, the sacred, the real, and the extraordinary are applied to
festival versus everyday life.
In this passage, Harvey also speaks to the sense that these festivals are “home” for
the Pagans who return to them year after year. Particularly for people who feel alienated
in the dominant culture, their everyday “homes” may not feel very home-like. As one
regular festival attendee puts it, “there is a family out there, ready to embrace me
whenever I feel lonely or out of touch. All I need is to find a Pagan gathering and I’ll be
home” (Pike, 2001, p. 32).
Sarah Pike (2001) found that most Pagans with whom she interacted at festivals
and in online communities expressed some sort of environmental ethic, but they chose
not to be politically active in expressing their environmentalism (p. 48). Rather,
respondents in her study reported making lifestyle choices based on their Pagan and/or
environmental beliefs. For example, one Pagan wrote in a listserv discussion, “the sacred
connection which I feel with the earth is manifest in organic/biodynamic gardening,
support for alternative technologies, solar passive housing, etc.” (pp. 45-48).
While some Pagans become active environmentalists owing to their religious
beliefs, it more commonly happens the other way around: environmental activists adopt a
Pagan belief system because it jibes with their convictions (Partridge, 2005, p. 73).
“Because [Paganism] is inherently ecocentric, it is, for many environmentalists, the
15
obvious spiritual choice” (p. 76). Regina Smith Oboler (2004) defines Paganism as
fundamentally environmentalist by taking Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion as “a
system of symbols which act to produce powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and
motivations” and identifying the following symbols in contemporary Paganism: Nature,
the Earth, and the Environment. She asserts that these signifiers create “a system of pro-
environmentalist moods and motivations” (p. 86).
In her 2004 study, Smith Oboler attempted to characterize and quantify the
environmentalist ethic and action among Pagans, and her findings supported her thesis
that Pagans are by nature environmentalists. For example, 98.5% of her respondents (all
of whom identify as Pagan) believe the natural world is sacred, and 95% of respondents
make healing the Earth part of their spiritual practice (p. 88). When she compared Gallup
poll responses from Pagans vs. the general population, she found that Pagans are more
environmentally aware and active than the general population (pp. 95-96). However, she
also found that most of her respondents identified as environmentalists before they
adopted Paganism, leading Smith Obeler to conclude that “it is not so much that religion
is the cultural system that dictates the terms of social action, as that religious action and
more mundane social action are parts of a larger cultural system that encompasses both,
in which each reflects the other as a mirror image” (p. 105).
The original proliferation of contemporary Paganism in the United States
concurred with the more mainstream environmental movement. There has been an
undeniable greening of human consciousness in the United States, particularly since the
first Earth Day in 1970, the unofficial beginning of the modern environmental movement
16
(Partridge, 2005, pp. 42-43), although environmentalist sentiment had been percolating in
public consciousness for several years prior, as evidenced in part by the popularity of
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962 (Greenwood, 2005, p. 33). The public
face of the environmental movement has been almost entirely secular, which makes sense
given the contemporary dominance of scientific rationalism. However, environmentalism
does have its theological and spiritual components, both in terms of the greening of major
world religions and in terms of emerging nature spiritualities (p. 43) that have acted as
co-creators with the environmental movement.
The term “nature religion,” which describes a diversity of belief systems, entered
the vernacular around the same time as the first Earth Day (Taylor, 2005, p. 2661).
Before the inception of the environmental movement, “magical religion” was the primary
label for the same grouping of belief systems that came to be known as “nature religion”
and “earth religion” (Clifton, 2006, p. 3). This had the simultaneous effects of
highlighting the (more socially accepted) ecological components of these religions and
obscuring the (much less accepted) enchanted aspects (Pike, 2001, p. 23). Perhaps
because of an actual or intuitive understanding of this semantic shift, in some Judeo-
Christian circles, “nature religions” have been framed as “primitive, regressive, and
dangerous” while proponents see them as “perceptive, authentic, and ecologically
beneficient” (Taylor, 2005, p. 2662). As Taylor and Van Horn (2006) point out, “for
some, environmentalism is viewed with suspicion, particularly when it is seen as tied to
deep reverence for or even worship of the Earth. Some conservative Christians, for
17
example, consider environmentalism to be a Trojan horse that threatens Western
civilization with a revitalized Paganism” (p. 165).
Within Paganism, “there is a great emphasis on one’s responsibility towards other
creatures (human and non-human) and the environment” (Partridge, 2004, p. 79). In some
cases, this leads practicing Pagans to become politically active in the environmental
movement. As Taylor and Van Horn (2006) write,
those who are self-consciously pagan in their religious identity are the ones most
likely to be at the forefront of ecological resistance movements in America. This
is because when the earth is itself considered sacred, and not only indirectly so
because it was created by a divine being, then the earth itself becomes the locus of
religious and ethical devotion (p. 177).
Dragon Environmental Network, an explicitly Pagan environmentalist organization that
was founded by Wiccan followers of the well-known eco-activist Witch Starhawk, makes
a good example of the Pagan tendency toward environmental activism. One of Dragon
Environmental Network’s principle practices is “eco-magic,” in which the practitioners
use magic and ritual to focus their energies on halting environmental destruction and
supporting the work of people protecting and preserving the land (Partridge, 2005, p. 73).
Environmentalism itself takes on religious significance for its most dedicated and
active participants. Taylor and Van Horn (2006) argue that “religious perceptions and
practices have decisively shaped American environmentalism and have done so to such
an extent that much environmentalism can be considered a form of nature religion” (p.
165). In the experience of contemporary philosopher and environmental ethicist J. Baird
18
Callicott, “when one pokes passionate greens deeply enough, underneath you find a sense
of the sacred” (quoted in Taylor, 1997, p. 105). Most early environmentalists, more often
labeled conservationists, had recognizably Pagan belief systems (Taylor, 1995, p. 104).
For example, John Muir (1838-1914) referred to “all the spirit creatures of these rocks
and of this whole spiritual atmosphere” in his notes (quoted in Taylor, 1995, p. 103).
Catherine Albanese (1990), describing the religiosity of Muir’s conservation work, wrote
that “to go to the mountains and the sequoia forests, for Muir, was to engage in religious
worship of utter seriousness and dedication; to come down from the mountains and
preach the gospel of preservation was to live out his life according to the ethic that his
religion compelled” (p. 101).
Despite the apparently spiritual role that nature played in their lives and work,
Muir and his contemporaries did not always overtly proclaim their Pagan beliefs because
Christianity was so dominant in the society, and they understood that alienating
Christians would defeat their environmental goals (Taylor, 1995, p. 104). This trend of
deemphasizing if not hiding one’s nature-based spiritual convictions continued
throughout the 20th century and is still apparent today. Like Muir, Rachel Carson
practiced a nature-based spirituality. “Of course, when writing Silent Spring, Carson was
concerned about her scientific credibility, and so her spirituality and ethics were only
subtly expressed” (Taylor and Van Horn, 2006, p. 173).
Contemporary Pagan scholar Bron Taylor (1997) envisions a possible “universal
religious environmental ethics” or “planetary civic religion” described as follows:
19
a pluralistic earth religion, based on a minimum common denominator that
affirms the entire earth and its processes as sacred, one that is informed and
shaped by the best available science, one that respects cultural diversity as part of
the sacred whole and allows many expressions and viewpoints about how to
proceed (pp. 105-106)
Taylor presents this vision in a spirit of possibility, saying hopefully that it “might not be
either pernicious, or merely a utopian fantasy” (p. 106). Similarly, Taylor and Van Horn
(2006) predict “that nonsupernaturalistic nature religion will likely become an important
feature in the religious life of America and beyond, and such religion will increasingly
become a wellspring for environmental action based on kinship ethics and a reverence for
life” (p. 180).
Kinship ethics and reverence for life are the foundation of deep ecology, a
philosophical, political, and spiritual worldview that has found currency among some
Pagans and some environmentalists. Founded in 1973 by eco-philosopher Arne Naess,
deep ecology amounts to a radical rejection of anthropocentrism. The central tenet is
“biospherical egalitarianism” (Partridge, 2005, p. 56), or the concept that all life forms on
Earth have inherent worth, apart from how they may benefit humans, and ultimately that
all creatures on Earth (including humans) are fundamentally equal in cosmic importance.
Susan Greenwood (2005) provides an apt illustration of the philosophical shift
represented by deep ecology: “the world is no longer our oyster, we share it with oysters”
(p. 34). Both the animism and the philosophically revolutionary bent inherent to deep
ecology are evident in Bron Taylor’s (2000b) summary: “In short, deep ecology posits
20
that a transformation of human consciousness must take place if humans are to
reestablish harmony with nonhuman nature” (p. 277).
In 1985, deep ecologists John Seed and Joanna Macy (2009) developed their
“Council of All Beings” workshop, described in this way on the workshop website:
… Rediscovering our “deep ecology”—our interconnectedness with all beings—
we find empowerment as agents of healing change… We retrace our steps
through our evolutionary journey and allow other life forms to speak through us.
We shed our solely human identification and feel deep empathy for the myriad
species and landscapes of the Earth.
Although you wouldn’t know it from the Council of All Beings website, founder John
Seed was a member of the radical eco-activist group Earth First! when he developed the
workshop, and Earth First! still uses the workshop today. The Council of All Beings has
since spread around the world and is practiced by a great diversity of groups with various
political inclinations, from activists to religious groups to environmental educators
(Partridge, 2005, pp. 69-70).
The terms environmentalism, environmentalist, and the environment can be
problematic for deep ecologists as well as animist Pagans because they connote a human-
environment or human-nature duality. As Graham Harvey (2006a) explains, “humans,
badgers, eagles and microbes do live within particular environments, but the world is not
‘our environment’ in the sense that it is a resource chiefly for human benefit” (p. 179).
The concept of environmentalism assumes a stewardship ethic toward the nonhuman
natural world. It’s not that Pagans aren’t concerned with the health and wellbeing of
21
nature; it’s that, speaking as members of the natural world, some Pagans frame what is
commonly referred to as environmental stewardship or environmentalism in different
terms so that they “prefer not to speak of ‘environmentalism’ but of ecology or ecological
ethics, or of living respectfully among ‘all our relations’” (p. 179). It is difficult to
conceive of environmentalism within this dramatically different human-nature
relationship. In David Abram’s (1996) words,
It may be that the new “environmental ethic” toward which so many
environmental philosophers aspire—an ethic that would lead us to respect and
heed not only the lives of our fellow humans but also the life and well-being of
the rest of nature—will come into existence not primarily through the logical
elucidation of new philosophical principles and legislative strictures, but through
a renewed attentiveness to this perceptual dimension that underlies all our logics,
through a rejuvenation of our carnal, sensorial empathy with the living land that
sustains us (p. 69).
“Sensorial empathy with the living land” is only possible when the land is understood not
only to be living but also to have consciousness, for empathy is the experience of
another’s feelings, indicating an emotional and therefore conscious aspect to the
existence of the land. The new environmental ethic may not be defined by environmental
responsibility but rather by a shift in the relationship of human beings with the rest of the
natural world.
Ironically, the Pagan belief system taken to the extreme sometimes results in an
attitude of indifference toward environmental concerns. Given that the human race is but
a blip on the cosmic scale of life on Earth, “most pagan environmentalists believe that
22
edenic natural paradise will eventually be restored, with or without humans” (Taylor,
1995, pp. 139-140). Through a slightly different lens, but still focused on a cosmic
timescale, others see the end of the world as relatively immanent, believing that the next
big asteroid will likely strike the Earth soon, causing mass extinction, and that ultimately
the sun will explode in a supernova, ending all life on Earth (Taylor, 1997, p. 103). Add
to this the Pagan rejection of a behavior-regulating promised afterlife along with the
animist belief that humans are but one species of many on the Earth, having no special
powers, privileges, or responsibilities; some individuals conclude that what we do here
and now has little bearing on the long-term health and wellbeing of the planet, leading to
purely hedonist lifestyle proclivities (p. 103). This is a minority viewpoint that most
Pagans see as a misreading and a desecration of Paganism’s intent. While most Pagans
incorporate an understanding of life on cosmic timescales, this does not impede their
understanding of the Earth and nature as sacred, and it does not result in environmental
irresponsibility.
A more cohesive and overt Pagan stance on environmental concerns has been
emerging, as evidenced in part by “A Pagan Community Statement on the Environment”
that was published online at www.ecopagan.com on Earth Day (April 22) 2015. This
document was drafted by a group of 40-50 Pagans from a wide range of Pagan spiritual
identities, and it has been signed by over 6,000 individuals and organizations as of the
publication of this thesis in June 2015. The document focuses on the sacredness of the
Earth and the human-in-nature relationship that is central for all Pagans. It is action-
oriented in its call to “build a culture of true sustainability” and revolutionary in its
23
assertion that “any economic or political system which encourages the exploitation of
Earth and people must be dismantled or substantially reformed.” The statement calls for
change on the personal day-to-day level, the societal and cultural level, and the spiritual
level (Halstead et al., 2015).
For some Pagans, the only true solution to our environmental problems is a
fundamental shift away from the destructive Western separation of the sacred from the
mundane, and toward a resacralization of nature. Adrian Harris (1996) posits that “the
ecological crisis is more than a question of environmental destruction and human misery,
for it is at root a spiritual crisis” (p. 155). “Piecemeal repairs to the environment will only
postpone the crisis, for even if scientific techno-fixes can save us from global warming,
ozone depletion and habitat destruction, the human crisis remains” (p. 155). He calls for
radical change in the way we define and interact with the so-called environment, which
will involve “imaginative leaps” that go beyond all our preconceived notions, even
beyond language (p. 155).
FAERIES AS NATURE SPIRITS
It will likely come as no surprise that little has been explicitly written about
faeries in the academic literature, but faeries are mentioned in Pagan scholarship. Susan
Greenwood (2005) states that “for practitioners of nature religion the land is alive with
spirits of place, spirits of ancestors, deities and otherworldly beings such as fairies and
dwarves” (p. 61). Doreen Valiente defines the Pagan conception of faeries as a
24
conglomerate of “actual spirits of nature whose presence can sometimes be perceived, but
who usually share this world invisibly with humans, souls of the pagan dead, and folk
memories of aboriginal races, now mostly vanished” (quoted in Partridge, 2004, p. 80).
According to Graham Harvey (2006a), some animist Pagans interact with faeries and
other nature spirits, who are considered conscious beings of nature just like humans,
animals, plants, rocks, etc. (p. 91). Faeries of all these stripes and origins fit within the
broad animist tradition in that they are living spirits of nature.
Animism is a strong and defining current running through the practice of
Paganism that emphasizes relationship with “other-than-human persons,” a phrase coined
by anthropologist Irving Hollowell (Partridge, 2004, p. 83). As defined by Graham
Harvey (2006a) in his book Animism, “Animists are people who recognise that the world
is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in
relationship with others” (p. xi). In the animist worldview, “nature” refers to “the greater
realm of life that ambivalently includes, but never privileges, humanity” (p. 88). The
Latin root of animism is anima, meaning breath, life, or soul, so at root, animism
expresses the idea that the world is wholly inspirited (Greenwood, 2005, p. ix).
If animism is taken in its broadest definition, most people who identify as Pagan
subscribe to animist belief systems. In some cases, this takes the form of knowing,
naming, and communicating with individual animals or plants (Harvey, 2006a, p. 91).
Animism is sometimes practiced simply by taking time to live in nature, as “guests
among the trees” (p. 91) in an effort to minimize or abolish the artificial divide between
humans and other beings. In addition to believing that animals and plants have some
25
measure of consciousness, some animists also believe that rocks, soil, mountains,
streams, lakes, forests, etc. have their own consciousness. Indeed many Pagans believe
that the Earth herself is a conscious being, often referred to by the name Gaia (Partridge,
2005, pp. 61-63).
One area where faeries have found their way into the recent literature has been in
studies on the Pagan eco-protest communities in Britain. Andy Letcher (2001) spent time
in the field with some Eco-Pagans who were protesting a large-scale road-building
project in Great Britain in the 1990s (p. 147). Letcher (2006) asserts that in his
experience the protesters’ belief in faeries is literal, not metaphorical (p. 176). There are
reports of elves, pixies, gnomes, etc. (all referred to by the umbrella term faeries) having
been seen and more often heard or sensed. These encounters with faeries are taken as
proof that nature is on the side of the protesters (p. 182). In some cases, protesters take on
the persona of a faery; in others, they simply align themselves with faeries for support,
protection, and moral ground. “Protesters came to regard themselves as, or aided by,
fairies or nature spirits in a just cause that pitted nature against artifice, the little people
against the much larger, but corrupt, forces of law and order” (Letcher, 2001, pp. 147-
148).
Protest sites and camps are given enchanting names such as Cosmic Pixie Tree
Village, Skyward Camp, Fairmile (where the protesters call themselves “Fairies”) and
Fort Trollheim (where the protesters call themselves “Trolls”). The protesters themselves
also adopt pixie-like pseudonyms such us Poc, Busker, and Tegwyn (Letcher, 2001, pp.
149-150). Likewise trees at the protest sites are commonly named, an indication of their
26
status as autonomous beings even though they aren’t human. In fact some trees introduce
themselves to the protesters, as was the case when a tree introduced herself to two
different protesters as Hern. When another tree, Melea, was cut down by the road crew,
the protestors held a funeral and ritual burning of her body (Letcher, 2006, p. 182).
Acts of eco-protest or eco-sabotage are referred to as “pixieing” (Letcher, 2006, p.
177). The renaming of places, people, and activities serves to transform ordinary reality
into an enchanted time and place. “For Eco-Pagans this enchanted world of which they
are a part is not delusory, escapist or infantile, but a neglected, forgotten, and truer
reality” (p. 181).
The radical environmental action organization Earth First! has a significant Pagan
contingent, although individuals often prefer to keep their ideological connections to
Paganism implicit for political reasons. In an interview with Bron Taylor (2002), Pagan
Earth First!er Buck Young spoke of his introduction to the “faerie-world” as a key step
on his path toward radical environmentalism (pp. 46-47). Taylor quotes part of a
manuscript written by Young, in which he places faeries at the nexus of the Earth First!
environmental revolution:
Gnomes and elves, fauns and faeries, goblins and ogres, trolls and bogies… [must
infiltrate our world to] effect change from the inside… [These nature-spirits are]
running around in human bodies… working in co-ops… talking to themselves in
the streets… spiking trees and blowing up tractors… starting revolutions… [and]
making up religions (p. 47).
27
The Earth Liberation Front (ELF) is a radical anarchistic environmentalist group
that spun off from Earth First! in Great Britain in 1992 and was then exported to the
United States. Its adherents are called “elves” in keeping with the acronym by which the
organization is commonly known (Taylor, 2002, pp. 35-36). The elf archetype has
become significant in the identity formation of this activist group and its participants.
The ELF moniker caught on rapidly partly because it provided a rubric for putting
a positive spin on the most radical of actions (elves are viewed positively in
western literature as playfully mischievous, not malicious), and partly because the
idea of elves in the woods cohered with the pagan spiritualities of many of these
activists… These elves function as fairies do for other radical environmental
activists—they are appropriated as symbolic earth warriors—conjuring images
that resonate with the pagan spirituality animating many activists (p. 36).
Indeed contemporary Pagan beliefs are figuring into the modern-day eco-protest culture,
particularly in the road-blocking eco-protests in England, where Andy Letcher describes
“an enchanted world in which practitioners [of Eco-Paganism] are engaged in a
mythological struggle against a corrupt modernity, and they are reinforced through
phenomenological encounters with the non-human world” (p. 184).
Perhaps the most famous modern-day enclave enjoyed by faeries and other nature
spirits is the Findhorn community in Scotland. Founded in 1962 as a family garden (The
Findhorn Community 1975, 2), it has grown and thrived into a world-famous New Age
intentional community (The Findhorn Foundation, 2009). While the New Age spirituality
practiced at Findhorn is distinct from any brand of Paganism, members of both spiritual
identities interact with nature spirits.
28
Dorothy Maclean, one of the garden’s founding members, received her first
communication from a nature spirit in the garden’s first year. She was contacted by the
deva of the garden pea. Devas are “that part of the angelic hierarchy that holds the
archetypal pattern for each plant species and directs energy toward bringing a plant into
form on the physical plane” (The Findhorn Community, 1975, p. 7). To clarify, the pea
deva is not the spirit of any one individual plant; rather it is the overarching spirit of the
entire garden pea species. “While the devas may be considered the ‘architects’ of plant
forms, the nature spirits or elementals, such as gnomes and fairies, may be seen as the
‘craftsmen,’ using the blueprint and energy channeled to them by the devas to build up
the plant form” (pp. 58-59).
Robert Ogilvie Crombie, known as Roc, moved to Findhorn in 1966 (The
Findhorn Foundation, 2009). It was Roc who was gifted with the ability to communicate
with the nature spirits such as faeries and elves, also known as elementals as they are
made up of the natural elements of earth, air, fire, and water (The Findhorn Community,
1975, p. 102). Roc wrote out actual dialogues that he had with a small faun-like nature
spirit named Kurmos whose work entailed helping the trees to grow (pp. 105-106) as well
as conversations he had with the god Pan (pp. 108-111). According to Roc, nature spirits
in their primary state take the form of a “light body,” described as a nebulous misty
glowing whirl or vortex (p. 114), but they may assume a human-like or archetypal
“thought form” such as an elf, gnome, faery, etc. when necessary (p. 118).
In the broader Western culture, children engage with faeries more often and more
openly than do adults. They indulge in fairytales, dress up like faeries, build faery houses,
29
and are generally permitted to believe in faeries and interact with them in ways that are
not acceptable for adults in our culture. Richard Louv (2008) notes that science has
replaced myth and religion as the primary way that the dominant culture knows nature (p.
23), which has produced an emotional distancing. However, he also highlights the
animist and anthropomorphic understandings of the world that are just beneath the
surface of the dominant culture that is apparently based on scientific rationalism with a
sprinkling of Abrahamic religion. As Louv says, “Science may frown on
anthropomorphism, but children do not” (p. 298).
Children are excused for their anthropomorphic understanding of the world
because it’s seen as innocent child’s play and they’re too young to know better. John
Berger notes that children’s lives are full of toys depicting animals, even more than toys
depicting people. He says that these animal toys “address our loneliness as a species, our
powerful yearning, this spiritual hunger, which at its very core is a faith in the invisible…
Even as wildness fades from our children’s lives they signal their hunger—or, perhaps
more accurately, we sense their hunger. We come full circle, and nurture their souls with
totems, with the anthropomorphic symbols of the parallel lives all around us” (Louv,
2008, p. 298).
Many people in the Pagan community describe adult extraordinary experiences in
terms of revisiting childhood wonder. For example, Tanya Luhrmann (1989), in
describing the ritual activities of witches she was studying, said that “these witches were
recreating a childhood world, enchanting adulthood” (p. 18). Sabina Magliocco (2004),
describing her own experience as a participant, reported that “Because I decided to
30
remain open and vulnerable during rituals, I gained access to imaginative experiences I
had banished from my consciousness since reaching adulthood” (p. 12).
Louv (2008) draws attention to the deep distrust of animism among Christian
conservatives and the fear that environmentalists are necessarily animists and therefore
idolaters. “Some religious institutions and belief systems resist and distrust the suggestion
that nature and spirit are related. Suspicious of environmentalism as an ersatz religion,
they perceive a creeping, cultural animism. This belief, which runs deep in American
culture, is perhaps one of the least acknowledged but most important barriers between
children and nature” (p. 298). There is an unwillingness among many Americans to
consider the legitimacy of animist beliefs and the relationship between nature and spirit.
This attitude results in the marginalization of children’s spiritual and animist experiences
in nature as mere child’s play. Such experiences in adulthood are rejected outright as
lunacy and heresy, so childhood is the only time when the experiences are afforded any
possibility, and even in childhood they are not considered “real” or legitimate.
Louv (2008) notes that little has been written about children’s spiritual
experiences in nature, and he speculates this may be out of nervousness because such
mystical experiences are beyond adult or institutional control (p. 298). He describes “the
tangled vines of biblical interpretation, semantics, and politics” as “real barriers to
communicating the simple awe we felt as children as we lay on our backs seeing
mountains and faces in clouds” (p. 291). He seems to long for a culturally acceptable
context for the spiritual, mystical, transcendent experiences that children have in nature—
perhaps more than adults (pp. 293-294). “Nature introduces children to the idea—to the
31
knowing—that they are not alone in this world, and that realities and dimensions exist
alongside their own” (p. 296). Joseph Laycock (2012) points out that “childhood is also
where most Westerners are exposed to stories of faeries, fantastic creatures, and magic,”
which most adults learn to reject as unreal, but it should not be surprising that some never
do (p. 75). Faeries fill a deep and abiding human need for connection with nature in a
way that works for the imaginative and anthropocentric psyches of children as well as
some adults who either never lost this childhood wonder or managed to rediscover it.
APPROACHES TO STUDYING PAGAN EXPERIENCE OF FAERIES
Imagination, Play, and Multiple Realities
The concept of imagination has been given little serious attention, perhaps
because it is not easily pinned down. As Edward Casey (1976) attests, “imagining is easy
enough to enact or experience, but it is extremely difficult to capture in midair for
purposes of scrutiny and examination” (p. 4). Philosopher Richard Kearney (1998)
invokes Shakespeare in expressing the simultaneous familiarity and elusiveness of the
imagination when he describes it as something “more distant than stars and nearer than
the eye” (p. 5). Eric Unger (1953), in his essay “The Imagination of Reason,” delineates
three realms of human knowledge: the known, the temporarily unknown (which may be
probed through scientific inquiry), and the eternally unknown (which constitutes the
mysteries left to philosophy). Imagination sits squarely in the realm of the eternally
unknown—or eternally philosophized. Yet Unger describes philosophical inquiry into the
32
unknown as “imaginative reason or reasonable imagination” (Unger quoted in Brann,
1993, p. 783). This leaves us to conclude that exploration of the imagination is
necessarily imaginative, and it is intuitively true that studying the imagination requires an
imaginative approach. It’s no wonder then that few have met the challenge of trying to
understand the imagination, as any substantial exploration of this realm becomes a tail-
swallowing endeavor. Indeed, Eva Brann (1993), in the preface to her extensive
exploration, The World of the Imagination, refers to imagination as “the missing mystery
of philosophy” (p. 3).
Philosophers in all epochs have had something to say about imagination, but it has
mainly been in tangent to other explorations, and imagination has often been considered
only as an adjunct to other mental faculties. To quote Casey (1976), “at very few, if any,
discernable points in more than two thousand years of philosophical endeavor have
convincing and lasting distinctions been made between imagination and the group of
sibling acts that would include memory, perceptual illusion, fantasy, delusion, and
hallucination.” He goes on to say that “imagination is seen in some instances as an aspect
of perception, in others as a part of thought” (p. 15).
Imagination plays a central role in the defining myths of Western culture. Both in
the case of Adam and Eve eating from the forbidden tree of knowledge and in the case of
Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans, an act of rebellion
against the gods and their natural order bestows humans with creative, imaginative, god-
like powers that set them apart from the rest of the animal kingdom (Kearney, 1988, p.
33
80). Humans are defined as a special creature, neither animal nor god, because of their
capacity to imagine.
The dawn of modernism and Emmanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) “Copernican
Revolution,” in placing humans at the center of the universe and bestowing them with
creative powers, introduces the notion of imagination as a productive human activity.
Imagination is no longer a mimesis of divine creation, nor an intermediary faculty
between sensing and thinking; rather it is “the primary and indispensable precondition of
all knowledge” (Kearney, 1988, p. 156). This shift from a mimetic to a productive
paradigm (p. 155) means that humans have the ability to create their own realities. Kant
posits that without imagination and intellect, the so-called objective world would make
no sense to us. We ourselves impose the meaning, order, and regularity of appearance
that make up “nature” (p. 171). Kant’s ideas were preceded by Rene Descartes’ (1596-
1650) “I think, therefore I am” and David Hume’s (1711-1776) revelation that there is no
empirical rational reality divorced from imagination (pp. 161-164). Hume, however,
insists that “if reality is no more than a bundle of fictions, we must nonetheless cling to
these fictions as if they were real” (p. 165).
The currency of the imagination continued into the twentieth century with the
introduction of phenomenology, a philosophy that focuses on the experience of imagining
(Casey, 1976, p. 2) and makes room for—even relies on—the imagination. Father of
phenomenology Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) imbues the imagination with human
agency in his reframing of the image as “an act of consciousness” as opposed to the
classical notion of “a thing in consciousness.” Phenomenology rejects both inductive and
34
deductive reasoning as modes of understanding lived experience. In fact rationalism is
fundamentally rejected in favor of a more holistic method of gathering information and
making meaning that relies on multiple intellectual and sensory modes (Kearney, 1998, p.
14). Both perception (of reality and/or presence) and imagination (of unreality and/or
absence) are employed in making sense of the world (pp. 16-17). Husserl claims that the
true essence (eidos) of things may be apprehended “when they are grasped not only in
their actuality but also in their possibility”—and possibility may only be reached by way
of the imagination (p. 19).
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) takes phenomenology one step further in his
radical rereading of Kant’s transcendental (or productive) imagination. Given the Kantian
imagination’s original power of production, Heidegger concludes that imagination must
precede any experience of the object, meaning that we would have no conception of
reality without the power of imagination (Kearney, 1998, pp. 46-48). Moreover, he draws
from Kant that both sensation and intelligence (feeling and thinking) are derived from the
same imagination (p. 52).
Edward Casey’s (1976) concept of pure possibility that emerges only in the act of
imagining has its roots in Husserl’s phenomenological possibility.
By “pure possibility” is meant a kind of possibility that is posited and
contemplated for its own sake and not for the sake of anything external to, or
more ultimate than, itself. It is the sort of possibility that is considered on the
basis of its inherent interest, not on the basis of its actual or potential value in the
realization of projects that transcend the act of imagining itself (p. 116).
35
Casey draws a distinction between this “pure possibility” of imagining for the sake of the
imaginary and “hypothetical possibility,” which is present in hypothesizing, pretending
(both in child’s play and adult parody), and anticipating (p. 115). “All that I can claim for
certain,” says Casey, “is that what I imagine exhibits a purely possible space and time.
Likewise, the objects or events “in” such space and time are things which might be—
might just conceivably be—but which in fact are not” (p. 37).
Casey looks closely at the relationship between imagining and perceiving, and
he’s ultimately eager to separate the two. “The relationship between perception and
imagination has been interpreted in a bewildering variety of ways in Western
philosophy,” he notes. “Within one and the same tradition of thought, the two acts have
been regarded alternatively as modes of each other, contraries of each other, conjugate
acts, different expressions of still another act—and, much more rarely, as equal but
independent acts” (p. 127). More specifically, he finds that philosophers “have held that
imagining and perceiving overlap or coincide in certain crucial ways, including extension
of one act into the other, repetition of one by the other, resemblance between the two
acts, combination of elements through an act of fusion, and in still other ways” (p. 130).
Despite the relationships that philosophers before him have drawn between imagining
and perceiving, and despite his admission that the two acts are sometimes continuous,
Casey clearly states that “even in their closest conjunctions, imagining remains
distinguishable from perceiving: continuity does not imply coincidence” (p. 145).
Kieron O’Connor and Frederick Aardema (2005) subscribe to the
phenomenological view that perception and imagination work in tandem and that
36
imagination is the gateway to the possible. They put forward a “possibilistic model of
consciousness” in which “consciousness only ever presents the world in different degrees
of possibility, never as certainty” (p. 237). Everything real and unreal exists at some point
on the possibility continuum (p. 242), with imagination being used to conceive of
possibilities (p. 243), so that “what we take as our reality is arrived at as the most
possible world in the context of other possible worlds,” without any absolute certainty as
to what actually constitutes reality (p. 247).
While phenomenology was a step toward integrating the real and the imaginary
and granting agency to human consciousness, the existentialist response to
phenomenology amplified the divide between reality and imagination, weakening the
creative powers of the imagination in the real world and focusing on a lack of meaning in
lived human experience (Kearney, 1988, p. 196). Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) provides
the most comprehensive treatment of the imagination from an existentialist viewpoint.
Sartre subscribes to Husserl’s notion that perception and imagination differ only in their
intent and perspective (Kearney, 1998, p. 58). However, while Husserl is able to hold
imagination and perception as two simultaneous and complementary methods for
understanding the world, Sartre sees perception (of the present) and imagination (of the
absent) as mutually exclusive and incompatible (O’Connor & Aardema, 2005, p. 234).
For Sartre, “to posit the imaginary is ipso facto to negate the real” (Kearney, 1998, p. 62).
Therefore, Sartre concludes that imaginative people are in fact mentally ill, as their
imaginative conception of the world is by definition divorced from reality (p. 73). This is
an echoing of Sigmund Freud’s (1856-1939) grouping of the imagination with fantasizing
37
and hallucination as indicators of psychopathology (O’Connor & Aardema, 2005, p.
234). However, Sartre also agrees with Husserl that imagination grants us freedom in that
it is an escape from reality and a gateway to the possible. Sartre ultimately finds
imagination’s greatest utility to be its ability to define reality in relation to the unreal
(Kearney, 1998, pp. 76-77).
In contrast to Sartre’s conception of the imagination as the negation of reality, and
a person’s indulgence into imagination as a pathology, Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962)
celebrates the imagination as the ultimate “happiness of expression” (Kearney, 1998, p.
99). For Bachelard, imagination originates in an animate nature: “Images are born
directly from the murmuring voice—to which one listens in speaking nature. Yes, as so
many poets have said, nature speaks for those who listen to it” (Bachelard, quoted in
Kearney, 1998, p. 108). Bachelard’s imaginary does not represent unreality so much as
surreality or alternate reality. Imagination provides the opportunity to see reality in
various ways and to transform reality into the products of imagination. Bachelard
introduces the concepts of rêve, equivalent to Sartre’s pure negation of reality, and
rêverie, a constant re-creation of reality (p. 100). Rêve and rêverie are both viable modes
of the imagination, but it is rêverie that engenders the power of possibility a la Husserl.
For Eva Brann (1993), the imagination is an essential and defining component of
our humanity. She sees imagination as the glue that binds the human soul to the outside
world: “it both holds the soul together within and connects it to the objects without” (p.
3). She also sees imagination as the “pivot between sense and intellect” (p. 6),
demonstrating her phenomenological proclivities. Brann supports a complete
38
superimposition of imagination and reality, so that imagination is not “seeing this as that,
but rather seeing this and that: There is a dirt-filled ant-jar imprisoning a heap of acrid-
smelling, crawly insects and there is a secret underground city of competent and
purposeful little comrades” (p. 779). Most poignantly, Brann believes that “our most
specifically human mission [is] to remake the world imaginatively” (p. 774), and she
feels strongly that the power of imagination is best employed in the real world (p. 149).
In fact, she argues that perceiving the world without imagination provides an incomplete
understanding: “Instead of claiming that vision and imagination must displace each
other,” Brann asserts, “one should say that casting a cold, image-free eye is a curtailed
kind of seeing” (p. 776).
Brann (1993) is concerned about the future of the imagination in light of the
current trend toward rationalism and positivism in the West. She describes the
imagination as “humanly vital yet endangered” (p. 26).
It is strange that every contemporary book on the visual imagination must devote
itself primarily to the problem of its existence. In the course of its exposition all
definitions will be proved defective, all generalizations false, and the question
itself undecidable—undecidable, that is, in the terms of rigorously positive
reason. For such rationality acknowledges no right to inquire into any psychic life
whose operations cannot be tested and modeled. Now the imagination’s vital
signs wane under such severe treatment (pp. 781-782).
Sociologist Alfred Schutz (1962) points out that imagination is not necessarily
relegated to the realm of the individual when he writes that “imagining can be lonely or
39
social…. An instance of the first is day-dreaming, of the second the mutually oriented
intersubjective make-believe play of children or some phenomena studied by mass
psychology” (p. 240). Play is a very useful and fulfilling human activity that is
completely accepted, even encouraged, during childhood, when it is considered vital for
proper social and intellectual development (Henricks, 2006, p. 5). Play among adults in
our culture is viewed very differently, however. Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) (1955), a
Dutch cultural historian, asserts that this has not always been the case in all places and
times. He describes the medieval and renaissance periods in Europe as being full of play.
The cultural shift away from play, according to Huizinga, occurred with the onset of the
industrial age, characterized by “utilitarianism, prosaic efficiency, and the bourgeois ideal
of social welfare,” resulting in a pervading “portentous seriousness” in cultural
interactions (pp. 191-192). Huizinga sees value in the capacity of play to move people
beyond the serious: “In play, we may move below the level of the serious, as the child
does; but we can also move above it—in the realm of the beautiful and the sacred” (p.
17).
Huizinga (1955) frames play in the Middle Ages as being part of a broader
cultural “play-festival-rite complex” in which organized public events meant to serve
important functions in the community simultaneously displayed characteristics of
playfulness, celebration, and ritual (p. 31). Sociologist Thomas Henricks (2006) clarifies
how ritual and imaginative play were conflated: “ritual in earlier times was no simple
enactment of abstract form. Rather it was an imaginative creation of order through the
40
energy and inspiration of the participants. People ‘played out’ symbolic events so that
these might effect changes in cosmic order” (p. 17).
Imaginative play very often involves a temporary shift in identity for the
participants, sometimes facilitated by assuming different speech or behavior patterns or
donning costumes. “By dressing up in this way players become other beings, people who
have left behind their routine identities” (Henricks, 2006, p. 14). Formalized role playing
games like Dungeons and Dragons, Shadowrun, and Changeling involve the conscious
invocation of imagination to temporarily pretend that players are fae creatures. In
Changeling, “characters require the raw energy of human imagination, a metaphysical
force known as ‘glamour,’ to survive. The antithesis of this force, ‘banality,’ is deadly to
the fae” (Laycock, 2012, pp. 76-77).
In an example of radical identity shift facilitated by play, Lynne Hume (2006)
found that people who identify as vampires most often begin their exploration with a
spark of the imagination lit by fantasy literature. Some move on to more playful activities
including role-playing, dressing up, and acting out. If participants take this play seriously,
a new lifestyle and belief system can be born (p. 3). There are individuals other than
vampires who identify as part animal, angel, faery, or other mythological creature, an
identity group known by the term “Otherkin” (Laycock, 2012, pp. 65-66). Some Otherkin
believe they are only human in physical body and entirely other-than-human mentally
and spiritually (p. 72). The utility of this particular form of identity play is described by
an Otherkin who identifies as part wolf: “Sure we can explain it away as imagination, but
repressing anything completely inevitably leads to ill health, whether the repression is
41
physical or psychological. We need to play, and Otherkin allows us to express that within
safe boundaries” (p. 73).
When play is culturally sanctioned and conflated with ritual, and particularly
when it is framed as performance, it can also serve to form more permanent identities
(Henricks, 2006, p. 215). Henricks points to sociologist Max Weber’s (1864-1920)
assertion that Western rationalism has encouraged a questioning worldview and critical
thinking skills, which has resulted in the necessity for people to consciously form their
own identities (p. 92). Identity formation, according to Henricks, is accomplished through
a combination of the transformative act of play and the conformitive act of communitas
(or being in community) (pp. 92-93). This theory of identity formation coupled with
today’s relative dearth of play in adult life would presumably leave us with a rash of
partially-formed identities and identity crises. Intuitively, this does not seem far from the
truth.
In Letcher’s (2001) experience with the Pagan eco-protest community, the
protesters living at Fairmile who called themselves “Fairies” and those living at Fort
Trollheim who called themselves “Trolls” were actually playing the parts of their
ascribed archetypes. “The Fairies were mostly vegetarian, non-violent, played mandolins
and sang songs about their aesthetic eco-paganism; the Trolls ate meat, drank more
alcohol, and banned any music they deemed too ‘Fairy-ish’” (p. 152).
42
Huizinga illuminates the transformative power of play not only for individual
identity formation but also for transformation on a much larger scale. Henricks (2006)
summarizes Huizinga’s ideas on play as transformation:
To play is to take on the world, to take it apart, and frequently to build it anew. So
understood, play for Huizinga is a protest against determinism, a claim that
humans need not merely endure existential conditions but can reform these
according to their own desires and insights. For such reasons, play—especially in
its protected formal settings—is thought to be the engine of history (p. 185).
Henricks also identifies the ontological power of play when he writes that “play is the
laboratory of the possible. To play fully and imaginatively is to step sideways into
another reality, between the cracks of ordinary life” (p. 1).
Contemporary Pagans tend to understand the concepts of truth and reality as
subjective and multiple because each individual person perceives, interprets, and
imagines events according to their own experience, personality, and perhaps even genetic
make-up. As explained by one of Tanya Luhrmann’s (1989) informants, “I am aware that
my reality and my conclusions are the result of my unique genetic structure, my life
experience and my subjective feelings; and you are a different person, whose same
experience of what may or may not be out there will be translated in your nervous system
into something different…. This recognition that everyone has different experiences is a
fundamental keystone to Paganism” (p. 342). Reality is also multiple in that it is
momentary, meaning that an individual can shift from one reality to another in any
moment (including the dream reality, the everyday reality, the ritual reality, the play
reality, etc.) (Young & Goulet, 1994, p. 318).
43
The idea that reality is not a singular experience but rather that there are multiple
realities within which we operate was introduced by William James in his 1890 essay,
“The Perception of Reality.” He lists multiple “sub-universes” or “worlds” that we
experience: “there is the world of collective error, there are the worlds of abstract reality,
of relative or practical reality, of ideal relations, and there is the supernatural world” (p.
291). He explains that “each world whilst it is attended to is real after its own fashion;
only the reality lapses with the attention” (p. 293).
James doesn’t see all sub-universes as being equally real, however. He marks the
world of everyday life as the “ultimate or paramount reality” because it’s the world of our
senses and also the world in which we work. As explained by Alfred Schutz (1962), “all
these worlds—the worlds of dreams, of imageries and phantasms, especially the world of
art, the world of religious experience, the world of scientific contemplation, the play
world of the child, and the world of the insane—are finite provinces of meaning…. each
of [which] may receive a specific accent of reality (although not the reality accent of the
world of working)” (p. 232). Schutz frames this idea in a slightly different way when he
writes that “the world of working in daily life is the archetype of our experience of
reality. All the other provinces of meaning may be considered as its modifications” (p.
233). Erving Goffman (1997) characterizes James’s separation of the world of the senses
into a category of more real reality as a “cop out,” saying that “after taking this radical
stand… he allowed that the world of the senses has a special status, being the one we
judge to be the realest reality, the one that retains our liveliest belief, the one before
which the other worlds must give way” (p. 150).
44
Defining reality or the quality of “realness,” whether or not reality is conceived of
as multiple, is not a simple undertaking. According to William James (1890), “whatever
excites and stimulates our interest is real; whenever an object so appeals to us that we
turn to it, accept it, fill our mind with it, or practically take account of it, so far it is real
for us, and we believe it” (p. 295). James postulates that some realities are more real than
others because “as a whole, sensations are more lively and are judged more real than
conceptions; things met with every hour more real than things seen once; attributes
perceived when awake, more real than attributes perceived in a dream” (p. 300). He
essentially says that things that are sensed are taken as more real than things that are
imagined, which are “usually real with a less real reality than that of the things of sense.
They are taken less seriously; and the very utmost that can be said for anyone's belief in
them is that it is as strong as his ‘belief in his own senses’” (p. 294).
In a seeming departure, James also says that “a rare experience, too, is likely to be
judged more real than a permanent one, if it be more interesting and exciting.” James at
once claims that the quality of realness is determined by that which can be sensed and
also by that which is exciting. He explains that these ideas are actually not contradictory
in that “our emotions probably owe their pungent quality to the bodily sensations which
they involve. Our tendency to believe in emotionally exciting objects (objects of fear,
desire, etc.) is thus explained without resorting to any fundamentally new principle of
choice. Speaking generally, the more a conceived object excites us, the more reality it
has” (p. 307).
45
James introduces the notion that education can affect what is considered real
when he writes “the greatest proof that a man is sui compos is his ability to suspend belief
in presence of an emotionally exciting idea. To give this power is the highest result of
education. In untutored minds the power does not exist. Every exciting thought in the
natural man carries credence with it” (p. 308). Insofar as education is equated with
cultural indoctrination, this is a reasonable explanation for the differences in what
constitutes reality among different groups of people spread over time, space, and
ideology.
Folklorist Peter Rojcewicz (1991) questions what can reasonably be seen and
known inside a particular “cultural map” of reality (p. 495). For example, the cultural
map of modernity leaves no room for the possible existence of elves and sprites, so
subscribers to the dominant culture don’t even consider looking for them. These and
other nature spirits become fictionalized characters relegated to child’s play and fantasy
novels. As explained by Eva Brann (1993), “The forced imagination loses the courage of
its convictions and is overcome by the melancholy of its unreality. When its sustaining
energy is strained, the trust in its visions collapses and a kind of inner calamity, an
imaginative devastation ensues; the insubstantiality of the pageant seems manifest, the
fabric of every vision appears baseless, and all the spirits melt into thin air” (p. 792). The
gravity of the constraints imposed by our current cultural map are expressed by
Rojcewicz (1991) in the following passage:
The picture of reality that has dominated in the West for the last three
centuries is of a predictable, mechanistic, and purposeless world devoid of
human or spiritual qualities… We can only be certain that the universe is
46
highly susceptible to our particular interpretations, for better or worse. We
represent the world to ourselves as impersonal, mechanistic, and
purposeless, and we respond to this representation, as if it were a cosmic
law. The truth of the matter, perhaps, is that the impersonal, mechanistic,
and purposeless qualities are in ourselves (p. 499).
The implication of the way that Rojcewicz frames our cultural reality is that because the
source of the perceived reality is within each of us as actors in the culture, it is within our
power to change our own reality.
Anthropologists Charles Laughlin and Jason Throop (2001) would agree with
Rojcewicz that members of a culture are capable of defining their own reality—drawing
their own cultural map. “In the process of coming to know the world,” they say, “the
importance of intuition and imagination are at least as important as reason in forming an
accurate cognized picture of reality” (p. 720). Laughlin and Throop present a circular
flow diagram that illustrates how a culture’s cosmology informs its mythopoeia
(composed of the myth-ritual complex, art, drama, and other symbolism), which informs
experience, which when interpreted creates cosmology (p. 712). This circular flow is self-
sustaining and tends to reinforce the status quo—unless members of the culture
consciously choose to revise their interpretations of life experiences or engage in new and
different experiences. “A society’s mythopoeia is ultimately the product of the creative
imagination of its people. By creative imagination we do not mean mundane fantasy
(imagined unreality), but rather the imaginatio in Henry Corbin’s (1969, 179) sense—the
exercise of the creative intuitive faculties associated with imagery by which the
47
essentially invisible aspects of reality may be envisioned” (Laughlin & Throop, 2001, p.
713).
Laughlin and Throop assert that “modern Euroamerican culture is marked by a
vast chasm between its conception of reality as described by science on one hand and
unreal fantasy on the other” (p. 714), which is not at all the case for cultures that
understand the world to be enchanted. When considering the conceptions of reality in
other cultures from a Western viewpoint, “What is real, the scientists say, must pass our
tests. ‘Pass our tests’ means that it must be possible to discover something equivalent in
our culture” (Duerr, 1985, p. 127), meaning that the realities experienced by alternative
cultures are dismissed outright.
The enchanted realities that are a part of the contemporary Pagan experience are
sometimes described by practitioners as more significant and seemingly more real than
the so-called real world. This has been documented among practitioners who engage in
trance. Even if encounters in trance state are not “real” in the same way that “reality” is,
they may be more significant than “real” encounters or experiences, making them more
important in real life (Tramacchi, 2006, p. 100). While working with eco-protesters in
England, Andy Letcher (2006) found that “For Eco-Pagans this enchanted world of
which they are a part is not delusory, escapist or infantile, but a neglected, forgotten, and
truer reality” (p. 181). The same holds true for practitioners of shamanism, who believe
that the worlds of dreams, myths, and imagination are as real as the “hard” world (Taylor,
2002, p. 41). Some shamans who journey to otherworlds consider the worlds they visit to
be more real and more significant than the everyday world (Tramacchi, 2006, p. 100).
48
Philosopher Edward Casey (1976) asserts that “Imagination has no genuinely
ontological power, that is, no power to make real what is nonreal or the reverse—where
by “real” is meant having a determinate and intersubjectively ascertainable status within
an enduring spatio-temporal framework” (p. 82). He claims that imagination is non-
corrigable, that it is not subject to truth or falsehood (pp. 94-95), so it cannot be verified
or falsified “for verifiability requires the possibility of intersubjective confirmation, and
in imagining any such confirmation is excluded in the nature of the case” (p. 96). For
Casey, what is taken to be reality must be corroborated by multiple individuals
(intersubjectivity), and imagining is an individual endeavor that is never intersubjective,
therefore reality and imagination are not related. As explained by Casey, “to imagine is to
sup-pose something—an object, event, or state of affairs—as purely possible. Such
entertaining of pure possibilities cannot be understood as an activity of negating what is
empirically real, or even as being indifferent or neutral toward it” (p. 112). For Casey,
“part of the ‘purity’ of imaginative possibilities lies precisely in their independence of the
mutually exclusive alternatives of reality and unreality” (p. 113).
Casey’s definition of reality is not shared by other phenomenologists, who take
Husserl’s possibility as indicative of a more malleable reality that can be experienced
differently by different individuals in different moments. Coming from a more
traditionally phenomenological viewpoint, Kieron O’Connor and Frederick Aardema
(2005) outline a “possibilistic model of consciousness” wherein one’s conception of
reality is made up of simultaneous inputs of perception and imagination (p. 237), the
result being that “what we take as our reality is arrived at as the most possible world in
49
the context of other possible worlds” (p. 247). Eva Brann (1993) expresses a similar
understanding that “perceptual and imaginal visions of the world—the same world—do
occur simultaneously, and that it is precisely by reason of this double vision that the
imagination is very much engaged with the world” (p. 149).
The phenomenological imagination described by these scholars is not simply a
producer of fantasy or unreality; it is in fact one of the productive elements in our
experience of reality. As explained by a magician (a type of contemporary Pagan
practitioner), “The uninitiated interpret imagination as something ‘imaginary’ in the
popular sense of the term, i.e. something unreal. But the imagination is a reality. When a
man imagines, he actually creates a form on the Astral or some higher plane; and this
form is as real and objective to intelligent beings on that plane, as our earthly
surroundings are to us” (Luhrmann, 1989, p. 275).
In his discussion of Jung’s “active imagination,” Edward Casey (1976) seems to
agree in some respect with the idea that imagination engenders some sort of reality. He
says that “the content of what we actively imagine is indeed felt to be psychically real
insofar as it may affect and change the psyche of the imaginer himself” (p. 216). Casey
actually seems to appreciate that the “purely possible” in imagining may have more
import for an individual than does the empirically real, but he nevertheless does not want
to confuse the two. He ventures to say that “it might even seem as if the thetic character
of the real has been substituted for the purely possible insofar as active imagining puts us
in touch with archetypal material. What could be more ultimate, and thus more real, than
such material?” He goes on to say that “an archetypally attuned imagination deals with
50
what is purely possible—with what cannot be constricted to the empirically real” (p.
215).
Consciousness Studies, Transpersonal Psychology, and Ecopsychology
Exploration of consciousness plays an important role in the ways that
contemporary Pagans understand and operate in the world. The subtitle to Susan
Greenwood’s (2005) book The Nature of Magic is “An Anthropology of Consciousness,”
and Starwood Festival itself is organized by the Association for Consciousness
Exploration. Consciousness comes into play from multiple angles, the first being the idea
that human consciousness may be explored, expanded, and changed for the better.
According to Sabina Magliocco (2004), “the experience of altered or alternate
consciousness that reveals a previously hidden, spiritual reality is the core of the Neo-
Pagan movement” (p. 152). From a more political standpoint, Bron Taylor (2000)
summarizes the conviction among deep ecologists that “a transformation of human
consciousness must take place if humans are to reestablish harmony with nonhuman
nature” (p. 277). Susan Greenwood (2005) introduces the concept of “magical
consciousness,” which is embodied and intuitive, in contrast to the reflective and
intellectual qualities of individual consciousness in the dominant Western paradigm.
“Above all,” says Greenwood, “magical consciousness concerns the awareness of the
interrelatedness of all things in the world” (p. 7).
The concept of embodied cognition that is explained in The Embodied Mind, by
Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch (1991) bridges the gap between
51
phenomenology and cognitive science in the exploration of human consciousness. Varela,
Thompson, and Rosch “hold with [philosopher] Merleau-Ponty that Western scientific
culture requires that we see our bodies both as physical structures and as lived,
experiential structures—in short, as both “outer” and “inner,” biological and
phenomenological” (p. xv). In terms of cognition, they see the “biological” body as “the
context or milieu of cognitive mechanisms,” which works in concert with the
“phenomenological” body that is experiential in nature (p. xvi). Prior to the articulation
of this framework, cognitive science, rooted in the scientific method, and philosophy of
human experience, by definition an experiential inquiry, rarely overlapped. There was
(and to a large extent still is) a rift between these two disciplines that both explore human
consciousness, but from different perspectives and using different tools. Varela,
Thompson, and Rosch pay homage to both modes of inquiry and attempt to draw them
both under the same umbrella of embodied cognition. As articulated by the authors,
To deny the truth of our own experience in the scientific study of
ourselves is not only unsatisfactory; it is to render the scientific study of
ourselves without a subject matter. But to suppose that science cannot
contribute to an understanding of our experience may be to abandon,
within the modern context, the task of self-understanding. Experience and
scientific understanding are like two legs without which we cannot walk
(pp. 13-14).
Embodied cognition, as defined by Varela et al., is a particularly useful framework for
exploring the phenomenon of faeries because it lends legitimacy to the experiential as an
indispensable component of our understanding of human consciousness. Faeries exist in
folklore, literature, art, and in experiences that humans have, so a framework like
52
embodied cognition that makes room for experiences as legitimate evidence for
understanding consciousness, reality, and imagination makes sense for this inquiry.
Another main thrust of the Pagan understanding of consciousness is that it is not
exclusive to human beings. Taken in its broadest definition, most contemporary Pagans
are animist; that is they understand the world, and particularly the natural world, to be
inspirited (Greenwood, 2005, p. ix). The animistic worldview states that all beings have
consciousness (p. 10). For some animists, this extends to beings from nature’s
“otherworlds” or planes beyond normal human consciousness (Harvey, 2006b, p. 48),
including faeries and other nature spirits, who are considered conscious beings of nature
along with humans, animals, plants, rocks, etc. (Harvey, 2006a, p. 91).
The study of consciousness, including individual human consciousness as well as
the shared consciousness of the world in a Jungian sense, is made explicit in the field of
transpersonal psychology. “A self-identity that transcends the individual as a separate
entity underlies transpersonal psychology” (Davis & Canty, 2013, p. 603). Similar to
embodied cognition in its bridging of scientific and intuitive inquiry, “the transpersonal
approach seeks a new vision, one in which both human science and human spirituality
can be honored” (Hartelius, Rothe, & Roy, 2013, p. 3). Douglas MacDonald (2013) states
that “I approach transpersonal psychology as a subdiscipline of psychology, which I
define as the scientific study of consciousness, particularly non-ordinary states, modes,
processes, and structures of consciousness” (p. 326).
Transpersonal psychology employs the phenomenological focus on human
experience as a primary subject of study. As such it provides a framework for
53
incorporating extraordinary or transcendent human experiences such as interactions with
faeries into scientific inquiry. As reasoned by MacDonald,
if the transcendent were viewed in purely experiential terms, something that is
suggested by most, if not all, extant schools of mysticism, then it could be
positioned that the transcendent and transpersonal are just extensions of the
continuum of all human experience, and can comfortably be treated in terms that
are not dystonic with naturalism. Within this context, it might be said that the
assumption of naturalism may be better reconceived as that of experientialism—
anything that is available to human experience is a legitimate focus of scientific
study (p. 321).
MacDonald thus frames extraordinary human experiences as just one more aspect of the
natural human experience, and therefore worthy of our attention and our efforts to learn
what we can from these experiences through whatever means available to us, including
scientific inquiry.
In examining the intersection of transpersonal psychology with the emerging field
of ecopsychology, John V. Davis and Jeanine M. Canty (2013) find that both fields share
an alternative concept of the human-nature relationship. They explain that “for the most
part, ecopsychology presents two images for the relationship between humans and nature:
(a) nature as home and its inhabitants as family (e.g., siblings or Mother Earth) and (b)
nature as self, in which self-identifications are broadened and deepened to include the
non-human world” (p. 600). Davis and Canty articulate the differences between these
ecopsychological conceptions of the human-nature relationship and the ones that
predominate in Western thought: “These views stand in contrast to views that nature is
54
dangerous and needs to be controlled and dominated or that nature is (merely) a useful
resource to be exploited, protected, conserved, or stewarded” (p. 600).
Ecopsychology provides an apt framework for examining the role that belief in
faeries plays in the human-nature relationship in that it conflates the environmental or
ecological wellbeing of the Earth with the psychological wellbeing of individual human
beings. From this framework, the environmental problems facing the planet and the
psychological problems experienced by individual humans are two sides of the same
coin. As expressed by Theodore Roszak (1992) in the preface to his book The Voice of
the Earth:
This is an essay in ecopsychology. Its goal is to bridge our culture’s long-
standing, historical gulf between the psychological and the ecological, to see the
needs of the planet and the person as a continuum. In search of a greater sanity, it
begins where many might say sanity leaves off: at the threshold of the nonhuman
world. In a sense that weaves science and psychiatry, poetry and politics together,
the ecological priorities of the planet are coming to be expressed through our most
private spiritual travail. The Earth’s cry for rescue from the punishing weight of
the industrial system we have created is our own cry for a scale and quality of life
that will free each of us to become the complete person we were born to be (p.
14).
In his book Radical Ecopsychology, Andy Fisher (2002) postulates that “if we
accept the ecological view that we are members of the biotic community, rather than its
mere exploiters, then we may learn to recognize the natural world as a social and
psychological field, just as we do the human community” (p. 5). Fisher lays out four
55
basic tasks central to the practice of ecopsychology, and the second, or philosophical,
task is “to place psyche (soul, anima, mind) back into the (natural) world” (p. 9), which
Paganism strives to do.
Davis and Canty (2013) identify “the broadening of self-identity to include other
beings, the natural world, and the cosmos” as “a core theme” of ecopsychology. “It is
here that ecopsychology and transpersonal psychology share common ground most
visibly” (p. 598). In the ecopsychological framework, “humans and nature are both parts
of a transpersonal whole. Deepening this identity promotes self-transcendence, self-
realization, and optimal human maturity and at the same time, environmentally
sustainable attitudes and behaviors” (p. 598).
Both transpersonal psychology and modern ecopsychology have drawn heavily on
formative work in the field of depth psychology. Initiated by Carl Jung, depth psychology
relies on the collective unconscious of all human beings to offer wisdom to the individual
psyche by way of archetypes that have metaphorical significance for the individual. Alan
G. Vaughan (2013) asserts that “it is clear that Jung thought of his approach to
psychology, such as the collective unconscious and archetypes, in a way compatible with
modern transpersonal psychology” (p. 141). Vaughan draws a very close alliance
between transpersonal and depth psychologies when he says, “Undeniably, Jung was one
of the major precursors, if not the actual founder, of a transpersonal psychology” (p. 150).
Ideas that are recognized today as ecopsychological were expressed by Jung half a
century ago. For example, Jung (1964) wrote that “man feels himself isolated in the
cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional
56
“unconscious identity” with natural phenomena.… No voices now speak to man from
stones, plants, and animals, nor does he speak to them believing they can hear. His
contact with nature has gone, and with it has gone the profound emotional energy that
this symbolic connection supplied” (p. 85). The animism inherent in both depth
psychology and ecopsychology is evident here.
James Hillman’s foreword to the edited volume Ecopsychology (Roszak, Gomes,
& Kanner, 1995), entitled “A Psyche the Size of the Earth,” asserts that human psyches
incorporate the world in which we live, that the soul extends outward, merging the
individual with the environment and the “other.” He takes both Jung’s collective
unconscious and Freud’s id as representations of “the world,” concluding that Jungian
and Freudian psychologies both point toward harmonizing with the world as necessary
for psychological wellbeing. Hillman believes that for many people, the most profound
traumas in our psyches are in fact traumas to the natural world (or the “world soul”) that
are felt deep in our human souls (Roszak, Gomes, & Kanner, 1995, pp. xvii-xxiii).
Stephen Aizenstat has taken a similarly ecopsychological approach to Depth Psychology,
replacing the human collective unconscious with his notion of a “world unconscious” that
includes human as well as nonhuman nature (Roszak, Gomes, & Kanner, 1995, p. 92).
Aizenstat advocates an ecocentric perspective, in which we as humans learn to listen to
the voices of all Earth’s inhabitants, without separating ourselves from the world
(Roszak, Gomes, & Kanner, 1995, p. 99).
Richard Louv’s (2008) main thesis in Last Child in the Woods is that children
today are growing up without a connection to nature and that this lack of connection has
57
detrimental impacts both on children and on the natural world. Although Louv does not
self-identify as an ecopsychologist, his ideas are ecopsychological. Louv has coined the
term “nature-deficit disorder,” a pseudo-psychological diagnosis, to describe “the human
costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention
difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses” (p. 36).
Mitchell Thomashow (1995) provides an ecopsychological perspective on the
practice of environmentalism in his book Ecological Identity: Becoming a Reflective
Environmentalist. He regards environmental practice as a healing profession because it
involves healing the world. For example, conservation biologists heal damaged
ecosystems when they work to restore their balance, and effective environmental
educators heal both their students and the ecosystems those students impact (p. 143).
Thomashow strongly advocates taking care of the environmentalist as integral to
successful environmentalism, as the health of environmentalists and the health of the
environment are intertwined. In Thomashow’s words, “If ecological identity enables
people to identify with the earth, then to love the earth is to love oneself. This is how to
take care of the environmentalist…” (p. 168). This ecopsychological notion that the
wellbeing of the self and the Earth are closely aligned is strikingly similar to the
contemporary Pagan worldview.
Enchantment, Disenchantment, and Re-enchantment
There is a narrative of disenchantment and re-enchantment that circulates through
much of the literature about the 20th century emergence of alternative spiritualities,
58
including contemporary Paganism. In The Re-Enchantment of the West, Christopher
Partridge (2004) asserts that “alternative spiritualities provide eclectic, individualized
religion for disenchanted Westerners who want to hang on to the remnants of belief” (p.
36). Susan Greenwood (2005) writes that “re-enchanting the world for practitioners of
nature religion means learning to see nature as alive and also as having a spiritual
dimension” (p. vii). This story of cultural disenchantment and eventual re-enchantment
frames belief in faeries and the general inspiritedness of nature as elements of this ebb
and flow of enchantment over human history.
When sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) was writing in the early 20th century,
he witnessed what he termed a “cultural crisis” resulting from the rationalization and
disenchantment of the world (Gane, 2002, p. 4). According to Weber, the first steps
toward the disenchantment crisis of the 20th century occurred within religious practice.
There was a transition away from naturalism, characterized by a conflation of natural and
magical phenomena that were granted spiritual significance, and toward religious
symbolism, in which the forms and functions of gods were increasingly defined and
systematized for an entire population by people in positions of power. These authority
figures often focused the public attention on one god over others, initiating the move
away from the traditional spiritual practice of polytheistic animism and toward
monotheistic universal religion (Gane, 2002, p. 17). Over time, the god worshiped by the
populace became more symbolic and transcendent, or separate from the natural every day
world (p. 18). Promises of salvation likewise became increasingly otherworldly (p. 22).
59
As Weber sees it, disenchanted monotheistic universal religion in the West
culminated with Calvinist Protestantism, which had clear connections with the rise of
both capitalism and rationalism. The protestant work ethic and concept of a “calling” to
do a certain type of work fed into capitalism, and the banishment of anything magical or
supernatural from the practice of the religion was both a result and a cause of the
scientific rationalism taking hold of the culture. Ironically, Protestantism was ultimately
abandoned by both capitalism, which had no need for spiritual legitimation once its own
logic of production took over, and scientific rationalism, which eventually rejected and
devalued all religious values as irrational (Gane, 2002, pp. 19-21).
Weber agrees with nihilist Friedrich Nietzche (1844-1900) that the enlightenment
and the rise of scientific rationalism were movements toward “the devaluation of ultimate
values” in the West, and he vehemently disagrees with sociologist Émile Durkheim’s
(1858-1917) assertion that scientific progress and human progress are one and the same
(Gane, 2002, p. 2). He sees science as incapable of establishing values or resolving value-
conflicts (p. 8), and he asserts that the result of expunging a society of its values is a
dehumanized, impersonal world in which individuals are not ends in themselves but
means to an end. This is evident in the alienating systems of capitalism and bureaucracy
that predominate in today’s society (p. 23). Nicholas Gane (2002) spells out the nihilistic
culmination of Weber’s thesis:
…religious beliefs and ultimate ideals gradually recede from (public) life as they
are disenchanted by the claims of ‘rational’ science and are replaced increasingly
by the idealized pursuit of secular, material ends. This leads to a world in which
60
questions of meaning and value disappear from the public arena, and in which the
scope for creative action and for the pursuit of ultimate values becomes
increasingly restricted (p. 26).
This description of how ultimate disenchantment plays out in a society bears a striking
resemblance to the current condition of the dominant Western culture.
What follows the ultimate disenchantment of a culture? Weber posits that with
religion having been divorced from the rest of cultural life, people begin to practice
various religions and establish their own value systems that are not shared culture-wide
(Gane, 2002, p. 29). This is potentially what is going on with the current proliferation of
alternative polytheistic and pantheistic spiritualities as well as new brands of
fundamentalist monotheisms. At first blush, this looks like a hopeful possibility for re-
enchantment, but Weber’s narrative ends with the establishment of competing value-
spheres that ultimately fall back on rationalism to prove their efficacy (Gane, 2002, p.
151).
Despite Weber’s dire predictions for enchantment in the West, when the theme of
re-enchantment surfaces in the literature about alternative spiritualities, it is generally in a
more positive and empowered tone. In The Re-Enchantment of the West, Christopher
Partridge (2004) describes a cycle similar to the one Weber introduced, framing it in
terms of secularization. He says that churches become more and more secular to the point
that they are no longer meeting the spiritual needs of their followers, who then form sects
or cults, some of which grow with time into large religions, which then again begin to
secularize. Partridge asserts, however, that the current resurgence isn’t in individual sects
61
or cults; rather it is a return of magical culture, or occulture (p. 40), so today’s
proliferation of alternative spiritualities is accompanied by a re-enchantment that is not
subject to the cycle of secularization. Partridge (2004) quotes Michael Green, an advisor
to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, who observes:
the numbers attending church are in massive decline, and in many churches no
children and young people are to be seen… there is an undeniable spiritual quest
in the air. New Age, the new Paganism and the cults have an enormous
fascination for [those] who have found that materialism does not satisfy. But it
has to be said that their quest for authentic spiritual experience rarely takes them
to a church (p. 44).
An increasing number of spiritual questers are identifying as “spiritual but not religious,”
an important distinction that indicates people are gravitating toward the freedom, open-
mindedness, and experiential nature of a spiritual quest as opposed to the restriction,
closed-mindedness, and dogmatic nature of organized religion (pp. 46-48). According to
Adrian Ivakhiv (2006), the signifier religion has historically been defined by its
distinctions from other signifiers, such as magic, superstition, science, and secularism
(pp. 169-170). In this way, claiming that one is religious is putting oneself in a box that
excludes many other descriptors that may also apply to the individual’s spiritual outlook.
In concert with Weber and Huizinga, who both cite industrialization and scientific
rationalism as the precursors to disenchantment in the socio-cultural realm, Partridge
(2005) points to “the massive humankind-nature dislocation brought on by the Industrial
Revolution” and the “driving force of rationalization” as sources of the disenchantment
and desacralization of nature:
62
…no longer were the forests filled with the little folk of myth and magic, and the
animistic spirits of folklore. Whereas the supernatural used to be, to all intents
and purposes, natural, it gradually became extranatural, in that ‘modernity’
pushed it beyond the natural, empirical, real world, into the sphere of the
fantastical, the fictional, and the theological. Nature was rationally quantifiable,
empirical matter. It was not guided by the divine hand and infused with sacred
meaning, but rather operated according to its own laws and could be truly
understood only by scientific excavation (p. 44).
The proliferation of technology that accompanied industrialization has had an especially
direct disenchanting effect on nature. In his book Nature, Technology and the Sacred,
Bronislaw Szerszynski (2005) asserts that “it is in technology that nature’s
disenchantment is most clearly performed” and that “as technology’s powers advance,
those of nature withdraw” (p. 5). As the power of technology escalates, nature
increasingly becomes a powerless disenchanted place where it once was a magical, living
community of beings.
While Weber, Partridge, and Szerszynski may or may not agree with this
assertion, some Pagan scholars insist that it is possible for scientific rationalism to play a
role in the re-enchantment of nature. Bron Taylor (2005) argues that in its uncovering of
increasing knowledge about the world in which we live, science can and should inspire
awe and reverence for nature (pp. 2665-2666). “Despite the pronounced nature mysticism
and occasional distrust of rationality and science found among radical green groups and
participants in Earth-based spirituality, nature spirituality can be compatible with science,
which can even inspire proper spiritual perception” (Taylor, 2001b, p. 234). Indeed, as a
belief system rooted in the cycles and inhabitants of the natural world, Paganism is
63
arguably more compatible with natural science than are any of the major world religions.
Chas Clifton’s (2004) advice is this: “Yes, Western science is flawed, but it is our way of
knowing, so take what it offers: its taxonomy, its lists, its naming. Start there then build a
richer spirituality from that point” (p. 340).
People need not subscribe to Paganism per se to cultivate a sense of wonder, awe,
and reverence in the face of nature. A group of respected scientists, including Carl Sagan,
Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Schneider, and Hans Bethe, issued a statement to this effect
in the early 1990s:
As Scientists, many of us have had profound personal experiences of awe and
reverence before the universe. We understand that what is regarded as sacred is
more likely to be treated with care and respect. Our planetary home should be so
regarded. Efforts to safeguard and cherish the environment should be infused with
a vision of the sacred (quoted in Taylor, 2004, p. 998).
Carl Sagan (1994) also wrote, “a religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of
the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of
reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a
religion will emerge.” These sentiments fall under the rubric of “civic earth religion” or
“spiritual humanism,” depending on the emphasis preferred by the practitioner. There is a
growing movement in this direction, another indication of a contemporary re-
enchantment of the Earth.
Many contemporary scholars have agreed with Weber on the role that
monotheistic universal religion played in the disenchantment of the West. Partridge
64
(2005) focuses on the consequences this has for the ecological health of the planet:
“Christianity, by situating the divine outside nature, not only left nature vulnerable, but
also positively encouraged exploitation” (p. 45). Taylor and Van Horn (2006) express a
similar sentiment:
Christianity in general, and Puritanism in particular, provided a cosmology and
theology that reinforced the general impetus among European settlers to consider
land not as something sacred and worthy of reverence, but as a resource to be
exploited for both material and spiritual ends. For such Christians, both the
material and spiritual ends had something to do with glorifying and satisfying a
deity who resided beyond the Earth and thus should not be too closely identified
with it (p. 167).
These viewpoints expressed by Partridge, Taylor, and Van Horn are reiterations of “the
Lynn White thesis,” as it’s known, or the argument first put forth by historian Lynn
White, Jr., in 1967 that Christianity was largely to blame for the ecological crisis of the
20th century because its human-nature dualism led to extreme anthropocentrism, human
alienation from nature, and ultimately exploitation of the Earth as a resource. The strand
of White’s argument that is not as well known is his assertion that Christianity’s fierce
rejection of the animist Pagan belief system was detrimental to the environment. “By
destroying Pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of
indifference to the feelings of natural objects… The spirits in natural objects, which
formerly had protected nature from man, evaporated” (Lynn White quoted in Partridge,
2005, p. 51).
65
Paganism is viewed as a vehicle for re-enchanting Western culture and healing the
Earth community because it represents a true subversion of the destructive Christian
paradigm. Partridge already sees this process underway:
Following the Christian disenchantment of nature, we are now witnessing its
Paganized re-enchantment. Indeed, critical of the Christian understanding of God,
the Church’s historical attitude to the environment, and monotheistic patriarchy,
the principal tenets of the White thesis are often uncritically accepted as soft
orthodoxy within Paganism (Partridge, 2005, p. 78).
Arguing for a “Paganization of the west,” Dragon Environmental Network founder
Adrian Harris says that “the theology and practice of Paganism not only holds a solution
to our environmental crisis, but can bring about a revolution in the way our culture makes
sense of reality. Paganism puts us back in touch with the body, reconnecting our wordy
analytical culture with the physical self, bringing us back to Earth” (Adrian Harris quoted
in Partridge, 2005, p. 77). Although Harris uses more colloquial language than Weber or
Partridge, he is referring to the same crisis of modern disenchantment brought on by
rationalism (a.k.a. “wordy analytical culture”), and he sees Paganism as a viable path
toward re-enchantment (a.k.a. “bringing us back to Earth”).
Sabina Magliocco (2004) provides an eloquent summation of the re-enchanting
capacity of contemporary Paganism:
Neo-Pagans consider nature sacred, and divinity immanent in every
natural thing and living being. While they do not reject technology and
science, they perceive modernity as a force that has alienated humans from
a way of life that followed the rhythms of seasonal cycles and regularly
brought them into contact with the divine in nature. Pagans believe that as
66
humans became more detached from nature, they ceased to see it as
sacred. It is this sense of the numinous, the magical, the sacred in nature
and in the human form that their religions attempt to recapture (p. 4).
From an animist viewpoint, the founding ideals upon which our current
assumptions are built are faulty. As Graham Harvey (2006b) says, “If Descartes was
wrong in asserting that animals are unable to think in ways he considered distinctively
human, maybe the whole disenchanted construction of modernity has dangerously
erroneous foundations” (pp. 48-49), in which case re-enchantment amounts to a radical
reconsideration of the foundational myths of modernity. “Re-enchanting the world for
practitioners of nature religion means learning to see nature as alive and also as having a
spiritual dimension… Reciprocity between inspirited beings has to be developed to
establish communication” (Greenwood, 2005, pp. vii-viii). For Harvey (2006b), “re-
enchantment is not about mistaking imagination for reality but about achieving a more
adequate view of a dynamic world shared with a wider community of living persons… in
contrast to disenchantment in which humanity has claimed a unique and lonely position”
(p. 49).
Sabina Magliocco (2004) explains that cultural historian Morris Berman blames
cultural disenchantment for many of our contemporary world problems, including
environmental degradation. “As an antidote, he suggests a reenchantment of the world, a
politics of consciousness which would reconnect the individual to the community and to
the larger world” (p. 204).
67
One strand of the re-enchantment narrative has to do with romanticizing pre-
modern and primal cultures as enchanted elements from our past with which we must
reconnect in order to re-establish enchantment in the present. “The ‘ancient wisdom’ of
these cultures is understood to be the uncorrupted wisdom of a humanity unrepressed by
the external dogma, rationalism and authority of later institutionalized religion and
culture” (Partridge, 2004, p. 77). Some modern-day Pagans reconnect with their ancient
ancestors through the use of runes (a system of symbols, often painted on small stones,
that was developed by ancient Pagans living in northern Europe) for spiritual guidance,
divination, and communicating with non-human beings (p. 83). Some Pagans, most
notably in certain Wiccan traditions, claim a direct ancestral connection with ancient
Pagans, saying that oral tradition has passed their sacred craft through many generations.
For example, practitioner Claire Nahmad comments, “my material is drawn from the
ancient wisewoman’s tradition, a tradition which reaches back many centuries to a time
when the influence of the stars and the planets on all animate and inanimate things of the
Earth was acknowledged and accepted…” (Nahmad quoted in Partridge, 2005, p. 79).
David Abram (1996) ties in the proliferation of written language with the spread
of Western religion in his understanding of the disenchantment of nature:
Under the aegis of the Church, the belief in a non-sensuous heaven, and in the
fundamentally incorporeal nature of the human soul—itself “imprisoned,” as
Plato had suggested, in the bodily world—accompanied the alphabet as it spread,
first throughout Europe and later throughout the Americas. And wherever the
alphabet advanced, it proceeded by dispelling the air of ghosts and invisible
influences—by stripping the air of its anima, its psychic depth. In the oral,
68
animistic world of pre-Christian and peasant Europe, all things—animals, forests,
rivers, and caves—had the power of expressive speech… Only as the written text
began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade (pp.
253-254).
A parallel disenchantment narrative has developed around faery lore, with literacy again
postulated as the source of the disenchantment. In oral cultures, faery lore was circulated
amongst people and passed from generation to generation as living stories that had to be
told, performed, and lived. “Language, in oral cultures, is experienced as a property of
the sensuous lifeworld not just that of human beings” (Greenwood, 2005, p. 148). The
writing down of fairytales has rendered them static, lifeless, and exclusively human (pp.
143-144) and robbed them of their life-giving oral tradition, relegating them to the realm
of fiction (p. 167).
According to Howard and Mageo (1996), “spirits—pagan and pre-Christian,
irredeemable and recalcitrant—represent… emblems of cultural identity” and over time
“all cultures reimagine their identities and histories; where spirits survive, they are an
important medium for this reimagining process” (p. 4). This would indicate that the re-
enchantment of the West, particularly as concerns nature, is likely served by renewed
belief in faeries and other nature spirits. Howard and Mageo have found that among
disparate cultures, “spirits are, in contrast [to Gods], often experienced by people without
much power or status, who are locally perceived as being weak; or they may be
experienced by stronger people in marginal places or states (in the forest or bush, in the
twilight or dark, entering or waking from sleep), and notably more often by women” (p.
15). These findings all fit with the experience of faery in contemporary Paganism, and
69
coupled with the assertion that spirits play an important role in reimagining cultures, this
points to a power shifting element in the re-enchantment process.
70
METHODOLOGY
My research goal has been to learn from Pagan festival attendees who engage
with faeries and other nature spirits about how these activities and proclivities affect their
relationships with nature and their behaviors in the natural world. I took an ethnographic
approach, and as an ethnographer I was “participating… in people’s daily lives…
watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions—in fact, collecting
whatever data are available to throw light on the issues that are the focus of the research”
(Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995, p. 1). Ethnography is interpretivist rather than positivist
in its approach (Glesne, 1999, p. 5), meaning that the research is grounded in the
assumption that people construct the social world through their actions and
interpretations (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995, p. 11). This leads to an understanding
that in any setting, there are “multiple voices representing multiple interests or ‘realities’”
(Sluka & Robben, 2006, p. 19). Whereas ethnographers during the colonial period may
have taken an authoritative tone in conducting and reporting their research (p. 17),
ethnography today can be characterized by learning with and from research participants
rather than studying research subjects. This method is more ethically sound, and it
produces more authentic information (p. 26).
I conducted my research at Starwood Festival, July 21-26, 2009, in Sherman, New
York, a small agricultural town in the westernmost part of New York State. The year that
I conducted my field research, Starwood Festival was the largest pan-Pagan gathering in
the United States, with annual attendance of approximately 2,500-3,000 people. 2009 was
71
the 29th Starwood Festival. At a large festival like Starwood, there is something going on
at almost every hour of the day and night. Several workshops are offered simultaneously
throughout each day so that participants must choose among them (Association for
Consciousness Exploration, 2009). The fire circle serves as the social hub of community
activity, and the fire burns all night and into the next morning. The quietest times of day
are morning and evening, but the truth is that there is no time at Starwood that is
completely quiet.
The two research methods I employed at Starwood were interviews and
participant observation. I interviewed twelve festival participants during the week-long
festival. Informants were purposefully selected based on the richness of their personal
experience and engagement with faeries. I sought out people who were offering, or had
offered, workshops at the festival on something relating to faeries. I also sought out
unofficial leaders in the community (as there are no official ones) who have experience
with faery. Finally, I identified some informants by word of mouth, keeping in mind my
goal to find the most information-rich cases (Glesne, 1999, pp. 28-29).
Four of my informants played leadership roles in the festival. There aren’t any
formal leaders at Starwood, but three of my informants were considered elders in the
community and were respected as leaders in that capacity, and a fourth was both a leader
in the Druidic faith and a staff member of the festival. In addition to these four “leaders,”
three other informants occupied high profile positions at the festival as artists and
musicians. The remaining five informants played more pedestrian roles at Starwood; they
were participants. The experience of Starwood is created by the participants, especially as
72
compared to a music festival, for example, where the experience is largely created by the
musicians on stage. Because Starwood is a community-oriented gathering, simple
participation is significant.
Many Starwood attendees return year after year, making it a cohesive community
although it only comes together for one week each year. The average attendance tenure of
my informants was 12 years. Four of them had been attending for over 20 years, three
between 10 and 20 years, and five had attended fewer than 10 years. One informant was
at Starwood for her first year.
When I approached potential interviewees, I identified myself as a graduate
student from the University of Vermont and briefly summarized the research I was
conducting. I provided them with a copy of the IRB Informed Consent form (see
appendices). In some cases, I made an appointment for the interview sometime during the
festival; in other case, I conducted the interview on the spot.
Each interview was ½ to 1 hour in duration. I was prepared with some questions
to ask of the participants (see appendices), but the interviews were semi-structured to
allow the participants to help guide the direction and content of the interviews (Bennett,
2002a, p. 155). I included a variety of questions from all of the categories identified by
Patton (1990): experience/behavior, opinion/values, feeling, knowledge, sensory,
background/demographics (quoted in Glesne, 1999, p. 71). I strove for a tone of genuine
curiosity in conducting the interviews, as my goal was to learn as much as possible from
each of the participants (pp. 83-84). I set up a special tent in a relatively quiet, private,
73
and dry place to conduct the interviews so that the atmosphere was comfortable and
conducive to productive conversation (p. 75). However, I ended up conducting the
interviews in several sites around the festival grounds. It turned out to be more practical
to interview the informants on their turf than to bring them to my special tent. I recorded
the interviews with a digital voice recorder, a device with which I familiarized myself
before any interviews began. I made sure that the recorder had fresh batteries each time I
used it (Bennett, 2002a, p. 157), and I backed up the content of each interview
immediately after it was concluded onto my laptop computer as well as onto a memory
stick so that the data was stored in three places to mitigate any technical problems
(Denscombe, 2007, p. 289).
In addition to conducting interviews, I engaged in participant observation
throughout the festival. This means that I was a member of the Starwood community and
participated in the festival, but I was also constantly aware of my role as a researcher and
my goal to carefully observe the behavior of festival attendees (Bennett, 2002b, p. 139).
Participant observation is a key research method in ethnography; in fact, Hammersley
and Atkinson (1995) have asserted that ethnography necessarily involves participant
observation (p. 21) and Salomonsen (2004) describes the role of the participant observer
in ethnography as crucial. Participant observation, she says, allows a researcher “to study
an ethnographic field horizontally, in solidarity with an indigenous point of view, not
vertically and from externally applied norms” (p. 43).
While participating in the community is necessary for conducting research, it is
also important that the researcher be able to interpret the data collected during fieldwork
74
for an academic audience culturally situated outside the community being studied. For
this reason, I strove to strike a balance between emic and etic approaches, drawing from
my experience as a member of the Starwood Festival community as well as my
experience as an anthropological scholar. There is some “fear within the discipline of
scholars ‘going native,’ that is adopting the values, practices, and beliefs of those studied
to such an extent that one loses the ability to be reflexive about them” (Salomonsen,
2004, p. 43). Salomonsen points out that most ethnographers enter the field as “natives”
of the “Western, scientific culture” (p. 48), so the concept of “going native” is “entangled
with unacknowledged normativity and a positivist, hierarchical view of the relation
between observer and observed” (p. 43). It is generally accepted today that it’s
impossible to research a social setting without being somewhat involved in it, and all
people, including researchers, have a point of view and a measure of bias. Particularly in
the wake of postmodernism and its critiques of scientific positivism, ethnography has, for
the most part, accepted that objectivity is a myth, or a “dishonest illusion,” as
Salomonsen puts it (p. 48).
Ethnographers are necessarily part of the social worlds they study, making
reflexivity, or study of one’s own cultural actions, a central feature of ethnographic
research (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995, p. 16). Melissa Harrington (2004) goes so far
as to argue for further reflexivity in the study of Paganism: “Rather than trying to
eradicate the personality of the researcher, and to pretend that they do not have bias or
personal interests, by adopting a pseudoscientific approach in a nonscientific field, we
could instead aim for further reflexivity” (p. 78). With this in mind, I conducted and
75
reported my research self-consciously, taking note of my own viewpoints and considering
my particular biases but making no attempt to distance myself emotionally or cognitively
from the community I was studying.
In my particular case, I had been attending Starwood Festival for three years prior
to conducting research during my fourth year in attendance. I participated in the festival
in ways that called to me personally, which mainly involved ecstatic dancing at the all-
night fire circle. I was curious about faery faith and eager to learn more, as I did not hold
this particular belief. I did wear wings on occasion during parades and such, but I didn’t
profess belief in faeries. By the time I was conducting anthropological research at
Starwood, I was accepted by festival goers as a member of their community. However, I
still had a firm handle on the assumptions at work within the dominant Western culture,
where I’ve existed for most of my life, and I remained able to report my findings for an
academic audience.
Because the personal experiences and background of the researcher will
inevitably have an effect on the research, it is important that these things be disclosed in
the reporting. Denscombe (2007) asserts that researcher identity should be seen as a
crucial resource, not a limitation; in some cases, a researcher’s identity and particular
background and experiences actually enables the research (p. 301). In my case, I was
uniquely positioned to conduct this research because I had attended Starwood Festival for
the previous three years, so I was a somewhat established member of that festival
community, and I had a reasonable understanding of the social mores of a Pagan festival
(Harrington, 2004, p. 79). However, I had not claimed identity as a Pagan, and I was less
76
enmeshed in the community than some individuals who, for example, have grown up
attending Starwood and other Pagan gatherings since birth. Particularly in a population
that is marginalized the way that Pagans are, it is important that participants and
informants trust me as a researcher. Recognizing me as a festival attendee and knowing
that I am “one of them,” at least to some extent, went a long way toward making
participants feel safe enough to share their stories (p. 79).
When Starwood was over, and I returned from the field, I transcribed all of the
digitally recorded interviews and saved each interview by a code name, so that informant
names were not attached to the data. In analyzing the interview data, I coded words,
phrases, sentences, and/or passages that represented important and recurring themes in
the data, and then organized those codes into categories. My goal was to use coding as a
mechanism for interrogating and expanding the data as well as for organizing and
reducing it to manageable chunks (Coffey & Atkinson, 1996, p. 30). I looked for
“patterns, themes, and regularities as well as contrasts, paradoxes, and irregularities” in
order to “move toward generalizing and theorizing from the data” (p. 47). I worked to
build relationships among codes and categories (p. 48) in order to discover new meaning
in the data (p. 30). I was careful to maintain the narrative, or story telling, aspect as one
important iteration of the data (p. 52) in order to counterbalance the fragmenting nature
of coding and categorizing (p. 80). Particularly in this study that walks the tightrope
between reality and imagination, the stories that informants tell may possibly serve the
function of modern cultural myths, so it is important not to lose those.
77
I was sure to become deeply familiar with all of my data, both interview data and
field notes, as well as relationships among those data (Denscombe, 2007, p. 291) so that
my analysis was as rich as possible. When analyzing the coded and categorized data, I
avoided inductive reasoning, or making generalizations based on my specific data
(Coffey & Atkinson, 1996, p. 156). However, I did “develop theoretical ideas about
social processes and cultural forms that have relevance beyond [the] data themselves” (p.
163), being careful to indicate that my ideas are reasonable extrapolations from the data I
collected, and not necessarily true in all cases. As Denscombe (2007) points out, the
“data does not speak for itself; researchers derive meaning from the data through
interpretation” (p. 287).
Once I made initial interpretations of the data, I imaginatively considered other
possible alternative interpretations in order to be sure that the interpretations I settled on
make the most sense (Denscombe, 2007, p. 293). I was also careful not to exclude data
that do not support my theories, but to engage those data and present them as outliers (p.
302). Throughout the data analysis process, I was cognizant of leaving a clear “audit
trail” that others could follow to understand my thought process and the logic of my
interpretations (p. 295), and I did my best to explain the data analysis process that led me
to the results presented (pp. 302-303).
I conducted my research within an enactive framework in order to remain open to
all possibilities in the direction of the inquiry. The term enactive was first coined by
Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991) “to emphasize the growing conviction that
cognition is not the representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven mind but is rather
78
the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that
a being in the world performs” (p. 9). In the enactive view, cognition is essentially
embodied action and “has no ultimate foundation or ground beyond its history of
embodiment” (p. xx). “Such an approach implies that knowing evolves not only within
“minds,” but emerges collectively through engagement of shared action” (Haskell et al.,
2002, p. 2).
Doing social research within the enactive framework fundamentally changes the
relationship between the researcher and the researched because knowledge, culture,
reality, etc. are constantly being created through embodied action of the community’s
participants, and the researcher necessarily becomes complicit in these defining activities
(pp. 2-3). As illustrated in very colorful language by Johnna Haskell (2002), a researcher
who employs an enactive approach, “I experience the world arising as an intertwining of
relations. I re-search the world through embodying actions and through the storying of
experience. As researchers, we need to remain open to the experiences and environment
(world) like a kayaker dancing with a river” (p. 4). This describes well the approach that I
took in interviewing people at Starwood Festival. I basically remained open to any
account of faery they offered, collecting their stories without judgment as to their validity
or reality and documenting the significance of the stories for my informants.
According to Haskell, enactive inquiry is “a way of being ‘present’ or open to the
non-concrete” (p. 5), “a process whereby intention and action blur into the flow of doing.
Doing, experiencing, being are inseparable from the inquiry of embodied actions” (p. 6).
This approach is particularly useful in researching an extraordinary phenomenon such as
79
faeries because it focuses on the experiences of the research participants, makes room for
their stories, and allows the researcher to be open to whatever version of reality is being
presented by an individual at any given moment. Sound, effective, and ethical
anthropological research relies on this sort of openness and willingness to take informants
seriously (Swartz, 1994, p. 210), even when they are describing experiences that are
extraordinary by the measure of the anthropologist’s home culture (Young & Goulet,
1994, pp. 298-299). “Perhaps enactive inquiry brings forth the invisible through
embodying actions within the relational space of experience,” says Haskell (2002), “My
purpose is to awaken the alien, the unknown, the flesh of experiencing” (p. 8).
John Ippolito is another researcher who uses enactive inquiry, in his case to study
second language learning (Haskell et al., 2002, p. 16). For Ippolito, taking an enactive
approach means viewing language as a developing relation between speaker and listener
rather than a system of codes referring to a fixed reality and existing apart from the
people using the language. Language does not exist without speakers, and speakers also
do not exist without language. Language learners and speakers are actual embodiments of
the language, and meaning co-emerges through the relation of speaker and listener in
their embodied action of speaking the language (pp. 18-19).
Ippolito explains that “the speaking across languages which is part of my research
focus always involves the unknown, always involves uncertainty, always threatens the
self from beyond the comprehensible” (p. 19). I see a parallel between Ippolito’s
experience with second language learners who do not have a firm command of the
language they are speaking and my experience talking with informants about faeries and
80
other nature spirits. Although I was always speaking in my native tongue of English with
informants who also spoke English, we were talking about a subject that is not well
defined in the culture, a subject that is full of shifting and groundless signifiers. One of
the first tasks I undertook in each interview was to try as best I could to understand what
the word “faery” meant to my current informant—and the word does not mean the same
thing to all people. Consider other important terms in my inquiry, such as spirit and
nature. Needless to say, my research involved a great deal of uncertainty,
incomprehensibility, and unknowns.
According to Ippolito, “language is linked to nothing less than the creation of a
shared world between the self and the other” (p. 20). I have the sense that in engaging in
conversations about faeries, nature, inspiritedness, enchantment, etc., my informants and
I were helping to create the very world of which we were speaking. Talking about these
liminal, numinous entities; naming them; telling stories about them, all give them life.
81
RESULTS
PAGANISM AS NATURE RELIGION
“Nature” and “the natural world” were cited as important to all the people I
interviewed, and either “nature” or “the Earth” are central to the belief system of each
individual. One person said “I think I feel most connected with myself and with the
divine when I’m really connected with nature, when I really have my feet on the ground
and when I can see the stars…” Another said “Nature is important because when you get
out of the concrete jungle, you’re looking at a source for inspiration, and it’s harsh too,
and the greatest challenge.” When I asked the senior Druid whom I interviewed what it
means to be a Druid, the first thing he said was that it’s “Earth-based.”
Most of my informants didn’t report a personal alienation from nature, but they
were concerned about a general societal alienation from nature and the destruction of
wild places. One said “I think that there is a sense that the man-madeness of cities has cut
people off though from the nature, yeah, the trees and the you know people can live their
whole lives without really you know like getting into the flow of the seasons and the sun
and moon and the trees and the growing.” Another said “nature for me is kind of
pervasive, and I don’t feel that there’s that much of a separation or that perhaps the
conventional wisdom of the last several thousand years of separating mankind from
nature is valid.” One person, speaking of faeries, said, “When we lived in the natural
world, we had a lot more connection with them and would work with them consciously if
we could but I think in recent times there’s been quite a divergence,” indicating that this
person believes that humans once lived in the natural world but that we no longer do.
82
The spiritual belief systems of the people I interviewed and the spiritual paths that
led them to their current beliefs are each distinct but many of them do share traits. Eight
of the twelve informants were raised Christian, and none of them were raised Pagan, so
all the informants share a spiritual quest sort of experience that has led them to their
current beliefs, which in themselves are not an endpoint but in most cases a snapshot
taken mid-quest. One informant who was in his twenties told me he had “seeker’s ADD,”
having explored nihilism, Wicca, yoga, meditation, New Age, gnosticism, and most
recently shamanism. Spiritual identities vary from this seeker currently exploring
shamanism to a Wiccan dedicant to a senior Druid in ADF (abbreviation for Ár nDraíocht
Féin: A Druid Fellowship).
Most of the informants preferred not to be labeled with a particular religion or
belief system. I would describe two of them as New Age based on the language they used
to describe faeries, other nature spirits, and the spiritual landscape, but they did not
choose to self identify as New Age. Some of the concepts they invoked that come from
the New Age tradition include faery portals, astral projection, and the distinction between
devas (“the strategy of nature that bring natural forces into being,” according to the
informant) and faeries (“the tacticians”). Two informants, who were married to each
other, said that they “basically follow a Native American path” and that they “don’t have
a religion; it’s a spiritual path we’re on.” Another informant has created her own spiritual
path for herself and others which she describes as “ecospiritual.” Another informant says
that “I feel like my entire life is a quest for spirituality;” she’s comfortable with the label
“nature religion.”
83
Environmentalism and the identity of environmentalist were uncomfortable or
distasteful to most of the people I interviewed. When asked whether she considers herself
to be an environmentalist, one informant said “I don’t personally use that word, and I
don’t because it’s so political. What I believe is that I have a responsibility to the Earth, I
have a responsibility to be responsible for my actions as it affects the Earth.” Another
informant expressed a similar sentiment when she said “The problem is that it’s a
political term” and then said she prefers to live mindfully and lightly on the Earth. The
senior Druid framed the question of environmentalism by saying “the Earth is our
mother, and we come from her. And if we’re gonna make her look ugly, what are we
gonna look like?” He said that “with ADF…we try to be environmentally friendly with
what we’re doing. Most of us recycle, most of us try to reuse.”
One informant was very conscious of the cultural meaning of the term
environmentalist and why it’s problematic for her but still a somewhat apt descriptor.
Similar to other informants, her discomfort with the term was with its political
connotation. She said, “I consider myself kinda like a nonpolitical environmentalist…I
believe in living really closely with the Earth and being as self-reliant as possible and
have the lowest impact…So I guess I consider myself kind of like an old school
environmentalist, before it had the word and you know the political connotation with it.”
An informant who was more comfortable using the term environment and its
cognates was the one who started her own spiritual practice for herself and others. “It’s a
spiritual environmental connection that I’m working on,” she said, and she reported that
her spirituality and her environmentalism are “very much intertwined… the two are one.”
84
She said that “the environment is part of you, and if you are really serious about your
spiritual path you must recognize the relationship to the environment. We are the
environment.” She was instrumental in the “greening Brushwood” group, which sought
to improve environmental stewardship at Brushwood Folklore Center, where the
Starwood festival was held each year. She agreed with other informants that devotion to
the Earth or “the environment” needn’t take the form of political activism. “Now you
may not go out and chain yourself to a tree,” she explained. “That kind of action is not
suitable for many of us, but merely the fact of taking your dinner scraps and putting them
in a compost. Composting is a religious act. Recycling is a spiritual exercise. That is my
way of thinking, and in principle many if not most Neopagans, people who profess
Neopagan path, would agree with me.”
FAERIES AS NATURE SPIRITS
All of the individuals I interviewed incorporate faeries into their belief systems in
some way; this was a prerequisite for their participation in this research study. Three of
the informants understand faeries metaphorically. The other nine believe that faeries
literally exist.
The conception of faeries is closely tied with nature for all of my informants. One
described faery as “an elemental spirit, it’s a spirit of the Earth.” One of them said that “I
think that they are so intimately related to the trees, the grass, the animals and things that
it may be hard for us to see them as separate.” Two informants clearly stated that faeries
85
get their power from the Earth, one elaborating that “they’re absolutely Earth bound
Earth spirits.” Another informant said that “they’re totally in touch with nature and that’s
also what’s scary about them,” elaborating that engaging with faeries is “like that fantasy
of reconnecting with nature but it’s dangerous, it can kill us, it can harm us, it can
consume us.” An informant who was well versed in faery mythology asserted that “we
see throughout the record that faeries are attached to nature and to the natural world” and
that “throughout the faery record, faeries can be summoned by destroying some part of
nature.”
Some informants seemed to regard faeries as a sort of indicator species for wild
nature. That is, a place that is really teaming with fae is a healthy natural ecosystem
whereas a dispirited place has experienced some sort of disturbance. There was a general
concern among some informants that faeries are more and more scarce—because humans
are carelessly developing and polluting so many places without any regard for the
spiritual beings of those places. Two informants spoke of “electromagnetic pollution”
caused by cell phones among other things. One explained “Our cell phones emit
radiation, cell phone towers everywhere. When that kind of technology comes in, it’s
very very difficult for them [faeries] to maintain their structures because it’s constantly
sending energy through to disrupt it.” Another informant expressed concern that pollution
is “requiring them [faeries] to move further away from us. It would be destructive if they
continued to interface, and they need to with the land because quite a number of them
have certain purposes for protecting different species, different ecosystems. I think at
some point it’s gotta stop because it’s taking us dangerously out of balance. They are
86
guardians, protectors, and healers, and workers in their own right, just not necessarily of
humanity, and we need other species to live, so if we wipe out their guardians and wipe
out their species, what are we gonna do?”
Faeries seem to play a special role in the human-nature relationship because they
are particularly attuned to humans and interacting with them, so faeries can act as a
bridge between humans and non-human elements of nature, indicating to humans where
in nature we are welcome and where we aren’t as well as how we may use the land,
water, etc. and how we should behave there. Some informants reported keeping special
faery gardens, or in one case a wild corner of her property: “in my yard, which I call it an
old tradition, there is one corner left wild, not touched, and my feeling is that what we
call the faeries or the devas or the plant spirits will feel more comfortable there and it is
there I go to talk to them, or occasionally to ask help.”
Three informants regard faeries, at least in part, as more abstract
anthropomorphisms of nature elements. Conceiving of nature elements as human-like
numinous creatures called faeries allows us to interact with them as if they are other
people. One informant defined faery as “all of the energies of the Earth, which could be
the rivers, the ocean, the metal in the Earth, the dirt in the Earth, all of that.” Another said
“They’re the feeling that you get out of the corners of your eyes, you know the life force,
you know that all nature is sentient. And it’s not, faeries are more personification for me
of the awakeness of nature and our planet.”
Faeries are evident at Starwood Festival. Workshops that have been offered at
Starwood in recent years include Fairy Races of the British Isles, Experiential Elemental
87
Faerie, Living Between the Worlds—Working with Faerie in an Urban Setting, Fairy
Lore in British Folk Music, and The Erotic World of Fairie: Sexuality In British Fairy
Lore. Recurring events include The Annual Fabulous High Faerie Tea Party & Potluck,
The Faerie Woods Art Project, and The Pixie Parade. Places at the festival site include
The Faerie Woods, The Fairy Garden, and Pixie Pathway (Association for Consciousness
Exploration, 2009). In addition, dressing up in faery garb is common among festival
attendees. Festival participants commonly wear wings, and some wear tails and/or horns
or antlers.
The concept of childhood and a differentiation between childhood and adulthood
frequently come up in descriptions of interaction with faery. Many of my informants
reported seeing, hearing, and feeling the presence of faeries as children significantly more
often than they did as adults, or in some cases, their experiences of faery occurred only in
childhood. Informants believe this to be the case for a variety of reasons, including that
children are more open to the faery world, faeries are less trustful of adults, and adults
have taken on too much baggage from the dominant culture to be open to the experience.
One informant said “As I got older, they went away. I didn’t see them as much.”
When I asked him why he thought this was the case, he said “My personal belief is they
[children] don’t have the common man sensibility of ‘I’m seeing things, you really didn’t
see and hear that, we don’t see those things, we don’t hear those things.” For him, it’s a
matter of cultural indoctrination about what is real and possible, a process that occurs
during childhood, taking hold by the time we become adults.
88
Another informant reported that faeries appear especially to children because
children’s imaginations are more active. He reported that “I saw gnomes, for real… I was
a child, I was 11 years old seeing gnomes in Spain. I really thought I was chasing this
little dude running away, and he hid under this bush, and I don’t know where my brain
was. You know, I don’t know what was happening, but I really thought I saw a gnome.
And that’s when I became more accepting of faeries and the folklore like that.”
An informant told a story that illustrated her beliefs about the changing
relationship with faeries as people move from childhood into adulthood:
When my older granddaughter was… about four or five we were walking in the
woods, and I was saying to her about faeries, about spirit beings and this kind of
thing, and I said ‘now you really see them with your inside eyes, not much with
your outside eyes, because grownups don’t see faeries,’ and I said ‘you really
can’t see them,’ and she said ‘no Grandmother that’s not right,’ and she looked
around, and she said ‘it’s ok guys, you can come out, it’s just my grandmother
and she’s almost a kid.’ It’s one of the greatest compliments I ever had…. Now, at
23, I speak to her periodically, and I said ‘do you still see the faeries?’ And she
said ‘no, no I don’t, and it’s alright, I guess I’ve outgrown that.’ And it makes me
so sad because what she means is I’ve bought into the conception that they do not
exist and therefore if you have no acceptance of something existing, you cannot
experience it.
This informant expressed a belief that our experiences are largely determined by what we
expect to experience, by what is considered possible and/or likely within a given culture.
In her words, “If we don’t have a concept, we don’t have an acceptance of the reality of
89
something. We either don’t see it or we don’t accept what we see, which is another thing
I believe that humans see a great deal more but their mind shifts it to be something else.”
The same informant reported that “I think I probably did [see faeries] as a child”
but she hasn’t ever seen them as an adult. “I’m dreadfully earthbound,” she said, “and my
hope is always that that will open itself to my physical eyes, but my spiritual eyes and my
heart totally accepts their being here. I don’t have to see them to know they’re there, but
it would be nice.”
One informant’s experience was markedly different in that he reported that “My
relationship with faeries probably started when I was in my teens… As a teen, I got very
excited by mythology.” This informant’s relationship with faeries is almost exclusively
through myths and legends, “the faery record,” as he calls it, although he did report that
“I have seen faces in the forest, and I know what it is, and I look the other way.”
Some informants talked about the importance of what we imagine, create, or
experience, regardless of whether or not it’s real. An informant who makes art about
faeries reported that
they’ve had a huge effect on me in my imagination and my creativity, in making
my artwork and I do performance art so I feel like I enjoy performance art
because I feel like I can really make the art real, it’s in me as I’m doing it, I am
the art or the other people who are participating are the artwork, so I’ve done
pieces where we were portraying nymphs you know but you really are embodying
that energy so even though I don’t know if nymphs or faeries are real per se, we
made it real, the energy was real, that existed when we did that, you know what I
mean? It exists when I make artwork about it, portraying that thing. … I think
90
whether they’re real creatures or not, they’re totally real in our psychology and in
our everyday lives.
Another informant who is also an artist described the difference between metaphor and
reality as “an Occam’s razor sort of thing.”
An informant who creates faery-themed visual art sees art as well as fantasy
literature not only as modes for creating a faery reality but also as safe spaces for non-
believers to become acquainted with the world of faery. In describing an event he’s been
to called the “Fairy World’s Festival,” he said “since it’s fantasy they can introduce
Paganish concepts to the muggle world…” He added that “I’ve noticed that with
literature too, especially young adult literature, there’s a lot of delving into magickal
concepts in a nonthreatening way.”
Another informant pointed out that “you go to a culture where the fae are still
there—Irish, the Irish still believe that the fae are there, the elves are there, you know
some of the mounds, that’s where the fae live, you don’t go there. There’s actual things
that happen at some of the areas in Europe where they believe in the fae and people go
out there even with video cameras and weird things happen, and there’s no way to
understand what’s going on so it’s pushed directly to ‘it’s the fae, the fae made that
happen.’”
One informant invoked Einstein, a respected wise man from the rational scientific
tradition of our culture to support the value of the imagination. “Einstein, I will have to
paraphrase because I don’t remember, once said something to the effect of: imagination is
91
the strongest tool that we have for progress, because when we cease imagining other
possibilities, we are stuck with what we’ve got.”
One informant described the experience with faeries that first made him believe
they were real and that started him on the spiritual path that eventually led to Druidry:
I was 9 or 10, living at my grandparents house with my brother and my sister, and
I was laying in my bed one night. Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke up
hearing a song being sung and I woke up and I saw oh little creatures maybe this
tall—can you see that?—about a foot to 18 inches tall, give or take, they were
different sizes varying, different shapes, some had pointed ears or rounded ears
but they had kind of the same looks about them, and they were dancing around
my bed, in a circle, and the headboard of my bed was up against the wall and they
were still going around my bed, and I just sat there watching them, trying to
figure out what they were saying. They were singing, chanting a song, not
knowing any of the chant or the words or anything, and my brother woke up who
was across the hall from me, opened up his door, looked across to my room and
saw these things dancing around my bed and screamed his fool head off, just got
scared to death and would never come into my room ever again after that at my
grandparents house.
This informant’s story about faeries dancing around his bed included corroboration by his
brother, who also saw the faeries, lending credence to the experience. Similar
corroboration was included in the following story:
…we saw this blue light glowing at the side of the road, and I was wondering
what it was and walked up to the side of the road and said “What’s that?” And
both of us saw two little creatures probably about two-and-a-half feet high or so
and one of them I could tell you was a wizard, only because the guy that was in
front of him, standing in front of the stump of the tree, poked a stick towards us
92
that had a sharpened end and screamed out to us in this weird voice, “Leave the
Wizard Alone!!” Kinda weird, kinda strange, but it was a, it was an experience
that I was like wow, and it would happen for a few minutes and then finally the
wizard said something and he turned to the wizard and they disappeared. You
know the blue light went out and they were gone. And the lady and I had the same
experience, the next day we talked about it, and she was like that’s exactly what
happened, that’s exactly what I saw, that’s what I heard, and she said I’m never
talking about this again, that was too scary.
Another informant told of a visit to a large group of people by a fae creature called a
“guardian”:
…suddenly out of nowhere come this gigantic force. It was huge, benign but
huge, and…there was people camped and as this force passed them they woke
up…and it turned and went across a bridge and over and up a hill and there was
people in the sweat lodge and something stuck its head right through the canvas
and into the sweat lodge and they bailed. They just whoooo and they come
running to me. They said “What in the world?” And I said “What are you talking
about?” They said something stuck its head and it was visible. And it was huge,
and it had large elongated ears, and a big face and large teeth like a troll almost
but it was not, it was benevolent, and the energy went back up the hill and went
away.
Those research participants who had personal experiences with faeries were
generally eager to share them. They seemed both grateful and proud to have been graced
with a numinous or paranormal experience. Some informants who didn’t have personal
experiences to share seemed genuinely disappointed and even forlorn that they weren’t
fortunate enough to experience faeries directly. There was a sense that an interaction with
93
faeries is a gift as well as proof that the person having the experience is both connected to
the earth and open to the universe, hence the sense of pride in experiencing faery.
94
DISCUSSION
Imagination, Play, and Multiple Realities
Treatments of the imagination are scarce within academic discourse. This is
primarily because the primacy of positivist science in the current Western tradition
marginalizes any subject that cannot be studied by way of a testable hypothesis.
However, despite the impossibility of subjecting it to scientific study, imagination
persists as an undeniable phenomenon, unexplainable though it may be, and it is
unequivocally celebrated by some groups, admittedly on the fringes of Western culture.
Imagination was generally celebrated by my informants, especially in the context
of how the act of imagining can either create reality or can act as a precursor to the
manifestation of reality. One informant said “anything you can imagine, you can create or
you can cause to happen.” Another informant said that faeries have “had a huge effect on
me in my imagination…” and then spoke about how “whether they’re real creatures or
not, they’re totally real in our psychology and in our everyday lives.”
According to Edward Casey (1976), “‘real’ is meant having a determinate and
intersubjectively ascertainable status within an enduring spatio-temporal framework” (p.
82). Some of the experiences with faeries described by my informants were
intersubjectively ascertainable, that is they were experienced by more than one person.
Although I never asked whether others shared the experience, this information was
offered, probably to lend credence to the experience, to make me believe that it was real.
The experiences still may not be considered real by Casey’s definition because the spatio-
95
temporal framework of the encounter in most cases would not be described as enduring;
most experiences were fleeting. This is true for the story about the faeries dancing around
the bed, the wizards by the side of the road, and the “guardian” in the sweat lodge. In all
three of these stories, the extraordinary experience of witnessing fae creatures is made
more believable or more real because more than one person shared the same experience.
This constitutes Casey’s intersubjective ascertainability. However, in all instances, the
spirits appeared briefly and were then gone, so the spatio-temporal framework of the
experience was not enduring. For this reason, these experiences don’t fit into Casey’s
definition of reality despite the intersubjective ascertainability that does make them seem
more real than they otherwise would.
One informant reasoned that children probably experience faeries more often than
do adults because their imaginations are more active. Richard Louv (2008) writes that
children have spiritual, mystical, transcendent experiences in nature, perhaps more than
adults in our culture (pp. 293-294). This leads me to think that children probably use play
for spiritual exploration as well as lighthearted silliness. Perhaps the ability of play to
elevate human experience to the sacred is there for all people of all ages but has been
repressed in the dominant Western paradigm. The only play that is acceptable in our
culture is “child’s play,” which is insignificant, light, silly, and of course only for
children.
Johan Huizinga’s (1955) “play-festival-rite complex,” which he introduced as a
phenomenon of the Middle Ages that no longer exists, seemed alive and well at Starwood
Festival. The entire week was a celebration full of imaginative play including role
96
playing, dressing in costume, reenacting myths and legends, and taking on the identities
of other-than-human archetypes like animals, faeries, and gods. Huizinga’s observation
that “in play, we may move below the level of the serious, as the child does; but we can
also move above it—in the realm of the beautiful and the sacred” (p. 17) is evident at
Starwood Festival, where play serves both purposes. Adults do play as children in this
festival community, being silly and imaginative. They also role-play during rituals,
bringing the play experience beyond the mundane and into a sacred realm.
The people whom I interviewed generally understood reality to be multiple,
malleable, and/or participatory. This supports Tanya Luhrmann’s (1989) finding that
reality is understood to be subjective and malleable for Pagans (p. 342), with each person
experiencing the world and creating their own personal reality that may be related to the
multiple realities experienced by others but is not exactly the same for any two people.
One of my informants referred to “the consensual reality in which we’re living” and
spoke of “our own power to co-create reality.” She said that “anything you can imagine,
you can create or you can cause to happen.” The same informant also mentioned in
passing that many different accounts of events can be true “because we experience life
differently,” referring to the concept that reality is a lived experience and therefore
different for each individual as opposed to there being one true and fixed reality. Another
informant said that “people invent what they would like reality to be.” Another informant
put it this way: “When you believe something is true it is, and when enough people
believe it, it becomes a reality.”
97
As explained by Peter Rojcewicz (1991), what we understand to be reality is
largely influenced by our particular “cultural map,” which predetermines what is possible
and probable within a given culture (p. 495). When several of my informants spoke about
the existence of faeries, the ideas they expressed were very similar to Rojcewicz’s
“cultural map” concept. One informant expressed this articulately when she said, “If we
don’t have a concept, we don’t have an acceptance of the reality of something. We either
don’t see it or we don’t accept what we see.” The same informant went on to say that “I
believe that humans see a great deal more but their mind shifts it to be something else.”
This is interesting because many people in the dominant Western culture would say that
perhaps they thought they saw something unusual in the woods, but it was “just my mind
playing tricks on me.” This informant turns this idea on its head, suggesting that perhaps
there are unusual things that we don’t “see,” essentially because our minds are playing
tricks on us, because our cultural map does not incorporate the possibility of unusual
things in the woods.
The cultural map concept is essentially the reason cited by several informants for
why faeries are so much more often seen and experienced by children in our culture. One
informant told me about her granddaughter, who saw faeries as a child but reported to her
grandmother when she was 23 that she no longer saw them. She said “I guess I’ve
outgrown that.” The informant interpreted her granddaughter’s experience this way:
“what she means is I’ve bought into the conception that they do not exist and therefore if
you have no acceptance of something existing, you cannot experience it.” In other words,
faeries are not a part of our cultural map, so children who are not yet entirely
98
indoctrinated in the culture are able to see them but adults cannot see faeries because
their psyches are so enmeshed with the cultural map. Another informant expressed a
similar idea when explaining why he thinks that children see faeries: “My personal belief
is they don’t have the common man sensibility of ‘I’m seeing things, you really didn’t see
and hear that, we don’t see those things, we don’t hear those things.” This informant’s
“common man sensibility” is another way to express the concept of a cultural map, as
used by Peter Rojcewicz.
The cultural map concept is further supported by the observation that faeries are
believed to exist within some cultures but not within others. The existence of faeries is
accepted within the subculture of Neopaganism in the United States. Faeries are also
included in some cultural maps elsewhere in the world. An informant mentioned Ireland:
“you go to a culture where the fae are still there—Irish, the Irish still believe that the fae
are there, the elves are there, you know some of the mounds, that’s where the fae live…”
He went on to say that when unusual things happen in that culture, people believe “it’s
the fae, the fae made that happen.”
Consciousness Studies, Transpersonal Psychology, and Ecopsychology
The concept of human consciousness is ubiquitous at Starwood Festival. People at
this gathering think and talk about consciousness a fair amount. In fact, Starwood
Festival is organized by the Association for Consciousness Exploration. Most people in
this community, including those whom I interviewed, consider human consciousness to
be malleable and expandable. The Buddhist belief that individuals can gain awareness or
99
consciousness is shared by many members of the Pagan community in which I conducted
my research on faeries.
There is an understanding that some individuals are more open than others to the
faery world and other realms—and an understanding that just because one does not
personally experience faery does not mean it’s not there. Along with the belief that
consciousness can be expanded, many people also experience the loss of certain levels of
consciousness as they move from childhood into adulthood. Richard Louv (2008), in his
book Last Child in the Woods, pointed out that children have very spiritual, mystical
experiences, perhaps more than adults (pp. 293-294). This notion is supported by the
experiences of my informants, who generally reported more interactions with faeries as
children than as adults, in some cases having interacted with faeries as children but not at
all as adults.
Many people at Starwood also believe that consciousness is not relegated solely to
human beings. There is a strong current of animism running through the belief systems of
many festival participants. Individual animals and plants are often considered to be
conscious beings, and in some cases nature more generally and/or the Earth as a whole is
thought to have consciousness. One of my informants said that “all nature is sentient” and
that “faeries are more personification for me of the awakeness of nature and our planet.”
The various ways in which my informants understand consciousness to exist apart from
and/or beyond individual human beings are all expressions of a worldview consistent
with transpersonal psychology. All the people with whom I spoke consider faeries to be
100
conscious beings, and faeries are always associated with nature, so faeries represent one
way in which nature is understood to have consciousness.
On one level, faeries are anthropomorphisms of wild nature. When faeries take
human-like forms, they provide a means for humans to interact with nature in a more
direct, tangible way. Believing in creatures that are human-like in some way but are not
actually human and that are representative of non-human nature makes it possible to
relate to aspects of nature or the idea of nature as a whole in a way that is similar to
relationships with other human beings. Faeries generally are happy and feel welcome in
wild natural settings, and they feel sad, scared, and unwelcome in disturbed landscapes.
In this way, belief in faeries coupled with the human capacity for empathy, results in an
understanding that wild natural places are important and worthy of protection while
disturbed or developed places are undesirable and generally to be limited. When faeries
are understood as anthropomorphisms of wild nature, they can serve as a psychological
impetus for more ecologically sensitive worldviews and behaviors.
The present inquiry into the impact that belief in faeries has on the human-nature
relationship is a matter of psychology. The question is not whether faeries exist or what
form they take but rather whether individual human beings and/or groups of human
beings believe that faeries exist and the meanings that those people attribute to faeries in
their own thought processes and worldviews. The people whom I interviewed all have
psychological understandings of the world that incorporate belief in faeries as part of the
mythos that gives meaning to their lives and their surroundings. In all accounts, faeries
are spiritual beings that are closely aligned with nature, so faeries bridge the divide
101
between the psychological and the ecological. This is why ecopsychology is such an apt
lens for examining faery faith as a component of the human-nature relationship for
believers.
The core tenets of ecopsychology were expressed repeatedly during interviews
with my informants. One said “I think I feel most connected with myself and with the
divine when I’m really connected with nature, when I really have my feet on the ground
and when I can see the stars.” The informant who has consciously created her own
spiritual practice for herself and others expressed her ecopsychological proclivities when
she said that “It’s a spiritual environmental connection that I’m working on,” and then
went on to explain that her spirituality and her environmentalism are “very much
intertwined… the two are one.” She made plain her ecopsychological understanding of
the human-nature relationship when she said “the environment is part of you, and if you
are really serious about your spiritual path you must recognize the relationship to the
environment. We are the environment.” She asserted that “composting is a religious act;
recycling is a spiritual exercise.” The senior Druid said that “the Earth is our mother, and
we come from her. And if we’re gonna make her look ugly, what are we gonna look
like?” The understanding of the Earth as a mother figure, of the entire planet as a
personified divine being, conflates the wellbeing of the planet with the wellbeing of
humans, making this belief system compatible with an ecopsychological framework.
Enchantment, Disenchantment, and Re-Enchantment
Belief in faeries is one way for nature to be understood as enchanted. Natural
102
places become full of magical spirits who occupy space in our Earthly world as well as in
other realms. Some informants indicated that just as natural places are inspirited with
faeries, very developed or unnatural places are generally dispirited and faeries are scarce
or nonexistent. Informants were concerned that human beings are not leaving enough
terrain in a natural state for the faeries and that we are losing touch with these spirits and
the benefits they provide to the ecosystems and species with which they have affinities.
The belief is that there is a symbiotic relationship between faeries and natural
communities, ecosystems, and/or species with which they have affinities. When natural
communities are disturbed or destroyed, the faeries disappear. Likewise without faeries,
natural communities suffer, so a positive feedback can develop, leading larger and larger
swaths of the Earth to disenchanted and unnatural states. This is a true concern for some
informants.
Some informants subscribe to the notion that there was a time that has past when
nature was enchanted. “Separating mankind from nature” and “the man-madeness of
cities” were cited as modern-day problems that have negatively impacted the human-
nature relationship and the impact that humans have had on the natural world. One
informant referred to a time “when we lived in the natural world” and indicated that we
were more connected with faeries at that time. This indicates that this informant believes
that we no longer live in the natural world.
The “play-festival-rite complex,” as described by Johann Huizinga (1955), was a
cultural phenomenon of the Middle Ages (p. 17). This period of time was characterized
by significantly more enchantment than the present, at least within the dominant Western
103
culture. However, the “play-festival-rite complex” framework seems a very close fit with
the behavior observed today in the Pagan festival community, suggesting that modern-
day Pagan festivals are serving as agents of re-enchantment.
Information gleaned from my informants about their belief systems and spiritual
paths corroborates Christopher Partridge’s (2004) observation that there is a general
movement away from organized religion and toward an ongoing spiritual quest (pp. 46-
48). None of the research participants were raised Pagan, and they are all exploring
Paganism at least in a broad sense at this point in their lives. Most of them prefer to avoid
labels for their religions or belief systems, and some spoke overtly of being on a
“spiritual path” or “quest.”
Faith in faeries can be understood as a re-enchanting element in the modern quest
for spirituality. People who believe in faeries experience the natural world as inspirited
and enchanted. Most modern-day monotheistic world religions are marked by an abstract
conception of one true God who is removed from Earthly experience, thereby
disenchanting life here on Earth. Participation in these organized religions is on the
decline. However, much of the movement away from religion seems to be headed toward
rational science and a conception of the natural world that is understood in more
mechanical terms. The belief systems observed in the North American Pagan community
that incorporate faeries are heading almost in the opposite direction, toward magic and
spirit, a movement that is decidedly much less prominent than is the cultural investment
in science as the way of knowing the Earth and our place in it.
104
Despite the prominence of science in modern understandings of the natural world,
Richard Louv (2008) asserts that people are more motivated by spiritual beliefs than they
are by utilitarian or science-based arguments when it comes to changing behavior in
favor of the environment (p. 304). Louv also observes that “many scientists argue that the
practice and teaching of science must rediscover or acknowledge the mystery of nature,
and therefore its spiritual aspect” (p. 303). Louv’s prediction is that “the coming decades
will be a pivotal time in Western thought and faith. For students, a greater emphasis on
spiritual context could stimulate a renewed sense of awe for the mysteries of nature and
science” (p. 304).
A reconnection of people with nature would likely incorporate a “renewed sense
of awe for the mysteries of nature and science”—in other words, a re-enchantment of
nature in the popular consciousness. There is some effort toward connecting science and
spirituality to find resonance and a belief system that incorporates both, but this seems an
even weaker stream than the one moving generally away from rationalist science and
toward a magical or enchanted understanding of life on Earth.
105
CONCLUSIONS
The research I conducted at the 2009 Starwood Festival is essentially an
exploration of faery faith, a belief system that anthropomorphizes and recognizes
sentience in wild nature. Insofar as ecopsychology conflates the wellbeing of individual
human beings with the wellbeing of the Earth, and faeries are manifestations and/or
representatives of nature, faery faith is ecopsychological. Faeries provide a more tangible,
less abstract, way for believers to understand and co-create a healthy and mutually
beneficial human-(in)-nature relationship.
The Pagan belief system engenders a fundamentally different relationship
between humans and nature than do the more dominant belief systems in the West,
including those of the Abrahamic religions as well as those based on scientific
rationalism. Paganism places human beings within the natural world as one species
among many, all of whom have inherent worth and significance apart from what they
may or may not provide to human beings. This contrasts with a more special placement
of human beings as separate from the rest of nature, with greater worth, responsibility,
and privilege than other species.
Even in the context of widely-accepted Darwinian evolutionism, while people
understand that Homo sapiens is one species of many on the planet Earth, the dominant
socio-cultural construct still provides a special placement for our species, sometimes in a
category separate from “nature.” Some people in our culture who claim to believe in
evolution (i.e. as opposed to creationism) actually see Homo sapiens as a culmination of
the evolutionary process, though this clearly stems from a misunderstanding of evolution.
106
Another common belief is that human beings are vastly different from any other creatures
on the planet because of a perception that we have powers of reason and creation that all
other creatures lack. These beliefs held by many members of our culture are significant in
determining our collective understanding of how humans fit with the rest of nature.
Most Pagans view nature not only as important and worthy but also as alive,
inspirited, and even conscious. Belief in faeries is one manifestation of this understanding
of nature as having spirit and sentience. Holding the belief that humans are a part of the
living, conscious, “sensuous life-world,” to use David Abram’s (1996, p. 154) language,
means that consideration of the impact of one’s choices on the wellbeing of other
creatures and wild nature as a whole is ingrained in one’s worldview and daily habits.
Nature is an outward extension of the self, so caring for nature is caring for the self.
The people whom I interviewed, all of whom believe in faeries, expressed
concern about a general alienation between human beings and nature in the dominant
culture, but none of them reported feeling alienated from nature themselves. They all
claimed to feel closely aligned with and connected to nature. Their perception was of a
relatively healthy relationship between themselves and nature in contrast to a perceived
dysfunctional relationship between people and nature in the dominant culture. It’s not
possible to say that these people feel closer to nature because they believe in faeries, nor
vice versa, but it is significant that the two phenomena co-occur.
I was surprised in conducting this research to find that most of my informants did
not identify as environmentalist and had trouble with that identity. This discomfort with
environmentalism is clearly not shared by all Pagans, as evidenced by “A Pagan
107
Community Statement on the Environment,” published online at www.ecopagan.com on
Earth Day (April 22) 2015. The statement is an overt effort by some prominent members
of the Pagan community to create a unified Pagan front in addressing environmental
concerns.
It is notable that the statement excludes reference to gods, goddesses, faeries, or
spirits. In defining Paganism, it does say that “Paganism includes polytheistic and
pantheistic nature-worshipping religions, and often includes deities of all genders,
ancestor veneration, and celebrations in tune with our Earth,” but the rest of the statement
only mentions spirit in very abstract terms, alluding to pantheism in just one instance.
Most of the language is focused on science and on the human-nature relationship
(Halstead et al., 2015). If I were to read the statement without knowing the title or the
source, I would say that it takes a spiritual humanist perspective.
I believe that the scientific bent of the statement and inclusion of only abstract
references to spirit make it more palatable to a wider audience. It is clear that Paganism
and environmentalism are close allies in building a more sustainable future for the planet.
It’s as if the two groups speak different languages, and “A Pagan Community Statement
on the Environment” is a valiant attempt to appeal to both Pagans and environmentalists
at once, to identify common ground and common cause. The human-nature relationship
seems to be a comfortable framework for Pagans as well as environmentalists, and of
course it speaks to those who identify as Pagan environmentalist.
My research demonstrates that engagement with faeries is clearly a component of
the relationships that believers have with nature. Furthermore, the belief that nature is
108
enchanted and alive with conscious beings called faeries makes for a human-nature
relationship that is experienced as more intimate than the human-nature relationship that
exists in the dominant culture. Personification of Earth elementals and aspects of wild
nature within faery faith similarly creates a possibility for intimacy between humans and
nature that does not exist within the dominant Western paradigm.
Faery faith provides an element of enchantment within Paganism and points to the
role that Paganism is playing in re-enchanting the natural world for the growing
membership of this broadly-defined spiritual path or faith system. My observation that
the play-festival-rite complex, a cultural phenomenon of the Middle Ages described by
Johan Huizinga (1955, p. 31), is alive and well at Starwood Festival further supports the
idea that Paganism is a force for re-enchantment in our modern world. For Pagans, nature
is enchanted and inspirited, and as members of the human species on planet Earth, our
lives are also enchanted and inspirited.
The genuine belief in faeries among members of the American Pagan subculture
supports the validity of Peter Rojcewicz’s (1991) “cultural map” concept (p. 495). Within
the cultural map of the dominant Western culture, the existence of faeries is generally not
considered possible, though the idea that nature may be inspirited is afforded some
degree of possibility for many people. Within the cultural map of the Pagan subculture,
the premise that nature could be devoid of spirit is not considered possible, and there is
room on the map for the existence of faeries. Reality for members of the American Pagan
subculture includes an inspirited world that for many is populated by faeries.
109
My research does not indicate how widespread faery faith is among Pagans in
North America, nor even at Starwood Festival, where the research was conducted.
Participant observation gave me the sense that this belief is widely held in the festival
community, but data were not collected to determine how many people at the festival
believe in faeries. Interviewees were chosen in part because they engaged in some way
with faeries, so the fact that all the people whom I interviewed believe in some
manifestation of faeries is not an indicator of the prevalence of this belief. Because the
research population was limited to Starwood Festival, there is no indication of the
geographical prevalence of faery faith nor the relative prevalence within specific
traditions that fall under the Pagan umbrella. My research also didn’t explore other
common Pagan beliefs, such as faith in more distinct divinities like gods and goddesses,
and it only explored more pantheist beliefs tangentially. Faith in nature-based gods and
goddesses and pantheist beliefs also certainly affect the relationships that practitioners
have with the natural world. Further research into the prevalence of faery faith and the
effects of beliefs other than faery faith on the human-nature relationship would be
illuminating.
A few years of observation at Starwood Festival revealed that many individuals
who identify as Pagan (or Wiccan, Druid, animist, or another of the identities that fall
under the Pagan umbrella) include in their spiritual practice engagement with faeries or
other nature spirits. The individuals whom I interviewed all believe that spiritual entities
known as faeries, among other names, are members of our enchanted world, and most of
them report personal interactions with faeries. My research illuminates how engagement
110
with faeries both reflects and informs the Pagan worldview and conception of nature. For
Pagans, the Earth and all of its inhabitants and elements are inspirited, and faeries are a
part of that enchanted reality for many practitioners. Drawing on theories of enchantment,
consciousness, multiple realities, imagination, and play, my interpretations of the stories
of my informants contribute additional perspective to the contemporary practice of
Paganism as a small but growing countercultural movement within the dominant Western
culture, particularly as it informs the human-(in)-nature relationship.
111
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-
human world. New York: Pantheon.
Adler, M. (1986). Drawing down the moon: Witches, druids, goddess-worshippers, and
other Pagans in America today. Boston: Beacon.
Albanese, C. L. (1990). Nature religion in America: From the Algonkian indians to the
new age. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Association for Consciousness Exploration. (2009). The Starwood Festival 2009.
Retrieved from http://www.rosencomet.com/starwood/
Avens, R. (1984). The new gnosis: Heidegger, Hillman, and Angels. Dallas, TX: Spring.
Bateson, G. (1972). A theory of play and fantasy. In Steps to an ecology of mind (pp.
183-198). Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Bennett, K. (2002a). Interviews and focus groups. In P. Shurmer-Smith (Ed.), Doing
cultural geography (pp. 151-162). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Bennett, K. (2002b). Participant observation. In P. Shurmer-Smith (Ed.), Doing cultural
geography (pp. 139-149). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Bowman, M. (2000). Nature, the natural, and Pagan identity. Diskus, 6.
Brann, E. T. H. (1993). The world of the imagination: Sum and substance. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield.
Carpenter, D. D. (1996). Emergent nature spirituality: An examination of the major
spiritual contours of the contemporary Pagan worldview. In J. R. Lewis (Ed.),
Magical religion and modern witchcraft (pp. 35-72). Albany: State University of
New York.
Casey, E. S. (1976). Imagining: A phenomenological study. Bloomington: Indiana
University.
Clifton, C. S. (2003). Smokey and the sacred: Nature religion, civil religion and
American Paganism. Ecotheology, 8(1), 50-60.
Clifton, C. S. (2004). Nature religion for real. In C. S. Clifton & G. Harvey (Eds.), The
Paganism reader (pp. 335-341). New York: Routledge.
Clifton, C. S. (2006). Her hidden children: The rise of Wicca and Paganism in America.
Lanham, MD: AltaMira.
Clifton, C. S., & Harvey, G. (Eds.). (2004). The Paganism reader. New York: Routledge.
Coffey, A., & Atkinson, P. (1996). Making sense of qualitative data: Complementary
research strategies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Davis, J. V., & Canty, J. M. (2013). Ecopsychology and transpersonal psychology. In H.
L. Friedman & G. Hartelius (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell handbook of
transpersonal psychology (pp. 597-611). West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons.
Davy, B. J. (2007). Introduction to Pagan studies. Lanham, MD: AltaMira.
Denscombe, M. (2007). The good research guide for small-scale social research
projects. Maidenhead, UK: Open University.
Depraz, N. (2002). Confronting death before death: Between immanence and
unpredictability. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1, 83-95.
Duerr, H. P. (1985). Dreamtime: Concerning the boundary between wilderness and
civilization. New York: Basil Blackwell.
Evernden, N. (1992). The social creation of nature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University.
The Findhorn Community. (1975). The Findhorn garden. New York: Harper & Row.
The Findhorn Foundation. (2009). Findhorn Foundation. Retrieved May 23, 2009, from
http://www.findhorn.org
Fisher, A. (2002). Radical ecopsychology: Psychology in the service of life. Albany: State
University of New York.
Gane, N. (2002). Max Weber and postmodern theory. New York: Palgrave.
Glesne, C. (1999). Becoming qualitative researchers (2nd ed.). New York: Longman.
Goffman, E. (1961). Fun in games. In Encounters: Two studies in the sociology of
interaction (pp. 17-84). Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill.
Goffman, E. (1997). Frame analysis. In C. Lemert & A. Branaman. (Eds.), The Goffman
reader (pp. 149-166). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Greenwood, S. (2005). The nature of magic: An anthropology of consciousness. New
York: Berg.
Halstead, J., et al. (2015). “A Pagan Community Statement on the Environment.”
Retrieved May 16, 2015, from www.ecopagan.com.
Hammersley, M., & Atkinson, P. (1995). Ethnography: Principles in practice (2nd ed.).
New York: Routledge.
Harrington, M. (2004). Psychology of religion and the study of Paganism. In J. Blain, D.
Ezzy & G. Harvey (Eds.), Researching Paganisms (pp. 71-84). Walnut Creek,
CA: AltaMira.
Harris, A. (1996). Sacred ecology. In G. Harvey & C. Hardman (Eds.), Paganism today:
Wiccans, Druids, the Goddess and ancient earth traditions for the twenty-first
century (pp. 149-156). San Francisco: HarperCollins.
Hartelius, G., Rothe, G., &, Roy, P. J. (2013). A brand from the burning: Defining
transpersonal psychology. In H. L. Friedman & G. Hartelius (Eds.), The Wiley-
Blackwell handbook of transpersonal psychology (pp. 3-22). West Sussex, UK:
John Wiley & Sons.
Harvey, G. (1997). Contemporary Paganism: Listening people, speaking earth. New
York: New York University.
Harvey, G. (2003). Guesthood as ethical decolonising research method. Numen, 50, 125-
146.
Harvey, G. (2004). Introduction to nature religion for real. In C. S. Clifton & G. Harvey
(Eds.), The Paganism reader (pp. 335-341). New York: Routledge.
Harvey, G. (2006a). Animism: Respecting the living world. New York: Columbia
University.
Harvey, G. (2006b). Discworld and otherworld: The imaginative use of fantasy literature
among pagans. In L. Hume & K. McPhillips (Eds.), Popular spiritualities: The
politics of contemporary enchantment (pp. 41-51). Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Harvey, G., & Hardman, C. (Eds.). (1996). Paganism today: Wiccans, Druids, the
Goddess and ancient earth traditions for the twenty-first century. San Francisco:
HarperCollins.
Haskell, J., Linds, W., & Ippolito, J. (2002). Opening spaces of possibility: The enactive
as a qualitative research approach. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 3(3), Art.
14.
Henricks, T. S. (2006). Play reconsidered: Sociological perspectives on human
expression. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Hillman, J. (1975). Re-visioning psychology. New York: Harper & Row.
Howard, A., & Mageo, J. M. (Eds.). (1996). Spirits in culture, history, and mind. New
York: Routledge.
Huizinga, J. (1955). Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. Boston:
Beacon.
Hume, L. (2006). Liminal beings and the undead: Vampires in the 21st century. In L.
Hume & K. McPhillips (Eds.), Popular spiritualities: The politics of
contemporary enchantment (pp. 3-16). Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Hume, L., & McPhillips, K. (Eds.). (2006). Popular spiritualities: The politics of
contemporary enchantment. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Iacoboni, M. (2009). Mirroring people: The science of empathy and how we connect with
others. New York: Picador.
Ivakhiv, A. (1996). The resurgence of magical religion as a response to the crisis of
modernity: A postmodern depth psychological perspective. In J. R. Lewis (Ed.),
Magical religion and modern witchcraft. Albany: State University of New York.
Ivakhiv, A. (2001). Claiming sacred ground: Pilgrims and politics at Glastonbury and
Sedona. Bloomington: Indiana University.
Ivakhiv, A. (2006). Toward a geography of "religion": Mapping the distribution of an
unstable signifier. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96(1),
169-175.
James, W. (1890). The perception of reality. In The principles of psychology (Vol. II, pp.
283-322). New York: Dover.
Jobling, J. A. (2010). Fantastic spiritualities: Monsters, heroes and the contemporary
religious imagination. New York: T&T Clark.
Jones, E. J., & Valiente, D. (2004). The nature of the rites. In C. S. Clifton & G. Harvey
(Eds.), The Paganism reader (pp. 239-253). New York: Routledge.
Jung, C. G. (1964). Approaching the unconscious. In C. G. Jung (Ed.), Man and his
symbols. New York: Dell.
Kearney, R. (1988). The wake of imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Kearney, R. (1998). Poetics of imagining: Modern to post-modern. New York:
Edinburgh University.
Lambek, M. (1996). Afterword: Spirits and their histories. In J. M. Mageo & A. Howard
(Eds.), Spirits in culture, history, and mind (pp. 237-249). New York: Routledge.
Laughlin, C., & Throop, J. (2001). Imagination and reality: On the relations between
myth, consciousness, and the quantum sea. Zygon, 36(4), 709-736.
Laycock, J. (2012). "We are spirits of another sort": Ontological rebellion and religious
dimensions of the Otherkin community. Nova Religio, 15(3), 65-90.
Letcher, A. (2001). The scouring of the shire: Fairies, trolls and pixies in eco-protest
culture. Folklore, 112, 147-161.
Letcher, A. (2006). There's bulldozers in the fairy garden: Re-enchantment narratives
within British eco-paganism. In L. Hume & K. McPhillips (Eds.), Popular
spiritualities: The politics of contemporary enchantment (pp. 175-186).
Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Levy, R. I., Mageo, J. M., & Howard, A. (1996). Gods, spirits, and history: A theoretical
perspective. In J. M. Mageo & A. Howard (Eds.), Spirits in culture, history, and
mind (pp. 11-27). New York: Routledge.
Lewis, T. E., & Khan, R. (2010). Education out of bounds: Reimagining cultural studies
for a posthuman age. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Louv, R. (2008). Last child in the woods: Saving our children from nature-deficit
disorder. New York: Workman.
Luhrmann, T. (1989). Persuasions of the witch's craft. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University.
MacDonald, D. A. (2013). Philosophical underpinnings of transpersonal psychology as a
science. In H. L. Friedman & G. Hartelius (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell handbook
of transpersonal psychology (pp. 312-331). West Sussex, UK: John Wiley &
Sons.
MacKian, S. (2011). Crossing spiritual boundaries: Encountering, articulating and
representing otherworlds. Methodological Innovations Online, 6(3), 61-74.
MacLellan, G. (2004). Entertaining fairies. In C. S. Clifton & G. Harvey (Eds.), The
Paganism reader (pp. 365-372). New York: Routledge.
Magliocco, S. (2004). Witching culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.
McNierney, M. (2004). The stoic way of nature: A Pagan spiritual path. In C. S. Clifton
& G. Harvey (Eds.), The Paganism reader (pp. 260-272). New York: Routledge.
O'Connor, K. P., & Aardema, F. (2005). The imagination: Cognitive, pre-cognitive, and
meta-cognitive aspects. Consciousness and Cognition, 14, 233-256.
O'Dell, H. (2004). The solo witch. In C. S. Clifton & G. Harvey (Eds.), The Paganism
reader (pp. 273-280). New York: Routledge.
Partridge, C. (2004). The re-enchantment of the west (Vol. 1). New York: T & T Clark
International.
Partridge, C. (2005). The re-enchantment of the west (Vol. 2). New York: T & T Clark
International.
Patterson, B. (2004). Finding your way in the woods: The art of conversation with the
Genius Loci. In C. S. Clifton & G. Harvey (Eds.), The Paganism reader (pp. 354-
364). New York: Routledge.
Pike, S. M. (2001). Earthly bodies, magical selves: Contemporary Pagans and the search
for community. Berkeley: University of California.
The Pluralism Project. (2009). Statistics by tradition. Retrieved June 10, 2009, from
http://pluralism.org/resources/statistics/tradition.php#Paganism
Purkiss, D. (2000). At the bottom of the garden: A dark history of fairies, hobgoblins, and
other troublesome things. New York: New York University.
Rojcewicz, P. M. (1991). Between one eye blink and the next: Fairies, UFOs, and
problems of knowledge. In P. Narvaez (Ed.), The good people: New fairylore
essays (pp. 479-514). New York: Garland.
Roszak, T. (1992). The voice of the earth. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Roszak, T., Gomes, M. E., & Kanner, A. D. (Eds.). (1995). Ecopsychology: Restoring the
earth, healing the mind. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.
Sagan, C. (1994). Pale blue dot. New York: Random House.
Salomonsen, J. (2004). Methods of compassion or pretension? The challenges of
conducting fieldwork in modern magical communities. In J. Blain, D. Ezzy & G.
Harvey (Eds.), Researching Paganisms (pp. 43-58). Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.
Schutz, A. (1962). On multiple realities. In Collected papers I: The problem of social
reality (pp. 207-259). The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff.
Seed, J., & Macy, J. (2009). The council of all beings. Retrieved June 10, 2009, from
http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/coab.htm
Shaw, S. (2004). At the water's edge: An ecologically inspired methodology. In J. Blain,
D. Ezzy & G. Harvey (Eds.), Researching Paganisms (pp. 131-146). Walnut
Creek, CA: AltaMira.
Sluka, J. A., & Robben, A. C. G. M. (2006). Fieldwork in cultural anthropology: An
introduction. In A. C. G. M. Robben & J. A. Sluka (Eds.), Ethnographic
fieldwork: An anthology (pp. 1-26). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
Smith Oboler, R. (2004). Nature religion as a cultural system? Sources of
environmentalist action and rhetoric in a contemporary Pagan community. The
Pomegranate, 6(1), 86-106.
Swartz, L. (1994). Being changed by cross-cultural encounters. In D. E. Young & J.-G.
Goulet (Eds.), Being changed by cross-cultural encounters: The anthropology of
extraordinary experience. Peterborough, ON: Broadview.
Szerszynski, B. (2005). Nature, technology and the sacred. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Taylor, B. (1993). Evoking the ecological self. Peace Review: The International
Quarterly of World Peace, 5(2), 225-230.
Taylor, B. (1995). Resacralizing earth: Pagan environmentalism and the restoration of
turtle island. In D. Chidester & E. T. Linenthal (Eds.), American sacred space
(pp. 97-151). Bloomington: Indiana University.
Taylor, B. (1997). On sacred or secular ground? Callicott and environmental ethics.
Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion, 1, 99-111.
Taylor, B. (2000a). Bioregionalism: An ethics of loyalty to place. Landscape Journal, 19,
50-72.
Taylor, B. (2000b). Deep ecology and its social philosophy: A critique. In E. Katz, A.
Light & D. Rothenberg (Eds.), Beneath the surface: Critical essays in the
philosophy of deep ecology (pp. 269-299). Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
Taylor, B. (2001a). Earth and nature-based spirituality (part I): From deep ecology to
radical environmentalism. Religion, 31, 175-193.
Taylor, B. (2001b). Earth and nature-based spirituality (part II): From Earth First! and
bioregionalism to scientific Paganism and the new age. Religion, 31, 225-245.
Taylor, B. (2002). Diggers, wolves, ents, elves, and expanding universes: Global
bricolage and the question of violence within the subcultures of radical
environmentalism. In J. Kaplan & H. Loow (Eds.), The cultic milieu:
Oppositional subcultures in an age of globalization (pp. 26-74). Walnut Creek,
CA: AltaMira.
Taylor, B. (2004). A green future for religion? Futures, 36, 991-1008.
Taylor, B. (2005). Ecology and nature religions. In L. Jones (Ed.), Encyclopedia of
religion (Vol. 4, pp. 2661-2668). New York: MacMillan Reference.
Taylor, B., & Witt, J. D. (2006). New and alternative nature religions in America. In E.
V. Gallagher & W. M. Ashcraft (Eds.), Introduction to new and alternative
religions in America (Vol. 5, pp. 253-272). Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Taylor, B. R., & Van Horn, G. (2006). Nature religion and environmentalism in North
America. In C. H. Lippy (Ed.), Faith in America: Changes, challenges, new
directions (Vol. 3: Personal Spirituality Today, pp. 165-190). Westport, CT:
Praeger.
Tramacchi, D. (2006). Entheogens, elves and other entities: Encountering the spirits of
Shamanic plants and substances. In L. Hume & K. McPhillips (Eds.), Popular
spiritualities: The politics of contemporary enchantment (pp. 91-104). Burlington,
VT: Ashgate.
Tucker, M. E. (2006). Religion and ecology: Survey of the field. In R. S. Gottlieb (Ed.),
The Oxford handbook of religion and ecology (pp. 398-418). New York: Oxford
University.
Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind. Cambridge:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Vaughan, A. G. (2013). Jung, analytical psychology, and transpersonal psychology. In H.
L. Friedman & G. Hartelius (Eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell handbook of
transpersonal psychology (pp. 141-154). West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons.
The Witches' Voice. (2002). Welcome members of the press. Retrieved June 10, 2009,
from http://www.witchvox.com/xpress.html
York, M. (2003). Pagan theology: Paganism as a world religion. New York: New York
University.
York, M. (2004). Paganism as root-religion. The Pomegranate, 6(1), 11-18.
Young, D. E., & Goulet, J.-G. (Eds.). (1994). Being changed by cross-cultural
encounters: The anthropology of extraordinary experience. Peterborough, ON:
Broadview.
Young, D. E., & Goulet, J.-G. (1994). Theoretical and methodological issues. In D. E.
Young & J.-G. Goulet (Eds.), Being changed by cross-cultural encounters: The
anthropology of extraordinary experience. Peterborough, ON: Broadview.
APPENDICES
INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
These are questions that might possibly be asked of informants, but they will not all be
asked of every informant. Each interview will be formed by the conversation that
develops and the particular experiences and interests of the informant.
Starwood
How many years have you been attending Starwood Festival?
Have you attended any other similar gatherings?
What attracts you to Starwood?
How did you get to Starwood this year? How long did it take you?
Spiritual Path
What was your parents’ belief system when you were growing up?
On a scale of 1-10, what was your personal faith in the belief system you were raised
with?
How would you describe your belief system today?
Can you tell me a bit about your spiritual path? How did you arrive at your current
beliefs?
How would you define “spirit”?
Faeries
Do you believe any non-human beings have spirit?... Who or what has spirit?
How would you describe “faeries”?
What has your experience been with faeries or other nature spirits?
Can you tell me a story about a particular interaction with a nature spirit or faery?
Nature
When I say the word “nature,” what comes to mind?
What experiences have you had with nature?
Tell me about a particularly powerful experience you had in nature.
Have you ever had a spiritual experience associated with a certain place? Tell me about
the place.
Do you think your experiences in nature have affected your belief system?
Environmentalism
Do you consider yourself to be an environmentalist?
Is there a connection between your environmentalism and your spiritual beliefs?
Were you an environmentalist first or a [Pagan/Wiccan/Druid/etc.]?
How do you express your environmentalism in your life?
Are you an environmental activist? Tell me about some of the actions you’ve taken part
in.
Lifestyle
Would you describe your current living environment as rural, suburban, or urban?
Did you also grow up in a [rural/suburban/urban] setting?
What car do you drive? About how many miles do you drive per week?
How often do you eat meat?
Do you seek out organic food? About how much of your food is organic?
How much more are you willing to pay for an organic food item as compared to a
conventional equivalent?
Do you seek out local food? About how much of your food is local?
How much more are you willing to pay for a local food item?
Do you personally know any of the farmers who raise your food?
Do you consider packaging when making purchases?
How does concern for the Earth affect your daily life?
INFORMED CONSENT
Title of Research Project: How Does Engagement With Faeries Affect the Human-Nature
Relationship Among Pagan Festival Attendees?
Principal Investigator: Sarah Goodrich
Faculty Sponsor: Adrian Ivakhiv
You are being invited to take part in this research study because you are a Starwood Festival
attendee who engages with faeries or other nature spirits in some way. I am conducting this
research as a Master of Science candidate at the University of Vermont. The degree I am seeking
is in Natural Resources with a concentration in Environmental Thought and Culture. We
encourage you to ask questions and take the opportunity to discuss the study with anybody you
think can help you decide whether to participate.
Why is This Research Study Being Conducted?
I am interested in exploring the spiritual connection that people have with nature in the context
of a dominant culture that has largely lost that connection. Engagement with faeries or other
nature spirits may be one way that people connect with nature.
How Many People Will Take Part In The Study?
12-18 interviews will be conducted.
What Is Involved In The Study?
I will interview you for 30-60 minutes about your beliefs, thoughts, and feelings regarding
spirituality, nature, faeries and other nature spirits, and lifestyle. The interview will be recorded
so that I can use the transcribed text in writing my thesis, but the audio recording of the interview
will not be published.
What Are The Risks and Discomforts Of The Study?
There are virtually no risks or discomforts involved in this study.
What Are The Benefits of Participating In The Study?
The only benefit involved in this study is the chance to engage in a fascinating conversation and
to be part of an interesting research project.
What Other Options Are There?
Your options are endless. Your destiny is yours.
Are There Any Costs?
There are no costs associated with participating in this study.
What Is the Compensation?
There is no compensation for participating in this study.
Can You Withdraw or Be Withdrawn From This Study?
Your participation in this study is entirely voluntary, and you may discontinue your participation
at any time.
What About Confidentiality?
Your identity will be kept separate from the interview material and pseudonyms will be used in
the published manuscript to insure your confidentiality.
Contact Information
Should you have any further questions about the research, you may contact Sarah Goodrich, the
investigator conducting this study, at the address and telephone number below. Should you have
any questions about your rights as a participant in a research project, you may contact Nancy
Stalnaker, the Director of the Research Protections Office at the University of Vermont at 802-
656-5040.
Statement of Consent
You have been given and have read, or have had read to you, a summary of this research study.
You agree to participate in this study and you understand that you will receive a signed copy of
this form.
___________________________________________
Signature of Subject
____________________________
Date
___________________________________________
Name of Subject Printed
This form is valid only if the Committees on Human Research’s current stamp of approval is
shown below.
___________________________________________
Signature of Principal Investigator or Designee
____________________________
Date
___________________________________________
Name of Principal Investigator or Designee Printed
Name of Principal Investigator: Sarah Goodrich
Address: University of Vermont, Aiken Building
Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources
Burlington, VT 05405
Telephone Number: 802-310-2061
Name of Faculty Sponsor: Adrian Ivakhiv
Address: University of Vermont, Bittersweet Building
Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources
Burlington, VT 05405
Telephone Number: 802-656-0180