Introduction to the Special Issue on
Contemporary Pagan Ecospiritualities
This is the second of the double issue on Pagan Ecospiritualities (17.3 and 17.4), which originated in the inaugural conference of the Program for the Evolution of Spirituality at Harvard Divinity School. Readers should refer to the Introduction in the previous issue for a discussion of the overall logic of the two issues as well as a description of all the articles and book reviews featured in both issues. The first issue includes: Bron Taylor’s ‘Bounding Paganism: Who and What Is In and Out, and What Does this Reveal about Contemporary Kinship-Entangled Nature Spiritualities’; Giovanna Parmigiani’s ‘Ulía: Relational Ontologies and Political Activism in Salento (Southern Italy)’; and Sarah M. Pike’s ‘“There’s Divinity in Everything Here”: Ritualizing Ecological Practice at Pagan Nature Sanctuaries’; as well as book reviews by Michael York on Oberon Zell’s GaeaGenesis: Conception and Birth of the Living Earth (A Love Story), and Caroline Tully on Carole M. Cusack’s Invented Religions. Although as we note in the first Introduction no two issues of a journal can span the diversity of Pagan responses to the environmental crisis, we hope that readers will engage with all the articles in both issues.
This issue begins with ‘Fairies, Environmental Justice, and Re-Enchantment in Modern Pagan Narratives’ in which Sabina Magliocco and Sadie Rittman examine contemporary Pagans’ interpretations of fairies as nature spirits. The authors argue that Pagan attitudes to fairies are a response to environmental collapse. By casting fairies as environmental guardians, Magliocco and Rittman contend that Pagans participate in a wide set of cultural responses to the environmental crisis which encourages humans to engage in more sustainable practices through having personal, interactive links with animate nature.
Caroline Tully, in the following article, ‘Paradise on Earth: Feraferia and the Landscapes of the Mind’, examines a contemporary American Pagan religion called Feraferia through an ecocritical lens. By demonstrating how Feraferia interprets the natural world, Tully highlights its ideological kinship with other environmental approaches such as deep ecology, ecofeminism, and ecosexuality. Tully concludes that Feraferia’s ecospirituality is valuable because it heightens conscious awareness of human situatedness both on Earth and within the surrounding space of our part of the universe.
Barbara Jane Davy in ‘Negotiating Ecological Relations Amongst Inclusive Heathens’, focuses on the use of animal sacrifice within a Heathen (Northern European Pagan) ritual called a blót. Through participant observation, Davy finds that Heathen animal sacrifice enhances environmental consciousness among group members by stimulating participants to reassess their ideas about gift giving, attitudes about pets versus livestock, and what it means to honor the earth and all its beings.
In the concluding article, ‘The Environmentalism of the Far-Right Pagans: Blood, Soil, and the Spirits of Land’, Helen A. Berger focuses on the entanglement of environmental consciousness, usually associated with left-leaning political views, with white supremacist beliefs amongst far-right Heathens. Berger demonstrates that this form of Pagan environmentalism relies on concepts of purity and natural law to exclude non-white people and to claim America as a white nation.
This issue also includes three book reviews that focus on subjects relevant to the theme of this special double issue. Caroline Tully reviews Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover by Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens; Michael York reviews Heathen: Religion and Race in American History by Kathryn Gin Lum; and Bron Taylor reviews Spirit in the Land by Trevor Schoonmaker.