‘A higher degree of scholarship’: Pagans and the language of scholarly authority

Abstract

Through an exploration of the intellectual history and contemporary writings of the Pagan movement, this study will examine the lineage of ‘knowledge-based’ authority in contemporary Paganism. In particular, it will illuminate how the intellectual lineage of Pagan writings helped contemporary writers respond to a moment of crisis in Paganism, and it will provide an explanation for the traditionalised use of the rhetorical modes of scholarly authority among Pagan writers.

Keywords:

• Paganism
• neo-paganism
• Wicca
• Charles Godfrey Leland
• Gerald Gardner
• authority

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Veronica Savory McComb, Molly Geidel and, most especially, Michelle Robinson for their helpful comments and suggestions on this paper. I would also like to thank Michelle Robinson for her assistance in editing this work.

Notes

1. In a similarly iconoclastic statement CAW member John McClimans published a statement of the ‘“Official” CAW Beliefs’ in Green Egg that stated the first and only tenet of the Church to be that, ‘the Church of All Worlds doesn’t believe a thing, not a Motherfucking [sic] thing!!!’ (McClimans 1977, 4).

2. Pearson’s conclusions have been further bolstered by, among others, Coco and Woodward (2007) and Fedele (2014).

3. Here, Leland is referring to Charles Darwin (1809–1882), physicists John Tyndale (1820–1893) and James Prescott Joule (1818–1889), eugenicist Francis Galton (1822–1911), astronomer Joseph Norman Lockyer (1836–1920) and Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931). The references to Wallace and Huxley are most likely to the British biologists Alfred Russell Wallace (1823–1913) and Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), both prominent advocates of evolutionary views.

4. This quote appears in Leland’s “A Winter in Egypt” (Leland papers container #370, Library of Congress). Quoted here from Varesano 1979, 103

5. Leland is referring to the work of Eusèbe Salverte (1771–1839), whose 1829 work Des Sciences Occultes, ou Essai sur la Magie, les Prodiges et les Miracles had been published in translation in the United States in 1847.

6. Valiente 1989, 41–42, cited from Magliocco 2004, 240, note 19.

7. Others have noted the importance of direct experience in the authenticating discourse of modern Pagans. See Letcher (2001). Lectcher’s case, however, concerns the specific sub-culture of Eco-paganism and, as such, finds that the direct experience used to authenticate in this sub-culture revolves around both guerilla protest actions and encounters with supernatural beings.

8. Lammond’s feature was published under the pseudonym ‘“Robert” CAW’.

9. Here, we should distinguish between Pagan authors whose professions are actually academic in nature and those who are primarily popular writers and hence seemingly in little need of academic credentialing.

10. Although basically consistent with Berger et al., Ruickbie (2006, 121) suggests that these figures may be slightly overstated.