EDW: In
your publications, you are open about having been a practising Pagan
since at least your undergraduate days back in Portland, Oregon. How
did you first become involved in this new religious movement, then a
relatively new phenomenon in American popular consciousness ? Did you
begin by going it alone as a solitary practitioner or were you first
involved in a coven or other group ? Furthermore, what would you
describe as your own personal Pagan path today ?
I was one of
those people who got involved by reading a book, because I certainly
knew no Pagan practitioners in the early 1970s. In my case, I was 21,
an undergraduate, working on a summer job helping one of my former
teachers to build a large adobe house near Taos, New Mexico. One
evening, when he and his partner had gone backpacking for a couple of
days, I was examining his book collection and found Robert
Graves’ The White Goddess. I knew nothing about it, yet
something seemed to tickle my mind and say, "You were supposed to
read this." So I did—in two evenings. I know that the book’s
literary scholarship is suspect, but the first chapters were really
enough for me. Suddenly it seemed that there was a religion for poets
(as I then fancied myself), one that did not revolve around
renunciation nor seem to end at the city limits, with nothing to say
about the non-human world. I went back for my final year at Reed
College and read virtually everything Graves had written. Reed
required an undergraduate thesis, and mine was a book of poems titled
Queen Famine, which comes from a line of his. Later I performed a
self-initiation rite, taken from another book (Hans Holzer’s The
New Pagans)! It worked. (Link:
http://blog.chasclifton.com/?p=123)
 |
| Clifton (in the sunglasses), at a recent Pagan festival. |
It was
another eighteen months or so later and after a move from Oregon back
to Colorado when I connected with my first group, which was actually
a lodge of would-be Thelemic magicians. I learned the basics of their
system, but it did not really touch my heart. The next year I
connected with a Colorado coven—if you have read Margot
Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon, it’s the Colorado
group described in the first chapter. Things progressed from there.
For a few
years, my wife (we were joined in public Pagan wedding 35 years ago)
and I were involved with that coven and later with our own. In the
mid-1980s "some god or daemon" told me to go to graduate
school (I had worked mainly as a newspaper and magazine journalist),
and at the same time I started my own "zine," Iron
Mountain: A Journal of Magical Religion. (Later Fritz Muntean
would tell me that it helped to inspire him to start The
Pomegranate in the 1990s.) Mary and I sold our house in
Manitou Springs, Colorado, and went off to Boulder, where I was
attending the University of Colorado and (surprise!) working
part-time at a publishing company. After graduate school, I was
less involved in group magical work. Now I typically attend a
festival or two a year and try to just blend into the crowd—to be
one of the guys carrying in the pine tree Maypole or something like
that. My own practice is quirky and sort of animistic.
EDW: After
obtaining a bachelor's degree in English and Creative Writing from
Reed College, and then a master's degree in Religious Studies from
the University of Colorado, you entered into an academic career
teaching English at both Pueblo Community College and Colorado State
University–Pueblo. At work, were you “out of the broom closet”,
and if so, did you face much opposition or prejudice as a result of
your religious beliefs, as some other academics have done ?
In the
typical university I think that any religious involvement is seen as
intellectually suspect—a big wobbly—although one might get a pass
for Reform Judaism or Zen Buddhism—anything that seems intellectual
yet non-threatening.
I did not
make a point of being "out of the closet," although my academic
writing on Paganism was right there in my c.v., and Her
Hidden Children was on the display table at the annual
reception for faculty publications. For most of my time at CSU-Pueblo
in the Dept. of English & Foreign Languages I had an excellent
department chair who supported my work in studying religion, financed
travel to the extent that his budget permitted so on. One of the
reasons that I left that job ten or twelve years before normal
retirement age was that he was retiring himself, and the future did
not look as good.
EDW: In
the 1990s, you decided to turn your attention towards your Pagan
faith, and edited a four-part Witchcraft Today series
for Llewellyn through which you showcased a wide variety of Pagan
authors. What was this particular experience like, and did it
influence you in your later work in helping to fashion the academic
field of Pagan Studies ?
Starting in
about 1986, I became a regular writer and reviewer—a "contributing
editor"—for Gnosis: The Journal of Western Inner
Traditions, a wonderful quarterly that was published for about
fourteen years in San Francisco. In addition, I began doing more
column-writing for various Pagan zines—"Letter from Hardscrabble Creek" was originally a self-syndicated column before it became a
blog in 2003. Around 1990 I was contacted by Carl Weschcke, president
of the metaphysical publishing house Llewellyn Worldwide, who invited
me to edit this series that he had in mind. These books were for
practitioners, but I did try to keep them intellectually honest—for
example, I forbade the use of such phrases as "It is said that . .
." or "Legend has it . . . ." One of the best things about
editing the series, of course, was getting to know the contributors,
for instance, Evan John Jones or Felicitas Goodman, the
Hungarian-born anthropologist turned hands-on shamanism teacher [EDW:
Many of my readers may be familiar with Goodman as the translator of
Hans Peter Duerr's Dreamtime].
EDW:
During your career, you've met and worked with a wide range of
significant figures within the Pagan and esoteric movements. To my
mind, perhaps the most notable was Evan John Jones, the successor to
Robert Cochrane, with whom you co-wrote Sacred Mask, Sacred
Dance (1997), a book for practising Pagans published by
Llewellyn. What has it been like working with such eminent figures,
and are there any particularly notable experiences that you feel
you'd like to share?
John Jones
was a friend by correspondence at first, although I finally did meet
him and his wife, Val, in 1999 and spent several days with him in
Brighton. Unfortunately, walking long distances was beginning to be
difficult for him then and it was winter when I was there, so we did
not get to visit some of his favorite sites. We did talk a great
deal, and of course Cochrane was one of the topics—he gave me a
group photo of Cochrane’s coven c. 1965, which I prize and which
hangs on my study wall. One interesting thing is that while I have
heard a great deal about Cochrane’s so-called "ritual suicide," in John’s view, the main reason for it was the breakup of his
marriage—and with it, the coven—and it was accomplished with
whisky and sleeping pills, rather conventionally, not nightshade
wine. John was also an old soldier with a keen interest in military
history, so if you could hold up your end of the conversation, you
were as likely to find yourself talking about
Napoleonic-era infantry tactics or something like that as about
witchcraft. I have met more "eminent figures" who were
down-to-earth than those who want to dazzle you with their mysterious
powers—not to say that the latter do not exist. A phrase that I
heard at one of the large Colorado Pagan festivals sticks with me: "You can tell the elders—they’re the ones in blue jeans." In
other words, not in flowing robes or crushed velvet gowns.
EDW: You
have already earned your own place in history as a “founding
father” of Pagan Studies, being well known as the editor of The
Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, the only
peer-reviewed, academic journal devoted to this multidisciplinary
field. Taking over as editor of The Pomegranate (then
subtitled A New Journal of Neopagan Thought) from one of
its founders, Fritz Muntean, after it went on a hiatus in 2001, it
was you who helped relaunch it through Equinox Publishing as the
academic journal that it is today, back in 2004. How did you come to
adopt the mantle of editor, and what was the process of transforming
the journal in an academic direction like ?
Actually, I
like to call Aidan Kelly the founder of Pagan Studies, although I
helped a bit by publishing him in Iron Mountain c.
1986. His friend Fritz Muntean was another of the founders of the
West Coast Pagan revival in the 1960s in northern California, and
later quite involved with the Craft scene in British Columbia after
emigrating to Canada in the 1970s. After a career as a builder and
craftsman, he entered the University of British Columbia to complete
his bachelor’s degree and then pursue as master’s in religious
studies. He started The Pomegranate as a serious
journal for practitioners, and I had contributed something to it. (We
still had not met face to face at that time, although we had many
friends in common.)
Eventually he
started urging me to take a larger role. From my earlier experience
with Iron Mountain, I knew that it was hard to get a
self-published journal into academic indexing services, etc., and I
argued that we should make it a peer-reviewed journal publishing by a
known publisher. During the American Academy of Religion meeting in
2001, we approached several, and Janet Joyce, who was just preparing
to form Equinox, agreed to publish it if we could wait for her to
complete her arrangements, which of course we did.
EDW:
Within the field of Pagan Studies, your most significant publication
is undoubtedly Her Hidden Children (AltaMira, 2006),
the first published history of the contemporary Pagan movement in the
United States. What made you decide to take on this daunting task,
and how did you personally find the experience of producing such a
pioneering work ?
I had at
least twenty-five years’ worth of books, little ephemeral
magazines, and correspondence files—I had to do something with it! A
major question of my life, going back to age ten or eleven, is how
are we to related to the non-human world? It bothered me as a child
that aside from a prayer for rain and an occasional blessing of
animals or something, the Anglican Christianity I was raised in
seemed to say nothing at all. Nor did the other denominations.
Paganism seemed more promising, yet Wicca, in particular, had come to
North America in the 1950s as books and in the 1960s as people and
had primarily presented itself as a surviving ancient fertility
religion. Yet somehow people started using the terms "nature
religion" or "earth religions," and so my questions were how
and why did those terms arise. I do not claim the definitive answer,
but at least I made a start at it.
EDW: You are also
the editor of the Pagan Studies Series of books over at AltaMira
Publishing, as well as the co-chair of the American Academy of Religion's (AAR) Pagan Studies Group. How did your role in these endeavours
come about, and what progress do you feel that they are making for
the academic study of Paganism ?
These two
things happened almost simultaneously. The book series was thought up
by an editor at AltaMira who had been on the fringes of the
discussion, from around 1998–2000, about how to have both the
academic study of Paganism and of "nature spirituality" in a
non-theistic way represented within the AAR. That editor, however,
lost his job, as did his replacement (such is publishing), and
eventually my then-co-editor, Wendy Griffin, and I decided to find at
better home for the series, which was Equinox, who were already
backing The Pomegranate.
Meanwhile, an
informal meeting at the AAR’s annual meeting in 1995 brought
together people (many who frequently showed up at sessions on new
religious movements) who were interested in the academic study of
Paganism. In 1997 we met and decided to try to become an
official AAR program unit—I remember that Graham Harvey was one of those pushing for it.
We were
turned down on the grounds that we had not demonstrated that our work
could not be fit into other units, e.g., the New Religious Movements
Group. For the next few years we than organized "additional
meetings," where by paying a small fee anyone can have a meeting
scheduled a day before the official start of the annual meeting. In
those sessions people presented papers, held panel discussions, and
otherwise acted like a bona fide program unit. Then in 2004 we
re-applied and were accepted, and we have passed two Program
Committee reviews since then. Every year we try to hold at least one
joint session with, for instance, groups focusing on indigenous
religions, ritual studies, religion and ecology, or our old friends
in new religious movements. Jone Salomonsen of the University of Oslo
(author of Enchanted Feminism) and I are the co-chairs, and there is
a six-member steering committee.
Jone and I
have felt from the beginning that Pagan studies is not so much about
this group or that, but about Paganism as a way of being religious.
For example, we have had presentations that focused on the treatment
of images in a Pagan setting and in Mediterranean Catholic settings,
which leads to joking about "the i-word" (idolatry) and to
discussions of whether it is useful and usable in a scholarly setting
or whether one would do better to adopt some term like "sacred
materiality."
EDW:
You're currently busy with both the aforementioned projects and with
your own blog, Letters from Hardscrabble Creek, but what
I'm sure many of my readers would be eager to hear is whether there
are there any new projects or publications on the horizon ? I hear
tell of a book on flying ointments...
Back in the
1970s, the anthropologist and neo-shaman Michael Harner advanced the
view that the witch-trial reports of flying ointments indicated the
existence of a genuine, underground, European shamanism. I believed
him. Now I am not so sure. Nevertheless, flying ointment has
important symbolic uses in discussions of both historic and
contemporary witchcraft. For one thing, its use—or purported use—is
used to maintain boundaries between certain types of practitioners,
and that bears on the revival of so-called traditional, or
non-Wiccan, Craft. And it might also work as a way to
discuss theories of religious secrecy—I am just getting my
research underway there.
EDW: On a
final note, I'd like to ask you, in your capacity as a
practitioner-scholar with many years experience, in what direction
you see the academic field of Pagan Studies developing over the next
few decades ? In particular, it would be interesting to hear your
thoughts on some of the recent criticisms of the field, both from
within the Pagan community, and from academics such as Markus Altena
Davidsen ?
Davidsen's criticism was apt as far as it went, although it was based only on
one book that did not necessarily display the methodological atheism
that he would advocate. What he apparently does not realize is that
these outsider/insider issues come up all the time at our AAR
sessions, for example. But he is not there, he is in Denmark. Yes,
the AAR has its roots in the theological (insider) study of religion
yet incorporates many people who come in as outsiders. That tension
is there, although it is ignored most of the time. We in Pagan
studies have always been sensitive to any charge that we might be
advancing some kind of Pagan-practitioner agenda. We have even
scheduled our own "What’s wrong with Pagan studies?" session
for our 2013 meeting. But I think that anyone doing "BLANK Studies" should be sensitive and reflexive about such criticisms.
As for the
future, I make no predictions other than to assume that the field
will continue to grow. Outside events cause changes within the
academy too. At the November 2001 AAR meeting [EDW: just after the militant Islamist attacks of September 11], it was amazing to see
how every neglected backlist book on Islam was displayed prominently
in publishers' booths—and there are more sessions on Islamic
topics than there were then.
EDW: Thank you, Chas, for taking the time out to talk to us today.
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