Word: modernes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There, in the guise of Novelist Alice Thumb, the narrator accepts an invitation from an elderly couple to use their vacation in Italy. Her writer's eye quickly perceives that the dwelling's modern angularities serve no other function than a change from the traditional. Its furnishings are a collection of expensive replicas; the library is a random reflection of the chic. One volume is titled A Lifetime Reading Plan...
...bizarre ceremony, performed in a scruffy campground outside Demotte, Ind., was not some stunt but a modern pagan "handfasting," or wedding. It was one of the highlights of the Third Annual Pan Pagan Festival, a four-day conclave that brought together a witches' brew of 325 paganists, occultists and, well, witches from 26 states and Canada...
...spread of neopaganism around the country over the past decade. J. Gordon Melton, an Evanston, Ill., Methodist minister who heads the Institute for the Study of American Religion, reckons that there may be as many as 40,000 practicing pagans today. They constitute, says Melton, "a neopaganist movement, a modern revival of the rituals and faith by people who were not raised in them...
Originally, modern interest in ancient pagan practices was spurred by research early in this century by British Anthropologist Margaret Murray, who sought to dispel folklore that witches were invariably malevolent. But today's neopagan movement has its roots in the counterculture. Though many neopaganists live otherwise ordinary lives as, say, bank tellers or bartenders, others gather in communes. Psychologists say that neopaganism functions as a form of "folk therapy," a sort of ritualized search for self-worth in an increasingly complex society...
...Modern pagan groups tend to be small (at most 20 members) and eclectic, drawing their beliefs from such diverse sources as ancient Egypt, the Druids, Greek and Roman antiquity and the American Indian religions. But the groups share some tenets. Most believe in reincarnation" and in a universe ruled by a supreme godhead comprising two parts: a male half, which includes the sun, and a female half, which includes the moon. The distaff side is frequently considered to have more status, which makes neopaganism especially attractive to some feminists...