Word: paganisms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...Beasleys had in fact been married earlier in a Roman Catholic church to please their parents, they wanted a handfasting, because for them it alone contained "the spiritual element," as the groom put it. A priest and priestess at the festival, Jim Alan and Selena Fox, members of a pagan commune near Madison, Wis., called the Church of Circle Wicca, did the honors...
...festival, organized by a group called the Midwest Pagan Council, reflected what some religious leaders find to have been a rather rapid 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...
...Haviaras has need of this discipline. He writes of his coming of age between his ninth and thirteenth year in German-occupied Greece. The consistent thread piecing together this collection of incidents is not only the visionary quality of the prose, but the pagan innocence of the boy's view of events. There is a horror, an almost surrealistic quality to some of the incidents. Everything attains an almost symbolic importance. The enemy, for instance, turns the monastery into a prison...