Gender and Power in

Contemporary Spirituality

Contemporary spiritual practitioners tend to present their own spirituality

as non-hierarchical and gender equal, in contrast to ‘established’ religions.
Current studies of these movements often reproduce their self-description as
empowering, while other literature reacts polemically against these move-
ments, describing them as narcissist and irrelevant and/or in league with
capitalism. This book moves between these two poles, recognizing that
gender and power are always at work in any sociocultural situation. What
strategies do people within these networks use to attain gender equality
and gendered empowerment? How do they try to protect and develop indi-
vidual freedom? How do gender and power nevertheless play a role? The
contributions collected in this book demonstrate that in order to under-
stand contemporary spirituality the analytical lenses of gender and power
are essential. Furthermore, they show that it is not possible to make a clear
distinction between established religions and contemporary spirituality: the
two sometimes overlap, at other times spirituality uses religion to play off
against while reproducing some of the underlying interpretative frameworks.
While recognizing the reflexivity of spiritual practitioners and the recipro-
cal relationship between spirituality and disciplines such as anthropology,
the authors do not take the discourses of spiritual practitioners for granted.
Their ethnographic descriptions of lived spirituality span a wide range of
countries, from Portugal, Italy and the Netherlands to Mexico and Israel.

Anna Fedele is a research fellow of the Centre for Research in Anthropology

(CRIA) at the Lisbon University Institute and a chercheure associée of the
Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale of the École des Hautes Études en
Sciences Sociales in Paris. Her research focuses on the intersections of gender
and religion and especially on issues of corporeality and ritual creativity. She is
the author of Looking for Mary Magdalene: Alternative Pilgrimage and Ritual
Creativity at Catholic Shrines in France (Oxford University Press, 2012) and has
edited with Ruy Llera Blanes the volume Encounters of Body and Soul in Con-
temporary Religious Practices: Anthropological Reflections (Berghahn, 2011).

Kim Knibbe is a university lecturer in the Faculty of Theology and Religious

Studies at Groningen University. She received her PhD in cultural anthro-
pology from VU University Amsterdam. She has done research on religious
change and religious pluralism in the Netherlands and coordinated an inter-
national research project on Nigerian-initiated Pentecostal networks in
Europe and published widely on these topics. An ethnography on religious
change in the Netherlands will be published by Brill in 2013.

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6244-033-0FM.indd iv 10/10/2012 6:54:16 PM
 Gender and Power in
Contemporary Spirituality
Ethnographic Approaches

Edited by Anna Fedele and

Kim E. Knibbe

6244-033-0FM.indd v 10/10/2012 6:54:16 PM

 First published 2013
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
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 To our daughters, who were born while this book was being
prepared.

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6244-033-0FM.indd viii 10/10/2012 6:54:16 PM
 Contents

List of Figures xi
Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: Gender and Power in Contemporary

Spirituality—Ethnographic Approaches 1
ANNA FEDELE AND KIM KNIBBE

1 Cultivating the Sacred: Gender, Power and Ritualization in

Goddess-Oriented Groups 28
ÅSA TRULSSON

2 Spirituality within Religion: Gendered Responses to a

Greek ‘Spiritual Revolution’ 46
EUGENIA ROUSSOU

3 Individual Spirituality and Religious Membership among

Soka Gakkai Buddhists in Spain 62
MONICA CORNEJO

4 The Power of Submission? Personal Growth and the Issue of

Power among Umbanda Practitioners in Paris 78
VIOLA TEISENHOFFER

5 “Black” Madonna versus “White” Madonna: Gendered Power

Strategies in Alternative Pilgrimages to Marian Shrines 96
ANNA FEDELE

6 From Crisis to Charisma: Redefining Hegemonic Ideas of

Science, Freedom and Gender among Mediumistic
Healers in Germany 115
EHLER VOSS

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 x Contents
7 Spirituality, Charisma and Gender in a Jewish Spiritual
Renewal Community in Israel 126
RACHEL WERCZBERGER

8 Urban Witchcraft and the Issue of Authority 142

VICTORIA HEGNER

9 Gender and Power: Brahma Kumaris Spirituality and

Hinduism in Portugal 160
INÊS LOURENÇO

10 Obscuring the Role of Power and Gender in Contemporary

Spiritualities 179
KIM KNIBBE

11 In Search of Spirituality in Northeastern Mexico: Religious

Change and Masculinity among Addicts in Recovery 195
ETHAN P. SHARP

Bibliography 211
Contributors 231
Index 235

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 Figures

2.1 A woman in northern Greece is performing the ritual

of ksematiasma. 52
2.2 Spiritual crystals: A popular protection from
negative energy. 57

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6244-033-0FM.indd xii 10/10/2012 6:54:16 PM
 Acknowledgments

During the preparation of this edited volume we received useful feedback

from many colleagues, whom we would like to thank: Ellen Badone, Diana
Espirito Santo, Cyril Isnart, Sabina Magliocco, José Mapril, David Picard,
Sofia Sampaio, Clara Saraiva, Ramon Sarrò, Valerio Simoni, Kocku von
Stuckrad, Alexandra Grieser and Yme Kuiper.
This book is the outcome of the panel “Spirituality against Religion: The
Role of Gender and Power”, which we coordinated at the eleventh bien-
nial conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists held
in Maynooth (Ireland) in August 2010. We would like to thank those in
the public for their questions and suggestions and those participants whose
papers could not be included in this volume for different reasons: Austin
Buscher and Frans Jespers.
We are also grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers for their sugges-
tions and to William A. Christian, Sarah Pike and Barbara Boudewijnse for
their attentive reading of the introduction.
Laura Vollmer helped us with the editing of the introduction and Laura
Stearns at Routledge was always there to help us.
Finally we are also grateful to our partners, Cédric Masse and Andrei
Angnged, who supported us during the period of preparation of this volume,
when both of us were at different times pregnant, on maternity leave and
later struggling to combine work and motherhood.

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6244-033-0FM.indd xiv 10/10/2012 6:54:16 PM
 Introduction
Gender and Power in Contemporary
Spirituality—Ethnographic Approaches
Anna Fedele and Kim Knibbe

Growing up in a Catalan Catholic family, Maria Rosa received a lot of sex-

ual attention from men, causing her father a great deal of anxiety. He was an
illegitimate child, and therefore particularly afraid that Maria Rosa would
repeat the mistakes of his mother, by ‘giving in’ to her sexual impulses.
Although she was repeatedly abused sexually by a physician, she did not
dare to tell her parents, believing that her father would blame her. During
her childhood she had ‘psychic experiences’: she foresaw events and talked
to invisible beings. As a teenager, Maria Rosa read books about Buddhism
and studied to become a secretary.
After she got married (at nineteen), she continued to be afraid that her
sexual power would lead her to betray her husband and ‘become a slut’.
She worked as a secretary and as a housewife, and had two children with
her husband, following the model of her mother as a hardworking woman.
Although she did not go to church anymore, she did want her children to
be baptized.
Her youngest child, Laura, was born with learning disabilities and she
had to stop working. Due to various alternative therapies she came to under-
stand that she had ‘chosen’ to have a ‘problematic’ daughter, to make sure
that she could not compete for the attention of Oriol, her husband. When
her father died, she began to gain weight. She interpreted this as a way of
becoming less attractive to other men, decreasing the risk of betraying her
husband and ‘becoming a slut’. She went from one therapist to another, to
find a solution for Laura, and for herself.
Maria Rosa is now a spiritual practitioner herself, with a background in
kinesiology, Reiki, cromotherapy and numerology. She creates personal numer-
ological charts on request, based on a person’s birth date and complete name
and often travels with her husband. Together, they do a section of the Camino
de Santiago every year. During a pilgrimage to various shrines related to Saint
Mary Magdalene in Southern France taken with two of her female friends,
Maria Rosa felt that she was able to heal wounds related to gender and sexu-
ality that belonged to her own life story but also to that of her wider family.
During an organized trip to Jerusalem she made with her husband,
Maria Rosa became very upset because she was not allowed into the Holy

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 2 Anna Fedele and Kim Knibbe
Sepulchre. Almost bursting into tears, she was hugged by the tourist guide of
the organized group they were travelling with. She felt embraced by “Jesus’
energy”, a clearly “masculine energy” and had what she described as one of
her strongest “spiritual experiences”.

CONFRONTING CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY

Like Maria Rosa, since the 1980s an increasing number of people in Europe
and Northern America refuse to consider themselves (only) as part of estab-
lished religion and develop ‘their own’ spiritual practices. In the past two
decades a growing number of individuals in Western society state that they
are not ‘religious’ but ‘spiritual’.1 They embrace loosely organized groups
practicing meditation, channeling or Reiki, join workshops about sacred
sexuality or shamanic drumming and create altars at their homes with statu-
ettes of divinities from different religious traditions. Some of them criticize
established religion as patriarchal, misogynist and hierarchical and refuse to
depend on an external authority, such as a priest, in order to establish con-
tact with the divine, if they even recognize the divine as a separate domain.
Spiritual practitioners often describe their experiences in terms of an all-
pervading life force they call ‘energy’ and tend to create their own spiritual
patchwork, assembling together different theories, techniques and figures.
What do people mean when they call themselves spiritual? Is ‘spirituality’
indeed something that can be distinguished from ‘religion’ on an analytical
level? Are the practices developed by contemporary spirituality as empowering
as advocates state they are? What role do gender and power have in contem-
porary spiritual groups claiming to be gender-equal and to be nonhierarchi-
cal? In this volume we address these and also other more specific questions
related to contemporary spiritual practices, building upon existing theories.
Although the importance of the themes of gender and power has already been
noted by scholars, we found that they have been analyzed with little reference
to ethnographic evidence, often taking for granted ‘emic’ discourses on gender
and power. Furthermore, most studies of contemporary spiritualities refer to
theories that draw on data mainly derived from the United States, Canada
and/or the United Kingdom.2 This volume explicitly addresses what happens
in other European and American countries. We can thus ask how local speci-
ficities influence the forms spirituality takes, as well as how consideration of
the findings in these ethnographies may inform theory.
The way in which Maria Rosa came to interpret her life as well as her
body, her choice to embrace spirituality without renouncing Catholicism
and her trajectory from disciple to teacher show how lived spirituality is
a complex phenomenon that needs to be analyzed in ways that go beyond
practitioners’ own self-understandings. Her story also clearly illustrates how
spirituality can help women come to terms with traumas related to their
gender identities and their sexuality.

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 Introduction 3
However, as the chapters in this volume show, the claims of contem-
porary ‘spirituality’ to offer (gendered) empowerment and to be free from
the ‘traditional’ gendered hierarchies (in contrast to ‘religion’) should be
approached critically. In a sense, both the phenomenon and the analysis of
it are not new. Each age has known its own religious renewals claiming to
offer a ‘better’ more ‘pure’ religion not corrupted by power, money or the
search for status. At the same time, historiography and the social sciences
have shown that the desire to go beyond these corrupting influences para-
doxically functions as a way of hiding the existent power relationships and
domination within contemporary as well as more ancient spiritualities and
religious groups (we will elaborate on this further when we discuss the con-
tinuities between present-day spiritualities and vernacular religion ahead).
The complexity and slipperiness of spirituality make fieldwork particu-
larly important.3 Although in some contexts, people identify explicitly as
‘spiritual but not religious’ and do not want to be associated with any social
label, in other contexts, people identify as religious and spiritual, finding
their own ways beyond the religious tradition in which they were raised.
Many spiritual practitioners in traditionally Catholic countries of Southern
Europe,4 but also in the south of the Netherlands,5 may still be nominally
Catholic, baptize their children and marry in a church. Moreover spiritual
practitioners are often conscious of common critiques about their kind of
religiosity as self-indulgent and consumerist and tend to have a defensive
attitude, rejecting the labels attempting to classify them as soon as they
emerge (we will return to this issue later). Through participant observation,
the recollection of life stories and in-depth open interviews, it is possible
to gain an intimate glimpse into the worlds of people who call themselves
spiritual.6
In order to explore these issues we organized a panel for the eleventh
biennial conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists
held in Maynooth (Ireland) in August 2010, entitled “Spirituality Against
Religion: The Role of Gender and Power”. We invited participants to
explore the role of gender and power in contemporary spirituality, draw-
ing on their ethnographic data, and inductively develop theoretical insights,
without prescribing any theoretical orientation beforehand. The discussions
during the panel and various rounds of writing and feedback have led to the
chapters of this book. Their authors come from different countries and ana-
lyze spiritualities in areas where little ethnographic research on this topic has
been done, such as Israel, Southern Europe and Mexico. They also draw on
French and German literature on spirituality that has often been neglected
in the English literature.
In this book, we will address what the people in our research areas mean
when they speak of ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’. But what do we as academ-
ics mean when we speak of spirituality and religion? How do these terms
overlap with other terminology, such as ‘New Age’, ‘new religious move-
ments’ and contemporary ‘Paganism’? The following section summarizes

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 4 Anna Fedele and Kim Knibbe
some of the approaches to these phenomena and the terminology used in
the academic literature.

SPIRITUALITY AGAINST RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY AND

RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY = RELIGION?

In recent years several authors have spoken of a “turn towards spirituality”7

or a “spiritual revolution”,8 positing the thesis that ‘religion’ is gradually
giving way to ‘spirituality’. Does the end of religion predicted by the social
scientists in the 1970s and 1980s imply not secularization but rather a sort
of ‘spiritualization’ of religion? Much of the current literature on spirituality
takes the ‘spiritual revolution’ thesis of Heelas and Woodhead as a touch-
stone to either argue against it, or to throw light on their own data. These
authors posit a distinction between religion and spirituality: religion stands
for ‘life as’, supports traditional social structures, and usually has at its cen-
ter a transcendent God. Spirituality, in their perception, is oriented towards
subjective life, individual development and a holistic worldview. Authors
such as Aupers and Houtman have used similar distinctions to argue that
a spiritual revolution is taking place in many other countries.9 However,
as indicated by the case studies examined in this volume, there are some
people who prefer to call themselves ‘spiritual’ rather than ‘religious’, but
there are also many people who see themselves as spiritual and religious.
Furthermore, a substantive examination of the ideas espoused by people
labeling themselves as spiritual reveals that many of them can just as easily
be associated with a ‘transcendent’ as with a holistic worldview, transgress-
ing the distinctions posited by Heelas and Woodhead.
In her study of homebirth in America, Pamela Klassen observed that peo-
ple made a distinction between religion as an “age-old tradition, encrusted
with hierarchy” and spirituality, seen as providing “a more immediate,
accessible, personal relationship with God (or another deity)” and that
these notions had “a powerful hold over contemporary discourse about reli-
gious or spiritual matters”.10 Like Klassen, we believe that theories about
a spiritual revolution should be considered as representative of one kind of
discourse about spirituality and religion that exists alongside many others.
They rely on a homogenized and simplified image of both ‘spirituality’ and
‘religion’. Talal Asad has argued that the secular can be thought of only in
reference to religion;11 similarly, ‘spirituality’ seems to be inextricably linked
to ‘religion’.12 Moreover, as van der Veer argues, the spiritual and the secular
“are produced simultaneously as two connected alternatives to institutional-
ized religion in Euro-American modernity”.13
On an analytical level, what is now called spirituality could be seen as an
instance of what has previously been called ‘folk religion’, ‘popular religion’
or ‘lived religion’.14 One of the important contributions of anthropologists
to the study of religion has been to show that the lived religion of people

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 Introduction 5
is very different from the orthodox religion described in sacred texts or by
representatives of religious institutions.15 We cannot assume that through-
out history religious traditions have been fixed and coherent and that only
in recent times they have ceased to be so, as both the ‘spiritual revolution’
thesis and the secularization-thesis seem to do. For example, the historical
analysis of Christianity16 has shown the dynamic nature of lived religion and
the way in which lay people have manipulated dogmas and created their own
way of relating to divine forces. The continuity between ‘folk religious’ prac-
tices and other types of spiritualities also becomes visible in the contribution
by Roussou on the spirituality of Greek women. Similarly, whereas certain
French sociologists see a ‘new’ kind of bricolage,17 religious historians and
anthropologists show that this bricolage in fact has occurred and continues
to occur in many different times and places.18 This emphasis on continuity
does not mean that we do not recognize that there may be something new in
contemporary spirituality (see ahead for an analysis of innovative aspects);
we just want to point out that there seem to be many more commonalities
between contemporary lived spirituality and vernacular religion than some
social scientists and spiritual practitioners seem willing to admit.19
As in vernacular religion, in contemporary spirituality gender (and power)
relations are complex, entangled with their social context and cannot be
reduced to a dualistic model of female dominating or female empowering.20
Anthropologists have shown that male dominated religious traditions that
may seem to the superficial observer only to subjugate women may in fact
offer them empowering alternatives in their social contexts.21 Others have
argued that women manipulate the rules and roles established by religious
institutions in order to gain charisma and power. Similarly, in this volume
we argue that contemporary spiritualities that apparently challenge existing
religious gender roles do so in multiple ways and need to be studied bear-
ing in mind the social context in which they originate. They can empower
women, offering new roles and figures of reference, but they can also end up
reproducing gender stereotypes or gendered domination or even lead to cases
of abuse, as Werczberger illustrates in her contribution to this volume.22
As Courtney Bender has shown in a recent ethnography, the practices
and ideas that many people who call themselves ‘spiritual but not religious’
draw on have a long history (she refers to them as ‘new metaphysicals’) even
though these practitioners are not concerned at all with this history. Other
religious scholars focusing on the United States have traced back the conti-
nuity of certain spiritual theories and practices to the end of the nineteenth
century.23 Astrology, Tarot, magnetism and channeling, among others, are all
part of a long lineage of practices that are studied within the newly emerged
field of the study of esotericism.24 This field struggles with similar difficulties
of definition. As von Stuckrad argues, it would be a mistake to view ‘West-
ern esotericism’, and by extension present-day ‘spirituality’ drawing on eso-
teric ideas and practices, as an identifiable tradition or system of thought.
Rather, he speaks of ‘esoteric discourses’ in Western culture as a body of

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 6 Anna Fedele and Kim Knibbe
discursive operations that includes the academic study of esotericism and
religion. This means that the narratives both of marginalization of esoteric
traditions and of ‘secret knowledge’ are studied as part of the genealogies of
identities within a European historic context that is much more pluralistic
than is often posited.25 Esotericism, and by extension, present-day ‘spiritual-
ity’, should therefore be analyzed in relation to the social and cultural fields
in which it attempts to claim and occupy a certain position (which, in many
cases, is a field dominated by the concept of religion).
Popp-Baier offers an overview of the ways in which the distinction between
religion and spirituality has been made. She shows, using the same European
Value Survey Data that many other scholars have used to argue for a spiritual
turn, that these data can also be analyzed in a way that yields a much more
complex pattern.26 Ultimately, she advises “against including the concept of
spirituality in our analytical terminology in order to describe or interpret
religious change”. She points out “the variety of emic meanings of this con-
cept” and “the serious flaws the different etic concepts of spirituality have”
and proposes to connect the debate about contemporary religious change
“with historical investigations, ‘territorial’ contextualization, and theoretical
clarifications”.27 In line with these arguments, we believe that ‘spirituality’
or ‘religion’ can be understood only within the social and cultural configura-
tions and historical trajectories in which such self-identification occurs. As
the chapters in this volume show, different ethnographic contexts have dif-
ferent configurations of the spiritual vis-à-vis the religious.
Nevertheless there seem to be some common traits that, local specificities
notwithstanding, tend to emerge. These common traits have to do with the
oppositions used in describing oneself as ‘spiritual’ in relation (or opposi-
tion) to ‘religion’. The following series of distinctions emerge quite often:

Religion—spirituality
Fixed—flexible
Authority—absence of authority
Gender inequality—gender equality
Hierarchy—nonhierarchical structure
Status-oriented—inner development-oriented
Mediated access to divinity—unmediated access to divinity
Body/sexuality hostile—body/sexuality friendly

Although not all these distinctions may be operative across all contexts,
it is clear that spirituality is assumed to act critically on the presumed ‘nega-
tive’ traits of religion. Issues of power and gender seem to play a crucial
role in this process of construction by opposition. Even if spiritual practi-
tioners say that they contest all established religion, the kind of ‘religion’
they oppose seems to be mainly related to the Jewish-Christian heritage of

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 Introduction 7
Western society.28 One might wonder, and we will analyze this point in more
detail later (see the section on gender), if through this process of construc-
tion by opposition spiritual practitioners do not end up reproducing certain
concepts that they had set out to criticize.
Previously, we have highlighted the continuity between contemporary
spirituality and vernacular religion. This does not mean that there is noth-
ing ‘new’ to observe in contemporary spirituality or that these innova-
tions do not challenge aspects of the social and religious order. From the
chapters in this volume it emerges that different forms of spirituality offer
practitioners new theories and ritual practices that allow them to come to
terms with the challenges of current sociocultural and economic contexts,
which are often globalized and mostly urban. Furthermore, the networks
of spiritual practitioners themselves are increasingly globalized, sometimes
forming transnational social fields. Another important innovative element
that emerges from the chapters of this volume is ritual creativity: spiritual
practitioners claim their right to ritualize, to create new rites instead of ste-
reotypically repeating traditional ones. They invoke divinities, use gestures
and combine symbols borrowed from different religious traditions but also
create new ones that represent current situations and problems. In this con-
text the authority of contemporary crafted rituals no longer derives from
being part of a shared tradition, but from the fact that they are experienced
by participants as something that works.29 Another recurrent feature is the
self-conscious approach of spiritual practitioners and their use of social and
psychological theories to create and justify their worldview, as well as to
create their rituals.
In conclusion, we take the distinction religion/spirituality to be a topic
of research in much the same way that Asad sees the categories of ‘religion/
secularity’ not as universal and analytical categories, but as the outcome of
a historical process of cultural dynamics, and therefore a topic of research to
be studied. Where he pleads for an ‘anthropology of the secular’ to comple-
ment the focus on ‘religion’, we plead for an anthropology of ‘the spiritual’
as a category that in recent years has emerged as a significant ‘other’ of the
category of religion. In this way, new questions arise: how is this distinction
used in different contexts? Is spirituality to some people a religion without
power?

Notes on Terminology
How then do these considerations relate to other, partly overlapping terms
such as ‘New Age’, ‘New Religious Movements’, ‘spiritualities of life’ and
‘esotericism’? Since the 1980s there has been a growing literature about
new religious movements (NRMs),30 the New Age movement31 and more
recently spirituality.32 All these terms have been used as umbrellas to describe
a range of more or less organized groups and movements as well as the per-
sonal trajectories of individuals unrelated to groups. Some of these groups

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 8 Anna Fedele and Kim Knibbe
would agree and even be eager to be identified as a well-recognized and
established ‘religious movement’ or ‘church’ (e.g., Seventh-Day Adventists),
whereas others do not consider themselves to be part of an established
religious group and, as we have seen, reject the term ‘religious’. The con-
tributors to this volume refer to social actors and groups that find ‘reli-
gion’ a problematic term and feel more at ease with the term ‘spirituality’.
They analyze cases that help to shed light on the complex entanglements of
spirituality and religion, but generally do not see these terms as indicating
distinct phenomena.
We try to avoid the use of the term ‘New Age’ because, as several other
scholars have noted33 even if it was used in the 1980s and 1990s,34 spiritual
practitioners now usually distance themselves from this term. Aware of the
accusations of self-indulgency, narcissism and consumerism made to New
Agers, social actors seem to have incorporated these criticisms into their
own discourses. They state that New Agers are self-absorbed consumers35
but that they themselves are not New Age. However, we do not go as far
as Matthew Wood to say that “no case has been convincingly made that
an area of religious belief and practice that can be described as New Age
exists”.36 As Sutcliffe and Bowman observed,37 New Age has now become a
mainstream term used to refer to a certain kind of music and other cultural
products and may be used to refer now to a wider cultural phenomenon
rather than a specific religious reality.
Some scholars have argued that the term ‘New Age’ has been substituted
by ‘spirituality’.38 In our view, this may be the case, but at the same time
the term spirituality has a wider application. New Age and spirituality can-
not be considered to be synonyms. It can be said that New Age has in some
way been subsumed into spirituality, but the term ‘spirituality’ has always
been used alongside ‘New Age’ to describe an area of beliefs and practices
that is wider and less specific than ‘New Age’.39 Moreover certain groups
who form part of the kind of spirituality we analyze, such as contemporary
Pagans, never identified with the New Age movement to begin with.40
We chose to use the term ‘spirituality’ because it is widely used and cur-
rently perceived as positive by the social actors we want to describe. The
chapters in this volume show that there are important differences between
spiritual groups and between the practitioners within the same group. Even
if they all may refer to common concepts such as that of ‘energy’ or ‘con-
sciousness’, this does not mean that their opinions coincide in other aspects.
We refer to the social actors we describe as ‘spiritual practitioners’ because
we wanted to emphasize the importance that practice has in contemporary
spirituality. Both of us found that when asked about their beliefs or about
why they believed in the efficacy of this technique or that meta-empirical
being, her informants often answered that they did not “believe”—they had
experienced its efficacy in their everyday practices.41 Spiritual leaders often
encourage their audience to try things out themselves and see what happens
(see, for instance, Cornejo in this volume).

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 Introduction 9
GENDER

Most so-called ‘new religious movements’ were created to challenge estab-

lished religions as well as secular society, and many of them emerged during
the period of the upsurge of the feminist movement. Nevertheless scholars
focusing on new religious movements created in the last half of the twenti-
eth century do not agree whether these movements really do offer women
alternatives that empower them.42 Often the theoretical gender equality of
these movements is not enacted in everyday life.43
The loosely organized movements that started appearing in the 1980s
such as the so-called ‘New Age’ or feminist spirituality movements also criti-
cize existing concepts of gender and tend to consider what they identify as
‘religion’ as one of the main opponents on humanity’s way towards gender
equality. Most scholars agree that the New Age and the contemporary Pagan
movements tend to have little hierarchical organization.44 They offer women
possibilities of empowerment and provide both men and women with alter-
native gender models and roles.45 Women represent the majority of those
attending (like in many other religious groups), as well as in the leadership
of contemporary spiritual groups.46 Several ethnographies on Pagan groups
in the United Kingdom and the United States have shown how they offer
women (and some men) alternatives to conceptualize their bodies as well as
their places in society.47
The emphasis on gender equality and critique of gender roles of estab-
lished religious traditions has characterized many emerging religious groups
in the past. If we consider the case of Christianity, for instance, we can
see that early Christian groups attracted many women because they gave
them more rights than the dominant religions of the time.48 Also Christian
groups later labeled as heretics, such as the Cathars, offered more privileges
to women and criticized the orthodox Christianity of their time with argu-
ments that are not so different from those of certain contemporary spiritual
groups. In fact spiritual practitioners often describe Christian movements
such as the Cathars or the Rosicrucians as their forerunners on the quest
for gender equality, and furthermore these movements are used as historical
authorities of contemporary spiritual theories.49
Analyzing the ‘emic’ attributes of spirituality and religion listed earlier, we
have seen that spirituality is perceived as gender-equal and having a more relaxed
attitude towards the body (especially the female body) as well as towards sexu-
ality. Spiritual practitioners describe the physical body as inhabited by divine
forces (often referred to as ‘energy’) and condemn the Judeo-Christian opposi-
tion of body and soul as the ideological ground that fostered the domination of
women and nature.50 Even if all exponents of contemporary spirituality do not
share the same attitudes towards body and sexuality as the Pagan-influenced
women described by Hegner and Trulsson in this volume, it can be said that the
conceptualization and celebration of the body (and especially the female body)
as sacred are important features of contemporary spirituality.

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 10 Anna Fedele and Kim Knibbe
As Brown observes in his ethnography, among channelers in the United
States the common trend is to bring back together concepts that have been
made into dichotomies within Western civilization and emphasize the part
that has been downplayed. So there is a focus on body rather than soul,
female rather than male, intuition rather than reason.51 But the emphasis on
what is identified as ‘female’ implies the acceptance of an extremely polar-
ized and often stereotypical conceptualization of feminine and masculine.52
If the male is rational, goal-oriented and giving, the female is intuitive,
emotional and receptive;53 very often these characteristics are considered
as being naturally given rather than culturally constructed.54 Nevertheless
spiritual practitioners do not want to express a sort of ideal and complete
male or femaleness; they aim to express both their ‘feminine’ and ‘mas-
culine side’. Following a popularized version of the principles of animus
and anima derived from Jungian psychology, men often find that through
spirituality they can find access to their feminine side.55 For women this
process tends to be twofold. Some observe that through spiritual practices
they can contact aspects of their feminine side they have learned to reject,
growing up as aggressive women who have to overachieve in work to be
considered as good as men.56 Others explain how they learn to contact their
male part and start taking charge of their lives and lead a life that is more
self-oriented.57
Gender critique is often one of the reasons that lead men as well as women
to abandon the religious tradition they had inherited from their parents.58
These movements offer women new ways to conceptualize their body and
find a more positive access to bodily processes such as menstruation, child-
birth, breastfeeding or menopause.59 Spiritual practitioners openly criticize
established religions, especially Christianity, and the negative stereotypes
they associate with the female body through key female figures like Eve,
who is considered responsible for the fall of mankind. Instead of rejecting
Christian figures and concepts, their meaning is often inverted and given a
positive meaning related to corporeality.60 This is the case with the “Stations
of the Vulva” (instead of the cross) described by Trulsson in this volume or
the “Black Madonna” opposing her “white” and immaculate equivalent
(see Fedele in this volume). A similar process of inversion also happens with
fairytales in which traditional figures such as Little Red Riding Hood or the
Sleeping Beauty are transformed into empowered female figures by authors
such as Barbara Walker.61
These inversions, and the way they use dichotomies and essentialized
notions of femininity and masculinity, raise the question of whether they
do not in some way reproduce some of the so-called ‘patriarchal structures’
they aim to subvert. Following the dichotomies just mentioned, it seems
that the body and sexuality can be only either sinful or sacred: is there room
for sex simply for pleasure? Could concepts of sacred sexuality or sacred
maternity be perceived as oppressive? Women and men may feel pressure to
achieve the spiritually fulfilling orgasm or to have (or help their women to

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 Introduction 11
have) an orgasmic birthing experience and feel inappropriate for not having
been able to cope with this ideal.
Focusing mainly on data emerging from the United Kingdom, Woodhead
and Sointu argue that spirituality is more attractive to women because it
validates traditionally feminine values of caring, but also helps them manage
the double (or triple) burden of contemporary femininity: taking care of the
material and emotional needs of their families in the private sphere, some-
times also caring for aging parents, and having to work in the public sphere
(although usually clustered in the caring professions). In their analysis, con-
temporary spirituality helps middle-class women to move from selfless caring
in their family life, and often also in their caring professions, to expressive
selfhood.62 They argue that contemporary spirituality with its focus on tak-
ing care of the self “can have profound moral consequences for individuals
located in social roles that deny the legitimacy of self-fulfilment”.63
What Luhrmann observed in the late 1980s among middle-class women
in London practicing witchcraft still seems to apply thirty years later.64
Caught within the dilemmas of what Hochschild describes as a “stalled
gender revolution”,65 women in the West live in a society “in which they
experience violence, but in which women’s anger is not well tolerated”.66
The changes related to the shift to a postindustrial context since the 1960s
as well as the politics that followed the feminist movement of the 1970s and
1980s imposed heavy expectations on middle-class women. They have since
often been expected to be competitive career women but also the nurturing
primary parents for the children. They lack models of women in the public
sphere and are often criticized either as over-caring stay-at-home mothers
lacking ambition or as over-competitive and unwomanly careerists.67 Dif-
ferent ethnographies focusing on Pagan practices have shown how through
crafted rituals women can come to terms with the anxiety and anger related
to their ambiguous position in Western society as well as with traumas and
conflicts left unaddressed by other religious or civil institutions like abor-
tion, sexual abuse or surgery on sexual organs.68
In the same article, Woodhead and Sointu criticize social theories labeling
spirituality as “narcissistic”69 or situating “the growth of therapeutic practices
within a late modern context that shifts the focus of aspiration from social
improvement to inner personal satisfaction”.70 They wonder why this kind of
spirituality tends to be labeled as self-indulgent and “lacking moral horizons”
and observe that this may be related to the fact that this kind of spirituality
encourages women to question their role as caretakers and find time for their
own self-development. In a society that still depends on the caring work per-
formed predominantly by women and that often receives little social acknowl-
edgment and economic retribution, a spirituality that invites women to take
care of themselves before taking care of others might be perceived as subver-
sive at least on a symbolic level, as a threat to her caring work for others.71
We agree that gender is an important element to take into account
when understanding the increasing success of spirituality and that, instead

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 12 Anna Fedele and Kim Knibbe
of labeling spiritual practices as narcissist, more attention should be paid
(among other things) to the ways in which they challenge or try to challenge
gender inequalities. But at the same time we think that the analysis at the level
of ‘emic’ discourses should continue on and inquire in more detail if spiritual
practices indeed encourage women and men to change their lives and to what
extent these changes may challenge the status quo in terms of gender.
An analysis of gender discourse and practices in contemporary spiritual-
ity should also take into account the differences existing on a religious as
well as on a gender basis between Europe and the United States, but also
within Europe. As the chapters in this volume show, the kind of ‘paganish’
spirituality that proves attractive for German women in Berlin would prob-
ably not be attractive to the Greek women described by Roussou. These
Greek women clearly grew up with certain gender stereotypes and practical
restrictions regarding access to economic independence and work that Heg-
ner’s Berlin-based women do not seem to share.
Paying attention to the particularities of spirituality in different coun-
tries might also help to overcome the stereotype of middle-aged, middle-
class women with a higher educational background as the main actors.
As Houtman and Mascini72 have shown, spirituality can also speak to the
younger generations and contemporary forms of Paganism are proving to
be increasingly attractive for teenagers and people in their twenties.73 Doing
fieldwork in so-called ‘spiritual societies’ and ‘paranormal markets’, Knibbe
found that the public at these gatherings was often dominated by lower-class
women and men with often only primary school or a few years of secondary
school education.74 During fieldwork about Goddess spirituality in Portu-
gal, Fedele found that, being in her mid-thirties, on several occasions she was
among the eldest participants of the group. Also in Spain, where the cost of
workshops and spiritual meetings is considerably lower than in other coun-
tries such as France or Italy, a significant number of women in their twenties
and also working-class women or women living on social security services
were involved in spirituality.75
Another point where studies of spirituality focusing on gender need
refinement is the almost exclusive focus on the centrality of the ‘self’. As we
have already seen in the previous section of this introduction, the impor-
tance attributed to the self is only one among many elements present in
spirituality and represents more an ‘emic’ concept than one that can be used
from an analytical point of view. Creating exclusively male or female groups
where one can exchange experiences, spiritual practitioners found that they
could talk about emotions and problems related to gender left unaddressed
by religious and lay institutions.76 They felt a sense of solidarity that they
perceived as opposed to same-gender competition in the private sphere (e.g.,
two women struggling to get the attention of the same man) or in their pro-
fessional lives.77
To enhance our comprehension of the importance of gender in contempo-
rary spirituality, more research also needs to be done about male involvement.

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 Introduction 13
In her ethnography about the Burning Man festival in Arizona, Lee Gilmore
found that there are a considerable number of men involved. In the kind of
“dark green spirituality” described by Bron Taylor, men also play an impor-
tant role.78 Men’s spiritual movements, such as that created by Robert Bly,79
have received little attention so far and also other forms of spirituality inher-
ent in male self-help groups such as AA (see Sharp’s contribution in this
volume) should be taken into account.
Contemporary spiritualities attract gays and lesbians because they tend
not to prescribe any sexual orientation. Especially Pagan groups in the
United States seem to be quite open to homosexuals and some of them
openly address issues related to LGBT issues.80 Nevertheless ideas about
gays and lesbians being “spiritually imbalanced” also circulate within cer-
tain networks of spiritual practitioners.81 Among channelers, for instance,
androgyny is perceived as a status fostering transcendence and spiritual
elevation.82 Lesbian or gay Pagan covens also represent an area of research
as yet unexplored.
Summarizing, it seems that gender plays a role in several ways: in the ways
spirituality positions itself as a gender-equal alternative to ‘traditional reli-
gion’, in the ‘healing’ it offers (especially to women) for the wounds inflicted
by an oppressive society, and in the creation of and the experimentation with
new models of femininity and masculinity. The task of scholars as we see it
is not only to analyze these self-descriptions, but also to question how these
projects in turn constitute processes of gender and power that may be differ-
ent from those originally envisaged by practitioners themselves. This brings
us to the second major theme of this volume: power.

POWER

Within the social sciences, in anthropology as well as in sociology and polit-

ical science, the topic of religion and power is not new.83 Yet, although
power is frequently a subject of discussion among people who call them-
selves spiritual, in the ethnographic literature on contemporary spirituality
it is rarely thematized from an analytical point of view. Nevertheless, it is
possible to distinguish two perspectives on power in the ways spirituality is
described and analyzed. On the one hand there is the perspective exempli-
fied by Heelas in his various publications. According to Heelas, the move
from ‘religion’ (relying on external authorities) to ‘spirituality’ (relying on a
‘sacralized self’) is empowering and enables social actors to resist dominat-
ing structures.84 This approach relies on Charles Taylor’s assertion that there
is a “massive subjective turn”85 taking place in present-day societies. ‘Power’
is thematized only in terms of the empowerment that seekers wish to develop
through engaging with New Age/spiritual practices.
Wood has criticized this approach quite forcefully: “scholars slip from
asserting that self-authority is emphasized in New Age discourses to asserting

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 14 Anna Fedele and Kim Knibbe
that the exercise of self authority marks the New Age”.86 In this way the self
and authority are not further analyzed and sociological analyses addressing
the constitution of the self through social contexts and the authority issues
related to this process are ignored. Wood invites researchers to “go back to
fundamental issues of social power and build up a more socially contextual-
ized and plausible theory for understanding the self and authority”.87
Similarly Hammer has pointed out that ‘emic’ self-perceptions of New
Age/spirituality as individualistic and antihierarchical are too simplistic and
need to be elaborated by a sociological, anthropological understanding of
the social nature of New Age. He argues: “a hierarchical organization with a
strong tendency to enforce a certain discourse in a top-down fashion is easily
recognized as such, and can be resisted”. In contrast, “an apparently amor-
phous general opinion, friendly voices that affirm that we should trust our
own experience and accept only what rings true to our own intuition, and
which goes hand in hand with presumably hardwired cognitive processes,
are much less readily identified as loci of external authority”.88
Another body of literature takes the dimension of power as a starting
point for the analysis of spirituality/New Age, departing from a Marxist/
Foucauldian perspective. Authors such as Carrette and King see contem-
porary forms of spirituality as the way in which people are duped by capi-
talism.89 Their joint publication aims to reveal how religion is now being
“sold” as spirituality to benefit “big business”. Their aim is to “explore how
spirituality can be reclaimed [from this corporate high-jack] as a means of
resistance against capitalism and its deceptions”.90 In this view, spiritual
practitioners appear as pawns in the hands of their spiritual teachers, even
while describing themselves as empowered human beings that follow the
whispers of their innermost self. If in the approach exemplified by Heelas
the discourse of spiritual practitioners tends to be overemphasized, it is clear
that in this second approach the ‘emic’ perspective receives little attention
and social actors seem to have no voice.
A middle position is taken up by scholars focusing on spirituality’s
entrance into the workplace. They have paid more attention to the “dark
side” of spirituality.91 In this literature, attention is drawn to workplace
spirituality as a technique of “pastoral power” in the Foucauldian sense,
harnessing people’s spirituality in the interest of the efficacy and productiv-
ity of the organization. We might then ask how these ‘micro-technologies’
of the self offered by contemporary spirituality act outside the workplace.
Do spiritual practices in the leisure spaces create a greater ‘governmentality’
of subjects (as Carrette and King among others seem to suggest)? Or do they
indeed enable people to act in ways that resolve the tensions and contradic-
tions of their individual situations, as suggested by Sointu and Woodhead?92
There is a similar debate on the role of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism:
on the one hand, these overlapping religious networks seem to create a
habitus that fits very well within a neoliberal world order.93 On the other
hand, a paradigm has emerged94 that analyzes the religious vitality of sub-

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 Introduction 15
Sahara Africa within a Marxist approach as a critical response to, or pro-
test against, forces of globalization and capitalist expansion, resulting in a
‘domestication of modernity’.95 Using a Foucauldian approach to develop a
more nuanced perspective, Ruth Marshall shows how the Pentecostal revo-
lution in Nigeria can be interpreted as the ways in which people attempt to
work on and engage with the effects capitalism and globalization are having
on their lives.96 Her analysis shows the importance of paying attention to the
ways that questions are posed and problematics are formulated by people
themselves for understanding the solutions people create.
Similarly, an ethnographic approach can show the ways in which present-
day spiritual practitioners formulate the problematics they encounter, lead-
ing us to an understanding of how the spiritual practices that Carette and
King see as the cynical products of a capitalist market economy become
tools to address these problematics. For many people, these practices can
open up new avenues to come to terms with their everyday lives, contest
previous forms of power and create something new. Whether and to what
extent they succeed is another question, but they need to be taken seriously
and cannot be reduced to passive victims of their social or spiritual milieu.
In this volume we attempt to move beyond the dichotomy of either repro-
ducing the claims of empowerment and gender-equality of spiritual practitio-
ners or ignoring them to ‘unmask’ spirituality as a form of false consciousness.
The ethnographies collected here pay attention both to the agency and self-
understanding of the people involved and the ways in which the field of
spirituality is socially organized and culturally reproduced through embodied
practice. These ethnographies show that institutionalization also occurs in
spirituality and that there are many ways of claiming, maintaining and chal-
lenging authority within these networks. They analyze how both institutional-
ization and authority imply the working of power, whereby certain viewpoints
and practices are excluded and others are sanctioned, and whereby certain
people are silenced and others are heard.
This perspective on power is certainly not new. The social sciences have
long ago moved beyond the perspective that power is only about one person
commanding another person, and instead they have integrated a sociology
of knowledge and a focus on embodiment into their views. Why then has
this perspective not yet been applied systematically within the ethnographic
study of contemporary spirituality? One could speculate about the reasons
for this. A likely cause is that social scientists doing research on spiritual-
ity are often quite close to their ‘informants’ in terms of age, gender and
social status. This makes processes of power and gender harder to identify.97
Other reasons have to do with the object of research: usually, people who
call themselves spiritual are quite reflexive. They are aware of the issues
related to power that are inevitably going on, providing the researcher with
ready-made perspectives on these matters.98 In some circles, academic work
and spirituality are entangled, and in many ways, academic work has given
rise to religious innovation. Finally, the fact that ‘spirituality’ appears as

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 16 Anna Fedele and Kim Knibbe
a privatized, individual form of religion emphasizing personal choice and
freedom makes it harder to discern how and in which ways power structures
play a role.
As the contributors to this volume and also other social scientists show,
spiritual practitioners use popularized versions of theories to justify them-
selves, explain their choices and oppose those who criticize them. The quote
with which Trulsson opens her chapter in this volume provides a clear exam-
ple of the self-reflexive and self-justifying processes going on within spiritu-
ality: “I hope we are not creating a religion”, her informant says, “all known
religions have been patriarchal”. Spiritual practitioners are voracious read-
ers and they integrate social, psychological and cultural theories into their
discourse, attempting thereby to limit the ‘polluting’ effect of power on their
spiritual practice and to justify the presence of those power structures or
relationships that are inevitably present within their spiritual groups. They
emphasize authenticity and individuality, and contrast this quite explicitly
with the social conformity and hierarchy they see as characteristic for ‘reli-
gion’. This reflexivity is particularly explicit in groups with a clear Pagan
component (see Hegner’s, Fedele’s and Trulsson’s contributions in this vol-
ume). It makes it all the more interesting to study how power and authority
still work, despite this reflexivity. This characteristic makes it necessary to
take into account how people themselves recognize, criticize and try to act
on power structures, inequalities and gender roles.99 Doing ethnographies
in contemporary societies, one can no longer assume that the ethnographer
is the only one who commands the analytical tools to unravel the power
dynamics that remain hidden to social actors.

ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACHES TO GENDER AND POWER

Gender, power, religion and spirituality are all troubled categories in constant
change and it is difficult to determine where one ends and the other begins.
The contributors to this volume develop practice-oriented approaches to
different forms of spirituality, relating them to the local and/or transna-
tional contexts where they are enacted. They are young scholars from dif-
ferent countries ranging from Greece, Germany and Sweden to Israel and
the United States.
The opening chapter by Åsa Trulsson offers a good introduction into the
fluid universe of contemporary spirituality and its criticism of the concept
of religion. The “Goddess-oriented groups” the author describes are part of
a transnational movement that cannot simply be categorized as New Age,
Pagan or Goddess spirituality. Trulsson focuses on the processes of ritualiza-
tion and concludes that from this perspective the opposition between reli-
gion and spirituality seems to dissolve. Like other scholars Trulsson points
towards elements of continuity rather than rupture between spirituality and
vernacular religion.100 She maintains that a focus on ritual reveals that “[p]ower

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 Introduction 17
and authority do not reside in adherence to the vision or interpretation of
someone else but concerns the creation of a ritualized body with a certain
competence, sense of the sacred and mode of embodying gender”.
Whereas Trulsson’s women openly criticize established religions and self-
consciously analyze their ways of challenging concepts of gender and power
in contemporary society, the Greek women described by Eugenia Roussou
do not perceive themselves as being outside the Orthodox religion that is
prevalent and almost omnipresent in their country. Roussou situates the
spiritual practices of her informants within the local context of Greece, and
her description shows how the analysis of contemporary spirituality can
be accurate only if it takes into account the local specificities of the culture
in which it manifests (see also Cornejo in this volume). The author skill-
fully relates Greek spiritual practices with traditional forms of evil-eye cures
and describes how Greek women have been challenging the Orthodox male
authority of the priests from within throughout the centuries. Spiritual prac-
tices such as Reiki or feng shui offer them new ways to continue this process
and allow their gendered challenges to be more visible in the social sphere.
Monica Cornejo’s chapter refers to another European context where one
form of Christian religion has prevailed throughout the centuries and there
has been (and still is) a connection between the State and the Church. The
author analyzes the Spanish Soka Gakkai movement and situates it within
the cultural and religious context of Spain, where religious divergence from
Catholic religion has been stigmatized, leading towards a sort of phobia
of sects that has only recently given way to a shared discourse of religious
tolerance. She shows that while spiritual seekers who decide to ‘convert’
and become members of Soka Gakkai share a distaste of organized religion,
they paradoxically find spiritual empowerment within the constraints of this
hierarchical organization. This means that the distinction between ‘collectiv-
ist’ religion and ‘individualist’ spirituality dissolves on an analytical level.
Through concrete life-stories she shows that the development of an inner-
oriented ‘spirituality’ is not a process of individualistic syncretistic bricolage,
as has often been suggested, but constitutes a religious discipline that has to
be learned within a context of authoritative texts and practices.
Focusing like Cornejo on the tension between individualism and commu-
nitarian constraints, Viola Teisenhoffer analyzes the processes of submission
and empowerment among Umbanda practitioners in Paris. She describes a
“New Age version of Umbanda” and observes how forms of submission
are most clearly visible in the ritual context. Teisenhoffer offers a detailed
description of the negotiations of power and authority and concludes that
social scientists focusing on contemporary spirituality need to take into
account the “co-presence of authority and its discursive negation” if they
want to avoid reductive analyses.
In her analysis of images of the Black Madonna, Anna Fedele highlights
the oppositions used by spiritual practitioners in describing the opposition
between their own spiritual practices and the ‘traditional’ religious context,

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 18 Anna Fedele and Kim Knibbe
characterized by the patriarchy and misogyny that they are trying to escape.
Gender and power are key themes in the critique of the religious past devel-
oped through the veneration of the Black Madonna. This veneration allows
women and men to develop new ways of expressing themselves in relation to
these themes. While these spiritual practitioners emphasize rupture, Fedele
also shows that the ways in which these pilgrims find empowerment through
their veneration of the Black Madonna have many continuities with the
vernacular tradition of Marian worship in other times.
Ehler Voss discusses the way in which mediumistic healers in Germany
try to redefine science, freedom and gender to justify their contact with spir-
its and gain charisma. Instead of rejecting the scientific hegemonic model
that dismisses their spiritual experiences, they say that their own approach
is scientific. Voss argues that mediumistic healers present themselves as a
minority that does not accept hegemonic ideas but often end up accepting
the norms prevailing in their society.
Also the Jewish Spiritual Renewal community described by Rachel Werc-
zberger aims to subvert or at least to transform certain hegemonic concepts
about gender and sexuality in contemporary Israel. The author analyzes the
rise and fall of a charismatic spiritual leader of the community in Tel Aviv
who used ideas about sacred femininity and sexuality derived from feminist
spirituality to reinterpret Jewish figures such as the Shekinah. Analyzing the
community’s veneration of Rabbi David and the subsequent reactions to
the discovery of the rabbi’s sexual transgressions, Werczberger shows which
role different types of authority and their interaction played in this chain of
events.
Continuing this examination of the role of leadership, Victoria Hegner
discusses the way in which the leader of a spiritual group constructs and
manages her authority over a group of feminist witches in Berlin, competing
with other religious groups. She analyzes in detail how the German women
both accept and challenge the leader’s authority and describes their practices
referring to Wood’s concept of non-formativeness.101 She shows furthermore
that the context of the city plays a decisive role in the shaping of the author-
ity of the group leader. The Pagan witches with whom she did her research
ultimately look to find a balance between authority from ‘within the self’
and authorities ‘outside the self’.
Taking up a comparative approach, Inês Lourenço confronts the role of
women in the Gujarati Hindu diaspora in Portugal with that of their Portu-
guese counterparts in the Brahma Kumaris movement, a new religious move-
ment of Indian origins. From her comparison it becomes apparent that there
are many elements of continuity between the Brahma Kumaris practitioners
on the one hand and established ‘religion’ such as Hinduism on the other
hand. In both cases motherhood (considered both in physical and in spiritual
terms) and service emerge as key concepts in the forging of female religious
experiences. In both cases women accept certain gender stereotypes but also
creatively appropriate them in order to justify their spiritual charisma.

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 Introduction 19
In her contribution on so-called ‘spiritual societies’ in the Netherlands, Kim
Knibbe shows how spiritual practitioners attempt to create a group that is
free from hierarchies, dogma and gender-inequality. Especially power and the
abuse of power are frequent topics of discussion among these spiritual practi-
tioners. However, through the ethnography it becomes clear that hierarchies,
gendering and a certain kind of dogma are certainly present, although this
does not fit with the self-perception of the group members. She identifies sev-
eral processes through which power and gender are constituted as well as the
mechanisms that simultaneously obscure and control these processes.
The final chapter of this collection is an exploration of Mexican men’s
search for spirituality in a rehabilitation center in Monterrey. Ethan Sharp
suggests that the kind of spirituality that is promoted through the twelve-
step program in the center tends to reinforce rather than challenge existing
models of masculinity related with the Mexican stereotype of the macho.
Sharp offers a first approach to a kind of spirituality that has received little
attention so far and seems to contradict common assumptions about the role
of spirituality in the process of challenging gender stereotypes.
With this volume we did not aim to prepare a complete overview of
the issues of gender and power in contemporary spirituality but wanted to
tackle existing discourses about spirituality from an ethnographical perspec-
tive. We offer some first steps and hope that others will go further in explor-
ing aspects we left unaddressed, particularly with ethnographies referring
to Latin American countries such as Mexico,102 Argentina103 or Brazil104 or
about Australia,105 New Zealand,106 South Africa107 and Japan,108 where
spirituality is quickly expanding.
From the contributions it becomes apparent that ‘emic’ discourses on gen-
der and power can and should not be taken for granted and that what might
appear as new or revolutionary at first glance can often be seen also from a
perspective of continuity rather than only from one of rupture. Although we
contest the absolute novelty of the approaches in contemporary spirituality,
we do not want to say that it does not have new and interesting elements or
that it does not challenge aspects of the social and religious order of the soci-
ety where it manifests itself. The spiritual actors we describe are neither pas-
sive victims of the neoliberal society nor religious heroes bringing about a
spiritual revolution. As anthropologists, fieldwork gives us privileged access
to people’s religious lives and their complexity precludes simplifications or
reductionist dichotomies.
Although we have encouraged all authors to develop an analytical
approach to gender and power rather than follow the discourse on gender
and power of the spiritual practitioners among whom they did their field-
work, this does not mean that we advocate a strict ‘emic’/‘etic’ division. As
pointed out earlier in this chapter, the field described here is strongly influ-
enced by, and even constituted through, academic discourses. Nevertheless,
as we hope these contributions will show, an emphasis on ‘what people do’
rather than on ‘what people say’ in combination with the analytical tools of

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 20 Anna Fedele and Kim Knibbe
our trade reveals new perspectives on gender and power. The ethnographies
presented here show how people reflexively grapple with the same issues
that we, as scholars, try to unravel in the pages of this book, and it may
even be that the reflections offered here will become part of the reflections
of ‘the field’ described.

NOTES

1. Described in many publications, e.g., Kieran Flanagan and Peter C. Jupp, A

Sociology of Spirituality (Surrey: Ashgate, 2007); Andrew Dawson, “Con-
suming the Self: New Spirituality as ‘Mystified Consumption’”, Social
Compass 58, no. 3 (2011): 309–315; B. J. Zinnbauer et al., “Religion
and Spirituality: Unfuzzying the Fuzzy”, Journal for the Scientific Study
of Religion 36, no. 4 (December 1997): 549–564; Yuk-Lin Renita Wong
and Jana Vinsky, “Speaking from the Margins: A Critical Reflection on the
‘Spiritual-but-Not-Religious’ Discourse in Social Work”, British Journal of
Social Work 39, no. 7 (October 2009): 1343–1359; Courtney Bender, The
New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Gordon Lynch, The New
Spirituality: An Introduction to Progressive Belief in the Twenty-First Cen-
tury (London: I. B.Tauris, 2007); Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, The
Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality (Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2005); R. C. Fuller, “Unchurched Spirituality”, Spiritual,
but Not Religious 1, no. 7 (2001): 1–13; Sarah Pike, New Age and Neopa-
gan Religions in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
2. Some examples include Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement: The Celebra-
tion of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell,
1996); Heelas and Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution; Eeva Sointu and
Linda Woodhead, “Spirituality, Gender, and Expressive Selfhood”, Journal
for the Scientific Study of Religion 47, no. 2 (June 2008): 259–276; Steven
Sutcliffe, “Category Formation and the History of ‘New Age’”, Culture and
Religion 4, no. 1 (2003): 5–29; Michael York, The Emerging Network: A
Sociology of the New Age and Neo-pagan Movements (Lanham: Rowman &
Littlefield, 1995); Ruth Prince and David Riches, The New Age in Glaston-
bury: The Construction of Religious Movements (Oxford: Berghahn Books,
2000); Marion Bowman and Steven Sutcliffe, eds., Beyond New Age: Explor-
ing Alternative Spirituality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000);
Jennifer Blain, Nine Worlds of Seid-Magic: Ecstasy and Neo-shamanism in
North European Paganism (London: Routledge, 2002); Robert J. Wallis, Sha-
mans/Neo-shamans: Ecstasy, Alternative Archaeologies, and Contemporary
Pagans (London: Routledge, 2003); Graham Harvey, Listening People, Speak-
ing Earth: Contemporary Paganism (London: C. Hurst, 1997); Chas Clifton
and Graham Harvey, eds., The Paganism Reader (London: Routledge, 2004);
J. G. Melton, J. Clark and A. A. Kelly, eds., New Age Encyclopedia: A Guide
to the Beliefs, Concepts, Terms, People, and Organizations That Make Up the
New Global Movement toward Spiritual Development, Health and Healing,
Higher Consciousness, and Related Subjects (Detroit: Gale Cengage, 1990).
3. Bender, The New Metaphysicals.
4. Anna Fedele, Looking for Mary Magdalene: Alternative Pilgrimage and
Ritual Creativity at Catholic Shrines in France (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012).

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 Introduction 21
5. Kim E. Knibbe, Faith in the Familiar (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Kim Esther
Knibbe and Iti Westra, “Van Ongeloof Naar ‘zeker Weten’: Betekenisgev-
ing En Legitimatie in De Context Van Het Fenomeen Jomanda”, Sociale
Wetenschappen 46, no. 2 (2003): 75–93.
6. Bender, The New Metaphysicals; Meredith B. McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith
and Practice in Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
7. Among others: Dick Houtman and Stef Aupers, “The Spiritual Turn and the
Decline of Tradition: The Spread of Post-Christian Spirituality in 14 West-
ern Countries, 1981–2000”, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 46,
no. 3 (September 2007): 305–320.
8. Heelas and Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution; Peter Berger, Grace Davie
and Effie Fokas, Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Varia-
tions (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
9. Stef Aupers and Dick Houtman, Religions of Modernity: Relocating the
Sacred to the Self and the Digital (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Houtman and
Aupers, “The Spiritual Turn and the Decline of Tradition”.
10. All quotes from Pamela Edith Klassen, Blessed Events: Religion and Home
Birth in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 4.
11. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Palo
Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003).
12. Peter Van der Veer, “Spirituality in Modern Society”, Social Research: An
International Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2009): 1097–1120.
13. Ibid., 1097.
14. Bowman and Sutcliffe, Beyond New Age; see also Fedele and Trulsson in
this volume.
15. Michael Lambek, Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of
Islam, Sorcery and Spirit Possession, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1993); Jill Dubisch, In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics at
a Greek Island Shrine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Anna-
Karina Hermkens, Willy Jansen and Catrien Notermans, Moved by Mary:
The Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009);
Elisabeth Claverie, Les Guerres De La Vierge: Une Anthropologie Des
Apparitions (Paris: Gallimard, 2003); William A. Christian Jr., Divine Pres-
ence in Spain and Western Europe 1500–1960: Visions, Religious Images
and Photographs (Budapest: Central European Press, 2012).
16. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Signifi-
cance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1987); Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays
on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone
Books, 1991); William A. Christian Jr., Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century
Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Mary Lee Nolan and
Sydney Nolan, Christian Pilgrimage in Modern Western Europe (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).
17. E.g., Danièle Hervieu-Léger, “Secularization, Tradition and New Forms of
Religiosity: Some Theoretical Proposals”, in New Religions and New Religi-
osity, ed. Eileen Barker and Margit Warburg (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press,
1998), 28–44; Françoise Champion, “La Religion à l’épreuve des Nouveaux
Mouvements Religieux”, Ethnologie Française 30, no. 4 (2000): 525–533;
Champion, “La ‘Nébuleuse Mystique-ésotérique’: une Décomposition du
Religieux Entre Humanisme Revisité, Magique, Psychologique”, in Le Défi
Magique: Esotérisme, Occultisme, Spiritisme, ed. Jean-Baptiste Martin and
François Laplantine (Lyon: P.U.L., 1994), 315–326; Champion, “À Propos des
Nouveaux Courants Mystiques et Ésotériques”, in Sortie des Religions/Retour
du Religieux, ed. Françoise Champion (Lille: l’Astragale, 1992), 149–169.

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 22 Anna Fedele and Kim Knibbe
18. E.g., Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community
in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002);
Eric R. Wolf, “The Virgin of Guadalupe: A Mexican National Symbol”,
The Journal of American Folklore 71, no. 279 (1958): 34–39; Christian,
Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain.
19. Bowman and Sutcliffe, Beyond New Age; Fedele, Looking for Mary Mag-
dalene.
20. Pike, “Gender in New Religions”, 212.
21. E.g., Lila Abu-Lughod, Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998); R. Marie Griffith, God’s Daughters:
Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997); Elizabeth E. Brusco, The Reformation of Machismo:
Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1995).
22. Janet L. Jacobs, “Abuse in New Religious Movements: Challenges for the
Sociology of Religion”, in Teaching New Religious Movements, ed. David
G. Bromley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); see also Jacobs,
“Gender and Power in New Religious Movements”, Religion 21, no. 4
(1991): 345–356.
23. Catherine L. Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian
Indians to the New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Ann
Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining
Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1999).
24. E.g., Olav Hammer, Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from
Theosophy to the New Age (Leiden: Brill, 2004); W. J. Hanegraaff, “New
Age Religion”, in Religions in the Modern World: Traditions and Trans-
formations, ed. Linda Woodhead et al. (London: Routledge, 2002): 249;
Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the
Mirror of Secular Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1996); Kocku von Stuckrad, West-
ern Esotericism: A Brief History of Secret Knowledge (translation of Was
Ist Esoterik? Kleine Geschichte Des Geheimen Wissens) (London: Equinox,
2005); Kocku von Stuckrad, Locations of Knowledge in Medieval and Early
Modern Europe: Esoteric Discourse and Western Identities (Leiden: Brill,
2010).
25. von Stuckrad, Locations of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern
Europe.
26. Ulrike Popp-Baier, “From Religion to Spirituality—Megatrend in Contempo-
rary Society or Methodological Artefact? A Contribution to the Seculariza-
tion Debate from Psychology of Religion”, Journal of Religion in Europe 3
(April 2010): 34–67.
27. Ibid., 62.
28. Fedele in this volume and Fedele, Looking for Mary Magdalene. However,
Lourenço shows in this volume that a similar distinction between ‘religion’
and ‘spirituality’ is constructed by the Brahma Kumaris movement in rela-
tion to Hindu traditionalism, especially concerning the role of women as
servants.
29. Catherine M. Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997); Ronald L. Grimes, Deeply into the Bone: Re-
inventing Rites of Passage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
30. E.g., Eileen Barker, New Religious Movements: A Perspective for Under-
standing Society (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1982); Eileen Barker “New
Religious Movements: Their Incidence and Significance,” in New Religious
Movements: Challenge and Response, ed. Bryan Wilson and Jamie Cresswell

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 Introduction 23
(London: Routledge, 1999), 15–32; Eileen Barker,“New Religious Move-
ments,” in The International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sci-
ences, ed. Neil J. Smelser, Paul B. Baltes, and David L. Sills (Amsterdam:
Elsevier Science, Pergamon, 2001), vol. 1, 10631–10634; Elisabeth Puttick,
Women in New Religious Movements: In Search of Community, Sexuality
and Spiritual Power (Hampshire: Macmillan, 1997).
31. E.g., Heelas, The New Age Movement; York, The Emerging Network;
Hanegraaff, “New Age Religion”; Hammer, Claiming Knowledge; Hane-
graaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture.
32. Houtman and Aupers, “The Spiritual Turn and the Decline of Tradition”;
Flanagan and Jupp, A Sociology of Spirituality; Dawson, “Consuming the
Self”; Zinnbauer et al., “Religion and Spirituality”; Wong and Vinsky,
“Speaking from the Margins”; Bender, The New Metaphysicals.
33. Deana Weibel, Kidnapping the Virgin: The Reinterpretation of a Roman
Catholic Shrine by Religious Creatives (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2001); Weibel, “Of Consciousness Changes and Fortified Faith: Cre-
ativist and Catholic Pilgrimage at French Catholic Shrines”, in Pilgrimage
and Healing, eds. Jill Dubisch and Michael Winkelman (Tucson: University
of Arizona Press, 2005), 111–134; Sarah M. Pike, Earthly Bodies, Magical
Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001); Fedele, Looking for Mary Magdalene.
34. But see Steven Sutcliffe, “Category Formation and the History of ‘New
Age’”, Culture and Religion 4, no. 1 (2003): 5–29 for a critique of this
assumption.
35. Fedele, Looking for Mary Magdalene; Bender, The New Metaphysicals.
36. Matthew Wood, Possession, Power, and the New Age: Ambiguities of
Authority in Neoliberal Societies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 7.
37. Bowman and Sutcliffe, Beyond New Age.
38. Ibid.
39. See the 1999 special issue of Social Compass on New Age, esp. Susumu
Shimazono, “‘New Age Movement’ or ‘New Spirituality Movements and
Culture’?”, Social Compass 46, no. 2 (June 1999): 121–133; Hildegard Van
Hove, “Introduction”, Social Compass 46, no. 2 (June 1999): 115–119.
40. Pike, Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves.
41. Anna Fedele, “From Christian Religion to Feminist Spirituality. Mary Mag-
dalene Pilgrimages to La Sainte-Baume, France”, Culture and Religion 10,
no. 3 (2009): 243–61; Anna Fedele, “Gender, Sexuality and Religious Cri-
tique among Mary Magdalene Pilgrims in Southern France”, in Gender,
Nation and Religion in European Pilgrimage, ed. Willy Jansen and Catrien
Notermans (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 55–70; Knibbe, “Faith in the Famil-
iar”; Knibbe and Westra, “Van Ongeloof naar ‘Zeker Weten’: Betekenisgev-
ing en Legitimatie in de Context van het Fenomeen Jomanda”; Kim Knibbe,
“An Ethnography of a Medium and her Followers: How Learning Takes
Place in the Context of Jomanda,” in Meister und Schüler in Geschichte
und Gegenwart: Von Religionen der Antike bis zur Modernen Esoterik, ed.
Almut Barbara Renger (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2012), 383–398.
42. See, e.g., Puttick, Women in New Religious Movements.
43. Ibid.; S. M. Pike, “Gender in New Religions”, in Teaching New Religious
Movements, ed. David G. Bromley (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), 211; Elisabeth Puttick, “Women in New Religious Movements”,
in Teaching New Religious Movements, ed. David G. Bromley (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007).
44. Although there are also hierarchical Pagan movements, such as Gardnerian
Wicca.

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 24 Anna Fedele and Kim Knibbe
45. Puttick, “Women in New Religious Movements”; Pike, Earthly Bodies,
Magical Selves.
46. See also Susan Starr Sered, Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister: Religions Domi-
nated by Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
47. Cynthia Eller, Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality
Movement in America (New York: Crossroad, 1993); Sabina Magliocco,
Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-paganism in America (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Pike, Earthly Bodies, Magical
Selves; Tanya M. Luhrmann, “The Ugly Goddess: Reflections on the Role
of Violent Images in Religious Experience”, History of Religion 41, no. 2
(November 2001): 114–141; Susan Greenwood, Magic, Witchcraft and
the Otherworld: An Anthropology (Oxford: Berg, 2000); N. Bado-Fralick,
Coming to the Edge of the Circle: A Wiccan Initiation Ritual (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005); Åsa Trulsson. Cultivating the Sacred:
Ritual Creativity and Practice among Women in Contemporary Europe,
Lund Studies in the History of Religions 28 (Lund: Lund University, 2010);
Helen A. Berger, A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-paganism
and Witchcraft in the United States (Colombia: University of South Caro-
lina Press, 1999); Loretta Orion, Never Again the Burning Times: Paganism
Revived (Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 1995).
48. Gillian Clark, Women in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian Life-Styles
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
49. E.g., Ean Begg, The Cult of the Black Virgin (London: Penguin Books
Arkana, 1985). See also the representations created in the popular book by
Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (New York: Pocket Star Books, 2003).
50. Anna Fedele and Ruy Llera Blanes, Encounters of Body and Soul in Contem-
porary Religious Practices: Anthropological Reflections (Oxford: Berghahn
Books, 2011).
51. Michael F. Brown, The Channeling Zone: American Spirituality in an Anx-
ious Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 48.
52. Ibid., 114; Eller, Living in the Lap of the Goddess.
53. Brown, The Channeling Zone, 96; Eller, Living in the Lap of the Goddess;
Fedele, Looking for Mary Magdalene.
54. Brown, The Channeling Zone, 97; Fedele, Looking for Mary Magdalene.
55. Brown, The Channeling Zone; Fedele, Looking for Mary Magdalene; Rob-
ert A. Segal, “Jung’s Psychologising of Religion”, in Beyond New Age:
Exploring Alternative Spirituality, eds. Marion Bowman and Steven Sut-
cliffe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, n.d.), 65–79.
56. Eller, Living in the Lap of the Goddess; Pike, Earthly Bodies, Magical
Selves; Fedele, Looking for Mary Magdalene.
57. Sointu and Woodhead, “Spirituality, Gender, and Expressive Selfhood”.
58. Among others, Jone Salomonsen, Enchanted Feminism: Ritual, Gender and
Divinity among the Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco (London: Rout-
ledge, 2002); Fedele, Looking for Mary Magdalene.
59. Salomonsen, Enchanted Feminism; Pike, Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves;
Trulsson, Cultivating the Sacred and in this volume; Fedele, Looking for
Mary Magdalene.
60. Eller, Living in the Lap of the Goddess; Pike, Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves.
61. B. G. Walker, Feminist Fairy Tales (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1996).
For an example of female empowering stories and myths, see Clarissa
Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths & Stories about
the Wild Woman Archetype (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995).
62. Sointu and Woodhead, “Spirituality, Gender, and Expressive Selfhood”.
63. Ibid., 238.

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 Introduction 25
64. Luhrmann, “The Ugly Goddess: Reflections on the Role of Violent Images
in Religious Experience”.
65. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes
from Home and Work (University of California Press, 2003); Sointu and
Woodhead, “Spirituality, Gender, and Expressive Selfhood”; Woodhead,
“Gendering Secularization Theory”, Social Compass 55, no. 2 (June 2008):
187–193.
66. Luhrmann, “The Ugly Goddess: Reflections on the Role of Violent Images
in Religious Experience”, 130.
67. Luhrmann, “The Ugly Goddess: Reflections on the Role of Violent Images
in Religious Experience”; Marika Moisseeff, “Une Figure de l’altérité chez le
Dencticio ou La Maternité comme Puissance Maléfique”, in En Substances:
Textes pour Françoise Héritier, eds. J. L. Lamard et al. (Paris: Librairie
Artème Fayard, n.d.), 471–489; Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Second Shift:
Working Parents and the Revolution at Home (New York: Viking, 1989);
Sointu and Woodhead, “Spirituality, Gender, and Expressive Selfhood”. See
also Knibbe in this volume.
68. Salomonsen, Enchanted Feminism; Fedele, Looking for Mary Magdalene;
see also Fedele, Hegner and Trulsson in this volume.
69. Christopher Lasch, The Culture Of Narcissism: American Life in an Age Of
Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978); Richard Sen-
net, “Narcissism and Modern Culture,” October 4 (1977): 70–79; Robert
Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1985).
70. Sointu and Woodhead, “Spirituality, Gender, and Expressive Selfhood”,
272.
71. Ibid., 273. But see Knibbe in this volume for an example of how this ethic
can also be disempowering.
72. Dick Houtman and Peter Mascini, “Why Do Churches Become Empty,
While New Age Grows? Secularization and Religious Change in the Neth-
erlands”, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41, no. 3 (September
2002): 455–473.
73. Kathryn Rountree, Crafting Contemporary Pagan Identities in a Catholic
Society (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010); Hanna E. Johnston and Peg Aloi, The
New Generation Witches: Teenage Witchcraft in Contemporary Culture
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
74. Knibbe, “An Ethnography of a Medium and Her Followers”; Knibbe and
Westra, “Van Ongeloof Naar ‘zeker Weten’”; Knibbe, “Faith in the Familiar”.
75. Fedele, Looking for Mary Magdalene.
76. Salomonsen, Enchanted Feminism; Bender, The New Metaphysicals.
77. Fedele, Looking for Mary Magdalene.
78. Lee Gilmore, Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burn-
ing Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Bron Raymond
Taylor, Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
79. Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo
Press, 2004).
80. Pike, Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves.
81. E.g., Michael F. Brown, The Channeling Zone, 103; see also Pike, Earthly
Bodies, Magical Selves.
82. Brown, The Channeling Zone, 93–114.
83. For example, an authoritative reader on the anthropology of religion such
as Michael Lambek, A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion (Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2002) contains numerous references to power.

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 26 Anna Fedele and Kim Knibbe
84. Cf. the “spiritual revolution” thesis by Heelas and Woodhead, The Spiritual
Revolution.
85. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (London: Harvard University
Press, 1991).
86. Matthew Wood, Possession, Power and the New Age: Ambiguities of Author-
ity in Neoliberal Societies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 38; Wood, “W(h)ither
New Age Studies? The Uses of Ethnography in a Contested Field of Scholar-
ship”, Religion and Society: Advances in Research 1, no. 1 (2010): 76–88.
87. Wood, Possession, Power and the New Age, 38.
88. Olav Hammer, “I Did It My Way? Individual Choice and Social Conformity
in New Age Religion”, in Religions of Modernity: Relocating the Sacred to
the Self and the Digital (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 66.
89. Jeremy R. Carrette and Richard King, Selling Spirituality: The Silent Take-
over of Religion (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2005).
90. See blurb on the publisher’s website: http://www.routledge.com/books/
details/9780415302098/, accessed April 2, 2012.
91. Marjolein Lips-Wiersma, Kathy Lund Dean and Charles J. Fornaciari, “The-
orizing the Dark Side of the Workplace Spirituality Movement”, Journal
of Management Inquiry 18, no. 4 (December 2009): 288–300; Emma Bell
and Scott Taylor, “The Elevation of Work: Pastoral Power and the New Age
Work Ethic”, Organization 10, no. 2 (May 2003): 329–349; Dennis Tourish
and Naheed Tourish, “Spirituality at Work, and Its Implications for Leader-
ship and Followership: A Post-Structuralist Perspective”, Leadership 6, no. 2
(May 2010): 207–224.
92. Sointu and Woodhead, “Spirituality, Gender, and Expressive Selfhood”.
93. E. J. Pfeiffer, K. Gimbel-Sherr and O. J. Augusto, “The Holy Spirit in the
Household: Pentecostalism, Gender, and Neoliberalism in Mozambique”,
American Anthropologist 109, no. 4 (2007): 688–700; R. Hoksbergen and
N. E. Madrid, “The Evangelical Church and the Development of Neolib-
eral Society: A Study of the Role of the Evangelical Church and Its NGOs
in Guatemala and Honduras”, The Journal of Developing Areas 32, no. 1
(1997): 37–52; B. Martin, “New Mutations of the Protestant Ethic among
Latin American Pentecostals”, Religion 25, no. 2 (1995): 101–117.
94. E.g., Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, “Occult Economies and the
Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony”, Ameri-
can Ethnologist 26, no. 2 (May 1999): 279–303; J. L. Comaroff, Of Revela-
tion and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South
Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
95. See, for a discussion of this paradigm, Van Dijk in Travelling Spirits:
Migrants, Market and Mobilities, ed. Gertrud Hüwelmeier and Kristine
Krause, Routledge Studies in Anthropology, vol. 4 (New York: Routledge,
2009), chap. 6; Ruth Marshall, Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Rev-
olution in Nigeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), chap. 1.
96. See Marshall, Political Spiritualities, especially chapter 1.
97. Wood, Possession, Power and the New Age; Brown, The Channeling Zone.
98. See especially the influential book by Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark: Magic,
Sex & Politics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988).
99. This follows the direction indicated by Luc Boltanski, Laurent Thévenot
and other followers of the French pragmatic sociology: Luc Boltanski and
Laurent Thévenot, “The Sociology of Critical Capacity”, European Journal
of Social Theory 2, no. 3 (1999): 359–377; Boltanski, “Sociologie Critique
et Sociologie De La Critique”, Politix. Revue Des Sciences Sociales Du Poli-
tique, 1990, 10–11; Boltanski, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation
(Cambridge: Polity, 2011).

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 Introduction 27
100. Marion Bowman and Steven Sutcliffe, eds., Beyond New Age: Exploring
Alternative Spirituality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000);
Meredith B. McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Fedele in this volume.
101. Wood, Possession, Power, and the New Age.
102. Elio Masferrer Kan, ed., Sectas o iglesias: Viejos o nuevos movimientos
religiosos (Mexico D.F.: Plaza y Valdés, 1998).
103. M. J. Carozzi, Nueva Era y Terapias Alternativa (Buenos Aires: Ediciones
de la Universidad Católica Argentina, 2000).
104. Sonia Weidner Maluf, Les enfants du Verseau au pays des terreiros: les
cultures thérapeutiques et spirituelles alternatives au Sud du Brésil (Ville-
neuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1998); Weidner Maluf,
“Des mythes collectifs et des récits personnels : guérison rituelle, travail
thérapeutique et émergence du sujet dans les cultures du Nouvel Âge”,
Ethnographiques 14 (2007), http://www.ethnographiques.org/2007/Maluf
(accessed September 2, 2012).
105. Lynne Hume, Witchcraft and Paganism in Australia (Melbourne: Mel-
bourne University Press, 1997).
106. Kathryn Rountree, Embracing the Witch and the Goddess: Feminist Ritual-
Makers in New Zealand (London: Routledge, 2003).
107. Andrew Spiegel en Silke Sponheuer, “Transforming Musical Soul into
Bodily Practice: Tone Eurythmy, Anthroposophy and Underlying Struc-
tures”, in Encounters of Body and Soul in Contemporary Religious Prac-
tices: Anthropological Reflections, ed. Anna Fedele and Ruy Llera Blanes
(Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011), 179–202.
108. Susumu Shimazono, “‘New Age Movement’ or ‘New Spirituality Move-
ments and Culture’?”, Social Compass 46, no. 2 (June 1999): 121–133.

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 1 Cultivating the Sacred
Gender, Power and Ritualization
in Goddess-Oriented Groups
Åsa Trulsson

“I hope we are not creating a religion”, Kathysays.1 “All known religions

have been patriarchal”. In Kathy’s perception, a gathering of Goddess-
inspired individuals would be a preferred model for the growing spiritual
community around Glastonbury, her hometown and the locus for her cre-
ative vision. Each summer, she co-hosts a large festival called the Glaston-
bury Goddess Conference, where hundreds of women and men gather to
celebrate the Goddess through artwork, discussions, workshops and, above
all, ceremony. Moreover, Kathy is the author of several well-read books
on the Goddess, a workshop organizer and a healer. She is also a key fig-
ure in establishing what might be called a Glastonbury Goddess tradition,
which consists of eight consecutive seasonal celebrations and a particular
ritual structure to establish sacred space. The Goddess community recently
opened a dedicated place of worship and activities are expanding to include
a so-called women’s moon lodge, different workshops and regular healing
ceremonies. Except for the Goddess Conference, the three-year-long training
of priests and priestesses of Avalon is probably the most well-known fea-
ture of the Glastonbury Goddess tradition. Kathy is its founder and teacher
and further reserves the right to choose intuitively who may best benefit
from taking part in the training. According to Kathy, the priestess train-
ing is a path of devotion and dedicated practice. At the heart is learning to
create ceremony, which Kathy defines as a space for the divine to manifest
and interact. Creating such a space, Kathy claims, is not about following
prescribed rules or manipulating certain symbols, but a craft that has to be
learned in practice—especially if the ceremony involves other people. One
has to be trained properly.
The following pages concern interaction in Goddess-oriented groups and
highlight negotiations of gender, power and authority through the lens of
ritual or, more precisely, ritualized practice. The women participating in
these groups regularly adhere to an egalitarian and feminist ethos and they
shun the label religion, which they associate with hierarchy, patriarchy and
domination. However, with regards to power and authority, only a brief
encounter with the fields in question paints a more complex picture. In fact,
there are several authorities at work. Kathy, for instance, is known to be

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 Cultivating the Sacred 29
an authority of the Goddess; she is the long-term teacher of hundreds of
people, and she has even encoded several of the practices that constitute
the core of the priestess training, the Goddess Conference and the Goddess
Temple. Hence, a more critical examination of the women’s discourse on the
distinction between what they regard as patriarchal religion and their own
spirituality is called for.
According to sociologist Matthew Wood, such an assessment is exactly
what has been lacking in academic studies of contemporary spirituality. As
noted by Wood, research about contemporary spirituality, whether termed
New Age spirituality, subjective spirituality, paganism, Goddess-worship
or anything else, makes limited use of ethnographic material, but instead
focuses either on written media or the discourses of the participants. The
consequence has been the adoption of different folk-models, among which
the concept of self-spirituality as the guiding principle for contemporary
spirituality has been particularly authoritative.2 The observation corre-
sponds to the central question posed in this volume: could the scholarly the-
sis on internal authority, the sacralization of self or subjective turn merely be
a reproduction of the internal discourses of contemporary spirituality, thus
leaving power and authority unexamined? Another consequence is that reli-
gious practice, including rituals, is under-communicated and at worst disre-
garded.3 From a scholarly perspective, ritual action has long been associated
with the constitution and negotiation of power and authority.4 However,
scholars commonly understand ritual as a collective mode of action that is
prescribed by an external tradition,5 which would perhaps seem contradic-
tory within the guiding theorems of self-spirituality and self-authority. In
short, ritual would have a limited role in religion “organized in terms of
what is taken to be the authority of the self”.6 In the same line of thought,
the practices of so-called spiritual seekers might also be regarded as some-
thing less than religious—unfocused, undisciplined or a constant search for
private peak experiences.7
In the subsequent pages, I will take a different approach and regard con-
temporary spirituality from a practice-oriented perspective. Firstly, I regard
practices less in terms of semantic representation, symbolization and display,
but rather as belonging to the realm of the body.8 Further, drawing on Saba
Mahmood’s theories on the strategic use of practice in the formation of the
self, as well as Catherine Bell’s perspective of ritualization as a strategic
process, I will discuss both the use of practice and the constitution of power
in practice.

THE FIELD SITES

In 2000, I made my first visit to the Goddess Conference in Glastonbury. The

event was chaotic and intense, featuring large collective ceremonies, art exhibi-
tions and numerous talks, workshops and performances. The conveners were

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 30 Åsa Trulsson
well-known and not-so-well-known contributors to the Goddess movement,
the Pagan milieu and so-called earth-centered spiritualities in England and
internationally. The different topics were quite diverse, presenting knowledge
and practices from assorted fields such as astrology, Goddess archaeology and
shamanism, as well exploring subjects such as sexuality, sacred dancing, sing-
ing and much more. The focus was certainly on female imagery, the Goddess
and women’s experiences, but aside from this, a wide array of beliefs, ideas
and discourses were presented. The women then ventured into the streets
to enjoy and participate in the bustling religious environment that is con-
temporary Glastonbury.9 While I struggled to achieve coherence, deduce an
underlying logic or systematic worldview behind these sprawling features, the
inconsistency seemed to disturb the other participants considerably less. They
simply shared, explored and evaluated the individual contributions. Also, and
perhaps even more intriguing, they followed the different presenters to other
contexts or brought new ideas home to already existing groups.
During the following years, my fieldwork followed the rhythm of the
participants at the Goddess Conference. It became increasingly multi-sited,
as the participants moved between different groups and contexts, often tra-
versing regional and national borders.10 I participated in several groups of
different sizes and organization, ranging from large festivals and publicly
advertised workshops to intimate and more regular settings that all featured
intense experimentation with different forms of practice. The groups would
perhaps seem to have little in common, except for the fact that the same
women tended to show up in several of these groups and that there was a
common emphasis on female deities and women’s experiences. Otherwise,
organization, symbolic content and transmitted meaning seemed diverse and
at times incompatible. Moreover, there was a wide variety of beliefs and dis-
courses among the participants, and each woman could also take divergent
positions at different times. The women were concerned neither with formu-
lating a clear religious identity, such as Goddess worshipper, Pagan or Wic-
can, nor with limiting their participation in different groups with regards
to coherence between different beliefs or worldviews.11 Furthermore, cor-
rect belief was never a prerequisite for joining any ceremonies, festivals and
workshops, but rather women claimed to disband beliefs when participating
in a specific ceremony or practice.
Scholars frequently note the fluid character of contemporary spiritual-
ity. Yet, while recognizing these features, scholars often promote unity and
discrete categorization, most notably by systematizing and extracting a
common belief system,12 or giving primacy to discourses on self-authority
and individualism among participants.13 Little analytical attention is given
to how themes of discourse and authority are played out in actual ethno-
graphic contexts.14
During my fieldwork, it became increasingly difficult and moreover
meaningless to try to categorize the gatherings as New Age, Pagan or even
Goddess spirituality, as none of these categorizations seemed adequate.

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 Cultivating the Sacred 31
Anna, for instance, organizes workshops with drumming and dancing from
the Italian regions of Calabria and Apulia. Her main spiritual inspiration
is the Madonna and most of her teachers come from the Catholic south of
Italy. Nevertheless, she is also initiated to a Sufi order in New York, per-
forms ceremonies associated with Brazilian Candomblé and makes extensive
use of various practices of so-called alternative healing. The issue becomes
even more complex when regarding the participants at Anna’s workshop,
who are often relatively new to the practices she teaches and also hold quite
diverse creeds. Their religious identity is not compromised by either their
attendance at the workshop or their participation in the ritual proceedings.
Of course, it might be argued that Anna and the participants follow their
own inner authority rather than adhering to specific religious traditions,
or interpret the different practices to suit their own personal motivations
or desires. When pressed with questions on why and how, they might also
rationalize their practices in this way. However, more often such questions
render vague answers or none at all, with respondents regarding them as
intriguing, odd or irrelevant. Moreover, when it came to ritualized practice,
people participated fully and claimed to abandon any preconceptions. It
would, therefore, be reasonable to suggest that the rationale for eclecticism
is located in the realm of practice rather than on a level of belief and reflex-
ive rationalization.
Several scholars emphasize that the realm of a systematized and coherent
beliefs system is often a scholarly pursuit rather than a lived, religious experi-
ence. Beliefs and intellectual systems have been the subject of research because
of a theological or even confessional understanding of religion, where the
Protestant emphasis on belief has become normative in establishing essen-
tial traits of religious life.15 Still, local religious life outside theological and
scholarly discourse is rarely “a seamless whole but consists of diverse and
sometimes discordant strands”.16 Instead, these scholars argue that religious
life should be located in specific contexts of interaction, which may or may
not harmonize on a logical level, but where meaning and power are continu-
ously negotiated primarily through the means of practice.17 In a similar vein,
I argue that there are several benefits in abandoning the focus on classifica-
tion and systematization with regards to the different settings present in my
fieldwork—whether referred to as Pagan, New Age or Goddess spirituality by
the protagonists or anybody else—and regarding them as local fields of inter-
action and practice. People move between these fields and utilize the knowl-
edge gained as a repertoire depending on circumstances, moods and needs.18
The women’s spirituality thus lacks systematic character, but this does not
automatically mean that it should be conceptualized as operating according
to inherently different parameters than religious life in other local contexts
that thrive outside the confines of normative theological exegesis or scholarly
classification. This approach also opens for a more processual view on reli-
gion, where it is regarded less in terms of a fully fledged worldview or stable
system beyond the participants and practices at hand, but is instead constantly

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 32 Åsa Trulsson
formed, negotiated and reworked in different fields of interaction. In Asad’s
words, it is about “constructing religion in the world (not the mind), inter-
preting true meanings, excluding some utterances and practices and including
others”.19 In this line of argument, the focus is not on any substantive defini-
tion of what is said or done, but rather how this is marked and authorized as
spiritual. Thus, although the contexts in my fieldwork might seem kaleido-
scopic on the level of beliefs, the fields become sites where not only a cultur-
ally defined sense of the sacred but also gendered identity become constantly
formed, negotiated, authorized and reworked in different settings.

THE DIDACTICS OF RITUAL

During subsequent years, the Goddess Conference was restructured as a

joint pilgrimage to the Goddess of Avalon. More time and effort are now
directed to large-scale collective ceremonies with the intention of providing
the participants with an experimental meeting with the divine. A central
ceremonial group encodes these practices and a large and growing number
of initiated priestesses facilitate the proceedings. It is thus a highly structured
environment. However, a great number of participants state that they espe-
cially appreciate these parts of the conference—in fact, they argue that the
possibility to participate in such rituals and the experiences engendered by
them are the main reasons for returning year after year.
Throughout my fieldwork, the women put a similar emphasis on rituals
and ceremony. Their statements raise questions on why bodily practices, like
rituals and ceremony, are considered more significant than, for example, cer-
tain verbal teachings or symbolic content.20 Miriam, a woman who regularly
seeks out different courses and workshops, as well as conducts her own, says:

It gives beauty. Strengthens. Every time you go there, every time you make
contact with the ritual room, with that form of reality, then you strengthen
your experience. You strengthen that reality’s presence in your life.

For Miriam ritual practice infuses life with a sacred reality. In the reli-
gious field, Wood argues, practices take place in a particular religious mode,
which Wood defines as fostering relationships to the supernatural. Hence,
in Wood’s perception, practices that explicitly involve such relationships
would authorize activities as religious or spiritual.21 While this observation
might be culturally specific, it is a viable characterization of the contexts
under consideration here. It also allows us to divert attention away from
discourse and beliefs and focus on the actual practice in different fields as
explicitly relating to female entities. Kathy says:

There are special occasions but I think you can do ceremony at any
moment. It’s just a remembering, it’s a re-membering to make you con-

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 Cultivating the Sacred 33
scious. To keep on renewing that connection to Goddess. That every-
thing we have comes from Her, everything we do comes from Her. She
is in everything and part of everything. So ceremony is just like wake up
and remember this is for Her. You know, expressing gratitude to Her,
it’s like constant prayer, to have constant prayer to Her.

There is thus a strong relational quality in the ritual practice, which does
involve other participants, but also nominally sacred entities, particularly
the Goddess. Ritual is used strategically to infuse life with divine presence,
but also to foster a continuous relationship to the Goddess, that would
affect the way the self engages in the world—through constant prayer. We
are hence concerned with what Bell calls the strategic use of ritual—that is,
how ritual practice is used for certain objectives.22
However, while most of the women enter into these kinds of practices out
of conscious choice rather than socialization, there is also a didactic aspect
to be considered. In fact, during my fieldwork it became apparent that the
women repeatedly sought out these contexts to develop their sense of self
and learn a set of practices that would change their mode of relating to the
world, most notably relating to a specific cultural construction of a sacred
reality. Again, it is worth quoting Miriam:

Partly, the most important thing is that it is different openings for learn-
ing, to get more self-knowledge; that it is about knowing myself more.
All these little pieces of the puzzle. . . . And then perhaps secondly to
learn methods and tools to work partly with myself and partly with oth-
ers. Continue that work . . .

In these respects, their endeavors are reminiscent of the cultivation of a

pious self that Mahmood discusses with regards to the so-called Mosque
movement in Cairo. According to Mahmood, the women consciously work
to form dispositions that would shape the subject’s emotions, desires and
motivations—in short, the entire mode of relating to the world. Ritual acts
are here strategic and hence not radically separated from more instrumental
acts of the everyday. Rather, they become a site to cultivate an ideal virtuous
self.23 In the groups under consideration here, however, the fields of interac-
tion are novel creations and the desired states less clearly formulated, but
nevertheless unfolding in relation to a strong notion of patriarchal religion.
With regards to ritual practice, the women often deemed rule-governance,
formality and dramatic display with no devotion as less desirable and out-
right bad performances. Eva’s statement concerning undesirable religious
practice is symptomatic:

You just feel that there is no passion, no devotion, no feeling behind

that . . . That is what I often thought when I was in a church, I thought,
what is this? This is so lifeless. I don’t feel it. I can’t feel it. It’s not

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 34 Åsa Trulsson
touching me. And when you feel it doesn’t touch the priest either, when
it’s really mechanical.

Here, repetition or punctilious performance is not important for a success-

ful ritual—in fact some women use the term ceremony for strategic reasons
to distinguish their own practice from such associations. Others reserved
the term ritual to denote emotionally heightened or especially meaningful
events. In either case, authorized religious practice concerns the intentional-
ity of the performer and is distinguished from what the women perceive as a
patriarchal mode of religious worship, which, given the women’s predomi-
nant religious background, is primarily associated with Christianity and the
hierarchical structure of the Anglican Church.
This does not mean, however, that the women cultivate their selves in
total freedom, or that power is absent from these contexts. Wood, who
is concerned with how power and authority are constituted in different
settings of contemporary spirituality, distinguishes between a formative
context, where authorities shape participants’ dispositions to guide sub-
sequent practices, harmonize experiences and impose a specific ordering
of the world, and the non-formative, where the authorities lack the ability
and incentive to form a group habitus. However, Wood argues that the
distinction between the contexts should be seen as a tendency, rather than
an absolute opposition, thus eschewing the notion that contemporary spiri-
tuality is inherently different from other parts of the religious field.24 More-
over, Wood notes that the tendency to non-formativeness is strongest on
the discursive level. Shared practices, on the other hand, create a stronger
sense of commonality in the group and a common context for experience.25
Bell’s well-known theory of ritualization allows us to theorize this further.
According to Bell, ritualization is a strategic and privileged way of acting
that derives its significance in the context of other practices. She argues that
privileged practice gives rise to privileged distinctions, such as sacred and
profane, which structure the surroundings and are embodied in the partici-
pants through practice. It thus produces the sacred, while simultaneously
shaping the self and its mode of relating to the world. Practice, and espe-
cially ritualized practice, can be seen to shape perception and experiences,
as well as change the subject’s mode of being in the world.26 Following Bell,
it would be viable to suggest that the women engage in practices where their
experiences and sense of self are formatively shaped.27 However, the process
is less about building a representation of the world—as the formulation of
specific doctrines or the transmission of certain ideas would be—but rather
about the cultivation of a bodily sense or a bodily competence. In other
words, we are concerned with the cultivation of embodied aptitudes,28 or
the creation of a ritualized body.29
The aim is to reach a desired state where the self is continuously and
without effort in relation to the sacred. Caterina, who participated in the
fields under consideration here for a period of ten years or more, argues that

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 Cultivating the Sacred 35
her life has increasingly been supported by divine comportment, until it was
entirely oriented towards spiritual practice.

But actually I would say that everything I do in my life is spiritual prac-

tice now, because I am writing, yes, but I am writing not just for the sake
of it, but I am writing about my spirituality. And all the work I do and
all the traveling that’s all really spirituality manifesting and sharing that
with other people. So it’s quite a big part. All the sacred drama and all
the processions and that was all part of it. Because I feel that’s my only
purpose in life, practicing and sharing spirituality with other people.

The priestess training in Glastonbury provides an example of how such

a cultivation evolves through practice. During the third year of training, a
daily practice is introduced, intended to give both a profound understanding
and a devotional connection to the Lady of Avalon. The description of the
training reads:

Performing an ever-deepening spiritual practice on a daily basis

quickly brings us face-to-face with our own personal resistances.
These resistances manifest in many different ways that are relevant
to the individual. Determination, commitment and self-discipline are
required for the student to continue with the Practice through the
resistances that arise. There is a balance to be wrought between the
obvious spiritual benefits of the Practice, which include increased
communication and inspiration from the Lady, and the obstacles that
the personality will throw into your pathway. As the Practice intensi-
fies and expands every three months so resistance can also increase.
In order to successfully complete the Practice you will need to develop
self-discipline and hone your spiritual will to accomplish what your
heart desires.30

Although the author of the text stresses individuality, it is clear the daily
practice also involves a certain amount of discipline. A repeated practice,
which is also increased in length and recurrence, creates a certain routine
that structures the day and orients the self towards a desired state—that is,
a devotional relationship to the Goddess and a sense of divine comportment.
The body becomes the site of learning, which is achieved by practice and a
set of techniques of the body. It becomes thus a reorientation that changes
the very perception of self and mode of being in the world.31 Martha, who
undertook the three-year-long priestess training in Glastonbury, argues:

And by the time I had done the full three years, I had a lot more power;
I had a lot more authority, and a lot more belief in myself. I’d studied
Goddess since 1973 but I didn’t know what to do about it, because I
just wasn’t that kind of person, you know, whereas Kathy had worked

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 36 Åsa Trulsson
all that stuff out and I was a bit more about reading books. So I needed
to have that side myself brought out as well.

For Martha, the training was less about assessing a host of theoretical
knowledge about the Goddess than learning to ritualize and conduct mean-
ingful ceremonies. Further, during the course, her sense of self changed. The
reader should note that this is not the same argument as proposing that the
priestess training necessarily involves a celebration of the self, but rather
concerns a reorientation of the subject, where the body takes center stage.
A stimulating and perhaps pressing issue in the fields under consideration
here is gender. In most of the fields, women are the central protagonists and
furthermore make up the majority of participants. In several of the fields,
identifying as a woman was even a prerequisite for joining or gaining access.
Although the women hold divergent or unclear positions on what actually
constitutes a woman or a man, female subjectivity especially emerges many
times as a specific focus for the proceedings. Following the foregoing argu-
ments of the role of practice in shaping the participants’ sense of self, it is
reasonable to argue that the introduction of novel practices would also mold
gendered subjectivity.32 In the following, we will examine three examples
that all explicitly involve female corporeality and subjectivity. The analytical
focus will, however, be primarily directed towards how power and authority
are constituted in practice.

THE POWER IN PRACTICE

Just before dusk, a soft and peculiar light is enfolding the beautiful gardens.
Yesterday, the organizer walked us through the gardens and taught us how
and where to perform a stylized series of acts. She claimed that she modeled
the practice on the “12 Stations of the Cross”, but that she preferred—as she
was Goddess-oriented—to call it the “Stations of the Vulva”. The practice
was to be executed twice daily and this morning the participants went one
by one through the gardens, just after waking up or after breakfast. Tonight,
we try to perform it together. There are twelve stopping points in the gar-
dens that all are considered specifically potent or symbolically significant,
including two ancient yew trees and a renowned healing pool, and the last
stopping point overlooks the rounded mounds of Glastonbury and the oddly
shaped hill known as the Tor. The company is cheerful, but at each station
focus returns and we jointly perform the movements and exclaim the pre-
scribed words in unison: Lady, awaken my Spirit (stretching arms to the sky),
Lady, open my vision (touching the space just above the middle of the eyes,
commonly known as the third eye in these contexts), Lady, be in my words
(touching the mouth) and in all my actions (extending the arms), Lady, fill
my heart (both hands touching chest), Lady, soothe my emotions (touching
upper part of the belly), Lady, bless my sexuality and creativity (touching

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 Cultivating the Sacred 37
genitals), and ground me in Your love (extending arms as to enfold the
whole of the body). At the last stop, the atmosphere is charged and the
women start singing a Goddess chant.
The “Stations of the Vulva” illustrates an ambivalence towards Chris-
tianity, in which most of the women have been born and raised. On the
one hand, “the Church” is considered patriarchal, but on the other a spiri-
tual routine is modeled on a reinterpretation of a well-known Christian
practice.33 Marion Bowman’s research on Glastonbury traditions clearly
demonstrates a similar ambivalence or even entanglement of the Avalonian
Goddess community vis-à-vis the Christian traditions in the town. This is
especially evident in the practice of making Bridie dolls, baking Lammas
bread and even attachment to Saint Brigit, which, argues Bowman, suggests
continuance between vernacular forms of Christianity and the burgeoning
Goddess tradition. It is also visible in the concluding procession of the God-
dess conference, whose route is a mirror image of a Catholic procession at
the site and, according to Bowman, the means to appropriate Glastonbury
for the Goddess.34 Similar ambivalence towards different Christian tradi-
tions among Goddess-oriented groups have been noted by Anna Fedele,
who argues that such reinterpretation allows Goddess-oriented individuals
to “solve the tension between the influence and attraction of their Chris-
tian past and their present critique of Christian rules and concepts”.35 The
“Station of the Vulva” is a privileged practice in that it distinguishes itself
from its contexts of practices, such as taking a stroll through the gardens,
bathing the feet in the healing pool or having tea overlooking the gardens at
any of these sites. It would thus be reasonable to suggest that it is ritualized.
Although stipulating a sacred reality—that is, the existence of a Goddess and
the sacredness of the body—it is the participants’ bodies that are the central
actors. Their movements actively create the sacred reality, while at the same
time allowing these schemes to become embodied in the participants. They
are thus practices that are aimed to orient the self towards a desired state—a
devotional relationship to the Goddess, a sense of divine comportment and
a remodeling of the female body as being experienced as sacred in its physi-
cality. Here, the body is not only an actor, but also a learner—not so much
by way of inscribing meaning, but rather through incorporation—where
certain states can be evoked if the individual regularly performs the practice.
This is different from suggesting a belief-centered approach, in that knowl-
edge of the sacred or the divine is not primarily transmitted in dogmas or
stable representation, but rather experientially through ritualized practice.36
However, it is also vital to remember that these bodily experiences are not
simply responses to the sacred, but the result of the schemes engendered by
ritualization. Experiences thus rise in the intersection between body and
practice.37
Although ritualized practices such as “Stations of the Vulva” are recent
creations, they are prescribed and formal. More importantly, someone other
than the practitioner encodes the practice. According to Bell’s perspective

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 38 Åsa Trulsson
on ritualization, it follows that the initiator of such practice exercises an
amount of control and power in terms of shaping experience, gendered sub-
jectivity and relationship to the world.38 In newly established practice, such
as the foregoing, the initiator can even be the sole authority on a particular
performance, both with regards to discourse and the use of the body. Yet, as
Bell underlines, it is rarely a question of direct coercion, but a bodily sense
that can be variously and strategically appropriated by participants.39 The
power inherent in ritualization is thus less an issue of control than a creation
of a ritualized body with a certain sense of ritual and the sacred.

THE POWER OF THE CIRCLE

In the middle of October, a group of women gather in a remote village in

the English countryside. The leader of the workshop, Emma, explains that
she firmly believes in working creatively with the body as a means to affirm
and heal particularly women’s sense of self. We all take our turn in telling
our own story, our reasons for coming and whether we have any particular
issues we would like to work on. After this sharing, we are immediately
directed through bodywork. One woman stands up and moves her body in
the way she feels emotionally at the moment. Then another woman builds
into that structure, making movements that respond to her emotional state,
yet harmonizing with the first. When everyone is up, we move like one body.
The following days evolve in the same manner. Emma introduces prac-
tices, such as massage, henna tattooing, free dancing, artwork and different
kinds of bodywork, with little explanation of their meaning or context. At
other times, the practices are devised in the moment, relying entirely on the
needs and wishes of the present participants. Emma and the women seem to
give great primacy to intimacy and the body, expressed in semi-nakedness,
sensual stimulation in touch, food and music as well as continuous move-
ment, either as individuals or as a group.
Although each day is certainly marked by informality, spontaneity and
creativity, one recurrent practice is rule-governed and even has a stipulated
order. After each practice, the experiences and reflective interpretations are
explored in so-called sharing. A sharing is a circular structure where each
woman has her turn in speaking and listening. The general rule is, however,
not to interrupt anyone to comment, support or disagree. In this particular
workshop, even offering handkerchiefs or supportive touch to a participant
in tears is not allowed, as Emma explains that it “stops the process”.
The practice of sharing is dispersed through the fields to the extent that it
has become a specific genre of speech that is distinguished from other modes
of speaking by its structure and mode of execution.40 The structure itself is
widely known, often to the extent that it needs little further explanation.
When performed in this manner, the sharing becomes ritualized.41 A sharing
usually follows any kind of joint practice and thus allows each participant to

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 Cultivating the Sacred 39
infer individual meaning reflectively. However, ethical considerations make
it difficult to dwell on individual formations of meaning, which is why the
following discussion will evolve along somewhat general terms.42 Further,
from a more practice-oriented perspective it is more compelling to examine
what such a practice accomplishes in terms of the constitution and negotia-
tion of power.
Firstly, individuals derive subjective meaning from a shared activity,
which, in Wood’s terms, thus creates a common context for subsequent
reflection.43 When shared in the ritualized genre of speech, the group legiti-
mizes the practice itself by constantly evaluating the practice with regards
to moods, intentions and life histories. Hence, they become not only enjoy-
able or perhaps arduous practices, but also the means of cultivating certain
dispositions and achieving desired states. In a roundabout manner, as each
woman reflects on her experience in the ritualized structure of the shar-
ing, the group also authorizes her experience. Furthermore, a sharing also
structures the experiences of the participants, as each narrative unfolds in
relation to previous speakers.44 During this particular workshop, different
members of the group introduce the themes of bodily processes, women’s life
cycle, relationships to other women (especially mothers) and sexuality, and
all of them are consequently mirrored in the narratives of the other women.
The last theme eventually becomes so prominent that it is made the focus
of the entire proceedings and subsequently worked upon through the body
and art. Similarly, certain expressions, like being grounded, connected, flow
and several others, become increasingly used, although their exact meaning
is left open and unspecified.
According to Bourdieu, language that has been authorized by a group—
and in this case we are concerned with a genre of speech that is privi-
leged—molds subjective experiences into more objectified and common
expressions.45 The expressions or themes thus become established and
authorized by verbal interaction and the privileged mode of sharing in
itself, as appropriate interpretations of the experience. Hence, although
the practices at the workshop are strikingly devoid of normative content, the
authority of the group shapes the experiences of them. Additionally, themes
of experience and certain expressions become favored as especially essen-
tial in embodying gender or in the struggle of leading a spiritual life as
a woman. These experiences are, however, also worked upon and struc-
tured intersubjectively. Consequently, even though female subjectivity is
constructed as specific and different from other genders, the women can-
not be said to merely reproduce norms about gender in any simple way.
The workshop also provides an opportunity to pursue alternative ways of
embodying gender by means of practice and subsequent sharing. Thus, the
workshop itself becomes a field of interaction, where participants’ sense
of self and experiences are structured and ultimately constructed by the
group. What is held as a deeply personal experience is ultimately created
intersubjectively.46

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 40 Åsa Trulsson
THE POWER OF TRADITION

During the course of my fieldwork, women’s so-called blood mysteries, that

is, the cycle of menstruation and women’s development through menarche
to menopause, constantly resurfaced as essential aspects of women’s sub-
jectivity and spirituality. In these contexts, blood mysteries mark women
as different from men, but are also viewed as something inherently sacred
and a foundation for women’s spirituality.47 When talking to the women, it
became apparent that such a perspective on menstruation is not part of the
upbringing or daily life of the women, but they employed different practices
to change, not only the discourse on menstruation, but also how it was expe-
rienced and related to.48 This was also evident in the celebrations of men-
arche and menopause, which the women claimed were publicly unnoticed
events that needed to be reclaimed.49 During my time among the women,
many of them claimed that they had organized first-blood ceremonies for
their daughters, while others described celebrating menopause in croning
ceremonies. Although there was no central rule or decree to follow, and
the women took great pains to make every event informal and suited to the
tastes of the woman concerned, the ceremonies showed a remarkable degree
of resemblance. The following is Martha’s description of a croning:

And we called in [the circle] and then we just said a few things about Eve.
And I read something called a seventeenth-century nun’s prayer, which
is just about getting old and funny. And then she sort of turned and we
arranged for two guards to escort her into the underworld, where there
was another priestess. . . . Big Cornwall Goddess lady and she was wait-
ing in the fogou50 to be the crone to meet Eve. But the guards, nobody
wanted to dress up in medieval stuff, everyone is fed up with that, what’s
it got to do with anything? So we decided to dress them up as bouncers at
a nightclub—dark glasses and everything. And when she turned around,
we just started to fall about; it was so funny. And then when she came out
we showered her with petals. Dressed her up, sat her in her throne, which
was a camping chair, and crowned her. It was great because it suited her
and her humor. But it was also serious because it was, you know, she met
the crone and she had that experience and she comes out again to this big
celebration of wisdom. Because that’s what we celebrate, it’s a woman’s
passage into wisdom. And into a very different life, because once the
womb is not capable of bearing life, we are not the same creatures.

The croning shares certain similarities with other ceremonies in these

contexts. Firstly, there is a basic structure of separation and integration, as
well as the experiential meeting with the divine. This model clearly relies
on Victor Turner’s vision of the ritual drama and its tripartite structure of
separation, liminality and integration. The influence of the scholar on con-
temporary ritual creativity has been duly noted by several researchers, to

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 Cultivating the Sacred 41
the extent that Bell argues that the ritual drama provides a prototypical
understanding of ritual events for contemporary cultural innovators.51 Also,
Salomonsen’s studies of contemporary menarche rituals among the Reclaim-
ing community and elsewhere confirm the structure’s wide distribution and
use.52 Secondly, there is regal symbolism that is commonly associated with
becoming a crone in these contexts. Thirdly, the so-called calling the cir-
cle—that is, invoking different Goddesses and their correspondences—is a
certain structure of acts that is widely used among Pagans as the means to
create sacred space.53 These acts are widely dispersed in different ceremonies
variously attended by the women and could hence be regarded as culturally
recognizable due to their frequency and use.
According to Tord Olsson, ritual events are characterized by their ten-
dency to quote ritual acts from a common repertoire of accepted and intel-
ligible forms.54 Similarly, Ann-Christine Hornborg claims that different acts,
such as smoking the pipe, the burning of sage and singing particular songs,
become quotes during newly invented ceremonies among the Mi’kmaq, thus
anchoring the proceedings in a larger context of neo-traditionalism and
ultimately authorizing the event.55 Similarly, the croning is designed to suit
the humor and personal taste of the woman concerned, but some elements
derive from a larger context of culturally recognizable acts, which legitimize
and anchor the ceremony. The individual elements provide an intersubjec-
tive experience, ripe with sensory stimuli and a high level of aesthetic charge,
while the latter provides a shared horizon that constitutes the traditional
way of doing things. Thus, the creativity at each ceremony resides in which
quotes are used and how performers place them together—something Ron-
ald Grimes calls the editorial process of ritual criticism.56 It is also evident
that the creators have to relate and strategically allude to a larger tradition
of previously encoded practices, which flow between the fields, to execute
a successful ceremony—something that, following Grimes, Hornborg and
Olsson, is indeed common in lived religious practice around the world.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

The orchestrated spaces of the workshops, ceremonies and conferences pro-

vide participants with an opportunity to cultivate dispositions and work on
their selves—together with others and through the means of practice. As the
women move between these spaces, they become increasingly interrelated
and a set of certain culturally recognizable practices begins to flow between
then. Furthermore, many women strategically seek out these and similar
contexts to infuse their lives with sacrality until they are completely oriented
towards the divine. In the process, the women submit themselves to the dif-
ferent authorities in the field.
The instigation of novel practices has the possibility to change the partici-
pant’s sense of self and alter the way the subject orients herself in the world

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 42 Åsa Trulsson
or embodies gender. All of these practices are privileged as specifically sacred
by their mode of execution, and they therefore have the potential not only
to shape dispositions that will guide further practice for the individual, but
also to give rise to privileged oppositions, such as sacred and profane, and
male and female. In several of these practices the distinctiveness of female
corporeality is brought forward as socially relevant, hence also marking
the category of woman as specific and distinct from other bodies, such as
men. It would therefore be viable to suggest that designing women-only
spaces and celebrating women’s body cycles do not subvert the dominant
ideology of binary gender construction, but rather uphold discrete and even
polar genders. However, in these contexts gender is not only privileged as
a socially relevant category, but also brought forward as bodily difference
with sacred meaning. It does not mean that every woman fully embraces the
possible normative meaning of different workshop organizers or teachers,
or that there is an underlying rationale that can be read as a text. Rather,
certain processes and states are re-signified as sacred and, through the means
of practice, the women are allowed to relate and mold previous and sub-
sequent experiences within this hegemony. Some of these practices provide
alternative models for the embodiment of gender than those that are com-
mon to the women’s upbringing or everyday lives. In the condensed places of
workshops, festivals and groups, there also exist possibilities to experiment
and indeed try out new gendered selves. Hence, these practices under consid-
eration could be said to simultaneously consolidate, negotiate and challenge
dominant gender ideologies in contemporary Europe.57
Similarly, the relationship between the women’s religious practice and
Christianity is complex. On the one hand, the women are involved in a
critique towards mainstream religious institutions in terms of organization,
gender politics and, most notably, perceived modes of practice. On the other
hand, their actual spiritual practice involves both a reinterpretation and con-
tinuance with Christian practice and symbols. In fact, when scholarly atten-
tion is directed away from discourse, classificatory schemes and coherent
belief systems, there is little rationale for conceptualizing the spirituality of
the women as inherently different from lived religion in other contexts. Such
a distinction seem to be more related to establishing normative boundaries
for religious practice among different religious authorities and indeed even
among academic scholars themselves, than an actual lived reality.58 On the
level of practice, the women’s interaction shows resemblance to the interac-
tion in other local contexts outside the confines of normative traditions and
theological exegesis. With regards to power and authority, the participants’
senses of self are shaped by ritual authorities that encode certain practices,
intersubjectively by a group and in relation to a burgeoning tradition of
ritual acts. Yet coercion or control is seldom the case. Power and authority
do not reside in adherence to the vision or interpretation of someone else but
concern the creation of a ritualized body with a certain competence, sense of
the sacred and mode of embodying gender.

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 Cultivating the Sacred 43
NOTES

I would like to thank the participants of the workshop “Spirituality against Religion:
The Role of Gender and Power” at the eleventh EASA biannual conference, and
Anna Fedele and Kim Knibbe for thoughtful comments and suggestions.

1. Many of the women gave their consent to use their names, but out of ethi-
cal consideration I use pseudonyms when citing the participants in the text,
with the exception of well-known authorities, such as Kathy.
2. Matthew Wood, Possession, Power and the New Age: Ambiguities of Authority
in Neoliberal Societies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 8, 27, 60–61.
3. There is a growing number of exceptions to both these tendencies, espe-
cially in the field of Pagan studies. See, e.g., Nikki Bado-Fralick, Coming
to the Edge of the Circle: A Wiccan Initiation Ritual (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005); Kirsty Coleman, Re-riting Women: Dianic Wicca
and the Divine Feminine (Lanham: Altamira Press, 2009); Susan Green-
wood, Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld: An Anthropology (Oxford:
Berg, 2000); Tanya Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual
Magic and Witchcraft in Present-Day England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1989); Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism
in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Sarah
Pike, Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search
for Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Jone
Salomonsen, Enchanted Feminism: The Reclaiming Witches of San Fran-
cisco (London: Routledge, 2002).
4. See Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1992); Maurice Bloch, Ritual, History and Power. Selected Papers
in Anthropology (London: Athlone Press 1989); and Edward Schieffelin,
“On Failure and Performance: Throwing the Medium Out of the Seance”,
in The Performance of Healing, ed. Carol Laderman and Marina Roseman
(New York: Routledge, 1996).
5. See Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw, The Archetypal Actions of Rit-
ual: A Theory Illustrated by the Jain Rite of Worship (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1994); and Roy Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of
Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
6. Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement: The Celebration of Self and the
Sacralization of Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 221.
7. See Steve Bruce, God Is Dead: Secularization in the West (Malden: Black-
well, 2002); and Zygmunt Bauman, “Postmodern Religion?” in Religion,
Modernity and Postmodernity, ed. Paul Heelas, David Martin and Paul
Morris (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
8. See Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 19; Thomas Csordas, Body/ Mean-
ing/ Healing (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 58–87; and Michael Jackson,
“Knowledge of the Body”, Man 18 (1983): 339.
9. For a detailed description of the religious environment in Glastonbury, espe-
cially what is commonly known as the Alternative community, see Ruth
Prince and David Riches, The New Age in Glastonbury: The Construction of
Religious Movement (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000). See also Marion Bow-
man, “Ancient Avalon, New Jerusalem, Heart Chakra of Planet Earth: The
Local and the Global in Glastonbury”, Numen 52, no. 2 (2005): 157–190.
10. For a detailed description, see Åsa Trulsson, Cultivating the Sacred: Ritual Cre-
ativity and Practice among Women in Contemporary Europe (Lund: Media-
tryck, 2010), 97–116; see also Sara Strauss, “Locating Yoga: Ethnography and

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 44 Åsa Trulsson
Transnational Practice”, in Constructing a Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in
the Contemporary World, ed. Vered Amit (London: Routledge, 2000).
11. See also Fedele and Hegner, this volume.
12. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secu-
lar Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1996)
13. See, e.g., Heelas, New Age Movement; and Paul Heelas and Linda Wood-
head, The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality
(Malden: Blackwell, 2005).
14. See Wood, Possession, 12, 38, 48–49.
15. See Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Power in Chris-
tianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 29;
Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 91; Tord Olsson, “De Rituella Fälten i
Gwanyebugu”, Svensk Religionshistorisk Tidskrift 9 (2000): 26–28; Mere-
dith McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008), 3–6, 19–44.
16. Michael Lambek, Knowledge and Power in Mayotte: Local Discourses of
Islam, Sorcery and Spirit Possession (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1993), 31.
17. Lambek, Knowledge and Power; and Olsson, “De Rituella Fälten”.
18. This view is indebted to Lambek, Knowledge and Power; Olsson, “De Ritu-
ella Fälten”; and McGuire, Lived Religion.
19. Asad, Genealogies, 44.
20. On the primacy of ritual practice and experience in other groups, see also
Teisenhoffer, this volume.
21. Wood, Possession, 66–67.
22. Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1997), 81.
23. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist
Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 124–139.
24. See Wood, Possession, 71–72.
25. Wood, Possession, 95–99.
26. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice.
27. See also Knibbe this volume.
28. Asad, Genealogies, 79.
29. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 100.
30. “In the Heart of the Goddess Priestess and Priest of Avalon Training: Spiral
Three”, Glastonbury Goddess Temple, accessed January 13, 2011, http://
www.goddesstemple.co.uk.
31. See also Csordas, Thomas, The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of
Charismatic Healing. (Berkley: University of California Press), 1994.
32. See Elisabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 116–118.
33. See also Fedele, this volume.
34. Marion Bowman, “Procession and Possession in Glastonbury: Continuity,
Change and the Manipulation of Tradition”, Folklore 115, no. 3 (2004):
281–282.
35. Anna Fedele, “From Christian Religion to Feminist Spirituality: Mary Mag-
dalene Pilgrimages to La Sainte-Baume, France”, Culture and Religion 10,
no. 3 (2009): 257.
36. See Jone Salomonsen, “The Ethno-methodology of Ritual Invention in Con-
temporary Culture—Two Pagan and Christian Cases”, Journal of Ritual
Studies 17, no. 2 (2003): 23.
37. Asad, Genealogies, 77; and see also Csordas, Body/Meaning/Healing, 58–87.
38. See also Hegner, this volume, for an example of this.

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 Cultivating the Sacred 45
39. See Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 100.
40. See also Hegner this volume for a verbal practice with a similarly stipulated
form.
41. See also Thomas Csordas, Language, Charisma and Creativity: The Rit-
ual Life of a Religious Movement (Berkley: University of California Press,
1997), 176–178.
42. The reader interested in the specific ethical implications of ethnographically
investigated contemporary ritual creativity is recommended Trulsson, Cul-
tivating the Sacred, 113–115; and the various contributions in Jenny Blain,
Douglas Ezzy and Graham Harvey, eds., Researching Paganisms (Walnut
Creek: Altamira Press, 2004).
43. Wood, Possession, 95–99.
44. See also Sharp this volume for a similar process.
45. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 170.
46. See also Galina Lindquist, Shamanic Performances on the Urban Scene:
Neo-Shamanism in Contemporary Sweden (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wik-
sell, 1997), 79–80, 86–87, 155.
47. The privileged standing of menstruation as a marker of female identity in
similar contexts is indeed noted by other scholars. See Greenwood, Magic,
Witchcraft, 129; and Salomonsen, Enchanted Feminism, 232.
48. For description of such practices, see Trulsson, Cultivating the Sacred. See also
Anna Fedele, “Sacred Blood, Sacred Body: Learning to Honour Menstruation
on the Path of Mary Magdalene”, Periferia 5 (December 2006): 15, http://
antropologia.uab.es/Periferia/catala/numero5/AnnaFedele.pdf (accessed Sep-
tember 3, 2012).
49. Menarche celebrations are specifically mentioned by Salomonsen, “Eth-
nomethodology of Ritual Invention”. For a different perspective on such
rituals see Michael Houseman, “Menstrual Slaps and First Blood Celebra-
tions: Inference, Simulation and the Learning of Ritual”, in Learning Reli-
gion: Anthropological Approaches, ed. David Berliner and Ramón Sarró
(Oxford: Berghan Books, 2007), 41–46.
50. A fogou is a stone-lined underground passage, commonly dated to the Iron
Age.
51. Bell, Ritual, 221, 263.
52. Salomonsen, “Ethno-methodology of Ritual Invention”, 16.
53. Magliocco, Witching Culture, 138.
54. Olsson, “De Rituella Fälten”, 54–55.
55. Ann-Christine Hornborg, “Being in the Field: Reflections on a Mi’kmaq
Kekunit Ceremony”, Anthropology and Humanism 28, no. 2 (2003): 129.
56. Ronald Grimes, Ritual Criticism Case Studies in Its Practice, Essays on Its
Theory (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990), 14–15.
57. Cf. Eeva Sointu and Linda Woodhead, “Spirituality, Gender, and Expressive
Selfhood”, Journal of Scientific Study of Religion 47, no. 2 (2008): 268–
271; see also Fedele this volume for a similar perspective on consolidating,
negotiating and challenging gender ideologies.
58. See McGuire, Lived Religion, 19–44.

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 2 Spirituality within Religion
Gendered Responses to a Greek ‘Spiritual
Revolution’
Eugenia Roussou

According to contemporary social scientific theory, the age of religion has

given way to a new age of spirituality, which is devoid of doctrinal and orga-
nized religious ideologies.1 Indeed, the contemporary world is thought to be
going through a ‘spiritual revolution’, where “traditional forms of religion,
particularly Christianity, are giving way to holistic spirituality, sometimes
still called New Age”.2 In the European context, central religious institutions
are losing their authority, church attendance is diminishing, and Christianity
appears to slowly be replaced as the dominant cultural tradition.3 Conse-
quently, the question is raised: is religion actually disappearing from Europe,
being replaced by spirituality, or is European religiosity simply changing?4
What follows is an analysis of the complex interface between religion and
spirituality in contemporary Greece, where particular emphasis is placed
upon the gendered dynamics of negotiating power in the context of everyday
Greek religiosity. The ethnographic data presented in this paper come pri-
marily from fifteen months of fieldwork in Rethymno, a town of the island of
Crete, and Thessaloniki, the second largest city of Greece, which I conducted
between August 2005 and December 2006.5 I chose my two field sites pri-
marily because of their location: Crete is situated in the very southern part of
Greece, whereas Thessaloniki is located in the northern part of the country.
This geographical distance between my two sites offered sociocultural variety
and a necessary comparative perspective, especially when it comes to gender
relations. Cretan society is generally considered to be male-oriented, and men
in Rethymno appear to be the leaders of their family and the ones who exer-
cise social power in the public sphere. In Thessaloniki, such gender power
struggles are not that obvious, but still present at times. During my research, I
spoke with both men and women, of the younger (aged between mid-twenties
and mid-forties) and the older (aged between early fifties and late sixties/early
seventies) generations, the majority of whom came from a middle-class social
background. And, with a few exceptions, it was predominantly the women
who mainly practiced spirituality in both my field locations, amalgamating
religion and spirituality in the context of their everyday lives.
In order to capture this synthesis of and reference to Orthodoxy and
alternative forms of spirituality, I employ the term ‘religion’ as synonymous

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 Spirituality within Religion 47
to the prevailing organized religious institution in Greece, namely Orthodox
Christianity. In doing so, I do not wish to portray Greece as mono-religiously
orientated, and in no way is it my intention to diminish the importance of
the other religions practiced in the country. Furthermore, I do not deny
the fact that ‘New Age’ practices may well be regarded as religious. Yet,
when Rethymniots and Thessalonikans mentioned religion during our con-
versations, they referred to Orthodox Christianity, which they thought to
be the prevailing institutional, doctrinal, official religion of Greece. During
my ethnographic research, that is, religion was perceived as synonymous to
Orthodoxy. Consequently, for the needs of the analysis, I follow the emic
interpretation of religion as synonymous to Orthodoxy, while being aware
of the possible limitations such an approach can entail.
‘Spirituality’ on the other hand is used to refer to noninstitutional and
more subjectivized practices that have recently entered the spiritual field of
contemporary Greece. My informants frequently characterized their prac-
tices as ‘alternative performances of a spiritual character’, and explained
how these practices transform and enhance their level of spirituality (pneu-
matikotita). One might well refer to such practices as ‘New Age’, a term that
contemporary scholars still employ so as characterize alternative forms of
spirituality. Yet, I have decided against the usage of this term, due to the the-
oretical and analytical problems it entails. Wood has recently criticized ‘New
Age’ studies, arguing against the existence of religious beliefs and practices
that can be described as ‘New Age’.6 As he points out, “the scholarly field of
New Age studies is fraught with a tendency to lack theoretical underpinning,
empirical evidence and comparative considerations”.7 Keeping in mind that,
as Morris puts it: “although an emphasis is often put on ‘New Age’ as a form
of ‘spirituality’, it undoubtedly expresses a religious metaphysic”,8 I have
found it analytically useful to follow my informants’ explanatory model.
Consequently, I will use the term ‘spirituality’ (and by extension the term
‘spiritual’)9 in order to refer to practices (energy channeling, crystal healing,
incense burning, meditation, as well as yoga, feng shui and Reiki) that are
popularly practiced by people in Rethymno and Thessaloniki as a means to
open themselves to alternative nonreligious paths.
In the rest of the paper I will aim to show how Greeks have begun to indi-
vidualize their religiosity by adopting and amalgamating Orthodox Christi-
anity and alternative forms of spirituality. At the level of daily practice, the
residents of Rethymno (Rethymniots) and Thessaloniki (Thessalonikans),
and especially the Rethymniot and Thessalonikan women, employ religion
and spirituality in a complementary rather than antithetical manner. At the
same time, these women renegotiate their gendered identity, in relation to the
men of their close social environment and the authority of the male Ortho-
dox priest(s). Greek women show that ‘charisma’10 is not incorporated by
a spiritual elite only; it is not restrictedly obtained by priests or other male
religious specialists either. A spiritual charisma can be claimed by women
during their everyday journey towards empowerment and spiritual growth.

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 48 Eugenia Roussou
And here lies the central point of my argument: through practicing spiri-
tuality and claiming the right to obtain a spiritual charisma in the course
of their everyday lives, women in Greece have taken large steps towards a
sociocultural and spiritual revolution. They have done so by, firstly, practic-
ing spirituality within a field of religiosity that had been considered thus far
as exclusively Orthodox and, secondly, by acting against the predominant
social authority of Greek men. The Greek spiritual revolution does not so
much represent a replacement of religion by spirituality as a pluralization
of religious practices in the Greek context. Women in Greece, I argue, have
begun to revolutionize Greek religiosity and their gendered identity, because
they challenge the authority of the priests, of their husbands and of Ortho-
dox Christianity. The act of transforming Greek religiosity, so that it is no
longer strictly synonymous to Orthodoxy, and the act of empowering gender
identity through practicing spirituality, is an action of challenging stagnant
spiritual and sociocultural boundaries; and as subtle as it may appear, it is
in fact an act of (sociocultural and spiritual) revolution.

REASSESSING RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY

IN CONTEMPORARY GREECE

Until recently, Orthodox Christianity, the prevailing religion of the country,

seems to have dominated the spiritual landscape of contemporary Greece.
As Alivizatos points out, around 97 percent of the Greek population is—at
least nominally—Orthodox.11 It is a fact that Orthodoxy and Greek socio-
cultural identity share a long-established intimacy. Orthodoxy’s penetration
in Greek culture commences from central social units, such as the family and
school. From a very young age, children are taught to believe that Christi-
anity in its Orthodox version is the best and the only ‘true’ religion. Such
belief has been reinforced by the historical narrative of the involvement of
the clergy in fighting the Turks throughout the years of the Ottoman domi-
nation of Greece. Furthermore, as the concept of ‘Helleno-Orthodoxy’ indi-
cates,12 a nationalistic link between Greek and Orthodox identity has long
been produced—a link that has significantly empowered the status of the
male Orthodox priest in the country.
These days, however, contemporary Greek religiosity is going through
a process of ‘individualization’.13 Spirituality has become an active part of
Greek religiosity. Orthodoxy14 appears to be losing its exclusive authority,
as Greeks have the choice to follow other spiritual paths. Rethymniots and
Thessalonikans attend church liturgies and do sun salutations at home; they
practice Reiki and simultaneously perform religious-oriented healing treat-
ments; they place Christian icons next to feng shui objects; they possess
religious amulets and healing crystals; they believe in the divine, the super-
natural and in flowing energy. In sum, they combine religion and spirituality,
based on their individual needs and beliefs.

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 Spirituality within Religion 49
This spiritual amalgamation between religion and spirituality that is cur-
rently practiced in Greece constitutes a fundamental development. It shows
that the link between Orthodoxy and Greek identity does not stand by itself
uncritically any longer. Greek religious identity has ceased to be ‘assumed’.15
Given the historical bond between Orthodox Christianity and Greek iden-
tity and the resulting predominance of Orthodoxy in the country for cen-
turies, people in Greece today are doing more than simply transforming
Greek popular religiosity. Instead, they are rebelling against an—up until
recently—predetermined religiosity without, however, abandoning doctrinal
religion altogether (as have many of their European counterparts). In that
sense, a distinct ‘spiritual revolution’ seems to be taking place in Greece.

Religion versus Spirituality

The ‘spiritual revolution’ claim has been formulated extensively by Heelas and
Woodhead in their homonymous book. In order to test the claim that mod-
ern western societies are characterized by a shift from religion to spirituality,
Heelas and Woodhead, with a team of other researchers, conducted empirical
research in the market town and regional center of Kendal, in the northwest
of England. Their research brought up a distinction between people who held
strong religious beliefs and those who had turned to what the authors call
‘subjective-life’ spiritualities.16 Heelas and Woodhead concluded that there
was no point in asking whether the Kendal residents were experiencing a
spiritual revolution. The spiritual revolution had already taken place.
Modern societies, according to the ‘spiritual revolution’ claim, are experi-
encing a turn “away from life lived in terms of external or ‘objective’ roles,
duties and obligations, and a turn towards life lived by reference to one’s
own subjective experiences”.17 Thus, subjective-life spirituality is a spiritual-
ity that rests on experience: it is experienced as sustaining life. Heelas and
Woodhead’s approach is problematic in two ways: firstly, because the claim
that the world had shifted from life-as religion to subjective-life spirituality18
generates a theoretic-analytical distinction between religion and spirituality;
secondly, because Heelas and Woodhead appear not to take into consider-
ation the fact that power struggles also occur within the spiritual practices
they are describing.19
Transcendence and immanence constitute perhaps the most important
words in engaging with this problematic. Religion, especially Christianity,
is associated directly with a transcendental God.20 Spirituality, on the other
hand, is associated with a rejection of external, transcendental authority; it
is the ‘self’ that possesses the ultimate power.21 Consequently, as the religion-
versus-spirituality religion thinkers contend, religion is based on the idea of
conformation to an external authority that is situated over-and-above the
self,22 whereas spirituality rests on developing or expressing one’s subjective
life and differs from religion “by the stress laid on subjective experience of
great transcendences by ordinary people”.23 I agree with Cannell’s call for a

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 50 Eugenia Roussou
reassessment of the Christian transcendence versus non-Christian immanence
dichotomy.24 As has been documented, transcendence can be part of non-
Christian spiritual environments and immanence can feature in Christian
contexts.25 In terms of everyday practice, at least, religion can be experienced
subjectively. Authoritative discourses are not embedded exclusively within
religious circles. Those who practice spirituality are frequently engaged in
authoritative relationships and power negotiations too. In sum, it is difficult
to maintain the distinction between spirituality and religion analytically.

Spirituality within Religion

Evanthia is a twenty-seven-year-old woman from Thessaloniki. She believes
in God, and accepts Orthodox Christianity as her official religious doctrine.
Although she rarely attends Sunday liturgies, she occasionally goes to church
in order to light a candle and pray; these church visits, as Evanthia explains,
compose an important part of her everyday life, since they fill her with a sense
of serenity and the reassurance of communicating with the spiritual. In parallel
to her religious performativity, Evanthia attends yoga classes and follows the
feng shui rules at home. She strongly believes that mingling religious and spiri-
tual practices is, to use her own words, ‘perfectly natural and appropriate’. The
way in which people handle these seemingly different spiritual paths, Evanthia
continues, depends completely on their individual needs, skills and beliefs.
The majority of Rethymniots and Thessalonikans who practice spiritual-
ity are predominantly younger individuals who, like Evanthia, amalgamate
religion and spirituality in the course of their daily livelihood. Although
there are men and older people who practice spirituality, my fieldwork has
shown that it is mainly younger women who demonstrate particular keen-
ness towards spirituality.26 Consequently, the ethnographic information on
which this paper is based comes mostly from them. These women are aged
between twenty and forty and come from a middle-class background. They
have chosen spirituality as their primary path of practicing religiosity. Yet,
they also perform their religious acts from time to time, even if this simply
includes the quick act of lighting a candle at a church, or praying in front
of the household altar.27 Nominally, at least, they characterize themselves as
Orthodox Christians, and do not perceive spirituality as opposing their reli-
gious beliefs. And as Knoblauch observes: “spirituality extends far beyond
that marked area that is culturally identifiable as religious and thus blurs the
boundary between the religious and the non-religious”.28
The recent appearance of spirituality in the still predominantly Ortho-
dox landscape of contemporary Greek religiosity encourages people to
practice their spirituality in everyday life. Yet, this movement towards non-
Orthodox pathways does not appear to be intentional, forced or organized.
It does not aim to replace or overthrow Orthodoxy, but, instead, mixes and
interacts with it. People in my Greek field sites have shown that religion
and spirituality should be considered as complementary—the boundaries
between them are blurred. Certainly, there is a long tradition of spirituality

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 Spirituality within Religion 51
within Orthodoxy. Thus, the synthesis of religious and spiritual practices in
present-day Greece may not come as a surprise. Mysticism and meditation
existed in the Orthodox circles long before yoga, feng shui, Reiki and spiri-
tuality in general made their appearance in the country.29
And here lies the peculiarity of the relationship between religion and spiri-
tuality in the Greek context. Generally speaking, in the Western sociocultural
context, denominational religion and subjectivized spirituality are perceived
and practiced in antithetical terms and can hardly coexist.30 In Greece, how-
ever, judging from my ethnographic findings at least, the boundaries between
religion and spirituality appear not only softened but almost collapsed. The
significance of such observation lies in the fact that, after centuries of Chris-
tian domination in the field of Greek religiosity, the historically forceful
bond between Orthodoxy and Greek socioreligious identity has loosened
up. Religion and spirituality are amalgamated in people’s everyday spiri-
tual practices. Self-proclaimed atheists do not entirely cut their bond with
Orthodoxy. Orthodox devotees are often open to and incorporate spiritual
ideologies in their lives. And, probably because of its recent appearance and
its unofficial character, the Church has yet to condemn either the appear-
ance of this exogenous spirituality or the synthesis between Orthodox and
spiritual practices at an everyday level. Most importantly, Greek religiosity
can no longer be regarded as synonymous to (Orthodox Christian) religion.

UNSETTLING RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY: FEMALE

EMPOWERMENT THROUGH EVERYDAY RITUAL
PERFORMANCE

In contemporary Greek society the relationship between men and women is

often conflictual. Especially when it comes to rural areas, men seem to exer-
cise greater power in the public social arena, and gender power struggles are
frequently observed. Although in Thessaloniki such power struggles are not
that evident, in Crete, especially as far as the older generation is concerned,
men are the ones who appear as the leaders of their family to the public
social sphere.31 In this sociocultural context, the figure of the male priest as a
carrier of religious authority remains powerful. Orthodoxy has been part of
my informants’ everyday lives since they were children, and has influenced
their practices and social discourses. Orthodox Christianity in Rethymno
and Thessaloniki is lived and acted as a popular part of Greek everyday life. It
is not thus difficult to understand why priests enjoy an authoritative status in
the Greek spiritual landscape, and why they are considered as the medium of
communication between laity and the transcendental divine power of God.
Orthodox male priests, however, do not stand alone in the process of claim-
ing religious power. Lay female healers, especially the ones who specialize in
the popular ritual against the evil eye (ksematiasma), experience an equiv-
alent social and spiritual empowerment, since they too are believed to be
capable of administering divine power and communicating with the sacred.

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 52 Eugenia Roussou
The evil eye practice, which constituted the central research direction
of my fieldwork in northern Greece and Crete, arises from the widely held
conviction in Greece that everyday social exchanges can inflict symptoms of
illness upon people. These symptoms are removed through a healing ritual
known as ksematiasma. Performed predominantly by lay specialists, the vast
majority of whom are women, this ritual contains numerous elements of
Orthodox Christian symbolism. Most commonly, the evil eye healers invoke
Jesus, the Virgin and various saints during their prayers. Also, the numbers
three—signifying the Holy Trinity—and seven—denoting the seven sacra-
ments—are repetitively used: the ksematiastra (evil eye healer) recites the
prayer either three or seven times, crosses the sufferer’s forehead three times,
and the latter has to drink/eat from the ingredients used (usually water, into
which oil from the household altar lamp has been poured, thus sacralizing
it) three times. This ceremony is condemned by the Church, which has its
own explanatory and healing version of the evil eye, as nonconforming with
the religious rules and as parekklisiastiko.32
In Greece, the (stereo)typical image of a ksematiastra is that of an older,
religiously devoted woman, who resides in a village and performs the anti–
evil eye ritual for her relatives and neighbors. As Du Boulay points out,33
Greek women, especially the ones of an older age, are the spiritual guardians
of their family and the spiritual mediators between the divine and the mate-
rial world. Anthi, for instance, is an experienced healer in her early sixties,

Figure 2.1 A woman in northern Greece is performing the ritual of ksematiasma.

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 Spirituality within Religion 53
who lives in northern Greece. She performs a particular type of ksematiasma,
which she saves exclusively for her family. Every night she goes before the
household altar and prays for their daily protection against the evil eye and
other evil forces. Ksematiasma, therefore, can be performed habitually, as
part of an everyday effort of women to keep their family and friends spiritu-
ally sheltered. At the same time, as we shall see ahead, their spiritual capabili-
ties earn them power in the social sphere.
In her study of death laments (moirologia) in Mani, Seremetakis34 shows
how Maniatisses (the women of Mani) are considered to be the ritual experts
of moirologia in the region. As the anthropologist argues, through their par-
ticipation in the death rituals, women in Mani acquire symbolic and social
power. During the act of moirologia, Maniatisses create their own public space
of ritual action: a symbolic world where men are forbidden to enter. When the
male figure of religious authority, the priest, enters the polyphonic female space
during the lament action, the conflict between official and unofficial ritualism,
and between female and male power, becomes chaotic.35 Women, who have
been lamenting on top of and around the deceased body, go silent the minute
the priest enters the room. They punish him with a sudden lack of polyphony,
refusing to allow any man to invade their powerful ritual and cultural domain.
The ritual healing against the evil eye works in a similar way as the female
lamenting in Mani. The evil eye healers, who, as mentioned before, are mostly
women, exercise their ritual power on their husbands, male friends, neigh-
bors, even priests. Indeed, I have heard quite a few narratives from healers
themselves as well as other informants, in which a priest surrenders his reli-
gious authority to a ksematiastra, asking her to perform the ritual healing for
him. Through their engagement with the evil eye, ksematiastres (evil eye heal-
ers) construct a symbolic sacred space of ritual action, by which they acquire a
higher social status, while empowering their gendered identity. Their practice
shows that religious authority is not the sole prerogative of the male repre-
sentatives of the Church. Lay female healers too can act as mediums between
this world and the world of the divine. Everyday ritual performativity hence
enables women to challenge the social authority of men and the religious
authority of male priests; it offers Greek women the chance to be regarded as
carriers of religious authority, while empowering their gendered self.
The Church does not accept the ritual since it does not want its own author-
ity—that of the priest in particular—to be transferred to lay believers. It is
clearly a matter of power. The Church wants to maintain the dominance of the
ritual. It is the king of Orthodox rituals. The evil eye is a part of everyday life,
where lay people have taken up an authority that used to belong to the priest.
That is why they don’t like it; because it is—supposedly—a stolen power.
In agreement with the foregoing statement, which comes from a Thessa-
lonikan informant of mine, people in both my field sites, practitioners of spir-
ituality and devout Orthodox adherents alike, have argued that if the Church
positively acknowledged ksematiastres as powerful enough to perform ritual
healings, it would presumably grant them social authority. But if the Church

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 54 Eugenia Roussou
did that, it would lose its exclusivity as far as spiritual power is concerned.
And, naturally, as my informants point out, the Church cannot allow such a
loss of dominance. Therefore, Orthodoxy and the clergy maintain that priests
are the only individuals legitimized to practice evil eye treatments.
Thus far I have argued that lay female healers have always challenged the
exclusivity of priestly male religious authority in the course of their every-
day lives. Through the evil eye practice, these women employ religious and
spiritual power so as to successfully perform their ritual healing and, con-
sequently, empower their identities and manage their gendered selves. How-
ever, the stereotypical image of the old, religiously devout female spiritual
healer calls for an update. In present-day Greece, ritual expertise does not
belong solely to older, female Orthodox devotees. Of course these women are
still present and continue to challenge male religious authority. Yet, in recent
years, a change has occurred: the popularity of spirituality has increased, and
the majority of its practitioners appear to be women. Indeed, most of the evil
eye healers I met in Rethymno and Thessaloniki are young women who lead
a busy urban life and actively practice spirituality. These women communi-
cate with the transcendental sacred during the ritual healing of ksematiasma;
at the same time, they search for the inner divinity by practicing yoga, Reiki
and other alternative types of spirituality. Through negotiating their power in
both its transcendental and inner-subjective form, they consciously re-create
their identities and construct gender-charged spaces of power redistribution,
against the dominance of the male Orthodox representatives. Their everyday
(spi)ritual performativity can be analyzed to understand how religion and
spirituality interact and merge in the context of everyday Greek religiosity.

TOWARDS A PLURALIZED PATH: GREEK WOMEN

PRACTICE SPIRITUALITY

It is a fact that most practitioners of spirituality in Greece are women of

a younger age, who are more aware of global spiritual trends and willing
to incorporate and adapt them according to their own personal needs. In
their case, spirituality stands for an alternative path that can lead to the
discovery of their inner god, their power ‘within’. By practicing spirituality,
they aim to fight against Orthodox religious authority, which they consider
male-oriented and which they feel has been imposed on them from a very
young age. These women, however, still consider Orthodox Christianity as
part of their culture and do not completely abandon religion for the sake of
spirituality. Instead, they amalgamate the two, by inventing novel ways to
incorporate their spiritual practices within Orthodox religion.

Energy exists. For example, when you feel there is something negative
in certain people around you, and you try to avoid them or else you
become influenced by their negative energy. The opposite is also true.

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 Spirituality within Religion 55
Namely, positive energy can make you feel much better. In the same
logic, when someone blesses you with a prayer, whether this someone
is a priest or a ksematiastra, something very positive is transmitted to
your body.

Melina, whose words I just cited, is a twenty-eight-year-old Thessalonikan

woman who performs the ritual healing against the evil eye by reciting Ortho-
dox prayers, practices yoga frequently, meditates and follows the feng shui
rules when buying new items for her house. Having grown up in a religious
household, she had to attend church liturgies every Sunday until the age of
fifteen, when, as she told me, she realized that she did not want to be part of
a religious authoritative system, “where priests think they have all the power
in the world and they can impose this power on you”. After many fights with
her mother, who is a very religious person to date and is still urging her to be
“more actively Orthodox”, Melina became an atheist “because I felt I didn’t
want to be part of a male-centered Orthodoxy that doesn’t allow women to
express themselves”. In her early twenties, however, she was taught by her
mother how to become a ksematiastra, and she successfully began to heal
people by reciting Orthodox prayers. She then started reconnecting with her
Orthodox roots, because of her inner need to get back in touch with the spiri-
tual. Some years later she discovered spirituality, which she has followed ever
since, while believing in God and lighting a candle at a church from time to
time. As Melina explains, she never wanted to become like her mother, who
she feels is gender-powerless, as she is solely dedicated to her husband and the
priest of the neighborhood church: “. . . you see, unlike my mum, I don’t want
to have any man sitting on my head”. Thus, by performing the ksematiasma
and practicing spirituality, Melina feels that she strengthens her female iden-
tity, while disempowering the religious authority of the male priest.
Like Melina, almost all of the women I talked to in Thessaloniki and
Rethymno, evil eye healers and spiritual practitioners alike, strongly believed
in energy channeling between people. Channeling usually refers to “the use
of altered states of consciousness to contact spirits—or to experience spiri-
tual energy captured from other times and dimensions”.36 Energy channel-
ing is a very popular idiom in spirituality, and even Orthodox adherents who
dismissed energy in the past use it extensively these days. Doing yoga, burn-
ing sage, practicing Reiki healing, and placing spiritual rocks and crystals
around the house is a popular practice among younger women who want to
fill themselves and their houses with positive energy. Having a priest perform
a house blessing can throw negative energy away from one’s house. Going
to a church liturgy or reciting a prayer at home is also considered effective.
The widespread use of the concept of energy and its channeling in present-
day Greece is symptomatic of the popularity that spirituality has gained in
the country. It also proves to be the link between religion and spirituality.
“Every human being broadcasts thought-forms. That is, when people think
about others, they send out some kind of energy which creates a variety of

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 56 Eugenia Roussou
feelings and somatic symptoms in people”. Antigoni, a Rethymniot woman
in her mid-thirties, is an active spiritual practitioner. She practices yoga and
meditation every day, she believes in energy channeling, she carries heal-
ing crystals with her, and her house is decorated according to the feng shui
rules. In addition, she has studied the feng shui philosophy thoroughly: she
holds a certificate that allows her to practice feng shui as a professional, and
hence considers herself an expert on the subject. Antigoni does not go to
church. Declaring herself a feminist, she believes that the Church is nothing
more than “a space where men who supposedly hold religious authority find
ways to make women feel inferior”. Yet, she considers herself an Orthodox
Christian and has bought a few religious icons in order to fill her house with
positive energy. Even so, spirituality constitutes her main spiritual path for
she believes it can help and empower her. As she told me, however, she helps
other women feel empowered as well.
Antigoni explained that Cretan society is still very much considered to
be male-oriented, where women are in charge of the household and men
exercise social authority in all domains, including the religious one. Anti-
goni feels that through spirituality women obtain power over their husbands
and the priests. Her shop is very popular among Rethymniot women, who
frequently pay her a visit in order to buy energetic crystals, lucky charms
and feng shui objects. As these women admit to Antigoni, by placing these
objects inside their house, they feel a sense of empowerment in relation to
both their husbands (they do not fight with them as often; the men are not
aware of the positive energy that is circulated with the help of spiritually
powerful objects; such objects constitute a ‘spiritual secret’ for Rethymniot
women, who see them as a female power tool) and the priests (these objects
represent a new spiritual path, where it is women and not the Orthodox
male representative who hold the spiritual power).37
Feng shui has indeed claimed a highly popular position within the Greek
everyday context. Women in Rethymno and Thessaloniki follow the feng
shui philosophy consistently. They buy mini-fountains, because the sound
of the water is supposed to create a positive aura in the house; they place
wooden ducks and crystals in the appropriate corners of their living room in
order to attract love, prosperity and good luck; they make use of glass balls
and pyramids in order to be protected from the evil eye and other forms of
negative energy. Moreover, they hang Orthodox icons on their walls, as they
believe that their religious power can also protect them from all types of evil.
Although spirituality is an inseparable part of these women’s everyday lives,
they have not abandoned their religious belief. To quote Kaiti, a Thessa-
lonikan woman: “I have all these feng shui objects, but I also have my icons
and my cross. I think they are all helpful and powerful in their own ways”.
Ioanna is a northern Greek woman in her early forties. She is an active
spiritual practitioner: she reads mind-spirit-body books, burns sage in order
to drive negative energy out of her environment, possesses a variety of crystals
and feng shui objects, and consults alternative healing practitioners for health

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 Spirituality within Religion 57

Figure 2.2 Spiritual crystals: A popular protection from negative energy.

problems she sporadically faces. She is also a Reiki healer, who treats plenty
of her Greek female friends very successfully, and “I urge them to follow an
alternative spiritual path themselves, in order to feel the power inside them,
in order to feel luminous and free”. Ioanna believes that her act of practicing
spirituality puts her in touch with her inner light, feelings and the divine, while
empowering her body and self.38 While exercising her inner power, Ioanna is
an Orthodox adherent. She attends church liturgies whenever she can, wears
a golden cross around her neck and prays in front of her household altar every
night. As she told me, establishing closeness with the Christian, transcendental
sacred is as vital as cultivating her inner spirituality.
Marina, a young woman in Thessaloniki who practices both religion and
spirituality, aptly summarizes the way in which my female informants in Crete
and northern Greece approach religion and spiritual in the following statement:

I believe you can manage this spiritual power if you reach a certain level
of spirituality. This [power] can be related to God, to the Orthodox
Church, or to Buddhism. . . . it exists as energy. Now, what you choose
to do with it and how you name it is totally up to you.

Greek women practice spirituality in order to empower their female identi-

ties against the religious authority of the priest. Nevertheless, they perceive
religion and spirituality as complementary and amalgamate the two, while

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 58 Eugenia Roussou
attempting to find their individual spiritual path. This spiritual synthesis
may not be entirely unexpected for, as Hanegraaff maintains, the boundaries
between (‘New Age’) spirituality and Christianity are far from rigid.39

GENDER, SPIRITUALITY, POWER: TOWARDS A DIFFERENT

‘SPIRITUAL REVOLUTION’

Female empowerment through spirituality has grown to be a fundamental

part of Greek daily life. My female informants claim that through their spiri-
tual practices they gain social and spiritual power, as well as the opportunity
to challenge gender stereotypes, patriarchal social schemata and the male-
oriented authority of the Orthodox Church. Unlike practitioners of feminist
spirituality, though, whose primary goal is to critique Western patriarchal cul-
ture and Christianity and empower their gendered identity,40 Greek women
experience their gendered empowerment as a significant by-product of their
affinity with spirituality.41 Their critique of patriarchal modes of religiosity is
subtle yet vigorous: namely, Greek women are able to fight against patriar-
chal stereotypes by choosing to practice spirituality without rejecting and/or
leaving Orthodoxy. The fact that Greek women do not abandon Orthodoxy
or leave their husbands does not signify that they are simply reproducing
already given sociocultural norms, without empowering their gender identi-
ties. Greek women have actually already contributed to a change at the level
of everyday religiosity and gender role-playing. Greek religiosity is no longer
considered to be synonymous to Christianity, and the authority of the male
priest is no longer a given. Women in Greece have claimed and acquired spiri-
tual charisma and, by practicing spirituality, they express a “desire to move
away from traditional roles ascribed to the feminine”.42
According to Butler,43 “gender reality is performative, it is real only to
the extent that it is performed”. What is more, performance is a matter of
power, and “separating power from performance is logically indefensible,
we cannot separate the acquisition of power from the way in which it is
exercised”.44 Female social actors perform spirituality, gain power, challenge
gender identities and lead Greek religiosity towards a spiritual revolution.
As Macpherson remarks:45

It is precisely within these fields of contemporary spirituality that we may

find new ideals and alternatives to traditional gender roles. Hence there
is space within these fields for women and men to reinscribe, redefine
and reimagine their own bodies and their constructions of masculinity
and femininity so that possibilities occur for the reclamation of power.

New spiritual practices have manifested themselves in the everyday life of

Greeks. These alternative spiritualities, however, have not necessarily started
a war with Orthodoxy, which remains influential and has not experienced

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 Spirituality within Religion 59
tremendous erosion to date. Yet, Orthodox practitioners have become less
religiously exclusive. Consequently, present-day Greece seems to be taking
part in a different kind of ‘spiritual revolution’. Orthodox Christianity has
lost its dominance, and currently goes hand in hand with subjective-life
spiritualities. When it comes to Rethymniot and Thessalonikan women, in
particular, it appears that they have realized they can free themselves from
the confinement that has been imposed on them by the male-dominated
Church. They have the choice to follow Orthodoxy, or to reject it altogether.
They can be Christian adherents and simultaneously experiment with other
spiritual practices. Greek women have therefore expanded their repertoire
of symbolic actions to creatively act in the spiritual landscape of contem-
porary Greece, and they challenge the predominantly masculine Greek reli-
gious authority from within.

NOTES

Financial support from the Portuguese Foundation of Science and Technology (FCT)
made possible the writing-up stage of this article. I wish to thank Anna Fedele and
Kim Knibbe for their insightful comments on this paper. I am also grateful to Christina
Konstantaki for thoroughly discussing many of the ideas presented here, and for all her
support throughout the editing process.

1. Susumu Shimazono, “‘New Age’ Movement’ or ‘New Spirituality Move-

ments and Culture’?” Social Compass 46, no. 2 (1999): 125. Cf. Paul Hee-
las and Linda Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving
Way to Spirituality (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Paul Heelas, Spiritualities of
Life: ‘New Age’ Romanticism and Consumptive Capitalism (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2006); Hubert Knoblauch, “Europe and Invisible Religion”,
Social Compass 50, no. 3 (2003): 267–274; Hubert Knoblauch, “Spiritu-
ality and Popular Religion in Europe”, Social Compass 55, no. 2 (2008):
140–153.
2. Heelas and Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution, x.
3. Knoblauch, “Europe and Invisible Religion”, 270.
4. Tuomas Martikainen, “Changes in the Religious Landscape: European
Trends at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century”, Swedish Missiological
Themes 95, no. 4 (2007): 365–385; Rodney Stark et al., “Exploring Spiritu-
ality and Unchurched Religions in America, Sweden, and Japan”, Journal of
Contemporary Religion 20, no. 1 (2005): 2–23; Detlef Pollack, “Religious
Change in Europe: Theoretical Considerations and Empirical Findings”,
Social Compass 55, no. 2 (2008): 168–186.
5. I have since returned to my field sites, making sure that my ethnographic
observations and analytic conclusions are still up to date.
6. Matthew Wood, Possession, Power and the New Age: Ambiguities of Author-
ity in Neoliberal Societies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
7. Ibid., 9.
8. Brian Morris, Religion and Anthropology: A Critical Introduction (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 304.
9. Using the term ‘spiritual’ to refer to ‘spirituality’ does not mean that I neglect
the spiritual character of Orthodoxy. In order to be consistent in the use of

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 60 Eugenia Roussou
terminology, however, ‘spiritual’ in the present article signifies exogenous
and thus non-Orthodox forms of religiosity.
10. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (London:
Collier Macmillan, 1964), 358.
11. Nicos Alivizatos, “A New Role for the Greek Church?” Journal of Modern
Greek Studies 17 (1999): 25.
12. Lina Molokotos-Liederman, “Sacred Words, Profane Music? The Free
Monks as a Musical Phenomenon in Contemporary Greek Orthodoxy”,
Sociology of Religion 65, no. 4 (2004): 403–416.
13. Pollack, “Religious Change in Europe”.
14. ‘Orthodoxy’ and ‘Orthodox Christianity’ are used alternatively and denote
the predominant religion of Greece. In addition, ‘Church’ in its capitalized
form signifies the doctrinal organ of Orthodox Christianity and the reli-
gious ideology that is embedded in it.
15. Charles Stewart, “Relocating Syncretism in Social Science Discourse”, in
Syncretism in Religion: A Reader, ed. Anita Leopold and Jeppe Jensen (Lon-
don: Routledge, 2004), 280.
16. Subjective-life spiritualities have to do with the invocation of ‘the sacred in
the cultivation of unique subjective-life’ (Heelas and Woodhead, The Spiri-
tual Revolution, 5).
17. Ibid., 2.
18. Heelas and Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution, 5.
19. Wood, Possession, 61.
20. See Fenella Cannell, “Introduction: The Anthropology of Christianity”, in
The Anthropology of Christianity, ed. Fenella Cannell (Durham: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2006), 39.
21. Paul Heelas, The ‘New Age’ Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the
Sacralization of Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
22. Heelas, Spiritualities of Life, 223.
23. Knoblauch, “Spirituality”, 145.
24. Cannell, “Introduction”, 41.
25. Ibid., 39–45.
26. A close affinity is indeed established between the older generation of
Greeks and Orthodox Christianity. Greeks in their fifties, sixties and seven-
ties are by far less likely to know and practice alternative spirituality than
the older generation in other countries of northern Europe and America,
for example. One could assume that the Greek elderly are more religiously
observant than the younger Greek generation, and reject spirituality. How-
ever, I have encountered quite a few young people who attend church litur-
gies every other Sunday, and older individuals who decorate their house by
following the feng shui rules, burn sage to clean their house’s atmosphere
and believe in the existence and exchange of energy. Greek social stances
are thus dynamic and varying, and are determined by age only up to a
certain degree. Nevertheless, my ethnographic fieldwork has shown that
spiritual practices seem to be far more popular among the younger Greek
generation, who tends to amalgamate religion and spirituality to a greater
degree.
27. In almost every Greek household, people, regardless of whether religiously
devoted, dedicate a corner in their house to create a family altar, an iconos-
tasi (literally, an icon stand), which is usually filled with Christian icons and
an oil lamp. This altar is supposed to protect the household from evil forces,
and it is the place where members of the family go to pray and establish a
form of communication with the sacred.
28. Knoblauch, “Spirituality”, 146.

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 Spirituality within Religion 61
29. Perhaps the most well-known practice of Orthodox mysticism is the so-
called ‘Hesychast method of prayer’. It is based on the continuous reciting
of the Jesus Prayer (‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me’),
while one regulates one’s breathing and adopts a particular bodily posture,
namely chin resting on the chest and eyes fixed on the place of the heart
(personal communication with a priest in Thessaloniki).
30. See Shimazono, “‘New Age’ Movement”; Stark et al., “Exploring Spiritu-
ality”; and Knoblauch, “Spirituality”. Exceptions are the works of Anna
Fedele, “From Christian Religion to Feminist Spirituality: Mary Magdalene
Pilgrims to La-Baume, France”, Culture and Religion 10, no. 3 (2009):
243–261; and Kathryn Rountree, Crafting Contemporary Pagan Identities
in a Catholic Society (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010).
31. For a detailed analysis on gender power struggles in Greek society, see Jill
Dubisch, ed., Gender and Power in Rural Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1986); Evthymios Papataxiarchis and Theodoros Paradel-
lis, eds., Tautotites kai Fylo sti Sygxroni Ellada (Athens: Alexandreia, 1998).
32. The literal meaning of parekklistiastiko is ‘deviating from the Church’.
33. Juliet Du Boulay, “Women—Images of Their Nature and Destiny in Rural
Greece”, in Gender and Power in Rural Greece, ed. Jill Dubisch (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press), 139.
34. C. N. Seremetakis, The Last Word: Women, Death and Divination in Inner
Mani (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991).
35. Ibid., 163.
36. Michael F. Brown, The Channeling Zone: American Spirituality in an Anx-
ious Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), viii.
37. C.f. Eeva Sointu and Linda Woodhead, “Spirituality, Gender, and Expres-
sive Selfhood”, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 47, no. 2 (2008):
270.
38. C.f. Cynthia Eller, Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spiritual-
ity Movement in America (New York: Crossroad, 1993), 213.
39. See Wouter Hanegraaff, ‘New Age’ Religion and Western Culture: Esoteri-
cism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 189.
40. Jean M. Herriot, “Feminist Spirituality, Theology and Anthropology”, in
Explorations in Anthropology and Theology, ed. Frank A. Salamone and
Walter Radolph Adams (Lanham, MA: University Press of America, 1997),
47; C.f. Janet. L. Jacobs, “Gender and Power in New Religious Movements:
A Feminist Discourse on the Scientific Study of Religion”, in Feminism in
the Study of Religion: A Reader, ed. Darlene M. Juschka (London: Con-
tinuum, 2001).
41. Feminist spirituality originated in North America in the early 1970s. As
Eller notes, “feminist spirituality’s unique contribution to individual women
is empowerment, and empowerment in a particular form: empowerment as
a woman” (Eller, Living in the Lap of the Goddess, 208).
42. Sointu and Woodhead, “Spirituality”, 260.
43. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in
Phenomenology and Feminist Theory”, in Performing Feminisms: Feminist
Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1990), 278.
44. Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and Soci-
ety (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 123.
45. Judith Macpherson, Women and Reiki: Energetic/Holistic Healing in Prac-
tice (London: Equinox, 2008), 11.

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 3 Individual Spirituality and Religious
Membership among Soka Gakkai
Buddhists in Spain
Monica Cornejo

In the final months of 2009, while I was engaged in exploratory fieldwork

in the new spiritual market in Madrid, I met a group of friends with excit-
ing spiritual careers. Several of them had become respected professionals
as yoga teachers, Reiki masters, feng shui assessors and experts in a wide
variety of techniques related to ‘energetic wellness’. The group was het-
erogeneous and it was always changing. Thus, it was not surprising that
two of the women in the group began attending meetings of Soka Gakkai,
a Japanese branch of Buddhism that follows the teachings of the ancient
monk Nichiren Daishonin.1 In the beginning, the other friends considered
Buddhism, regardless of the branch, to be an interesting way to approach
spiritual knowledge more deeply. These friends considered themselves to be
counter-religious free spirits in contrast with the larger Catholic culture of
the country. Exploring Buddhism seemed to them appropriate in the begin-
ning. However, one day, Rocio and Chiara went beyond their free spiri-
tuality and became converts. The other members of the group expressed
doubts about what was happening with the two women. Had they been
“kidnapped” or “brainwashed” by a sect? Why were they refusing their
spiritual freedom and exchanging it for a huge apparatus that appeared to
be church-like?
The Spanish religious context has historically been shaped by a singular
and strict assimilation between religion and Catholicism.2 When new reli-
gious movements arrived in Spain in the late 1970s and 1980s, religious
diversity was seen as a rare deviation. As Joan Prat has shown, the early
literature on new religious movements in Spain reveals the durable stigma
attached to religious difference.3 Both Catholic and atheistic sources intro-
duced the imaginary of sect-phobia with such expressions as ‘brainwashing’,
‘totalitarian groups’, ‘destructive sects’, ‘terror messiah’, ‘cult slaves’ and
other shocking expressions that appeared in popular book titles. Today, reli-
gious tolerance has changed markedly towards more open-minded attitudes,
although among spiritual seekers there is still residual suspicion about a pos-
sible lack of personal freedom or religious autonomy. However, most spiri-
tual seekers nowadays associate this danger of alienation with the Catholic
Church (rather than with new religious movements).

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 Individual Spirituality and Religious Membership 63
The rejection of an ecclesiastic style of organizing is one of the key ideas
and attitudes in contemporary spirituality. Paul Heelas, Linda Woodhead
and others in the field of sociology have explained the current transforma-
tion of religious forms by opposing individual spirituality and institutional
religion as two mutually exclusive paradigms, while spirituality is replacing
religion in culture.4 Some works in the field of anthropology have already
revealed that the beliefs and practices in the scope of the spirituality move-
ment are not far removed from traditional religion.5 The case of Buddhist
converts in Spain offers a good chance to explore the transformation from
collective religion to individual spiritualities. Despite the long doctrinal and
monastic tradition of Buddhism in other regions, European (including Span-
ish) and American Buddhism seem to be just one of an array of options for
individual spirituality. At the same time, however, Buddhist groups (includ-
ing Soka Gakkai) maintain strong institutional structures, similar to those
of a religion model. Here, I will explore the possibilities of the paradigmatic
opposition between spirituality and religion to clarify what is happening
in post-Catholic Spain and the possibilities of Spanish Buddhism to reveal
the conditions of contemporary religious change. First, I will discuss the
place and relevance of the spirituality-religion dichotomy in the discourse
and practice of Nichiren Buddhists living in Madrid. Next, I will explore
some key ideas in sociology of spirituality concerning community power and
individual empowerment, paying special attention to gender issues. Finally,
I will pose alternative hypotheses for understanding the importance of reli-
gious institutions in contemporary spiritual pathways.

THE SPIRITUALITY-RELIGION DICHOTOMY:

DIFFERENTIATING ‘EMIC’ AND ‘ETIC’ USES

Following the general line of the invisible religion thesis, Woodhead and
Heelas maintain that the contemporary transformation of religious forms
consists of a disintegration of institutional rituals and beliefs and their
reinvention around new organizational structures.6 Woodhead and Heelas
describe the differences between religion and spirituality as an opposition
between external authority (collective, moral, institutional, symbolic) and
internal or self-authority (individual, lived, subjective, sensory). External
authority corresponds to the ‘life-as’ religious model based on social iden-
tity, which refers both to the roles established for individuals based on their
positions in a social system and to the membership in a church. This collec-
tive religiosity or ‘congregational model’ corresponds to an expert system
in which the sources of validation of religious knowledge and experience lie
in different types of specialists.7 This contrasts with individual religiosity in
which the individual experience of different beliefs or rituals emerges as the
only legitimate place for religious authority. In this sense, the congregational
model is characterized by an attitude of commitment to an external truth

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 64 Monica Cornejo
that usually consists of a repertoire of beliefs managed by the institution or
by the society and its traditional specialists, whereas the holistic and spiri-
tual model is committed to developing an individual exploration and per-
sonal expression of truth about oneself and for oneself, a truth that emerges
in the process of exploration and personal expression. The dichotomy also
expresses, therefore, an opposition between beliefs and experiences and
between doctrine externally produced (internally reproduced) and personal
searches, based on the individual’s emotions, for the validity of available
truths. According to numerous studies, it is a common discourse among the
social actors of New Age and other spiritualities of life that religion, tradi-
tion and the church are repressive or that they limit individual expression
through ideological regulations, whereas the new spirituality has an open-
ing dimension that fosters personal care, encouraging individuals to explore
their own selves more deeply, freely trying different sources of experience
and knowledge.
The laic Buddhism of the Japanese Nichiren School is one of the fastest
growing among the new religious movements, according to Martin Bau-
mann.8 Although the analytical classification of Buddhism under the cate-
gory religion may be more or less problematic,9 the importance of Buddhism
in the debate about religion and spirituality lies in the fact that members of
Soka Gakkai in Spain claim their practice as an example of spirituality in the
sense of Heelas: focused on the inner self.10

Spirituality versus Religion: Emic Representation

by Soka Gakkai Members
Among the members of Soka Gakkai in Spain, this dichotomist representa-
tion posited by sociologists of spirituality in which ‘religion’ appears as a
rigid external power structure opposed to a libertarian individual spiritual-
ity is widely shared and reproduced. Nichiren Buddhism is considered to be
a representative example of the latter model. Thus, in the words of Rocio,

What I like about this Buddhism is that nobody forces you to do any-
thing. You are free, very free; you can do whatever you want. If you want
to go to the group meeting you go. If you don’t want to go, you don’t.
Nobody says to you: “Oh, you did not come! Did you?” I mean. . . . if
you don’t go, well, what happens?

The background reference is the opposite. Antonella exposes how she felt
about her religious childhood thus:

For many years my life was . . . like . . . “You have to be good because
if you are not good, then you will go to Hell”, or “you have to obey”. I
don’t know, I was raised in a religious school with nuns and there was
a Sister also called Antonella [the speaker and the Sister referred here

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 Individual Spirituality and Religious Membership 65
have the same name] and she was . . . argh . . . In my first communion,
she [the sister] was always yelling at me. I was always the black sheep,
oh . . . I don’t know, I never took religion very seriously. I was not well
connected then.

Faced with that memory of religion, Soka Gakkai members in Spain (who
mainly have a Catholic religious enculturation) present the experience of
Buddhist practice as spirituality that is not only liberating but also extremely
pragmatic, as shown in Chiara’s testimony about the early days with her first
master, Rose:

Many people are surprised when they realized how our group practice
is . . . I mean, with a disciple-master relationship. All these things scared
me in the beginning, but Rose introduced the practice to me in a dif-
ferent way. She said [Rose]: “practice and look what happens!” So I
[Chiara] began invoking every day in a relaxed way, you know . . . and
she [Rose] said: “try to get some goals, you will see that it works”. Some
goals to ask for, you know . . . and I targeted two or three very difficult
goals and suddenly I got it! . . . Well, I asked firstly for illumination
about my relationship, whether I should break it out or not, and soon I
met someone else. Then I asked for an important business with K, that is
a very big company. It was almost impossible but I got it too! . . . Yes, I
asked through daimoku,11 I contacted in a week and business went well,
we work together now.12

In this extract, we can appreciate the use of Nichiren Buddhism as a tool

of personal empowerment, whereas the experience of the Catholic religion
is rejected as passive and dependent on external power:

I was very shocked when my father fell ill with a tumor. Suddenly every-
body began to pray! Now I understand why, but then I was so angry.
[I remember] we were in a church, my mother and I, and I felt . . . I
was not connected. Everyone was praying for something but no one
was believing in the strength of my father! . . . When my father left the
operating room, my mother said: “Alas! Thank San Antonio! Dad has
been saved by San Antonio!” But I said: “He wasn’t, Mom! He has been
saved by the doctor and by Dad’s strength!” . . . I stopped believing in
Catholicism because I was upset, because everybody’s energy had been
launched outside and not into the person. The strength is within each
person!

Although these speeches must be framed in the specific context of an

unusual Buddhism, and among converts whose category of religion is almost
synonymous with the Catholic Church, these statements match with a gen-
eral representation of religion in the context of the spiritual revolution as

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 66 Monica Cornejo
Woodhead and Heelas have described it. However, participant observation
of everyday practice also reveals that this liberating practice (that makes
the individual more powerful and autonomous beyond the spiritual dimen-
sion) is developed within a hierarchical community of believers in which the
neighborhood group or President Ikeda’s teachings are essential for under-
standing the full meaning of the practice and how it works. But what is Soka
Gakkai and what type of religiosity can be found among its practitioners
in Spain?

Soka Gakkai: Practice and Organization in Spain

As many members have noted, Soka Gakkai is nam myoho renge kyo. In
Japanese, this mantra is called daimoku and chanting it is the main practice
of Nichiren Buddhism. Defenders of Nichiren Daishonin’s Buddhist reform
argue that the Lotus Sutra contains the essence of the teachings of the Bud-
dha Sakyamuni. Indeed, the mantra summarizes both the philosophy and
the practice of Soka Gakkai and the words in Japanese mean ‘devotion to
the Lotus Sutra of the wonderful law’. This formula is chanted by the fol-
lowers of Soka Gakkai every day in front of the gohonzon. The gohonzon
is a paper representation of their mantra and some references to important
authorities from the Lotus Sutra (princes, kings and Bodhisattvas), all of
which are in Japanese script. This paper is considered a mandala and is kept
in a small closet (butsudan) in a central place in each practitioner’s house. In
front of the gohonzon, with hands together and clasping a small rosary, both
gongyo and daimoku are chanted. Chanting or “doing gongyo” consists of
reciting those extracts of the Lotus Sutra in Japanese selected by Nichiren
Daishonin.13
Gongyo and daimoku are also recited with other people. Often, Bud-
dhist friends to meet informally to “do daimoku” together, but there are
also regular meetings each month for the local group of practitioners. These
meetings are called zadankai or ‘dialogue groups’. The meetings are based
on local proximity and are usually held at the home of a ranking member.
In addition to chanting, the zadankai is a space for sharing reflections and
everyday experiences. Every month, a topic is proposed and one or two
people prepare a discussion of the topic. The meeting takes place in front
of the gohonzon. First, the group chants daimoku and gongyo. Next, the
people who prepared the discussion comment on a short reading for the
group. These members usually read extracts from the association’s monthly
magazine (Global Civilization) and they often choose selected thoughts from
the current president of Soka Gakkai, sensei Daisaku Ikeda, who publishes
his thoughts every month in the organization’s journals and books. When
commenting on the reading, the speakers try to relate the issue to personal
experiences to illustrate the contemporary and everyday importance of these
universal reflections. After this commentary, other participants take part in
the dialogue, and finally three daimoku are recited in front of the gohonzon

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 Individual Spirituality and Religious Membership 67
to thank the group and the gohonzon for the good meeting. Usually, the host
offers something to eat before everyone leaves.
In addition to this type of meeting, Soka Gakkai often organizes open
meetings to which the regular members invite friends or family. In the 1960s
and 1970s, the organization became well known and controversial in the
United States because its members invited people they encountered in the
streets. Looking for adherents in the streets or explaining lay Buddhism in
open meetings were the two old ways in which Soka Gakkai implemented
one of its social tasks, the shaku-buku, which means to spread the mes-
sage and the practice of Nichiren Daishonin as a way to achieve collective
happiness (kosen-rufu). In Europe, this proactive proselytism was never the
regular style. In European countries, a potential adherent is usually invited
by a member of Soka Gakkai to the open meetings held at kaikan or cultural
centers.
These neighborhood meetings form the social basis for the entire organi-
zation. In different countries with different implementation periods and dif-
ferent geographical distributions of membership, each structure is different.
In the case of Spain in 2010, the Society of Value Creation is divided into
seven major areas that comprise approximately five thousand practitioners
of Nichiren Buddhism according to Ines Vazquez, head of public relations for
Soka Gakkai in Spain.14 Each region is divided into several zones, depending
on the population density of the membership. Each zone is further divided
into general districts and each general district consists of two or three minor
districts. In each minor district there are dialogue groups, ideally formed by
ten people who live in the same neighborhood. As head of each level, one
person serves as a coordinator. The national leaders insist on the idea that
the group leaders, regardless of their level, cannot make decisions for their
constituents. As Ines Vazquez notes, the person in charge calls and organizes
events, ensures the happiness of the people in the group and encourages and
accompanies members. In fact, this latter function, accompanying, justifies
the gender and age division across the entire organization. Thus, the ideal
is that each group has four people in charge: a woman, a young woman, a
man and a young man. Each of these persons is expected to establish easy
understanding with their gender and age peers within the group.
In addition to these territorially organized groups, there are additional
sections, also called ‘departments’ or ‘divisions’. The national sections of
boys, girls, women and men are considered divisions or departments in this
sense and have four state-level general coordinators. Although we cannot
say that Spain has a Soka Gakkai children’s section per se, there is a leader
who organizes activities for the Future Group, which is composed of the
members’ children. In Spain, there are two stable professional divisions,
one for artists and the other for educators. Above all of this structure is
the presidency, which has functions of representation and organization but
has no executive functions. Command and decision-making are functions
of the Executive Committee, which is composed of the regional heads, state

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 68 Monica Cornejo
section coordinators and the president of the national division. In addition
to the presidency (or “down” the entire organization, in the words of the
members), there are two youth groups (one for girls and another for boys)
engaged in the logistical support of collective events. These groups consist of
people who are an essential but invisible part of the organization, and their
duties include greeting the guests, managing spaces or food and chanting
daimoku to foster the good course of the meetings.
The institutional profile of the organization, even one as small as that
in Spain, is remarkably developed and structured. Moreover, above the
national divisions of Soka Gakkai is SGI, Soka Gakkai International, which
coordinates the various national and continental organizations from the
headquarters in Japan. The SGI also coordinates numerous parallel orga-
nizations of the Society for Value Creating, such as universities, museums,
foundations and publishers. Most important in this description is that this
Buddhism can be easily classified as religious in the sense of sociological
taxonomy, despite Buddhist discourses on their practice as a highly indi-
vidualized and emancipating spirituality apart from the rigid structures of
Christianity. Indeed, Karel Dobbelaere has argued that Soka Gakkai behaves
as a characteristic ‘pillar organization’ in the style of the congregational
structures of central European religious fields in the 1950s in which the
members could take advantage of a wide variety of secular activities and
services (including political parties) to develop a more or less self-sufficient
life, segregated from the rest of secular society and focused on the religious
group’s social network.15 Thus, how does Nichiren Buddhism construct a
highly individualized practice with its remarkable hierarchy and strong gen-
der roles? Taking into account the practices and experiences of Buddhists
from Spain, the key to answering this question lies in the laic doctrine of
Buddhism on the one hand and in the biographical pathways of the members
on the other hand.

THE SPIRITUALITY-RELIGION CONTINUUM IN PRACTICE

Despite the institutional development of the organization, the foundation of

the entire structure of Soka Gakkai is based on three pillars that are clearly
typical of the subjective spiritual revolution: a simple individual empow-
erment-oriented practice, an immanentist doctrine and the experience of
other spiritual practices and doctrines learned in the personal pursuit of
spirituality.

Manifesting the Buddhahood

As we have seen, one of the common references in the discourses of the spiri-
tual bricoleur is the high valuation of the spiritual route towards individual
empowerment and the personal life improvement that results. In the case

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 Individual Spirituality and Religious Membership 69
of the Nichiren Buddhist, the first time someone “gets the law” (first gets
the news about the mantra), he or she is invited to verify the usefulness of
chanting daimoku to obtain concrete things that the beginner asks for him-
self or herself. This is referred to as “determining”—that is, to set goals and
personal targets. Learning to determine is considered to be one of the more
effective cognitive tools in the process of individual empowerment because
it requires the skill to make concrete specific personal desires. In this sense,
it is assumed that the pragmatic power of chanting daimoku comes from
“the heart of the person”, who connects to his or her powerful Buddha-
hood through the chanting. ‘Manifesting the Buddhahood’ also means to
become oneself visibly, to come out, to extract the personal self completely
and fearlessly. It is often said that the gohonzon is a mirror of the person
who recites in front of it; therefore the mandala has an imperative power:
the imperative to “connect with yourself” by adopting a habit of intimate
honesty that will result in a better coherence of personal behavior both in
the moral sense of “being the best version of yourself” and in the utilitarian
sense of “getting more things” (this sense includes concrete benefits, such as
social promotion, economic profits, employment upgrading, success in love
or healthy habits).
Although the practice is oriented by these individualistic and utilitar-
ian ethics, Nichiren Buddhists base their beliefs on the doctrine of Dharma
described in the Lotus Sutra or at least in the repertoire of interpretations of
this text by Nichiren Daishonin and Daisaku Ikeda. As we have seen, nam
myoho renge kyo means ‘Devotion to the Lotus Sutra of the Wonderful
Law’ and Law as translation for Dharma. Dharma refers to the fine reality
that underlies phenomenological manifestations. Thus, both the self and
the personal desires or the circumstances of life are different displays of
all-embracing and permanent reality. The essential permanency of Dharma
implies its normative character as law, especially in the sense that is com-
monly referenced by Nichiren Buddhists: the law of the simultaneity of cause
and effect. Whereas the notion of karma refers to the temporal sequence,
Dharma refers here to the simultaneity of all the facts. Those ideas provide
the basis for daimoku practice, and doing daimoku means a type of ‘tuning’
or ‘synchronization’ of the individual (and personal goals) with the Won-
derful Dharma. Thus, the mantra is considered to be the tool that enables
individuals to achieve their objectives (effect) by invoking them (cause). To
a certain extent, the convergence between doctrine and practice leads to a
simultaneous sacralization of the individual and the spiritual tools. How-
ever, for most converts to Soka Gakkai, “getting more things” through
strengthened spiritual individuality is the result of a laborious prior learning.

Learning the Self: Notes on Gender

Some expressions used by Nichiren Buddhists to describe the effectiveness
of daimoku are strongly reminiscent of some of the most famous New Age

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 70 Monica Cornejo
theories, such as the law of attraction by Louise Hay, the theory of synchron-
icity of James Redfield, or Deepak Chopra’s notion of visualization. In fact,
according to testimonies from both the monthly review and the dialogue
group meetings, many women who practice Nichiren Buddhism in Spain
consider Louise Hay’s practice of affirmations to be personal training for
accepting the power of daimoku. However, interviews with men have shown
that their practices before Nichiren Buddhism were based mainly on study
and reading but not on performances or experiences. When authors or texts
are cited as precedents, men mention texts from other Buddhist traditions
and philosophers and scientists with a greater academic reputation than
that of the writers of best sellers in the ‘holistic milieu’. Usually, the topics
of interest are similar among men and women, but the sources cited differ.
Differences in the discourse about personal beliefs represent the heritage
of different spiritual paths. Specifically, male respondents have pursued spir-
ituality especially through study and reading, while women have pursued
spirituality through the integration of the study, experience and active par-
ticipation in the networks and services of the holistic milieu. In both cases,
this pursuit can be considered an active and processual model of conver-
sion from early religious socialization within the family until receipt of the
gohonzon with intermediate stages between the two points, rather than a
dramatic conversion experience.16 Observed from a present-day perspective,
for Nichiren Buddhists in Spain, these intermediate stages mean learning a
cognitive and ethical discipline (in both the behavioral and the normative
sense) that is expressed through the daimoku and Soka Gakkai. However,
the training to ‘manifest the Buddhahood’ is not the same for women and
men. Only women and girls of Soka Gakkai in Spain have built their spiri-
tual biography specifically through the incorporation of cognitive schemata
that isolate the self as authority, after which they are sanctified in Buddhism.
These gender differences are partly but not completely consistent with
Woodhead’s theses of spiritual revolution as applied to the feminization of
the sacred.17 Woodhead explains the high number of women in the holistic
milieu as a response to the autonomy and legitimacy that spirituality gives
to subjective personal expression and its affirmation of the individuality of
women. However, this author also establishes a gender difference between a
relational spirituality, which is open to others and more likely to appeal to
women, and other strictly utilitarian and self-centered spiritualities, which
are more likely to be adopted by men. Among the Nichiren Buddhist practi-
tioners of Spain, this difference does not seem to have a gender profile. The
utilitarian notion of “getting more things” and the individualism of ‘mani-
festing the Buddhahood’ are active values for all members of Soka Gakkai,
regardless of gender. At the same time, Soka Gakkai is also characterized by
the notably relational values of the Human Revolution as a project for col-
lective happiness; these values are also shared by all members, although the
emphasis on individuality is stronger. However, it is imperative to note that
there are probably twice as many women as men in Soka Gakkai in Spain,

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 Individual Spirituality and Religious Membership 71
which could explain the benefits of Buddhist practice to women for express-
ing their subjectivity.18
Despite these differences, there are also parallels in the spiritual path-
ways of men and women. As in other testimonies of conversion, everything
begins with spiritual disappointment. Most members of Soka Gakkai in
Spain learned religious doctrine and the routines of praying in childhood
and had no intention of rebelling against their beliefs until an event caused
some kind of crisis. Today, this crisis is described not only in terms of the
rejection of priests, nuns and the Church in general, but also as a rejection
of the notions of God, good and evil and all the doctrines that sustain the
external condition of the sacred; it is assumed that the external condition of
the sacred condemns the believer to resigned acceptance and passivity. Those
who reject religion and its life-as model but are still interested in “connecting
with the spiritual dimension” begin a personal search for spirituality in the
subjective style described by Heelas and Woodhead. Each person develops
this route towards spirituality in a heterogeneous way within a variety of
experiences, but in general, it is possible to discern a common and cyclical
sequence of five steps. First, one reads or hears about a belief or practice.
Next, he or she decides whether to prove it or to study about it either by
becoming a ‘client’ or by beginning autodidactic study. Such study leads to
the crucial third step, the contrasting test: “Does it work for me?”
This single question likely encapsulates the meaning of the entire spiritual
revolution. At any other time in European religious history, such a question
would have been pointless, but today what seems out of order is questioning
truth, objectivity or even the value of religious knowledge. “Does it work
for me?” inserts into the religious sphere a strictly individual and relativist
utilitarianism that encourages a subjective life-model of behavior in which
individual experience stands as the main criterion of the new religious cul-
ture. In this crucial third step, if the answer is negative, the seeker returns
to the beginning and probably becomes interested in another practice or
doctrine. If the answer is positive, the seeker continues towards acquiring
a disciplined specialization, either through self-learning or through active
participation in an activity or group associated with the spiritual realm that
works. When the spiritual seeker arrives successfully at the fourth step, those
who want to commit seriously to their new discipline will enter a fifth stage:
the acquisition of a stable role in the spiritual realm either as a specialized
professional or as a client (or convert) who practices regularly with some
degree of collective commitment.
As previously noted, one of the main characteristics of contemporary spir-
ituality is the plurality and the internal heterogeneity of its composition. A
person in the pursuit of spirituality can make and remake this route as many
times as he or she wishes over the course of a lifetime. It is fairly common
for a person to become a specialist in different disciplines over time, starting
with the moment that he or she moves away from institutional and external
religion and begins to strengthen his or her own subjective turn of the sacred.

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 72 Monica Cornejo
Someone in pursuit of individual and individualistic spirituality probably
becomes a member of an organization such as Soka Gakkai because it works
in strengthening the individual, but additional reasons exist.

FROM INDIVIDUAL SPIRITUALITY TO THE MEMBERSHIP

EXPERIENCE: NOTES ON POWER

Comparing her experiences in a wide variety of alternative disciplines, Rocio

says that “this practice [Nichiren Buddhism] is simple, but it is more com-
plete”. According to Daniel, a careful student of Eastern philosophy, “it
is the shortest route, the fastest tool” to personal growth and it results in
performed achievements and fulfilled goals. Nichiren Buddhism offers the
doctrinal tradition, the social dimension and the organizational platform
not offered by the blurred and relativist ‘patchwork belief’ or holistic milieu.
The sense of individual power and priority of subjective experience are war-
ranted by Soka Gakkai at the discursive level; at the practical level, however,
the subjective experience of spirituality is oriented towards a certain con-
ceptual and narrative orthodoxy. This tendency towards orthodoxy occurs
partly because doctrinal learning takes place and partly because the meetings
are based on the narration of testimonies, which means that eventually the
scripts of the testimonies will acquire narrative and cognitive alignment. In
addition, at the level of practice, it appears that individuals are encouraged
to merge their own power and personal goals with the power and overall
goals of Soka Gakkai Buddhism. Three rules have been especially designed
to limit possible compromises: the organization never requires payment for
goods or services, members should not do business with other members
and members should not seek romantic or sexual relationships within the
community of practitioners. Nevertheless, because nothing is strictly forbid-
den, members do provide money as gifts (for what has been achieved by
chanting), they do business with one another and they sometimes become
involved in romantic relationships.
Beyond these basic rules, a general principle of relationships among
Buddhist practitioners is that the members support and guide one another;
this principle is the main form of internal control within the organization.
Although the vast institutional apparatus of Soka Gakkai may convey a dif-
ferent impression, the authority in the community of practitioners in Spain
is diffuse, and egalitarianism and pluralism are the ideals in power relation-
ships. These ideals can cause significant paradoxes that frequently disturb
beginners. One example of such a paradox is the ubiquity of President Ikeda,
who appears quite often in texts, videos and speeches, even in the daily
chanting of gongyo. For many beginners, the constant presence of authori-
ties in meetings or rituals, although symbolic, contradicts the principle of
‘manifesting the Buddhahood’ in a narrowly individualistic sense, but Dai-
saku Ikeda is presented as “a human like us”, one who has succeeded in his

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 Individual Spirituality and Religious Membership 73
life by manifesting his Buddhahood. In addition, the separation of men and
women, young and old, bothers many beginners, but the organization pres-
ents it as an easy way to foster greater personal affinity within the groups.
Another political paradox surfaces when someone with responsibility in the
organization corrects individual private behavior. For example, the organi-
zation regularly publishes photographs of members in their journals, but if
a member were to post pictures or information about the meetings on Face-
book, he or she might be advised that it is not appropriate.
Despite these paradoxes, one of the main attractions that Nichiren Bud-
dhism has for its members is the possibility of transcending individualis-
tic spirituality and projecting personal and spiritual power into the social
transformation preached by Daisaku Ikeda.19 Indeed, one characteristic and
controversial issue of this activist lay Buddhism is its social and political
vocation. The Lotus Sutra provides the doctrinal basis for personal transcen-
dence and social transformation and aligns with the most popular doctrine
of Mahayana Buddhism: enlightenment is possible for all humans (not only
for saints) in the period of a single life.20 When Tsunesaburo Makiguchi
founded the Society for Value Creation (Soka Gakkai) in 1930, he recovered
the teachings of Nichiren Daishonin precisely because Nichiren gives special
importance to social transformation, which must begin within the individual
as a manifestation of both the Wonderful Dharma and the original place of
Value.21 This alternative interpretation of the Lotus Sutra led the Japanese
Nichiren Buddhists to the creation of a political party.22 Nevertheless, today
the Society for Value Creation has redefined its political work as a task of
philosophical teaching at several levels, ranging from the transmission of
shaku-buku by the base membership (talking about the practice with oth-
ers) to the high-level conferences of Daisaku Ikeda at the United Nations or
the Club of Rome.23 As part of the institutional structure, members of Soka
Gakkai in Spain not only appreciate the personal benefits of the practice but
also feel that they are part of a great humanist reform movement that seeks
peace and happiness for all men and women.

INDIVIDUAL SPIRITUALITY AND COLLECTIVE RELIGION

IN A DYNAMIC RELATIONSHIP

The first general idea that drives this study is that religious varieties repre-
sented by the notions of spirituality and religion, as they have been proposed
by some sociological works, are not opposing, incompatible or exclusive
alternatives. On the contrary, they are linked in a dynamic relationship that
draws another picture of religious change. When Heelas, Woodhead, Tacey,
Roof, Flanagan, Hervieu-Leger and others addressed these issues, they tried
to create a theory that accounts for the decline of church religion and the
simultaneous ascent of subjective spirituality. However, in the case of Soka
Gakkai in Spain, we can see that individual spirituality is embedded in an

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 74 Monica Cornejo
extensive institutional apparatus that is attached to the pragmatics of ritual
(chanting daimoku to get more things) and linked to a larger doctrinal tradi-
tion (‘manifesting the Buddhahood’ as a synthesis of the Lotus Sutra). Thus,
the reconstruction of collective forms of religiosity is not only possible but
also even desired by many spiritual seekers. This practice of reconstruc-
tion does not mean that the key concepts proposed by sociologists about
spirituality are useless. Rather, it allows us to appreciate how social actors
represent religious changes occurring within themselves and beyond in their
religious fields of reference. Thus, whereas the dichotomy between religion
and spirituality makes sense in the discourses of social actors, adopting this
same scheme for the general explanation of religious practices obscures the
institutional and political dimensions of spirituality as well as the gender
differences and the relevance of social reform projects that accompany reli-
gious subjectivism (see also Teisenhoffer and Knibbe, this volume).
Another general conclusion we can draw from this case study relates to
spirituality as an autodidactic tool and not solely as a final expression. As
we have seen, if one of the most significant dimensions of religious culture
change is related to the displacement of authority from the outside (God,
church, community) to the inside (in this case Buddhahood), this transfor-
mation does not occur only as an immediate effect of social and historical
changes in family, education and work. A diachronic perspective through
personal biographies reveals that the new religious culture consists of guided
learning and the acquisition of a new religious discipline and is not simply
the confused consumption of beliefs and practices; nor is it the syncretistic
creativity of countless individuals. In the vast repertoire of the holistic milieu,
those individuals concerned with religious issues will have to learn a new
way to manage and validate religious knowledge based on strictly personal
experience. For individuals educated within Catholic families in Spain and
especially for women, this learning involves a long process of self-isolation
during subjective experimentation, after which subjectivity is embodied and
embedded as a central element in the cognitive schemata and behavioral
scripts of the new religious culture. At the same time, given the learning of
subjectivity and the articulation of religious varieties, we can realize that
this learning is not the same and it does not have the same meaning in plural
religious fields or in monopolistic religious fields, like the culturally Catholic
societies of southern Europe (see also Roussou, this volume).
Surprisingly, studies on Soka Gakkai in the United Kingdom, the pio-
neers of Soka Gakkai in Europe, note as significant the shortage of Catholic
converts;24 however, the European country with largest number of Nichiren
Buddhists is Italy and a significant number of Soka Gakkai members in
Spain come from Italy.25 Are we witnessing a singular pattern of transforma-
tion of the post-Catholic religious field related to Buddhism? The way that
Buddhists imagine religion (as a life-model) does not match the congrega-
tional domain proposed by Heelas and Woodhead. In the case of Spain, it is
relevant to note that other churches and religious affiliations, Christian or

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 Individual Spirituality and Religious Membership 75
otherwise, are in the minority and are usually far away from the individual’s
social network. In this Catholic domain, a spiritual crisis rarely drives a
person to immediate contact with the community of other believers. On
the contrary, it sets up an alternative and lonely spiritual pursuit that has
the effect of integrating an individualistic complex that is rarely present in
Catholicism.26 Are those biographies of spiritual pursuits part of a charac-
teristic pattern of conversion from Catholicism? Can we generalize based on
individual biographies? Empirical research on Nichiren Buddhism has thus
far studied the religious background of the Buddhists, considering only their
congregational affiliation, and spiritual pathways have not been reported
as significant. This case study in Spain suggests that the paths of spiritual
seeking are a key element in the transition from Catholicism to Buddhism,
but only a systematic comparative study in several countries with different
religious fields could provide further support for this hypothesis.

NOTES

1. Nichiren Daishonin was born and died in thirteenth-century Japan. Nich-

iren created and led a radical branch of Mahayana Buddhism based on
the exclusive centrality of Lotus Sutra. Nichiren Buddhism includes many
other branches, but in Europe and America it is better known for the laic
movements Risho Koseikai and the more widespread Soka Gakkai or Soci-
ety for Value Creation, which was formed by Tsunesaburo Makiguchi in
1930. See Dayle Bethel, “The Legacy of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi: Value-
Creating Education and Global Citizenship”, in Global Citizens: The Soka
Gakkai Buddhist Movement in the World, ed. David Machacek and Bryan
Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 42–66. For more specific
information on Soka Gakkai see also Phillip Hammond and David Mach-
acek, Soka Gakkai in America: Accommodation and Conversion (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999); Richard H. Seager, Encountering the
Dharma: Daisaku Ikeda, Soka Gakkai and the Globalization of Buddhist
Humanism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Bryan Wilson
and Karel Dobbelaere, A Time to Chant: The Soka Gakkai Buddhist in Brit-
ain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); David Machacek and Bryan
Wilson, eds., Global Citizens: The Soka Gakkai Buddhist Movement in the
World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
2. This assimilation is generally considered to be a consequence of the Coun-
cil of Trent. A brief overview of the history and politics of Catholicism in
Spain is introduced by Stanley G. Payne, The Spanish Catholicism (Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). See also William A. Christian,
Local Religion in Sixteenth Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1981); William A. Christian, Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and
the Reign of Christ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Julio
Caro-Baroja, Las formas complejas de la vida religiosa: Religión, sociedad y
caracter en la España de los siglos XVI y XVII (Madrid: Akal, 1978); Julio
De la Cueva Merino, Clericales y anticlericales (Santander: Universidad de
Cantabria, 1991).
3. Joan Prat, El estigma del extraño (Barcelona: Ariel, 1997); Joan Prat,
“Nuevos Movimientos Religiosos: Lecturas e interpretaciones”, Estudios
de Juventud 53, no. 1 (2001): 93–115.

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 76 Monica Cornejo
4. Paul Heelas et al., The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to
Spirituality (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). Linda Woodhead and Paul Heelas,
Religion in Modern Times: An Interpretative Anthology (Oxford: Black-
well, 2000); Paul Heelas, Spiritualities of Life: New Age Romanticism
and Consumptive Capitalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008); David J. Tacey,
The Spirituality Revolution: The Emergence of Contemporary Spirituality
(Hove: Brunner-Routledge, 2004); Kieran Flanagan and Peter C. Jupp, eds.,
A Sociology of Spirituality (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Robert K. C. For-
man, Grassroots Spirituality: What It Is, Why It Is Here, Where It Is Going
(Exeter: Imprints Academic, 2004); Eileen Barker, “The Church Without
and the God Within: Religiosity and/or Spirituality?”, in The Centrality of
Religion in Social Life: Essays in Honour of James A. Beckford, ed. Eileen
Barker (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 187–202; Meredith McGuire, “Towards
a Sociology of Spirituality: Individual Religion in Social/Historical Con-
text”, in The Centrality of Religion in Social Life: Essays in Honour of
James A. Beckford, ed. Eileen Barker (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 215–32;
Robert Wuthnow, “Spirituality and Spiritual Practice”, in The Blackwell
Companion to Sociology of Religion, ed. Richard K. Fenn (Oxford: Black-
well, 2003), 306–18; Daniele Hervieu-Leger, “Individualism, the Validation
of Faith and the Social Nature of Religion in Modernity”, in The Black-
well Companion to Sociology of Religion, ed. Richard K. Fenn (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2003), 161–75; Wade Clark Roof, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby
Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999); Michelle Dillon and Paul Wink, “Religiousness and
Spirituality: Trajectories and Vital Involvement in Late Adulthood”, in The
Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, ed. Michelle Dillon (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), 179–89.
5. Martin Wood, “The Nonformative Elements of Religious Life: Questioning
the Sociology of Spirituality Paradigm”, Social Compass 56, no. 2 (2009),
237–48; Anna Fedele, “From Christian Religion to Feminist Spirituality:
Mary Magdalene Pilgrimages to La Sainte-Baume, France”, Culture and
Religion 10, no. 3 (2009): 243–61.
6. Heelas et al., The Spiritual Revolution, 9; Woodhead and Heelas, Religion
in Modern Times, 145. On the other hand, the invisible religion thesis refers
to Thomas Luckmann’s classic critique of the more extreme theories of secu-
larization. The thesis states that the decline of traditional religious forms
should not be interpreted or explained in terms of religious extinction but
in terms of a transformation of the sacred and a new style of sacralization.
Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion (London: Collier-McMillan,
1963); Thomas Luckmann, “Shrinking Transcendence, Expanding Reli-
gion?”, Sociological Analysis 50, no. 2 (1990): 127–38.
7. Hervieu-Leger, “Individualism, the Validation of Faith”.
8. Martin Baumann, “Buddhism in Europe: Past, Present, Prospects”, in West-
ward Dharma: Buddhism beyond Asia, ed. Charles S. Prebish and Martin
Bauman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 92.
9. Martin Southwold, “Buddhism and the Definition of Religion”, Man 13,
no. 2 (1978): 362–79; Ilkka Pyysiäinen, Supernatural Agents: Why We
Believe in Souls, Gods and Buddhas (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009). A different point of view takes into account the singularity of West-
ern Buddhism, e.g., Phillip C. Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Charles S. Prebish and
Martin Baumann, eds., Westward Dharma: Buddhism beyond Asia. Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 2002.
10. Heelas et al., The Spiritual Revolution, 4.

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 Individual Spirituality and Religious Membership 77
11. Daimoku is the name given to the mantra that Nichiren Buddhists chant.
12. Reading a draft of this paper, Chiara noted that now she does not agree with
her own original expression “ask it through daimoku”. Although she used
that expression frequently in her first days as a Buddhist, at present she has
changed “ask” to “invoke”. She explained to me that asking means to trust
in an external agency (“asking somebody for something”) while invoking
means “to open the inner Buddha eyes”—in this sense, to trust in her own
agency. At this moment she is considering changing “invoke” to “pray”.
13. Those chapters are number 2 (“Expedient Means”) and number 16 (“The
Life Span of the Thus Come One”).
14. There are no internal or external statistics concerning membership. The num-
ber of members is an approximation that includes not only consistent partici-
pants but also people who only occasionally participate in the meetings.
15. Karel Dobbelaere, “Toward a Pillar Organization?”, in Global Citizens:
The Soka Gakkai Buddhist Movement in the World, ed. David Machacek
and Bryan Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 238.
16. About processual model of conversion see Jaume Vallverdu, “Conver-
sión, compromiso y construcción de la identidad en el movimiento Hare
Krishna”, Alteridades 9, no. 18 (1999): 57–70; John Lofland and Rodney
Stark, “Becoming a World-Saver: A Theory of Conversion from a Deviant
Perspective”, American Sociological Review 30 (1965): 862–75.
17. Linda Woodhead, “Why So Many Women in Holistic Spirituality? A Puzzle
Revisited”, in A Sociology of Spirituality, ed. Kieran Flanagan and Peter
C. Jupp (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 115–25; Heelas et al., The Spiritual
Revolution, 94.
18. Although there are no statistics, we can take into account the data from
Italy, where the ratio of men to women is 4:8, according Maria Immacolata
Macioti, “Buddhism in Action: Case Studies from Italy”, in Global Citizens:
The Soka Gakkai Buddhist Movement in the World, ed. David Machacek
and Bryan Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 375–401. The
attendance ratios at general assemblies in Madrid confirm that calculation.
19. Daisaku Ikeda, La nueva revolución humana (Madrid: Civilización Global,
2008); Daisaku Ikeda, El nuevo humanismo (Mexico DF: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 1999).
20. Daisaku Ikeda, El logro de la budeidad en esta existencia (Madrid: Civili-
zación Global, 2010).
21. Bethel, “The Legacy of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi”.
22. Daniel Metraux, “The Changing Role of Komeito in Japanese Politics”,
in Global Citizens: The Soka Gakkai Buddhist Movement in the World,
ed. David Machacek and Bryan Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000), 128–52.
23. Ricardo Diez-Hochleitner and Daisaku Ikeda, Un diálogo entre Oriente y
Occidente: En busca de la Revolución Humana (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutem-
berg, 2009).
24. Wilson and Dobbelaere, A Time to Chant, 80.
25. Macioti, “Buddhism in Action”.
26. Monica Cornejo, La construcción antropológica de la religión: Etnografía
de una localidad manchega (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 2008), 96;
Caro-Baroja, Las formas complejas de la vida religiosa, 13.

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 4 The Power of Submission?
Personal Growth and the Issue of Power
among Umbanda Practitioners in Paris
Viola Teisenhoffer

Recent sociological writings on the changes of the Western religious land-

scape emphasize the decline of institutionalized religion and the rise of sub-
jective religious attitudes subsumed under the label of “spirituality”. These
attitudes are most often described as the individual’s liberation from the bur-
dens of obedience and his or her submission to the duties imposed by main-
stream religions in favor of the freedom of personal, subjective experiences
of the sacred, centered on the self and based on an openness to emotions,
sensations, dreams, creativity, expressivity and so forth in order to achieve
self-realization. Deference to the higher and external authority of “old”,
institutionalized religion gives way to the nurturing of an intimate inner
authority; relationships with divinity become a strictly personal affair.1 The
emic stance according to which the inner self is the ultimate authority that
must free itself from social constraints in order to achieve the individual’s
own potentialities instead of conforming to others’ has thus become a cen-
tral feature in the definition of spirituality. Heelas2 points to freedom as one
of the cardinal values of the New Age: not only from oppressive religious
institutions, but also from tradition in general, as well as from the past and
from the “ego”, whose shaping by education and “patterns of belief” may
limit the blossoming of the true self. In this light, the individualism and crav-
ing for freedom proper to alternative religiosity should lead spiritual seek-
ers to turn away from institutionalized religions and favor mobility within
the framework of loosely knit networks with no central authority. These
networks would allow individuals to follow a kaleidoscopic quest through
experiences in a variety of existing (exotic) traditions and to create new ones
in accordance with their private spiritual needs. Thus, one of the hallmarks
of spirituality would be the rejection of any form of external authority in
favor of the (independent) cultivation of one’s inner divinity.
However, in sociological accounts, “spiritual” attitudes are most often
described from the perspective of general social theory regarding the place
and fate of religion in modernity or postmodernity. Little attention is given
to what people who engage in alternative religious activities actually do to
develop their “inner divinity” and how they relate to authority in the course
of their practice. Drawing on written sources and quantitative data, these

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 The Power of Submission? 79
studies tend to set aside the fact that individuals’ spiritual quests are deter-
mined by a series of particular face-to-face situations and, most often, by
group practices that imply power relations with senior practitioners and/or
supernatural beings.3 While those participating in (one of) the (two) French
Umbanda shrine houses where I conducted my PhD research4 defined them-
selves as “spiritual seekers” and shared a critical attitude towards main-
stream religions, they were nonetheless involved in relationships in which
differences of power play a major role. Umbanda, as it is practiced in Paris,
is held to liberate practitioners from external constraints that may limit their
self-fulfillment and to allow for the creation of a spiritual brotherhood, but
it also leads devotees to subject themselves to a rigorous ritual practice and
a hierarchical organization controlled by a charismatic leader. On the one
hand, the shrine house’s ritual activities confer a sense of empowerment on
practitioners; on the other, they compel them to assume attitudes of submis-
sion and coercion. Inspired by studies on the specificities of New Age and
Neopagan ceremonial,5 I will try to shed light on this apparent contradiction
by looking at how these divergent orientations are realized within the frame-
work of the shrine house’s organization and in its ritual activities.

A NEW AGE VERSION OF UMBANDA

Umbanda, a synthesis of African religions, Christianity, European Spiritual-

ism and elements drawn from Amerindian religious practices, was intro-
duced into France about fifteen years ago by individuals looking for unique
spiritual experiences. In spite of its foreign cultural references, many features
of the Afro-Brazilian religious system attract French people interested in
religious alternatives. On the one hand, Umbanda is appealing because of
its African and Amerindian origins, which allows adepts and sympathizers
to see it as a “traditional”, “pure”, “authentic”, early pre-Christian tradi-
tion. On the other hand, the divinities worshiped in Afro-Brazilian religions
(orixás)6 explicitly relate not only to social and psychological processes, but
also to natural phenomena such as the forest, the wind, the sea, etc. This
allows practitioners to renew what they perceive to be their lost tie with
nature by means of initiation in which an alliance is established with these
deities. For this reason, Umbanda affords practitioners a strong spiritual
experience they feel to be missing from mainstream religions. In addition,
Afro-Brazilian religions have become universalistic, not linked to any par-
ticular race or social standing, with an increasing number of non-Brazilian
worshippers outside Brazil.7 It is significant that in their new settings these
religions attract local people, rather than Brazilian migrants. While authors
note that in Argentina and in Portugal Afro-Brazilian religions are grafted
upon preexisting popular beliefs and practices,8 in Paris most devotees of
Umbanda belong to the local “alternative circuit”9 and share a fascination for
ancient and/or “exotic” rituals. The spread of Umbanda and Afro-Brazilian

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 80 Viola Teisenhoffer
religion in general may thus be understood as a form of “folklore reclama-
tion” as defined by Magliocco—that is, the “rediscovery and reevaluation
of traditions previously abandoned because they were considered markers of
backwardness or low status, especially by a colonizing culture”.10
Umbanda, as it is practiced in the Templo Guaracy in Paris, as in the
Brazilian shrine house from which it derived,11 is a truly novel version of
the Umbanda described in the specialized literature.12 In contrast with most
other Brazilian Umbanda groups, the Temple manifests many of the char-
acteristics of Neopaganism and New Age thinking13 and is aimed towards
upper- and middle-class Brazilians and Westerners interested in religious
alternatives. In this respect, comparison is more fruitful with practices such
as those of English magicians studied by Luhrmann,14 than with what is
described in the writings on “traditional” Afro-Brazilian religions.15
In the Templo Guaracy, as theorized by its founder, Umbanda is an ancient,
natural synthesis of various religious traditions that has “re-emerged” as
a result of a present-day “shift of consciousness”. This idea echoes what
Hanegraaff calls the “pathos of change” in the New Age, “a vague enthu-
siasm about the breaking down of the traditional patterns and the open-
ing up of new horizons”.16 Devotees are taught that Umbanda brings forth
the “spiritual light of all masters”: Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed and others.
Thus, the Temple shares two central New Age tenets: on the one hand, all
religions and spiritual practices have the same essence and, on the other,
spirituality cannot be limited to a particular religious practice, but it stands
above religions that are so many “fragmentations”17 of spirituality. Accord-
ingly, devotees do not reject institutionalized religions all together—many
of them had a Catholic upbringing—yet they consider them bounded and
disapprove of their exclusiveness.
The Temple proposes what we may call a “generic” or “universal” vari-
ant of Afro-Brazilian worship in which the cultural markers that characterize
Umbanda as the “genuine Brazilian religion”18 are significantly diminished.
In particular, Catholic iconography is suppressed—which makes adhesion
easier for people weary of Catholicism—in favor of a sober setting attesting
to its African and Amerindian influences: plants, natural elements such as
water, stones and honey, as well as an effigy of the Temple’s spiritual mentor,
an Amerindian spirit named Pai Guaracy. Also present are other symbols
drawn from various traditions: the yin-yang symbol, the astrological sign
of Gemini, a statue of Buddha, the Wheat symbol created by the Temple’s
leader to represent its philosophical tenets. In the same vein, supernatural
beings that are worshipped are not represented as potentially dangerous
spirits linked with marginalized social categories:19 Amerindians (caboclos),
African slaves (pretos-velhos), crooks (exus), prostitutes (pomba-giras),
etc. Rather, they are said to be “spiritual consciences” that “represent the
dynamics of Human Conscience on Earth”, “depositaries of the highest
Conscience of Love”, “consciences which protect our states of Loneliness”,
etc.20 The orixás, divinities worshipped in the course of some ceremonies,

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 The Power of Submission? 81
are part of a complex, intellectualized and “psychologized” systematization
called the xirê or the “wheel of the orixás”, in which they are associated
with the “four cardinal elements” (fire, earth, water and air). This wheel,
which recalls the zodiac or a Native American medicine wheel, is for the
Temple’s devotees a powerful, synthetic key to its cosmogony. Depicting the
evolutionary stages of the universe and of human life, it is, in the words of
the shrine house’s leader, as quoted on his website,21 “the ‘golden key’ that
opens all the doors of understanding of all the phenomena of creation, be
they physical, psychological, intellectual or spiritual”.
Finally, another important feature that distinguishes the Templo Guaracy
from the shrine houses described in the specialized literature is that it does
not propose magical services typical to “traditional” Umbanda. The motives
that lead clients to consult mediums during the public ceremonies, such as
illness, relational, emotional or financial problems, are never attributed to
the intervention of external agents through black magic (trabalho feito),
envy (olho grande), “closed paths” (caminhos fechados) or the like. When
persons claim things such as “my aunt has bewitched our family”, they are
dissuaded from this idea. Rather, they are told that they need protection
and that their “interior light” must be cleansed and nurtured; it may also be
necessary that they “connect” with their spiritual guides. The notion that
sensations of instability, helplessness, powerlessness and the like may be
caused by black magic are held to result from “an excess of mysticism”, as
the Temple’s leader explained during a lecture in 2005. Experiences of mis-
fortune are not held to be caused by outside agents, but are seen as correlates
of cycles of “expansion” and “contraction” that punctuate human life and
the universe as a whole and/or as symptomatic of the “excess” or “scarcity”
of one of the four cardinal elements in one’s life.
The “spiritual work” of the Templo Guaracy aims to allow the individual
to handle these ups and downs without fear or despair, keeping his or her
balance and sensation of well-being. Developing an individual, autonomous
relationship with one’s spiritual entities is also deemed important as a way
of avoiding a blind acceptance of religious dogma and becoming overde-
pendent on a spiritual leader. In the leader’s words, one must “become one’s
own master”. He is indeed an advocate of personal freedom and individual
self-fulfillment so characteristic of New Age spirituality. Thus, in the Templo
Guaracy, features of “traditional” Afro-Brazilian religious practice and the
contemporary “spirituality” are closely combined in an innovative “New
Age version” of Umbanda.22

EMPOWERMENT

Knowledge of the existence of the Temple is spread by word of mouth travel-

ing through the local networks of alternative practices most French devotees
of Umbanda were involved in before joining the shrine house. For many,

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 82 Viola Teisenhoffer
this practice thus represents a further step on their “spiritual path”. In some
cases, devotees continue to practice Reiki, yoga, meditation, South Ameri-
can shamanism, Zen, Sufi dancing, etc. even after joining the group, as long
as these do not affect their regular attendance to the shrine house.23 Many
devotees of the Templo Guaracy—Brazilian, French or North-American—
enjoy a good level of education and had little or no previous knowledge
about or experience in Afro-Brazilian religions. Most practitioners are inter-
ested in readings on theosophy, anthroposophy, Buddhism, Jungian psychol-
ogy, etc. and have, accordingly, deeper knowledge in these areas than about
mainstream Afro-Brazilian religions. Indeed, New Age ideas play a more
important role in this shrine house’s functioning than knowledge about
Umbanda and Afro-Brazilian religions in general.
Devotees are thus free to practice and study other religious expressions
outside Umbanda in their efforts to attain spiritual development and enjoy
significant liberty in their “spiritual path”, even after enrolling in the shrine
house. In practice, in the Temple, devotion to Umbanda is rarely exclusive,
but rather cumulative and complementary to other practices. For instance,
some mediums who practice yoga claim that the development of medium-
istic experiences is like the “wake of the Kundalini” (“enlightenment” or
“spiritual awakening”). A medium who practices Buddhist meditation states
that meditation makes her incorporation more profound; a couple of medi-
ums run a center where they offer their own methods of spiritual care. Con-
versely, the few mediums that started their “spiritual path” in the Temple
may develop an interest for other practices as they share experiences with
other members of the group.
The goal of “spiritual work” carried out in the frame of public and pri-
vate rituals is “the preservation and full development of Life”, as the Tem-
ple’s website advocates and is taught to persons who become interested in
the Temple’s activities. This means, as a Brazilian dignitary explained, the
liberation of the individual from conditioning that may restrain the expres-
sion of one’s full potential and the discovery, through initiation, of one’s
true inner nature or “essence”. Such limitations are “negativities” described
by practitioners as anger towards persons or situations in the past, fear of
affronting difficulties, guilt, self-judgment and so forth. “Spiritual/medium-
istic development” brings a new perspective and transformation in one’s life,
liberating the individual from limitations and bringing forgiveness, compas-
sion, courage, strength, etc., which are held to allow individuals to live their
life “fully”. Hence, the ritual activities bring about a sense of empowerment
to the practitioners, pushing them to go beyond their limitations and reveal-
ing that they are more than what they seem to be. The term empowerment
will thus be used here as a synonym of self-enhancement. Gender issues,
however, seem secondary in this process. Practitioners may indeed deal with
gender-related questions in the course of their spiritual development, yet
these are not conspicuous in their narratives. Living life “fully” implies mak-
ing peace with such issues by accepting oneself and others.

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 The Power of Submission? 83
In the frame of public ceremonies, visitors are invited to consult the spiri-
tual entities senior mediums embody. At the first consultation, the new-
comer is often told “you have a lot of power in your hands”, “you have
lots of [spiritual] light”, “you are a queen”, “you have a caboclo [spiritual
entity that, according to the Temple, manifests as an Amerindian] on your
head”, “this house [the Temple] is open to you”, and so on. These utterances
represent the first step in the creation of a non-ordinary, ritual identity24
suggesting that individuals are endowed with powers that they ignore or
extraordinary capacities that need recognition and development. The first
ritual manipulations the visitor undergoes aim to cleanse and nurture what
is called “interior light” (lumière intérieure or eledá), a divine substance held
to be found in all humans. The “cleanliness” and “firmness” of the “inte-
rior light” allows mediums to develop their “verticality”—that is, contact
with the spiritual realm—and to “connect” subsequently to spiritual enti-
ties of “higher planes” through incorporation. As participants evolve in the
Temple, they are led to discover and embody new qualities of extra-human
entities that provide self-knowledge, wisdom, well-being and balance. The
entities are said to guide mediums—at later stages of their spiritual devel-
opment—to “meet” their orixá or tutelary divinity through initiation. This
experience is often described by French worshippers as the discovery of their
“essence” or an internal nature that brings about a particular feeling of
wholeness and integrity. Indeed, these entities are held to link the individual
to the divine realm by spreading spiritual light, elevating one’s conscious-
ness, bringing appeasement, love and balance, as well as by triggering the
self-transformation, self-knowledge and self-actualization devotees look for.
This conception of the orixá and the role attributed to one’s spiritual guides
is indeed very similar to that of the idea of the Higher Self, as the “real”,
natural or sacred identity, well known from the New Age literature.25
The conceptions the Temple shares with other New Age practices certainly
make Umbanda attractive for potential practitioners; however, it is above all
ritual experience that makes this practice appealing.26 Devotees often avoid
giving precise explanations about the nature of the spiritual work provided
by the Temple when they invite someone to a ceremony in order not to influ-
ence the newcomer’s personal impressions and experiences. Most mediums
recall being persuaded by the “structured” character of the Temple’s rituals,
their “beauty” and the “strong” feelings they experienced during their first
visits rather than metaphysical teachings. Although the vocabulary used in
the Temple may be familiar to visitors (terms such as “interior light”, “ver-
ticality”, “energetic cleansing”, etc.), they learn about the complexity of the
“wheel of the orixás” and the elaborateness of the Temple’s philosophical
system only after a certain period of regular attendance. Thus, what may
seem familiar to newcomers are not so much the philosophical tenets and the
intricate cosmogony, but the aim of the spiritual work developed here and
the extraordinary experiences rituals may bring about. Indeed, in the Temple,
as in the case of the Neopagan practice of magic, belief is guided by action.27

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 84 Viola Teisenhoffer
The Temple offers a complex ritual system of public, private and indi-
vidual rituals, as well as retreats and outdoor ceremonies. The main goal of
these ceremonies is to learn to incorporate spiritual entities of different cat-
egories and to observe the correct ritual conduct necessary to have a “good
quality” of incorporation. Accordingly, the favored technique of spiritual
work in the Temple’s weekly public rituals is to induce the consultants to
undergo incorporation. This experience may further be trained and “deep-
ened” in the frame of private rituals if one wishes to engage in the Temple’s
activities. The shrine house follows a very accommodating policy: it is held
that everyone is endowed with mediumistic capacities and may learn to
incorporate spiritual entities.28 Clients are thus invited to establish a mimetic
relation with senior mediums from the beginning of their attendance at the
Temple. The spiritual entities ask consultants to dance with eyes shut and
they are encouraged to “let go” (lâcher prise)—that is, to abandon possible
intellectual constraints (le mental) that may restrict the approximation of
the client’s spiritual guide and to dance freely to the sound of the drums
and sacred chants. As the ceremony progresses, more and more participants
dance in the “sacred space” (espace sacré, gongá), carefully supervised by
the entities.
The weekly public rituals called gira follow a fixed pattern of sequences
dedicated to “spiritual work” with the public and to mediumistic training.
Neophytes, as well as initiates who pertain to different hierarchical degrees
and fulfill different ritual functions, get to incorporate at different moments
of the ritual according to repetitive sequences. Outdoor rituals organized at
the seaside or near a waterfall follow the same sequences of the public gira,
but are held to be more powerful than the weekly ceremonies because of
the proximity of natural elements. If the organization of public ceremonies
depends on the Temple’s hierarchy, in the private rituals dedicated explicitly
to mediumistic training (camarinha)29 hierarchical positions often tend to be
blurred. At these events all participants perform in general roughly the same
activities independently of their place in the hierarchy.30 The ritual activities
that compose these private ceremonies differ significantly from those of the
public gira, as they do not always follow a fixed pattern and remain largely
undetermined and unpredictable. In addition, while the public giras are led
by the French shrine house’s “coordinator”, camarinhas held in Paris are
orchestrated by the biological sister of the Temple’s leader—a high dignitary
responsible for the development of the Temples abroad. In Brazil retreats are
conducted by the Temple’s leader himself during the French group’s biannual
visits. Private rituals are thus considered “stronger” than ordinary giras, as
the dignitaries who conduct them are held to guarantee a perfect quality of
“vibration”, which is likely to make incorporation more profound.
Camarinhas are often referred to by French practitioners as “initiations”,
although these rituals do not systematically bring about change in the par-
ticipants’ status. In any case, private rituals are deemed to be the most pow-
erful rituals in the Temple, especially those that take place at the Brazilian

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 The Power of Submission? 85
shrine house. Mediums’ entities may, for instance, adopt a more idiosyncratic
behavior during private ceremonies: their incorporation often becomes more
confident and their entities may start to speak and/or to manipulate ritual
objects. Affording participants strong experiences of incorporation, private
rituals therefore represent turning points in spiritual development, as they
enhance both mediums and their spiritual entities, even if not all of them
imply initiation.
The different stages of mediumistic development are associated with
clearly defined hierarchical degrees and ritual functions determined by ini-
tiation. Consultants who may have already experienced a certain degree of
incorporation and are willing to engage in this spiritual work may become
“mediums in development in the public” (Médium en Développement
dans l’Assistance, MDA). MDAs are led to assume some independence in
their spiritual work, as they incorporate spiritual entities without the assis-
tance of senior mediums in a ritual sequence dedicated to this hierarchical
degree.31After this stage, one can be “elected” to enroll in the shrine house’s
“mediumistic chain” (corrente mediúnica)32 and become a “chain medium”
(Médium de Corrente), which implies the assuming of ritual roles as an offi-
ciant (cambono or supleente). The cambonos’ duty is to assist a senior medi-
um’s spiritual entities during incorporation by providing the ritual objects
they use, such as their adornments, cigars, water and candles, as well as not-
ing the entities’ messages and the rituals they prescribe to visitors. Supleentes
replace absent cambonos and help look after consultants. Mediums may
undergo initiation once they have joined the “mediumistic chain”. The first
stage of initiation (bori) is a ceremony that seals the medium’s relationship
with two spiritual entities. The Temple’s leader may then enable these initi-
ates to take on the function of “working medium” (Médium deCorrente
com Ordem de Trabalho) and develop spiritual work with consultants in
the frame of public ceremonies. In general, it is once they have acquired
extensive experience in “spiritual work” that mediums may be designated
to undergo the second stage of the initiatory process (feitura, “making”
literally). During this ceremony the Temple’s leader identifies the medium’s
personal divinity (orixá) or “essence” and composes its material representa-
tion while the initiate connects to it through incorporation. The medium is
then said to become the priest or priestess (sacerdote or sacerdotisa) of the
specific quality of energy represented by his or her tutelary divinity. At this
degree, one may be assigned to conduct public ceremonies in the case of the
absence of the Parisian Temple’s coordinator or perhaps even to become a
coordinator, if the Temple expands.
As a result of spiritual development and repeated contact with the spiri-
tual entities, mediums are no longer supposed to be the prey of the nega-
tive energies and bad influences of their environment, but strengthened,
conscious and protected individuals with a mission in life and a specific
place in nature. Consultations afford participants an enhanced self-image
and mediumistic development progressively allows the expression of what

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 86 Viola Teisenhoffer
is considered one’s “sacred self”. Hence, the different stages of the initia-
tory process and incorporation bring about a sense of empowerment as
the medium becomes surrounded and filled with energy and spiritual con-
sciousness. Furthermore, mediumistic training is associated with spiritual
development, while initiation creates composite and pluralized individuals
endowed with extraordinary capacities. Empowerment indeed seems better
understood in the sense of “ritual enhancement”, as rituals are configured
in such a way as to produce complex agents.33
Repeated contact with spiritual entities is thought not only to bring about
an “elevation of consciousness”, but also to allow the achievement of a
“spiritual brotherhood”, which is, in addition to individual self-realization,
one of the ultimate goals of the spiritual work performed here. Individual
spiritual development is held to be instrumental in attaining brotherhood;
there is thus a strong emphasis on egalitarian relationships in the group.
Correspondingly, devotees make every effort to show a tolerant, support-
ing, respectful, loving and caring attitude among themselves and towards
visitors. Furthermore, all who engage with the Temple become the spiritual
children of the Temple’s spiritual mentor, Pai Guaracy, as well as of the Tem-
ple’s leader—addressed as Pai (father)—and practitioners sometimes refer
to each other as “brothers” and “sisters”. Generally speaking, relationships
between devotees tend to be egalitarian, however hierarchical they may be
in ritual.

SUBMISSION AND COERCION

Yet, commitment to the Temple’s activities is concomitant with its hierar-

chical organization determined by the Temple’s leader, as we have seen in
the previous section. And this hierarchy is not only about empowerment
and the recognition of spiritual development, but also about submission,
self-sacrifice and coercion. Indeed, ritual participation implies submissive
attitudes, obedience is connected to “promotion” in the Temple’s hierarchy
and coercive attitudes may be observed in the transmission of ritual com-
petences. Equality is therefore rather a potential in the shrine house and it
stands as a discursive element, for, in practice, one has to subject oneself to
the hierarchical organization.34
In order to rise in the hierarchy, mediums must demonstrate submission
to the Temple’s rules, which are characterized by some as being “bureau-
cratic” or even “military”. From the grade of MDA, mediums are expected
to attend public ceremonies regularly; their presence is noted and absences
are counted. Ritual outfits are uniform: MDAs wear white jeans and a white
t-shirt with the Temple’s logotype; female “chain mediums” wear colorful
dresses inspired by Afro-Brazilian colonial costumes; men and drummers
wear African-inspired outfits made in Brazil. Senior mediums make writ-
ten records of the consultations and the coordinator must regularly e-mail

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 The Power of Submission? 87
reports about the progression of ceremonies to the Temple’s leader in Bra-
zil. As to the hierarchy, any higher promotion is announced by one of the
spiritual entities of the Temple’s leader as an “order”. One may thus say the
following: X received an “order of bori/feitura” or an “order to work”. At
the same time, the devotee who undergoes such initiation is said to “receive”
a ritual, which is greeted as a gift or a privilege. Finally, mediums must
incorporate their spiritual entities at the same time, to the sound of a specific
chant, and during determined ritual sequences they must “desincorporate”
(désincorporer) at the same time as well.35 Little place is thus given to indi-
vidual initiatives or to idiosyncratic behavior.
In general, Umbanda shrine houses’ structure is determined by bureau-
cratic organization on the one hand and spiritual organization on the
other.36 Accordingly, there are, in general, two parallel power structures.
The authority of the leader determines a “spiritual hierarchy” based on the
recognition of his or her theological knowledge and religious competences,
as well as the close relation he or she is held to maintain with the extra-
human beings that are worshipped. The leader is helped by those, often
senior, devotees who have conquered his or her trust in terms of their spiri-
tual qualities and reliability. These persons are the leader’s close assistants
in the religious activities with mediums and clients (they may be cambonos
or drummers or fulfill other specialized ritual charges, which vary between
shrine houses). Parallel to this, there is what may be called a “material hier-
archy”37 with a president, a secretary and a treasurer who are in charge of
the practical issues of the shrine house, such as the payment of bills. The
mediums and sympathizers are associates in this structure and pay monthly
dues to maintain the association. There is often an overlap between the two
hierarchies, as senior mediums recognized in the spiritual organization are
more likely to assume the role of president, treasurer and so forth.
In the Temple the two hierarchies are particularly intertwined as practi-
cally all mediums, from the grade of MDA, are demanded to assume several
tasks in the administrative and financial maintenance of the shrine house.
Such material activities include helping to run the Alaká—a small shop
specifically intended for the followers—where one may buy, among other
things, ritual ingredients (candles, incense, soaps, beads, etc.) and ritual
clothing. Others are assigned to the “CESA”, an administrative service that
collects the monthly fees and manages membership in the association. Every-
one takes a turn helping with the Kilombo, a catering service that offers a
meal after the weekly public ceremonies. These activities are not entirely
independent of the spiritual development of mediums, as they are meant
to teach them the notion of “service”, as the coordinator explained. Also,
a leaflet that describes the MDAs’ duties says that these tasks, although
not officially mandatory, are essential as they are meant to contribute to
attaining the “conscience of spiritual brotherhood”. Indeed, these duties are
closely related to the ritual activities proper, as, for instance, some of them
are accomplished in costumes that evoke ritual.38

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 88 Viola Teisenhoffer
The particularity of this shrine house’s organization lies in the fact that in
the same way its leader can elect a medium to a higher hierarchical degree he
can also demote him or her from it. The contingence of being downgraded
does not, however, depend exclusively on spiritual matters. According to
my observations, the participation in material activities plays an equally
important role in these decisions. Indeed, the accomplishment of what seem
to be extra-ritual tasks may have an incidence on the rituals’ organization.
Although in Brazil dismissals may occur in a more radical manner than in
Paris, it seems representative of the Temple as a whole. In 2006 about thirty
Brazilian mediums were discharged because the CHEV (Centro Holístico
de Eventos e Vivências, a service in charge of workshops and lectures on
Umbanda and spirituality in general) fell behind in a project.
In Paris, demotion may occur, for instance, if a medium is absent from
the weekly public ceremonies more than three times a year “without a valid
reason” (work, health or travel). This rule is in fact related to one’s progres-
sion in ritual: it is as if the effects rituals may exert were somehow perish-
able. Demotions may also be explained by the mediums’ “spiritual needs”
(besoins spirituels), according to the alternation of the Temple’s and the uni-
verse’s dynamics of “expansion” and “retraction”. There are also periods of
what is called sacudimento, which is a way of penalizing behaviors deemed
to be wrong.39 Internal tensions in the beginnings of the Parisian group
led, for example, to a partial and temporary closing of the shrine house.
When there is sacudimento “promotions” are “closed”—that is, nobody
can be elected for the grade of MDA, for instance. Also, spiritual work with
determined categories of spiritual entities may be suspended or the Temple’s
leader may refrain from incorporating his main spiritual guides. “Working
mediums” or cambonos may also be relieved from their functions if the
leader considers it necessary. Demotions, however opaque their explanation
may be, are most often serenely welcomed by mediums and accepted as nec-
essary for their spiritual development and the general good.
Nonobservance of rules, sacudimento and what are called “ritualistic
errors” (erreurs ritualistiques) may all entail penalizations related to the rit-
ual activities. What may count as ritualistic error is, however, hard to define
because there is no commonly shared view of it. Indeed, mediums have differ-
ent levels of ritual competences according to their experience and initiatory
degree; thus their aptitude to identify possible faults varies considerably. Field
data shows, however, that a ritualistic error occurs when a senior medium
or a Brazilian dignitary identifies an action as such. Indeed, similar mistakes
do not entail systematic calls to order. In public rituals conducted in Paris,
senior mediums most often point out faults that concern ritual competences,
such as the right moment to incorporate, the knowledge of sacred chants
or the entities’ and divinities’ salutations. It may occur—both in public and
private rituals—that if the MDA’s incorporation is not harmonized—that
is, if one of them incorporates before the specific chant that calls the enti-
ties—all participants’ entities are sent away and the incorporation has to be

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 The Power of Submission? 89
repeated. Regarding chants, many French mediums have considerable dif-
ficulties in learning them, as most of them are in Portuguese and some of
them are quite long, have elaborate lyrics and follow complicated rhythmical
patterns. Yet, mastery of the chants is held to be an essential competence to
assure the good course of ceremonies. As such, senior mediums make every
effort to teach the novices and sometimes their methods may be coercive,
although most of the time lack of command of chants is overlooked. For
instance, during a public ritual, one of the coordinator’s entities asked the
group to learn a specific chant identified as containing important “founda-
tions” (fundamento, knowledge about the meaning of ritual gestures, chants,
etc.). After the ceremony a senior medium wrote the lyrics on a white board,
translated the words and rehearsed it several times with those present. Four
weeks later, at the following ceremony where this particular category of enti-
ties was invoked once again, the entity of the senior medium who wrote
down the chant put the MDAs to the test. Although they made serious efforts
to sing, and one of them even used her lyrics-book, the entity was not satis-
fied with their performance: he refused to wear his ritual adornments and
“desincorporated” very fast because the mediums had not learned the chant
by heart. The medium explained later to the MDAs that an entity may refuse
to “come” (i.e., incorporate) if the chants are not sung properly.
In the private rituals called camarinhas, coercive and submissive attitudes
are more salient than in the public ceremonies. Camarinhas are awaited for
not only with joy and excitement about the teachings and unpredictable
experiences likely to happen, but also a certain degree of apprehension of
possible “ritualistic errors”. Mediums are also anxious about not being wor-
thy if an initiation takes place, and devotees who travel to Brazil for the first
time may be afraid of not being accepted by the Temple’s leader. In Brazil,
the conditions imposed on the participants of a camarinha may be highly
coercive and absolute obedience is required: one may not speak without
authorization, must sleep on the ground, walk barefoot, eat from a coconut
shell, may wash only at determined moments, etc.
In Paris, during a camarinha conducted by the Temple leader’s sister,
several gestures were identified as ritual faults. She had given the order to
respect absolute silence, but a medium made the parquet crack while walk-
ing across the room. The medium was asked in a firm tone to retrace his
steps without making any noise. At lunch, several participants were asked to
leave the room because they did not have their ritualistic coconut shell (cuia)
to eat from. Another medium was excluded later on because she cried out
of joy when she heard that at the next sequence we were to “work” with a
category of entities that is seldom invoked.
However, those suspended were allowed to return to the ritual later, on
the demand of the priestess’s spiritual entity. The participants who stayed
were asked to volunteer to leave the room and give their cuias to those
excluded along with a hug. Once everyone was back, the entity proffered
the following teaching: penalizing those who had made a ritualistic error

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 90 Viola Teisenhoffer
by sending them out was the right choice, but the most important of all is
the brotherhood between mediums, as those who volunteered had consid-
ered the eventuality of being excluded in their turn for not having a cuia.
The disappointment of those who were excluded was further lessened when
the entity made them incorporate. Be they in the context of public or pri-
vate ritual, such episodes are devoted to teaching participants that correct
ritual behavior implies the demonstration of their willingness to obey ritual
instructions, particularly in private ceremonies, as camarinhas seldom fol-
low any preestablished pattern and participants can never really know what
comes next. According to the different ritual events, it is only by following
the leaders’ or senior mediums’ injunctions that devotees can establish cor-
rect ritual behavior. In ritual practice obedience thus holds sway over experi-
ence or actual knowledge about the Temple’s rituals.

DISCUSSION

We have seen that the apparent antinomy between equality/empowerment

and submission may be observed at different levels in the Temple, but it
takes on its strongest implications in its rituals. At an individual level, devo-
tees seek self-fulfillment and liberation from the limitations of conditioning,
which, incidentally, shows in their considerable degree of freedom concern-
ing the parallel practice of different “spiritual disciplines”. Yet, mediums
are compelled to obedience and submission in the Temple’s ritual practice.
At the group’s level, there is the potential of creating a “spiritual brother-
hood”, which in fact goes together with the Temple’s hierarchical organiza-
tion according to material and spiritual principles. Rituals imply episodes of
empowerment due to the incorporation of spiritual entities and the recogni-
tion of one’s spiritual development through initiation and promotion in the
Temple’s hierarchy. But there is the possibility of demotion in the Temple’s
hierarchy and that of coercion in the transmission of ritual competences.
Furthermore, as the formal differences of public and private rituals show,
the more a ritual event is held to be powerful, the more it is likely to give
space to coercive attitudes and calls to order. Finally, these seeming opposi-
tions are manifested in the Temple’s vocabulary, as promotions in the hier-
archy are referred to both as “orders” (“order to work”, “order of feitura”)
and as rewards (“receive” bori/a ritual or the possibility to incorporate an
entity).
During my fieldwork I was always puzzled by this permanent tension
between coercion, submission, obedience and empowerment, as it looked as if
submission to the Temple’s rules and engagement in its material activities were
somehow rewarded with promotion in the ritual’s hierarchical organization.
To use a medium’s words who was scolded for not having learned the chant,
it was as if one had to be the “good pupil” to evolve in the Temple. At first,
it might thus seem that submission could be part of a more or less conscious

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 The Power of Submission? 91
strategy to step ahead in the hierarchy. Devotees would then show submis-
sion intentionally or unintentionally in order to be rewarded for their dedica-
tion.40 However, the medium quoted is today a “chain medium” although
she still has gaps in her knowledge of chants. In addition, it would be hard
to understand why French mediums continue to practice Umbanda if they
are constantly faced with the frustration of finding constraints while they are
in fact seeking liberation from limitations. Finally, there are very few selec-
tive criteria in the Temple: everyone who “hooks” (accrocher) or “vibrates”
(vibrer) with its ceremonies may potentially become a medium and evolve in
the hierarchy.41 In fact, attitudes of empowerment, submission and coercion
are not contradictory, but complementary and constitutive of the practice of
this New Age variant of Umbanda.
Attitudes of submission undoubtedly represent constraints in the Temple,
but participants do not deliberately submit to them in the frame of a strat-
egy. As the Temple’s ritual activities are the favored loci of the transmission
and learning of the practice of Umbanda, it is clearly the ritual context that
gives rise to attitudes of submission and empowerment. As Houseman sum-
marizes his findings on the pragmatic premises of people’s participation in
ritual, “the participants’ emotional and intentional dispositions . . . not so
much inform their actions . . . , as they are informed by them”.42 This means
that ritual rests upon stipulated patterns of behavior that are not motivated
by the ritualists’ ordinary emotional states and intentions, as in everyday
activities. In the ritual context, each participant elaborates his or her internal
states out of imposed patterns of behavior. We may therefore say that French
practitioners of Umbanda do not demonstrate submission at determined
moments of their ritual activities because they feel meek, but because ritual
imposes on them to do so. Correspondingly, the reason that leads dignitaries
to exert pressure on mediums is not so much an interior feeling of vexation,
but a ritual attitude senior mediums must assume in their duty of teaching to
the novices the right ritual conduct a medium is supposed to follow. If sub-
mission is stipulated behavior, empowerment, as the acting out of the “inner
authority” or “higher self” enhanced by the spiritual guides and divinities,
is also triggered by ritual, constructed through the repeated experience of
incorporation. As such, it makes sense only in the context of ritual itself. In
the case of the practice of Umbanda in Paris, the question of power there-
fore seems pertinent in ritual as it is there that attitudes related to power are
acted out. However, extra-ritual relationships tend to be egalitarian; practi-
tioners regard each other as being brothers and sisters and spiritual work is
held to bring about spiritual brotherhood.
Hence, community-based spiritual practices such as that of French devo-
tees of Umbanda are not devoid of forms of authority. Participants’ discourse
stresses equality and their interactions outside of the ceremonial frame do
not reflect power relations. Nevertheless, the collective ritual activities they
engage in compel them to exert authority over others and/or manifest their
submission to them, as a function of the positions they occupy in the course

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 92 Viola Teisenhoffer
of their careers in the Temple. Thus, there is an ongoing tension between
ceremonial hierarchy and spiritual equality.
Contrary to ideas put forward in sociological accounts, the role of power
relations in New Age phenomena is particularly baffling. However, it can-
not simply be ignored, but remains essential for an understanding of such
practices. Participants’ discourse promoting equality is indeed only one side
of the coin and should not be taken at face value as sufficient in and of
itself. Further research on spiritual practices must consider the co-presence
of authority and its discursive negation in order to avoid reductive solutions
to the issues raised by power-related considerations.

NOTES

I wish to thank Michael Houseman for his many inspiring suggestions and careful
reading, as well as Emma Gobin for her valuable comments. I also thank the partici-
pants of the workshop “Spirituality against Religion: The Role of Gender and Power”
at the eleventh EASA biannual conference for the rich discussion that followed the
presentation of a first version of this text.

1. Paul Heelas et al., The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way
to Spirituality (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
2. Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the
Sacralization of Modernity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996), 26.
3. For a thorough criticism of discourse-based approaches and the use of writ-
ten sources in this field, see Matthew Wood, Possession, Power and the
New Age: Ambiguities of Authority in Neoliberal Societies (Aldershot: Ash-
gate, 2007).
4. The materials presented here were collected during research conducted in
Paris between 2004 and 2009, comprising three periods of field work in
Sao Paulo, Brazil (in 2005, 2006 and 2007). Methods included participant
observation in public and private rituals as well as semi-structured inter-
views. In Brazil I took part in ten-day ritual activities dedicated to French
devotees as well as two retreats independently.
5. Michael Houseman, “Menstrual Slaps and First Blood Celebrations”, in
Learning Religion: Anthropological Approaches, ed. David Berliner et al.
(New York: Breghahn Books, 2007); “Des rituels contemporains de pre-
mière menstruation”, Ethnologie française 40, no. 1 (2010): 57–66; Tanya
M. Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contem-
porary England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
6. In Brazilian Portuguese x is pronounced sh.
7. See, e.g., Alejandro Frigerio, “La expansión de religiones afrobrasileñas en
Argentina: Representaciones conflictivas de cultura, raza y nación en un con-
texto de integración regional”, Archives des Sciences Sociales des Religions
117 (2002): 127–150; Arnaud Halloy, “Um candomblé na Bélgica: Traços
etnográficos de uma tentativa de instalação e suas dificuldades”, Revista de
Antropologia 7, no. 2 (2004): 453–491; Maïa Guillot, “Du mythe de l’unité
luso-afro-brésilienne: Le candomblé et l’umbanda au Portugal”, Lusotopie
16, no. 2 (2009): 205–219; Ismael Pordeus Jr., Uma casa luso-afro-brasileira
com certeza (São Paulo: Terceira Margem, 2000); Clara Saraiva, “Afro-
Brazilian religions in Portugal”, Etnográfica 14, no. 2 (2010): 265–288.

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 The Power of Submission? 93
8. See, e.g., Maria Julia Carozzi et al., “Mamãe Oxum y la Madre Maria:
Santos, curanderos y religions afro-brasileñas en Argentina”, Afro-Ásia 15
(1992): 71–85; Saraiva, “Afro-Brazilian Religions”.
9. Maria Julia Carozzi, “Ready to Move Along: The Sacralization of Disem-
bedding in the New Age Movement and the Alternative Circuit in Buenos
Aires”, Civilisations 51, no. 1–2 (2003): 139–154.
10. Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture: Folklore and Neopaganism in America
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 8. There is, however,
a major difference between the Argentinean and the Portuguese contexts on
the one hand, and the French case on the other. In the former, high dignitar-
ies of Afro-Brazilian religions mobilize historical and political arguments in
the legitimization of their practice, while such discourses are nonexistent in
Paris; see, e.g., Frigerio, “La expansión”; Guillot, “Du mythe”.
11. The Temple has “branches” in North America, Portugal, Switzerland, Aus-
tria and Belgium, as well as in France. All of them are managed by local
coordinators named by the Temple’s leader; they follow the same principles
of organization and keep close ties with the Brazilian shrine house located
in Sao Paulo. The Temple counts about four hundred mediums in Brazil and
more than a hundred abroad.
12. See, e.g., Maria Helena Villas Boas Concone, Umbanda, Uma Religião
Brasileira (São Paulo: CER/USP, EDUSP 1987); Vagner Gonçalves da Silva,
Candomblé e umbanda: Caminhos da devoção brasileira (São Paulo: Edi-
tora Ática, 2000); Yvonne Alves Maggie Velho, Guerra de Orixá: Um
estudo de ritual e conflito (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2001); Paula Montero,
Da doença à desordem: A magia na umbanda (Rio de Janeiro: Edições
Graal, 1985); Lísias Negrão, Entre a cruz e a encruzilhada: Formação do
campo umbandista em São Paulo (São Paulo: EDUSP, 1996); Renato Ortiz,
A morte branca do feiticeiro negro: Umbanda e sociedade brasileira (São
Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1988).
13. I adopt a loose definition of the New Age, as “a broad cultural ideology”
that includes Neopaganism (Luhrmann, Persuasions, 30; see also Wouter
J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the
Mirror of Secular Thought [New York: State University of New York Press,
1998], 77–79), although many Neopagans are critical towards such an
understanding, see, e.g., Magliocco, Witching Culture, 85–86; Sarah Pike,
Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for
Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 145. As both
orientations show overlaps, especially regarding cultural borrowing, I con-
sider Neopaganism as an “ethnic branch” of the so-called New Age. It is
important to emphasize that the Temple’s devotees do not define themselves
as (Neo)pagans, but rather as “spiritual seekers”, yet they are about as
critical towards the “New Age” label as Neopagans. For a discussion of the
problems raised by the effort of finding adequate descriptors for contempo-
rary religious attitudes, see Wood, Possession.
14. Luhrmann, Persuasions.
15. The Templo Guaracy is comparable to a relatively new tendency in the
recent evolution of Umbanda in Brazil called “esoteric” and “initiatory”
Umbanda; see Rivas Neto Umbanda: A protosíntese cósmica. Epistemolo-
gia, ética e método da Escola de Síntese (São Paulo: Editora Pensamento-
CULTRIX, 2002). These new modalities of Umbanda have not yet drawn
the attention of scholars; an exception is Marcelo Camurça, “Espaços de
hibridização, desubstancialização da identidade religiosa e ‘idéias fora do
lugar’”, Ciencias Sociales y Religión 5 (2003).
16. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion, 336.

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 94 Viola Teisenhoffer
17. Fragmentation is a relatively common theme in the New Age literature; see
Hanegraaff, New Age Religion, 143–145.
18. Concone, Umbanda.
19. Fernando Giobellina Brumana and Elda Gonzales Martinez, Marginália
sagrada (Campinas: Editora da Unicamp, 1991).
20. A similar process occurs in the revitalization of Amerindian rituals; Jacques
Galinier and Antoinette Molinié, Les néo-Indiens: Une religion du IIIe mil-
lénaire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006), 249.
21. See www.temploguaracy.org.
22. For different examples on connections between more traditional religious
expressions and contemporary spiritual attitudes, see chapters by Roussou
and Werczeberger in this volume.
23. There are about twenty-five steady mediums in the group; there is only
one Brazilian among them. About twenty consultants attend the public cer-
emonies on a regular basis; very few of them are Brazilian. Participants are
aged between sixty and eighteen; most are middle-class Caucasians. They
belong to varied socio-professional categories: psychotherapist, teacher,
accountant, jurist, yoga teacher, office worker, civil servant, veterinarian,
etc. Women and men are represented in equal proportions.
24. Luhrmann, Persuasions, 229.
25. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion, 211–215.
26. For another example, in this volume, on the predominance of experience
over teachings, see Trulsson.
27. Luhrmann, Persuasions, 310.
28. The Temple’s leader describes this particularity with the following amusing
phrase: “Even the mailman leaves the Temple spinning [with the ability of
going into trance] (Até o carteiro sai do Templo girando.)”. To my knowl-
edge, there is only one European medium that cannot incorporate.
29. In the “standard” vocabulary of Umbanda, camarinha designates the place
where neophytes are secluded during initiation; Olga Guidolle Cacciatore,
Dicionário de cultos afro-brasileiros (Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária,
1977). In more “traditional” variants of Umbanda, initiation does not nec-
essarily imply reclusion. Mediums may undergo “baptism” (batismo) in
a waterfall, at the seaside or in the shrine house, with spiritual baths and
offerings. In the Temple, camarinha designates ritual events dedicated to
initiation, the transmission of theological knowledge and/or ritual compe-
tences.
30. This changed during the final stage of my field work, in 2008. Henceforth,
in Brazil, camarinhas are held separately according to hierarchical degrees.
31. They are also given access to the Temple’s private ceremonies, including
those dedicated to exus and pomba-giras, male and female spiritual enti-
ties that represent libido and “creational energy”. Pomba-giras make some
female mediums feel uneasy, as these entities wear sensuous costumes and
may dance lasciviously, counter to mediums’ bashfulness, challenging them
to assume their bodies and sensuality. However exacerbated gender may
appear in this specific context, the acting out of attitudes related to power
follows the same general pattern described here.
32. This term evokes at once the ties and unity between fellow mediums (they
form a single chain) and the energy that is held to flow between them during
rituals.
33. Houseman, “Menstrual Slaps”, “Des rituels contemporains”.
34. For other examples, in this volume, on the compatibility of hierarchical
organization or submission to a charismatic leader with liberating and
empowering doctrines, see chapters by Cornejo and Werczeberger.

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 The Power of Submission? 95
35. French mediums may have to be subject to further constraints in their efforts
to practice Umbanda, such as learning Portuguese, given that it is the ritual
language of the Temple. As many of the senior mediums’ spiritual entities
speak Portuguese, good knowledge of this language is often considered in
the choice of cambonos.
36. Bureaucratic order inspired by civilian associations was introduced in
Umbanda as a means to counterbalance the negative social image it had in
global society. It was meant to suggest that it is an organized and institu-
tionalized religion and not some kind of barbarian magical practice; Diana
Brown, “Uma história da Umbanda no Rio”, in Umbanda e Política, ed.
Diana Brown et al. (Rio de Janeiro: ISER/Editora Marco Zero, 1985).
37. Maggie, Guerra de Orixá.
38. Initiate women who run the CESA wear a colorful African-style gown and
a matching turban, while mediums who work in the Kilombo wear outfits
used in private rituals; there is no dress code for the Alaká.
39. In the “standard” vocabulary of Umbanda, sacudimento stands for a cleans-
ing ritual performed with leaves, offerings, sacred chants or sacrifices (Cac-
ciatore, Dicionário). The word is a derivate of the Portuguese verb sacudir,
to shake.
40. This interpretation, inspired by Bourdieu’s concept of strategy, would imply
the supposition that promotion in the hierarchy is a necessary recognition of
obedience. Yet, as Elster’s critique shows, the concept of strategy suggests a
“conspiratorial vision” of the social world and Bourdieu does not account
for the mechanism that triggers unconscious strategies. Jon Elster, “Le pire
des mondes possibles: À propos de La Distinction de Pierre Bourdieu”,
Commentaire 19 (1982): 442–451.
41. Selective criteria concern one’s general state of physical and mental health
and physical conditions.
42. Houseman, “Menstrual Slaps”, 34.

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 5 “Black” Madonna versus “White”
Madonna
Gendered Power Strategies in Alternative
Pilgrimages to Marian Shrines
Anna Fedele

Recent years have seen remarkable growth in pilgrimages aimed at discover-

ing and contacting the “energy” stored in “power places”, in communing
with “Mother Earth” or in contacting the power of the “Goddess”.1 Influ-
enced by the transnational Neopagan movement and by the so-called “New
Age”,2 such pilgrims may have a Christian background but do not consider
themselves practicing Christians, preferring instead to identify themselves
as part of a growing worldwide “spirituality”. During fieldwork for my dis-
sertation (2002–2005)3 I joined three organized pilgrimage groups visiting
Catholic pilgrimage shrines in France dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalene or
that house dark madonna statues; one pilgrim group was from Italy, another
from Spain, while the third was comprised of pilgrims from the United States
and Britain.
Like other spiritual practitioners described in this volume, the pilgrims I
encountered rejected what they identified as “religion” in favor of a “spiri-
tuality” they perceived as more gender-equal and that allowed more freedom
to the individual. Happy to have escaped from the dogmas and practices
of a Catholic religion they described as constricting and disempowering,
these men and women did not recognize themselves as part of any par-
ticular religious group. And yet, even if they did not describe themselves as
“Pagans” the pilgrims had a great deal in common with the transnational
Neopagan movement.4 They venerated a feminine, immanent divinity iden-
tified as “Mother Earth” that manifested through nature, and claimed roots
in the pagan religions of their European or American ancestors. They also
advocated the sacrality of body and sexuality and the need to transcend
dichotomies inherent to “patriarchal” religions and societies—body and
soul, material and spiritual, human and divine were no longer considered
separate aspects but as two sides of the same coin. The pilgrims’ concern with
ecology also led to a critique of what they saw as patriarchal and misogynist
ideas inherent in the current and globalized social order, ideas that underlie
the exploitation of the planet and the human domination of Mother Earth.
And they blamed the (Christian) “Church” for providing the theological and
ideological underpinnings that have made it possible to dominate women,
exploit the planet and persecute pagans throughout history.

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 “Black” Madonna versus “White” Madonna 97
This essay centers on the kind of relationship these pilgrims established
with what they identified as “Black Madonnas”, and the kind of “energy”
described as emanating from the madonnas themselves. Most of the attri-
butes of the Black Madonna derive from a strategy of construction by oppo-
sition that allows pilgrims to see the dark madonna statues as an antidote
to the “white and immaculate” Virgin Mary the pilgrims associate with
their Catholic upbringing. The pilgrims, influenced by certain books, use the
Black Madonna to come to terms with their Christian past and to articulate
emotions they perceive the orthodox Virgin Mary as incapable of address-
ing. Encountering in the Black Madonna a female divinity that could relate
to female corporeality and sexuality, the women and the few men I accom-
panied described profound experiences of gendered empowerment.
For these pilgrims the Black Madonna represents an icon of a transnational
and transhistorical spirituality that does not belong to any particular religion,
historical period or nation and that expresses a “dark side of the Feminine” that
has been repressed by the patriarchal order inherent in organized religions. The
meanings ascribed in this context to the Black Madonna offer a useful example
of the importance of gender and power in the construction of a contemporary
“spirituality”, as opposed to “religion”—in this specific case, Christianity and
particularly Catholicism. Just as the concept of Paganism (and Neopaganism)
presupposes the existence of Christianity—the term “Pagan” was adopted by
the early Christians to distinguish themselves from those worshipping other
divinities—the pilgrims’ concept of “spirituality” loses much of its meaning if
dissociated from its opposite (and opponent), “religion”.
Nevertheless, analysis of the ways in which the pilgrims relate to Black
Madonnas and speak about their experiences of contact with “her energy”,
and a comparison of these details with other ethnographies about lived Mar-
ian devotion, shows not only rupture but also a striking continuity between
these pilgrims’ spirituality and vernacular devotion to the Virgin Mary, past
and present.

BLACK MADONNAS

The Marian images the pilgrims described as “black” range from light brown
to jet black. This language is telling alongside that used by Christian devo-
tees who often use color words other than “black” to characterize these
same images. As William A. Christian has shown in the case of the Virgin of
Montserrat,5 commonly referred to by Catalans as “la Moreneta” (the dark
one), Catholic devotees in the early 1990s did not attribute any particular
importance to her color. This observation coincides with my own findings
among Catholic devotees of the Christ of Lepanto,6 a dark brown statue
venerated in the cathedral of Barcelona; when I asked the devotees where I
could find the statue of the black Christ (el Cristo Negro) in the cathedral,
they could not answer.

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 98 Anna Fedele
Images of the Virgin or the Christ with a skin tone darker than that of
devotees are mostly venerated in France, Italy and Spain. Ilene H. Forsyth,7
in her study of early French madonnas, found no evidence for dark images
before the sixteenth century.8 Like other art historians, she suggests that dev-
otees became used to soot-blackened images and that eventually the images
were painted to follow suit. Other writers ascribe the darkness of Madonna
images to the syncretism of pre-Christian devotion to fertility goddesses.9 As
William Christian found, “questions of origins have been the main, indeed
the only focus of studies of dark Madonnas in Europe”.10 Different authors
who have tried to find common features make these claims: that the images
date to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, are located along certain pilgrim-
age routes, and were considered especially powerful by the local popula-
tion.11 Monique Scheer12 offers a detailed overview of earlier studies about
black madonnas and argues that focusing primarily on the color’s origin,
authors debated “whether the color came about intentionally or not, oscil-
lating between extremes of exoticization and denial”.13 Scheer points out
that the historical moment in which an image was created does not necessar-
ily coincide with the moment it became black; she also notes an “apparent
lack of interest in the color of the images”14 until the seventeenth century.
For Scheer this discrepancy does not necessarily imply that the statues later
identified as black were not dark before that time period, but that “regard-
less of the actual color of the image, the concept of a black madonna had not
yet been fully developed as an accolade heightening an image’s prestige”.15
She argues that what were elements of prestige were the image’s antiquity
and its origin near or in the Holy Land, and that blackness might have sug-
gested “not only aged wood but also precious types such as ebony or cedar
thought to grow only in the Eastern Mediterranean”.16 The dark madonnas’
supposed antiquity might explain their popularity in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, but, as Scheer argues, “whether it was already visible
or in fact ‘helped along’ to its blackness at this time is not as important as
the point that the color eventually became an indispensable visual marker
for these particular images”.17
In the mid-nineteenth century “a new conception of Mary’s appearance”
as predominantly white was fostered by the Catholic Church’s dogma of the
Immaculate Conception and by subsequent Marian apparitions throughout
Europe. Suddenly, it became important to emphasize the Virgin’s whiteness,
and the most common theories about the darkness of certain statues asserted
that they had turned dark because of candle smoke or frequent touching by
devotees. It is only recently that the color of the statues became significant,
and mostly among people interested in spirituality.18
Like many other spiritual practitioners I met during my fieldwork in
Italy, Spain, France and later in Portugal, the pilgrims I met were assiduous
readers,19 and when talking about Black Madonnas most of them referred
directly or indirectly to Ean Begg’s popular book, The Cult of the Black
Virgin (1985). Begg’s work revives theories about the dark madonnas’ inten-

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 “Black” Madonna versus “White” Madonna 99
tional blackness and hints at a continuation between dark statues and pre-
Christian earth and goddess cults. According to the author, black madonnas,
“essentially a product of the 12th century Gothic renaissance”,20 represent
survivals of the statuettes of ancient goddesses; the dark statues were made
with these statuettes in mind or were brought back to Europe by the Crusad-
ers. A Jungian psychologist, Begg considered the “Black Virgin” a powerful
archetype and believed that its reappearance in various forms signaled “the
profound psychological need to reconcile sexuality and religion”.21 Begg
was also influenced by Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth
and Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), and in fact his Black Madonnas appear
as an antidote to the Immaculate Virgin Warner describes:

. . . every facet of the Virgin had been systematically developed to dimin-

ish, not increase, her likeness to the female condition. Her freedom from
sex, painful delivery, age, death, and all sin exalted her ipso facto above
ordinary women and showed them up as inferior.22 . . . The cult of
Mary is inextricably interwoven with Christian ideas about the dangers
of the flesh and their special connection with women.23 . . . By setting
up an impossible ideal the cult of the Virgin does drive the adherent
into a position of acknowledged and hopeless yearning and inferior-
ity. . . . The process is self-perpetuating: if the Virgin were not venerated,
the dangers of sex, the fear of corruption, the sense of sin would not be
woven together in this particular misogynist web, but would be articu-
lated in a different way.24

As we will see in some detail, the pilgrims and their leaders I accompa-
nied all knew Warner’s theories directly, or indirectly, through other works
that drew upon her writings. Influenced by Warner’s approach, the pilgrim-
age leaders stated the importance of substituting the ideal of the Christian
(white) Virgin with another one that did not disconnect human sexuality
from sacrality.

CONTACTING THE ENERGY OF THE BLACK MADONNA

All three organized pilgrimages I took part in included visits to dark madonna
shrines. The Italian group I accompanied in the summer of 2003 consisted of
ten women and three men between the ages of thirty-five and fifty-three, as
well as a two-year-old boy. This group was led by Celso, a naturopath and
spiritual teacher in his early fifties, who had organized the eight-day tour
that included a visit to two Black Madonna shrines: Notre-Dame de Sous-
Terre in the crypt of Chartres cathedral and Notre-Dame de Rocamadour.
I also accompanied a Spanish and Catalan group on their seven-day tour
in the summer of 2004. This group visited only one dark madonna statue,
Notre-Dame de la Confession in Marseille. Led by Dana, a Barcelona-based

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 100 Anna Fedele
Argentinean woman in her late forties, this exclusively female group con-
sisted of two dozen women aged twenty-four to fifty-five.25
Black Madonnas played a particularly important role in the American
and British pilgrimage led by Roger Woolger,26 which I joined in the fall
of 2005. Roger, who worked mainly as a past-life therapist, was the best-
known of the three pilgrimage leaders and had published several articles and
two books. His group consisted of twelve women and three men, aged fifty
to seventy-three, all Americans except for two British women. Roger’s pil-
grims spent a great part of the twelve-day “basic” tour27 visiting the French
region of Auvergne, a region with a high density of dark Marian statues.
Among those that most touched these particular pilgrims were the statues
at Notre-Dame de la Confession (Marseille), Notre-Dame du Puy (Le-Puy-
en-Velay), Notre-Dame d’Orcival (Orcival) and Notre-Dame-de-la-Bonne-
Mort (Clermont-Ferrand).
In his introductory speech to the pilgrimage Roger Woolger observed:

The problem of Christianity, as I see it, is that it tends to take everything

up into the sky. It neglects the earth. And it is left to the old religions,
the pagan religions that still remain under disguised form, to sort of
bring Christianity down to earth . . . the underworld becomes a dark,
dangerous, nasty place in the Middle Ages. . . . More earthy pictures of
the [underworld] spheres [come] from Celtic culture. They felt that the
earthy and the spiritual dimensions were intertwined. (October 1, 2005)

This vision of Christianity as denying both the body and darkness—as

opposed to the Celtic tradition (and other traditions honoring the “God-
dess”), which welcomed the interrelatedness of darkness and light, body and
spirit—appeared in the discourse of all three pilgrimage leaders. On another
occasion Roger referred directly to Warner’s writings, and observed:

We have idealized the mother of Jesus so much that almost nothing

human was left in her. . . . She [Marina Warner] says that the Early
Church was so terrified of sexuality that they idealized virginity. . . . All
it did was to bring this [Madonna-Whore] split in society that we’ve
been living with for almost two thousand years. It’s been haunting so
many generations. (October 6, 2005)

Roger refers here to one of his articles28 in which he speaks of a

“Madonna-Whore split” in Western society that relates sexuality to procre-
ation and that divides women into two categories: those who remain virgins
and could therefore remain pure like Mary, and those who have had children
like Mary but could no longer be immaculate because of the sexual relation-
ship entailed. In both cases, Roger asserted, women are deemed failures;
either they fail to fulfill their role as procreators or they become corrupted
by sexual intercourse.

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 “Black” Madonna versus “White” Madonna 101
In the view of the pilgrims, Black Madonnas, like other divinities related
to darkness,29 offered the possibility of actually healing this split. The pil-
grims saw healing as possible because these images represented acceptance
of the dark, bodily dimension of humanity and the possible coexistence of
sexual pleasure with sacredness; these dark images represented a kind of
spiritual elevation attained by inhabiting the body instead of transcending
it. As emerges in the pilgrims’ narratives about their encounters with differ-
ent Black Madonnas, each dark statue seemed to have her own personal-
ity and inherent power or effect. All dark statues or images of Mary (for
example, Our Lady of Montserrat in Catalonia) shared certain attributes
related to ancient goddesses, Mother Earth, the sacrality of the body, and
so on, but had additional distinctive traits that related to their external fea-
tures, their particular location, history and so on. To the pilgrims each Black
Madonna was different, each with specific traits and powers; this specificity
explained why one statue could have a strong effect on some pilgrims while
not particularly impressing others. The specific effects of each madonna
were explained and interpreted according to the different kind of “energy”
emanating from them.
During visits to the dark madonna shrines, pilgrims from all three groups
followed a similar ritual pattern when approaching the statues. They stood
or sat in front of the statues (most of the times with eyes closed) and estab-
lished a connection with “Her” in order to receive her “energy”. Even if the
pilgrims had come from different countries of origin, they shared a common
spiritual background and used common terms and theories to describe their
experiences in front of the statues. All pilgrims considered themselves to be
part of a world permeated by a living force that was most often referred to
as “energy”.30 Establishing an “energy connection” with a Black Madonna,
pilgrims could then receive the energy contained in “Her” energy field and
store it in their own energetic body.31
The pilgrims I accompanied often developed personal rituals to intensify
their contact with the statues. The three leaders of the organized groups all
invited their pilgrims to respect the sacrality of the Catholic churches they
visited and not to disturb other, Catholic, devotees. Sometimes (as in the case
described ahead) Celso or Dana, the Italian and the Spanish leader, respec-
tively, encouraged their pilgrims to perform a common “ritual” in order to
foster the connection with the Madonna.
The pilgrims described the effects of the energy they received from the
statues in terms of physical sensations, such as a feeling of warmth, but also
through messages and visions. Their experiences in front of the dark statues
had certain elements in common; most of them were related to a sensation
of “grounding” and of contact with “the darkness”. The centrality of these
two experiences is further emphasized by an American pilgrim who had
been a priest of the Liberal Catholic Church, the denomination founded in
1916 by James I. Wedgewood and Charles Leadbeater, which had a close
association with theosophism and which was not recognized by the Vatican.

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 102 Anna Fedele
The American pilgrim, Leonard, described the spiritual crisis that had led to
his separation from the Liberal Catholic Church:

In Christianity the darkness was something evil that had to be avoided.

But now I was beginning to see that the darkness was not at all evil, it
was just the other half, the other half of who we are, the other half of
our being and that if we deny the darkness we deny a huge piece of who
we are. In the church, there was a suppression of the feminine and sup-
pression of anything to do with the darkness. . . . The Virgin Mary was
brought in as the feminine aspect, but I saw the Virgin Mary as being
basically sterilized and sanitized for most of the feminine aspect. She too
was cut off from the earth; she was never seen on the earth; she was seen
in the stars. (October 5, 2005)

These pilgrims had had enough of the “white, celestial Mary”, who was
always loving, motherly and perfect. They thought that she had been muti-
lated and deprived of all bodily secretions other than her maternal milk; they
wanted instead a flesh and blood “Mother” who expressed their moments
not only of love and serenity but also of rage, pain and destructiveness. As
the shadow of the “White Virgin”, the Black Madonnas projected in dark
tones all that had been “hidden”.

THE DARK SIDE OF THE GODDESS

Immacolata, an Italian woman in her forties who had started work right
after high school, was living on her own in Rome, where she worked as a
clerk. Immacolata told me that her most beautiful experience during the
pilgrimage had happened at Chartres, in front of the Black Madonna:

In the crypt of Chartres I stayed near the tabernacle and I still shiver
when I think about it. I felt like a hollow reed, crossed by that energy
coming from below. It was an amazing experience. I would like to go
back there . . . it was near the Black Madonna. . . . Celso made us form
a circle and take each other’s hands. I remember taking off my shoes and
nudging Gemma [a fellow pilgrim and friend of Immacolata] with my
elbow telling her: Take off your shoes! Because without shoes there was
no obstacle to this flow [of energy]. (April 8, 2005)

There, in front of the Notre-Dame de Sous-Terre, whose advocation

means “underground”, Immacolata experienced a connection with Mother
Earth. Like other pilgrims, she felt energy rising from the ground, through
her feet, nurturing her and making her feel “grounded” and full of power.
Her description is telling. When speaking about what drew them to the
pilgrimage groups in the first place, many pilgrims referred to a lack of

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 “Black” Madonna versus “White” Madonna 103
grounding, a loss of connection with the nurturing energy of Mother Earth.
Like Neopagans in Britain and the United States, these pilgrims considered
Mother Earth a powerful, feminine divine being that should be honored
and protected.32 To them the planet Earth was the physical and visible rep-
resentation of Mother Earth, and its pitiless exploitation was proof of the
overall lack of grounding of Western humanity. From the pilgrims’ vantage
point, only those who are unable to establish a nourishing relationship with
Mother Earth could possibly engage in processes that dominate nature. Like
Neopagans the pilgrims interpreted the human domination of nature as the
consequence of the patriarchal domination of the Feminine and the demoni-
zation of the body, especially the female body, by the Church. According
to this view humans harmed the environment because they considered it
separate from themselves and thus could not feel supported by her nurtur-
ing, feminine energy.
Just as the Black Madonna was constructed in opposition to the White
Virgin, Mother Earth was constructed in opposition to the Christian God,
as Father, situated in the sky. The pilgrims wanted to overcome the feel-
ing of being dominated by the rules proclaimed by a male (Christian) god
who sat far above them, proclaiming women inferior and all bodies impure.
The opposition thus created was a female god(dess) situated below, thereby
allowing for the direct empowerment of bodies that came into contact with
her. Black Madonnas with their “earthy” color represented Mother Earth,
thereby offering seekers the opportunity to reconnect with “Her” in a dou-
ble sense: first, as in the case of Immocalata, by the Madonna’s energy fos-
tering a sense of grounding; and second, using Leonard’s words, by bringing
the Virgin Mary down from the stars, returning her to earth. Black Madon-
nas also allowed the pilgrims to invert the Church’s processes that Leonard
had described as sterilization and sanitization. Mary, and the female part
of humanity she represented, had gained back the right to express all the
aspects that had been “obscured” by the Church’s debasing them as dark
and dangerous: aspects such as female anger and destructivity, sexuality free
from reproductive pressures, menstruation and so on. Female pilgrims, espe-
cially, perceived the recovery of the connection with Mother Earth as the
recovery of their own right to be powerful women and not to feel ashamed
or guilty because they were not the good and ever-giving, understanding
women/mothers. This sense of female empowerment emerges from Imma-
colata’s account of the pilgrimage’s effects on her:

I. . . . I don’t know if it was the journey or because of other reasons, . . . but

I feel myself much more. . . . Whereas before I felt myself to be a woman,
but more of a victim, now I feel great force, great power. . . . Because I
always felt like the one who had to undergo things. I mean, you were
born woman . . . you had this misfortune. This also is in some way part
of the Southern Italian mentality of my parents, that . . . it’s a misfortune
[to be a woman]. . . . Because there is a difference between the woman

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 104 Anna Fedele
who has to find her way through indirect, hidden ways, and the fact of
feeling it [the power of being a woman], of feeling it like a sense of being
one’s own center, of being centered . . . this has been something, a really
beautiful feeling, I did not have before. (April 8, 2005)

The pilgrims wanted to recuperate all the aspects the Church had labeled
as “dark” and attribute to them a different, positive meaning. Accepting
the relationship of certain areas of “the Feminine” with darkness, the pil-
grims inverted the meaning of dark. In this way they did not totally refuse
the “Christian ideology” they criticized but conferred on its basic concepts
a different meaning. This process mirrors their attitude to dark madonnas
in general: instead of refusing the Christian figure of the Mother of God,
they included her in their pantheon, ascribing to her another, opposing
meaning.
Notably, even in cases where all the dark statues in question represented
Mary holding her child, Jesus was seldom mentioned. The pilgrims’ Black
Madonna was not subordinated to a male “God”. She did not need to
ask Jesus or “God the Father” to have mercy on those who prayed to her,
thereby acting as a mere intercessor. She was the female equivalent of the
heavenly God, the expression of his complement, Mother Earth. The dark
statues venerated in the shrines visited by pilgrims represented a woman
crowned as queen, sitting on a throne or adorned with royal robes. To them
she was the “divine Queen” of her own accord, a woman with her own son,
demonstrating no need for either father or husband. And, like the ancient
pagan goddesses, she was seen as representing the fertility of the earth, the
possibility of life but also the power of death.
References to goddesses from ancient religions such as Inanna, Artemis
or Isis and from other contemporary religious traditions such as the Indian
Kali, the Afro-Brazilian Oshun or the Chinese Tara did occur on occasion,
but the main female figures the pilgrims invoked derived from the Christian
world. Unwilling to abandon the figure of the Virgin Mary they had known
from childhood or to renounce the use of Christian churches as places to
commune with the divine, the pilgrims, with the help of their leaders, cre-
ated their own Mother of God by turning her into a Mother Goddess. Even
though they saw the official Christian religions as the expression of what
they identified as patriarchy, they still believed in the potentialities of what
some described as “the Christian tradition”.
Through the work of authors such as Marina Warner and others influ-
enced by her, the pilgrims had learned to see some of the ideological and
political implications of the heavenly and immaculate Virgin Mary and thus
considered her to be the personification of the patriarchal domination of
women. Influenced by Jungian theories about the power of archetypes33
shared by their pilgrimage leaders, the participants looked for a female
archetypal figure that could serve as a reference for women and men freed
from the boundaries of patriarchal structures.

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 “Black” Madonna versus “White” Madonna 105
The following shows the oppositions that have emerged so far, as they
relate to the Madonna:

White Madonna—Black Madonna

Virginity—Sexuality
Light—Darkness
Heaven—Earth
Domination of women—Empowerment of women
Religion—Spirituality

Shadows cannot exist without the light. Just so, it seems that the Black
Madonna, described by one Catalan pilgrim as “the Goddess against the
light”, would not exist without her white equivalent. Similarly, the pilgrims’
spirituality was also presented as a construction in opposition to what they
perceived as (Christian) religion.
Marina Warner, authors of spiritual-esoteric literature who were influ-
enced by her, as well as the leaders and pilgrims themselves all refer to the
cult of the Virgin Mary in abstract terms, taking for granted the assumption
that she has been venerated by Christian laypeople according to whatever
features were ascribed to her by institutional Christianity. By so doing, the
pilgrims and their leaders have accepted the idea that laypeople have been
passively absorbing formal ecclesiastical teachings about the Virgin Mary
throughout the centuries. But ethnographies about Marian devotion34 as
well as historical studies about Christianity35 show that the Virgin (and
other Christian divinities) of Christian writers and priests is quite different
from the Mary of everyday devotees and pilgrims. These accounts show a
Mary who appears as a powerful figure associated with a plethora of mean-
ings that often challenge the status quo, including the predominant social
and religious order.
In her ethnography about pilgrimages to Medjugorje, Élisabeth Clav-
erie36 analyzes the local apparitions of the Virgin since 1981 that have not
been recognized as authentic by the Catholic Church. Claverie has shown
how Our Lady of Medjugorje has been used by locals to make sense of and
even to justify the war that brought about the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and
to come to terms with the traumatic experiences related to massacres dur-
ing that war, as well as earlier conflicts in that same region. In his historical
ethnography about the visionaries in the Basque town of Ezkioga in 1931,
William Christian also found that their Virgin allowed the local Basque com-
munity to cope with current political and social changes and to voice their
protest accordingly.37 To take an example of another dark madonna statue,
Judith Samson describes Catholic American women making pilgrimages to
Czestockowa (Poland) to confront their guilt for having had an abortion
and to recover from what they identify as “post-abortion syndrome”.38

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 106 Anna Fedele
In the introduction to their edited volume about Marian pilgrimages,
Anna-Karina Hermkens, Willy Jansen and Catrien Notermans observe that,
in a context of modernization that sharpens inequalities such as those of
gender, ethnicity, class, religion and age, “for many Catholics, Mary pro-
vides the answer to such globally produced problems, and they bond with
Mary to gain empowerment and improve their lives”. The volume as a
whole suggests that “old and new Marian symbols, places and movements
are put to work”, and Marian devotion is used “to legitimate suppression,
inequality and violence” but also to resist oppression and inequalities. The
editors conclude that “Marian devotion simultaneously uses modernity and
acts against certain outcomes of modernity”.39
In this sense there exists more continuity than opposition between these
pilgrims’ Black Madonna and the vernacular cult of the Virgin Mary, past
and present; in both cases believers have used the Madonna creatively, to
address specific situations and to justify personal and social claims.

GENDERED EMPOWERMENT AND HEALING

Like Immacolata’s experience at Chartres, other pilgrims’ experiences included

contact with the “nurturing and grounding energy of Black Madonnas”.
Thanks to this encounter they said they were gradually able to acknowledge
and heal wounds related to gender and sexuality. Black Madonnas allowed
the pilgrims to come to terms with aspects of themselves that had been pre-
viously repressed, including negative emotions and, more generally, weak-
nesses and frailties inherent to the human condition.
For some pilgrims dark madonna statues like those at Notre-Dame de
Sous-Terre in Chartres or Notre-Dame-de-la-Bonne Mort in Clermont-
Ferrand awakened the image of a female figure related to the underworld.
Interpreting the underworld in Jungian terms as the unconscious, pilgrims
held that the energy of the dark statues helped them to recover memories
and traumas, thereby freeing them to pass from the unconscious into
consciousness. In effect, a Christian-Pagan divinity emerged that allowed
the pilgrims to express a sense of alienation about deep-seated problems
related to sexuality. The Black Madonnas allowed women to feel their
pain and anger about the domination and medicalization of the body
that had characterized their entire lives.40 These statues helped women
to acknowledge and to give new meaning to experiences of abortion and
sexual abuse but also to more common experiences such as menopause
or depression. The Black Madonna, according to two men in Roger’s
group, helped them to recognize and resolve the sense of rejection and
humiliation they felt when manifesting their vulnerability in a society
that expects men to be invariably strong and performing.41 Margot Hen-
derson, a poet and story writer living in the Findhorn Community in
Scotland, had organized a fundraising party in order to be able to join

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 “Black” Madonna versus “White” Madonna 107
Roger’s “Magdalenetour” for her fiftieth birthday. She told me about her
pilgrimage experience:

One of the other strong moments for me was knowing I was coming to
meet la Mère de la Bonne Mort [the Mother of the Good Death], because
I suppose that part of my journey, you know turning fifty, was something
about facing mortality, facing my own aging and my own human frailty.
And preceding my fifties, going through menopause, the experiencing of
a lot of changes through my body, some concerns about what was going
on in my body. So there was something powerful in facing her, you know,
really thinking about death. (October 13, 2005)

Tanya Luhrmann has analyzed the meaning of the destructive side of

the “Goddess” among women she met during her research into witchcraft
practitioners in London, in the 1980s. These middle-class women criticized
Christianity as sexuality-denying and told Luhrmann about experiences that
mirrored those in the pilgrims’ accounts, such as having fathers who despise
femininity.42 Luhrmann’s women described the Goddess as “death, under-
world and destruction” and felt that this aspect of the Goddess had helped
them to reach the “deepest”, “truest” aspect of themselves.43 What Luhrmann
observed about the London women of the Goddess movement applies to both
male and female pilgrims I spoke to during my research. Black Madonnas
allowed the pilgrims to acknowledge their experiences of violence and some-
times to share these openly with other pilgrims. In Luhrmann’s words, these
men and women were using “a very old, very powerful, way to deal with
suffering, which is to name it, to place it within a narrative of transformation,
and by the naming and narrativizing to feel some mastery over it”.44
Unable to find in the Christian Virgin a useful, or meaningful, feminine
reference figure and a divinity capable of helping them deal with their daily
problems as well as their past pain, the women and men I accompanied on
their pilgrimages had crafted their own Madonna whose traits did not con-
tradict their own humanity. The “dark side of the Goddess” helped female
pilgrims come to terms with a social order “in which they experience vio-
lence” and “in which women’s anger is not well tolerated”.45 Through the
concept of darkness female pilgrims found ways to express the mixture of
“anxiety, doubt, fear and anger” related to the politics that rose subsequent
to the feminist movement of the 1970s and 1980s.46 As Luhrmann observes,
“women are socialized to be nurturing, relationship oriented, and, usually,
the primary parent of their children” but also “cut-throat, competitive, and
successful within the canons of a male-dominated workplace”. Black Madon-
nas offered female pilgrims positive figures of reference for their negative
emotions, which in turn seemed to allow the women “to transform culturally
induced shame at being angry and female into an experience of pride”.47
Referring to her experience in front of Notre Dame de Sous-Terre, Imma-
colata explained that the energy she perceived there allowed her to overcome

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 108 Anna Fedele
the sense of victimization she had learned to associate specifically with being
female. She also started to feel the power inherent in womanhood. Through-
out this process she grew able to acknowledge and to voice the kind of
domination she had perceived, having always to be a “buonina”, a good
girl, and “to find her way through indirect, hidden ways”. In Immacolata’s
case the kind of empowerment she experienced during the pilgrimage went
hand in hand with important changes she then made in her life. After the
pilgrimage she took up biodanza and eventually became a teacher of this
“spiritual dance technique”. While I was writing this chapter she contacted
me, proudly announcing that she had just completed her BA in psychology
and wanted now to pursue her master’s degree.
In her study of how women’s reproductive processes are described and
perceived in American culture, Emily Martin48 has argued that women in
the United States feel they must behave well and hide their anger and other
negative emotions, and that this pressure relates directly to women’s sense
of alienation from their bodies. Women perceive their own body as an entity
separate from the self, something they need to control if they want to fulfill
the roles assigned to them at work or in their families. Building on Fou-
cault’s49 analyses of power and corporeality, other social scientists have
argued that the model of domination and alienation proposed by Martin
can be applied more generally to women in Western countries.50 In this
same vein, studies about masculinity have shown that men also experience
a sense of alienation because they perceive the expression of certain emo-
tions and in general their own vulnerability as disallowed.51 These forms of
gendered domination emerged from the pilgrims’ discourses, and through
their pilgrimages they tried to formulate alternative ways of describing and
approaching their body and their gender identity.
Male and female pilgrims spoke of the need to accept the “dark aspects of
oneself” they had once rejected as a result of their Christian, mostly Catho-
lic, education. Some weeks after participating in Roger Woolger’s pilgrim-
age, Leonard sent this e-mail, explaining its effects on him:

The primary message I got from the tour is that it’s important to embrace
the darkness within myself—to explore and integrate those aspects of
myself that I’ve rejected—and I’ve been doing that intentionally since
I returned. . . . This collective darkness is huge and complex, but I feel
that some of the issues it touches upon are sexuality, receptivity, and
vulnerability. It is the fertile, earthly quality that the church rejected in
favor of a sky god who came from a virgin mother.

As we can see from Leonard’s account the Madonna-Whore split men-

tioned by Roger was also deeply affecting to men, who had been taught to
choose between immaculate women, who would be rendered impure by the
very act of making love with them, and women who, by virtue of the fact
that they were open to sexuality, would already be deemed “impure”. Male

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 “Black” Madonna versus “White” Madonna 109
pilgrims also complained about how the patriarchal rules of the social order
they had been raised in did not allow men to discover or express their own vul-
nerability. Expected to be strong, performing and proactive, these men felt cut
off from a part of themselves they now referred to as “feminine”, a part they
had had to deny just to fulfill the conventional roles assigned to males. Again,
here we see that the nature of the spirituality embodied in the Black Madonna
corresponds directly to a sense of disempowerment related to gender.
Black Madonnas allowed male and female pilgrims to voice emotions
they felt were not welcome in their inherited social and religious order.
Through their encounter with the dark statues the pilgrims could narrativ-
ize past experiences of domination and violence and endow sometimes pain-
ful physical processes such as menopause, operations on sexual organs or
simply aging with meaningful interpretations. This process of acknowledg-
ment and narrativization fostered a healing experience described by some
as “embracing the darkness”—that is, voicing and accepting those parts of
themselves they had been taught to “obscure”. The process of transforma-
tion described by the pilgrims implied not only a healing experience on an
individual level but also a collective resistance against a social and religious
order perceived as deeply sexist and oppressive.

CONCLUSION

Far from receding into legend like the goddess Ishtar, as Warner had pre-
dicted,52 the Virgin Mary, in her “black” or “white” version, continues to
attract hundreds of pilgrims every year, and the features ascribed to her offer
insights into her devotees’ needs and troubles as well as into the paradoxes
of our age. Throughout this chapter I have analyzed the way in which pil-
grims who do not call themselves practicing Catholics, or even Christians,
conceptualize and interact ritually with Black Madonnas. Even allowing
for the influence of Ean Begg’s and Marina Warner’s texts on the pilgrims,
we can see that these men and women did not passively accept the theories
formulated about the Virgin Mary but rather went about establishing their
own personal relationship with the dark statues themselves.
Analyzing the changing significances attributed to dark madonna stat-
ues throughout the centuries, we have seen that what emerges as the topic
that preoccupies researchers are questions regarding the figures’ color. I
believe with Scheer that it would be more telling if we understood when
and if the statues’ darkness became an important factor for people, why
darkness became an attractive feature in certain historical periods and the
range of meanings associated with the dark figures. As for the pilgrims I
have described in this chapter, their interpretation of the dark statues drew
on a sort of magical mirror that reflected the image of their patriarchal
white Mary, but that inverted her conventional attributes and meanings.
The Madonna’s darkness was for the pilgrims a central element of her nature

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 110 Anna Fedele
that spoke to them about the female earth as opposed to the male sky; sexual
power as opposed to virginity; anger, pain and destruction as opposed to an
ever-nourishing and humane, mothering attitude.
I have argued that the Black Madonna is connected to a series of dichoto-
mies that are also related to the way in which the pilgrims distinguish and
even set spirituality in opposition to religion. As an icon of a transhistori-
cal and transnational spirituality constructed in opposition to (Christian)
religion, the Black Madonna should counterbalance the negative effects of
the immaculate white Virgin, representative of a religion marked by gender
inequality and the stigmatization of the body as impure.
To set the pilgrims’ narratives in a broader perspective: their strategy in
constructing both their Black Madonna and their spirituality can be seen
as an example of how people in Europe and Northern America who self-
identify as “spiritual” rather than “religious” tend to construct their own
spirituality in opposition to an inherited religion that has been clearly influ-
enced by Western culture’s Judeo-Christian heritage. This process of con-
struction, however, is based on a conceptualization of religion that does
not distinguish between the religion as prescribed by formal ecclesiastical
teachings and the actual lived religion of religious practitioners. Drawing
on historical and anthropological texts about vernacular Christianity, I have
argued that the way in which dark madonna pilgrims creatively appropriate
and reinterpret Christian figures and symbols is not so very different from
the ways in which Marian devotees, past and present, have created their
own Mary. Cases such as that of the Virgin of Medjugorie as analyzed by
Claverie53 or of another dark madonna, Our Lady of Czestockova, analyzed
by Samson,54 show how Mary is creatively appropriated by pilgrims in ways
that allow them to justify their own beliefs and practices.
Through their creative rituals and the use of an energy language, the pilgrims
I accompanied rejected the theories and values related to sexuality and gender
they had received through their Christian, mainly Catholic, education. Through
reference to the Black Madonna men and women managed finally to voice
emotions and to come to terms with aspects of themselves they had learned to
suppress, or alienate—aspects of the self, male or female, that were not well
accepted by society at large. The pilgrims also elaborated on different notions
of body and sexuality that did not entail dichotomies such as body/soul or
material/spiritual. Indeed, the pilgrims’ own accounts revealed that contacting
Mother Earth and the “darkness within” implied profound processes of recog-
nizing psychological and physical wounds that related to their gendered bodies
and, in particular, to what they had finally come to name as “the feminine side”.

NOTES

This text is based on chapter 8 of my dissertation, which is published under the

title, Looking for Mary Magdalene: Alternative Pilgrimage and Ritual Creativity at
Catholic Shrines in France (Oxford University Press, 2012). Some citations of this

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 “Black” Madonna versus “White” Madonna 111
text form part of that book. Financial support was provided by the Portuguese Foun-
dation for Science and Technology. I am grateful to William A. Christian, Élisabeth
Claverie, Josefina Roma, Monique Scheer, Tanya Luhrmann and Kim Knibbe, all of
whom provided useful suggestions and comments. Susan L. Scott helped me with
the editing of the text.

1. Among others: Ellen Badone, “Pilgrimage, Tourism and The Da Vinci Code
at Les-Saintes Maries-de-la- Mer, France”, Culture and Religion 9, no. 1
(2008): 23–44; Marion Bowman, “Drawn to Glastonbury”, in Pilgrimage
in Popular Culture, ed. Ian Reader and Tony Walter (London: Macmillan,
1993), 29–62; Adrian J. Ivakhiv, Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and
Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
2001); Kathryn Rountree, “Goddess Pilgrims as Tourists: Inscribing the Body
through Sacred Travel”, Sociology of Religion 63, no. 4 (2002): 475–496;
Deana Weibel, “Kidnapping the Virgin: The Reinterpretation of a Roman
Catholic Shrine by Religious Creatives” (PhD diss., University of California,
San Diego, 2001); and Deana Weibel, “Of Consciousness Changes and For-
tified Faith: Creativist and Catholic Pilgrimage at French Catholic Shrines”,
in Pilgrimage and Healing, ed. Jill Dubisch and Michael Winkelman (Tuc-
son: University of Arizona Press, 2005), 111–134. For an overview of this
kind of alternative pilgrimage see Laurel Zwissler, “Pagan Pilgrimage: New
Age Movements Research on Sacred Travel within Pagan and New Age
Communities”, Religion Compass 5, no.7 (July 2011): 326–342.
2. As Matthew Wood shows in Possession, Power and the New Age: Ambi-
guities of Authority in Neoliberal Societies (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007),
“New Age” is a contested term and it is difficult to understand what each
researcher means when referring to it. The pilgrims I met tended to have a
negative image of what they identified as “New Age” and did not like to be
called “New Agers”. See also the introduction to this volume.
3. Anna Fedele, Looking for Mary Magdalene: Alternative Pilgrimage and Rit-
ual Creativity at Catholic Shrines in Contemporary France (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012).
4. Among others: Helen Berger, A Community of Witches (Columbia: Uni-
versity of South Carolina Press, 1999); Tanya M. Luhrmann, Persuasions
of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic and Witchcraft in Present-day England
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Sabina Magliocco, Witch-
ing Culture: Folklore and Neo-paganism in America (Philadelphia: Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Sarah M. Pike, Earthly Bodies, Magical
Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001); and Jone Salomonsen, Enchanted
Feminism: The Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco (London: Routledge,
2002). See also Hegner and Trulsson this volume.
5. William Christian, “La devoció a les images brunes a Catalunya: La Mare de
Déu de Montserrat”, Revista d’etnologia de Catalunya 6 (February 1995):
24–31. On the Virgin of Montserrat see also Josefina Roma i Riu, “Nigra
sum? Reflexions antropològiques entorn de la Mare de Déu de Montserrat i
la Santa Muntanya”, Quaderns-e, July 2006, http://www.antropologia.cat/
antiga/quaderns-e/07/Roma.htm. For a study on Black Madonnas in Italy
see Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Black Madonnas: Feminism, Religion and
Politics in Italy (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993).
6. Anna Fedele, “La figura del Santo Cristo de Lepanto en la Catedral de
Barcelona, puerta hacia el mundo de arriba para la comunicación y la
negociación con lo Divino”, Actas del IX Congreso de Antropología de la
FAAEE (Barcelona, 2002).

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 112 Anna Fedele
7. Ilene H. Forsyth, The Throne of Wisdom: Wood Sculptures of the Madonna
in Romanesque France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).
8. Christian, “La devoció”, 24–31.
9. Marie Durand-Lefebvre, Étude sur l’origine des Vierges Noires (Paris: G.
Durassié, 1937); Emile Saillens, Nos Vierges Noires; leurs origines (Paris:
Les Éditions Universelles, 1945); Leonard W. Moss and Stephen C. Cap-
pannari, “The Black Madonna: An Example of Culture Borrowing”, The
Scientific Monthly, June 1953, 319–324.
10. William Christian. Citation from the unpublished English version of the
article, with permission of the author.
11. Jacques Huynen, L’énigme des Vierges Noires (Paris: Éditions Robert Laf-
font, 1972).
12. Monique Scheer, “From Majesty to Mystery: Change in the Meanings of
Black Madonnas from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries”, The Ameri-
can Historical Review 107, no. 5 (2002): 1412–1440.
13. Ibid., 1419.
14. Ibid., 1422.
15. Ibid., 1427.
16. Ibid., 1430.
17. Ibid., 1427–1434.
18. Ibid., 1439–1440.
19. Fedele, Looking for Mary Magdalene, 25.
20. Ean Begg, The Cult of the Black Virgin (London: Penguin Books Arkana,
1985).
21. Influenced by Begg’s theories in the 1990s, other authors went on to con-
sider black images of Mary as archetypal; the most popular book among
pilgrims was China Galland’s Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black
Madonna, a Ten-Year Journey (London: Rider, 1990).
22. Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin
Mary (New York: Vintage, 1983), 153.
23. Ibid., 67.
24. Ibid., 337.
25. For a detailed description of the itineraries see Fedele, Looking for Mary
Magdalene, 34–44, 311–314
26. Roger Woolger, Celso and Margot asked me to use their real names and
signed releases to that effect; I have used pseudonyms for the other pilgrims
quoted in this text.
27. It was also possible to choose an extended version of Roger’s tour that
lasted fifteen days.
28. Roger Woolger, 2005.
29. For an analysis of Mary Magdalene as another Christian figure who fosters
access to darkness, see Fedele, Looking for Mary Magdalene, 217–242.
30. For a detailed analysis of the pilgrims’ energy discourse see Anna Fedele,
“Gender, Sexuality and Religious Critique among Mary Magdalene Pil-
grims in Southern France”, In Gender, Nation and Religion in European
Pilgrimage, ed. Willy Jansen and Catrien Notermans (Farnham: Ashgate,
2012), 55–70; and “From Christian Religion to Feminist Spirituality: Mary
Magdalene Pilgrimages to La Sainte-Baume, France”, Culture and Religion
10, no. 3 (2009): 243–261.
31. Regarding energy connections with the dark Madonna of Rocamadour, see
Weibel, “Kidnapping the Virgin”, 107.
32. Among others: Pike, Earthly Bodies; Salomonsen, Enchanted Feminism;
and Magliocco, Witching Culture.

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 “Black” Madonna versus “White” Madonna 113
33. Begg, The Cult of the Black Virgin; Jennifer Baker Woolger and Roger J.
Woolger, The Goddess Within: A Guide to the Eternal Myths that Shape
Women’s Lives (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994).
34. Among others William A. Christian, Jr., Person and God in a Spanish Valley,
rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Visionaries: The
Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1996); and Divine Presence in Spain and Western Europe, 1500–
1960: Visions, Religious Images and Photographs (Budapest: Central Euro-
pean University, 2011); also Élisabeth Claverie, Les guerres de la Vierge:
Une anthropologie des apparitions (Paris: Gallimard, 2003); Jill Dubisch, In
a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Simon Coleman and John
Elsner, “Performing Pilgrimage: Walsingham and the Ritual Construction of
Irony”, in Ritual, Performance, Media, ed. Felicia Hughes-Freeland (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1998), 46–65; Robert Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street:
Faith and Communion in Italian Harlem 1880–1950 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1985); Anna-Karina Hermkens, Willy Jansen and Catrien
Notermans, eds., Moved by Mary: The Power of Pilgrimage in the Mod-
ern World (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); and Deborah Puccio, “La beauté de
la Vierge”, in Le goût des “belles” choses, ed. V. Nahoum-Grappe (Paris:
Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2004), 271–295. About
lived religion see Meredith McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in
Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
35. Carolyn Walker Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast: The Religious Significance
of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1987) and Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption:
Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York:
Zone Books, 1991); see also Christian, Person and God as well as Divine
Presence.
36. Claverie, Les Guerres de la Viege.
37. Christian, Visionaries.
38. Judith Samson, “Sexuality and Gender Discourses at European Pilgrimage
Sites” (PhD diss., Radboud University Nijmegen, 2012) and “EU Criticism
in Two Transnational Anti-abortion Movements”, in Gender, Nation and
Religion in European Pilgrimage, ed. Willy Jansen and Catrien Notermans
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).
39. Anna-Karina Hermkens, Willy Jansen and Catrien Notermans, eds., Moved
by Mary: The Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World (Farnham: Ashgate,
2009), 2. Marion Bowman also observed continuity between spirituality
and vernacular religion in Glastonbury; see “More of the Same? Christian-
ity, Vernacular Religion and Alternative Spirituality in Glastonbury”, in
Beyond New Age, ed. Marion Bowman and Steven J. Sutcliffe (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 83–104.
40. See Fedele, Looking for Mary Magdalene, chap. 6.
41. See, for instance, William’s experience in Fedele, Looking for Mary Magda-
lene, chap. 6.
42. Fedele, Looking for Mary Magdalene, chap. 6.
43. Tanya Luhrmann, “The Ugly Goddess: Reflections on the Role of Violent
Images in Religious Experience”, History of Religions 41, no. 2 (November
2001): 121–123.
44. Ibid., 130–132.
45. Ibid., 130.
46. See also the introduction to this volume.

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 114 Anna Fedele
47. Luhrmann, “The Ugly Goddess”, 131–132.
48. Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Repro-
duction (Boston: Beacon, 1987) and “Premenstrual Syndrome: Discipline,
Work, and Anger in Late Industrial Societies”, in Blood Magic: The Anthro-
pology of Menstruation, ed. Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988), 55–74.
49. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité: La volonté de savoir. (Paris: Gal-
limard, 1976).
50. Faye Ginsburg, Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American
Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Faye Gins-
burg and Rayna Rapp, eds., Conceiving a New World Order: The Global
Politics of Reproduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(New York: Routledge, 1990) and Undoing Gender (London: Routledge,
2004); Robbie Davis-Floyd, Birth as an American Rite of Passage (Berkeley:
Berkeley University Press, 1992).
51. Robert Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987); Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book about Men
(1990; repr., London: Rider, 2001); Joseph H. Pleck, The Myth of Masculin-
ity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981).
52. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 339.
53. Claverie, Les guerres de la Vierge.
54. Samson, “Sexuality and Gender Discourses” and “EU Criticism in Two
Transnational Anti-abortion Movements”, Gender, Nation and Religion in
European Pilgrimage, ed. Willy Jansen and Catrien Notermans (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2012).

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 6 From Crisis to Charisma
Redefining Hegemonic Ideas of Science,
Freedom and Gender among Mediumistic
Healers in Germany
Ehler Voss

MEDIUMISTIC HEALING IN GERMANY:

A CULTURE OF DIFFERENT SCENES

Contact with entities that are usually invisible, such as gods, spirits, fairies,
angels and so on, is common for many people all over the world; in anthro-
pological as well as in other literature there is a rich tradition of describing
the large variety of practices related to such entities. Many people in Ger-
many are also familiar with such practices, which often occur within the wide
context of healing. In this context, particular healers known as spiritual,
mediumistic, shamanic or miracle healers act in different ways as mediums
for various entities to enable them to curatively affect help-seeking clients.
During my multi-sited PhD fieldwork in Germany from 2005 to 2007, I fol-
lowed the metaphor of “mediumistic healing” and, through esoteric fairs,
flyers, advertisements in relevant journals, and later through referrals by
different healers or clients, I came into contact with about thirty healers
who are presently practicing as well as several hundred followers from vari-
ous, mostly transnational scenes, each of them with their own vocabulary,
techniques, social organization and ideas about mediumship. By name, there
are many people who call themselves a medium in a spiritistic tradition and
claim to “channel” information or “energies” from “the other world”; they
assume the existence of wise and knowing spirits that help humans in their
development. Others refer to themselves as shamans or shamanic practitio-
ners and establish contact with their helping-spirits through shamanic drum
journeys. In the Reiki scene, people believe in the existence of a universal
energy, which they call Reiki energy. It is assumed that this energy flows
through the Reiki healer’s body and leaves it through his or her hands. The
placement of the healer’s hands near or on the client’s body should cause this
energy to be transmitted, releasing within the client’s body energy blockages,
which are seen as sources of illness. In Family Constellation therapy in the
tradition of the German therapist Bert Hellinger, problems are traced back
to the client’s family system, which is supposedly not in the right order. By
performing the family system, it is assumed that the performers can be in
contact with the authentic feelings of their dead or living family members.

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 116 Ehler Voss
Bruno Gröning is also a mediumistic healer who, even after his death in
1959 in Germany, is believed to accumulate and transform the “divine heal-
ing stream” for humankind. Thus he can still be asked for help, which many
people do, not only in Germany.
Due to the fact that most of the healers and their followers are involved
in different scenes and thus combine or synthesize different methods, it is
generally difficult to make clear correlations. That is why I prefer to speak
of a “culture of mediumistic healing”.1

FROM CRISIS TO CHARISMA: ASCENDED MASTERS

AND AN ASCENDED HEALER

In reconstructing their biographies, the majority of the healers I spoke with

mentioned periods of crisis or referred to unusual bodily experiences as a
kind of initial moment when they came into contact with ideas of medi-
umship—these were experiences that they could not interpret with familiar
vocabulary and that destroyed the feeling of being an autonomous actor.2
Senta Heimeling can report many crisis periods in her life as well. She was
fifty-six years old when I first met her in 2005 through a flyer that promoted
her mediumistic abilities. In a biographical interview she recounted that she
grew up in a small town in Lower Saxony in “a working-class environment,
in relative poverty, and without culture. No books, no music, nothing”. She
was eight years old when a friend of her family began to regularly rape her.
After one year she was “totally destroyed”: “I was addicted to sleeping pills,
I couldn’t handle my anxiety, my nightmares, my feelings of guilt anymore”.
As a child she regularly received visions of how the situation would be in a
few years. “And then I received a vision, or rather it was an energy which
was placed at my disposal and this energy contained the information: One
day I will only do what I want! That was planted in the back of my head.
And that helped me to go on”. Senta’s mother was deprived of parental cus-
tody and she had to live in a children’s home. After finishing school, she was
educated as a secretarial assistant and moved to Berlin at the age of twenty.
There she came into contact with a man who introduced her to a psychologi-
cal way of thinking. “Actually it was quite easy, I have always just asked:
Why is it like that? With this question I could go very deeply. I was extremely
sensitive, hysterical. . . . I was afraid of everything. . . . And no matter how
painful it was, I faced the problem. And I had many painful experiences
like the sexual abuse”. She said that when she was awake she permanently
observed herself and immediately tried to find out why she reacted like this
or like that. “After sixteen years I thought I should stop this, because other-
wise it would become a mania”. She talked about joblessness and homeless-
ness during her time in Berlin. She herself was deprived of parental custody
of her first child and put her second child up for adoption: “Because at that
time I was again only able to present her with a hardship case”.

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 From Crisis to Charisma 117
In 1995 Senta met a medium and over a period of three years she had
about eight sessions. She said, there she learned many things about her life
and after one year she was able to channel for herself. What she learned
through her helping-spirits was the sensuousness of all her experiences and
that she was accompanied by these helping-spirits constantly. After another
year she could already channel for other people. “First it was pure channel-
ing. That means I posed a question and the helping-spirits answered. But
step by step my abilities became enhanced. I realized other people’s symp-
toms and could even talk to those symptoms, to their energies. I could ask
what they were for and then pass this information on to the clients. Later I
could even solve the problems. . . . But in fact it is not me who does this—a
medium is just a tool, a translator”. Senta said that she once healed a cli-
ent’s liver, which had a fungal infection. “When I heal this liver, energies
pass through me into the liver. These energies contain the information about
what the symptom needs. And in this case we asked the symptom: ‘Listen,
what’s up, are you ready to go?’ And it said: ‘Yes, actually I have no purpose
here anymore!’ Because obviously there was no reason why the symptom
was there anymore. And then we extracted it from the liver. . . . And two
months later the client called me and said the liver was healed, he had just
been to the doctor. . . . Before the liver had been completely parched and
porous, which I could see during the treatment”.
A few years ago Senta gained “direct access to the soul” of a client, which
increased the effectiveness of her treatment very much. She no longer had
to identify clients’ problems by asking one question after the other as she
had previously done and as is done in other kinds of treatments. “Also in
psychology you first have to unwind a ball of wool until you find out the
core of the problem”. Now she immediately knows the core of the prob-
lem. Her treatments are guided by so-called Ascended Masters, a canon of
spirits derived from theosophical thinking. They are said to be enlightened
spiritual beings who in former incarnations were ordinary humans and are
now helping human beings with their personal and collective development.
“I am mainly in contact with Saint Germain because he is in charge of the
transformation. He transforms energies which are not needed anymore with
his violet flame. The other ones I work with are Jesus and Lady Portia, some-
times also Kwan Yin and Hilarion”. Officially Senta works as a “life coach”
and earns a living with her healing sessions.3
In general, people assume that practices dealing with spirits disappear in
the course of a modernization process and that they are, at least in Europe,
just interesting from a historical point of view or—if such practices do occur
today, however—can be interpreted as survival, as intended fraud for finan-
cial enrichment or as a case for psychiatry.4 Nevertheless, healing practices
with the help of spirits are widespread in such societies. And in an increas-
ingly globalized world with an increasingly intercultural exchange of differ-
ent concepts concerning body, illness, curing and spirits, increasing numbers
of new and intermixing forms of spiritual healing are arising.5 In the culture

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 118 Ehler Voss
of mediumistic healing, patients as well as healers act in a medically plural-
istic surrounding in which they have to deal with the hegemony of biomedi-
cine and psychology. This inevitably results in resistance to hegemonic ideas
as well as resistance to the adoption of such ideas—a kind of involvement in
hegemonic ideas that can be regarded as an involvement in power.

INVOLVEMENT IN POWER: GENERAL

THEORETICAL APPROACHES

The term “power” is used in different ways. When talking about power
in the context of religion it is common in the social sciences to distinguish
religion and spirituality. In doing so religion is assumed to be a sphere in
which an external authority dominates the religious practice, whereas spiri-
tuality is characterized by an absence of external authority and the pres-
ence of an inner self-authority, typical for such modern religious practices
as the so-called New Age.6 Approaches like this are thoroughly criticized by
Matthew Wood,7 who instead suggests differentiating a religious field into
formative and non-formative religions. In his criticism he refers to a way
of using the term “power” that is mainly influenced by the approaches of
Michel Foucault.8 As is well known, Foucault criticized a usage of the term
“power” that regards power alone as a kind of repression—that is, one
can have power over someone and thus one can have more or less power.
Without neglecting the existence of such aspects of power, Foucault instead
conceptualizes power as omnipresent, inevitable and intangible.9 In combi-
nation with the background of a concept of knowledge that is historically
contingent, he thus highlights the productive elements of power. Among
other things, this concerns the establishment of hegemonic ideas regarding
knowledge and gender roles as well as the concept of the self and its body
and feelings: “We believe that feelings are immutable, but every sentiment,
particularly the noblest and most disinterested, has a history. We believe in
the dull constancy of instinctual life and imagine that it continues to exert
its force indiscriminately in the present as it did in the past. But a knowledge
of history easily disintegrates this unity . . . We believe, in any event, that the
body obeys the exclusive laws of physiology and that it escapes the influence
of history, but this too is false. The body is moulded by a great many distinct
regimes . . . Nothing in man—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to
serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men”.10
From such a perspective it seems strange, or rather it seems a manifesta-
tion of a modern self-conception, to divide religion and spirituality in the
way just mentioned. Thus, Wood concludes that scholars simply adopted
the indigenous concepts of self-authority uncritically for their own analy-
sis. Due to the assumption of inescapable power and the assumption that
self-essence does not exist, there is no realm in which one could be without
external authorities because it is not possible to divide the inside from the

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 From Crisis to Charisma 119
outside of the self. According to Wood, a formative religion is characterized
by a single authority, whereas a non-formative religion is characterized by
multiple authorities. In every religious field—as in the culture of mediumistic
healing—there is a tension between formative and non-formative religions.
And what is usually called New Age is thus not characterized by an absence
of external authority but by a deflection towards multiple authorities.
A concept of productive power does not necessarily exclude also using
the term in reference to repressive aspects of power. Thus another way of
talking about power describes the ability to, or rather the degree to which,
people or institutions control or influence their environment as well as
other people. In this, a classical and mysterious discovery is that the contin-
gent values of the repressors are generally shared even by the repressed—
that is, the hegemonic ideas and values are uncritically shared by people
in a non-hegemonic position. Pierre Bourdieu, for example, examines this
observation in his book Masculine Domination. He works out how male
domination is established through what he calls “symbolic violence, a gentle
violence, imperceptible and invisible even to its victims, exerted for the most
part through the purely symbolic channels of communication and cognition
(more precisely, misrecognition), recognition, or even feeling”.11 According
to Bourdieu, the inequality of men and women, in which women appear as
an appendix to men, is the product of a socialization process through which
cultural arbitrariness appears as natural and through which no more justi-
fications are necessary.
According to this perspective, social actors tend to be at the mercy of
hegemonic symbolic orders, even if Bourdieu promises that reflexivity can
help one escape their dominance. Usually more agency is ascribed to the
social actors when the term charisma is used in the way Max Weber shaped
it: “The term ‘charisma’ will be applied to a certain quality of an individual
personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated
as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically excep-
tional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordi-
nary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the
basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a ‘leader’”.12
With this discussion of power in mind, the following approach concern-
ing the culture of mediumistic healing in Germany focuses on the entangle-
ment of different aspects of power in the context of mediumistic healing in
Germany and asks: how do mediumistic healers gain charisma in a society
that assigns them to a non-hegemonic position?

INVOLVEMENT IN POWER: SCIENCE AND RELIGION

The majority of the healers I met accept both hegemonic ideas of knowl-
edge as well as their supposed own heterodox position. Instead of referring
self-confidently and in a positive way to the available terms—religion or

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 120 Ehler Voss
esotericism—most of the mediumistic healers refer to their own practices
as scientific while simultaneously and in accordance with hegemonic values
distancing themselves from all kinds of religious or rather esoteric practices.
This attitude is articulated most clearly by a Brazilian medium I met dur-
ing my fieldwork; this medium began the presentation of his approach to
an audience in Germany with the words: “Forget all you heard concerning
this topic until now! Here comes the scientific approach! No esotericism,
no mysticism, no religion—this is analytical science!” Senta, the medium
introduced earlier, also continuously claims the scientific character of all her
assumptions. For example, “Energy follows attention”, she said. “That’s
what physicists already proved a long time ago in the 1920s. It’s all verified
fact! They are universal natural laws! That is basic knowledge!” Another
example is Michael Harner, the founder of the Foundation for Shamanic
Studies, an organization that has been trying to establish Harner’s special
kind of shamanism in Western countries.13 According to Harner, science is
based on verifiable facts, while religion is based on assumptions and beliefs.
Concerning the debate on the existence of spirits, Harner claims the sha-
mans have a scientific character and, as a reverse argument, accuses con-
temporary scientists of being unscientific—that is to say religious. In 1996
he stated at the “1st Congress of the World Council for Psychotherapy” in
Vienna, “The shaman has always been a scientist!” This means that because
the shamans experience the spirits and study them systematically, they are
convinced of the existence of the spirits, and they definitely know what to do
to get help. “As we all know, the idea of spirits was destroyed during the age
of Enlightenment. Before that, it was the Inquisition which tried to destroy
shamanism because the inquisitors had their own idea about permissible
spirits . . . Now it is science which goes through with the extermination by
claiming that spirits do not exist. That is why science is based on belief—
without ever trying to verify this proposition”.14
The reference to science is mostly accompanied by the assumption that it
is possible to scientifically explain all existing phenomena—an assumption
that is prominently worked out in the writings of Allan Kardec,15 an impor-
tant figure of spiritism in the nineteenth century. He intended to clearly
differentiate his spiritistic approach from the belief in miracles, and thus he
talks of “naturalness”, “laws of nature” and “facts”, which can be verified
experimentally. The historian Helmut Zander calls this kind of approach
an “empiricization of the contact to the other world”.16 Concerning sci-
ence, the involvement in power means that the healers usually accept the
pretension that modern science has the best access to explaining the world—
accompanied by the pejorative usage of the terms religion and esotericism.
They reply to the fact that they are themselves usually labeled as unscientific
in the public sphere by reversing this perception: they attempt to unmask
established science as religious and claim to fulfill the scientific ideal with
their own practice. Thus, according to their self-conception, the mediumistic
healers appear as the real scientists.

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 From Crisis to Charisma 121
INVOLVEMENT IN POWER: SPIRITUALITY AND
THE FREEDOM OF THE SUBJECT

Most political, juridical, pedagogical, scientific and medical institutions in a

Western democracy are based on the assumption that they deal with, at least
potentially, free subjects.17 According to this assumption, neither history nor
individuals are influenced by spiritual entities. Instead, the self-confidence of
many members of such societies is based on the certainty that ideas of this
kind are superstitious and have thus been overcome. And in public discus-
sions, religious and/or esoteric groups are mostly associated with unfree,
dependent and fatuous subjects who willingly follow their human group-
leaders. In addition to that general stereotype, one could assume that in
the context of mediumistic healing, where it is popular to talk about spirits
and where it is an aim to be guided by spirits, the idea of a free subject and
a free will is all the more rare. But instead, the existence of free will is one
of the most emphasized propositions among mediumistic healers, and it is
very common to highlight the sole responsibility of each person for his or
her own life. Senta emphasizes this as well. She points out that we are not
at the mercy of anything, not life, the political or economic situation, or any
illness. She said that each person has to take full responsibility for his or her
life. “Once, Nelson Mandela said: ‘Most of the people are not afraid of their
weakness, but of their greatness!’ We are more powerful than we all think!”
Such an argumentation is predominantly rooted in a spiritistic tradition in
which the soul is conceptualized as an indivisible entity that has removed itself
from the nearness to God. Through an ongoing process of new reincarna-
tions, the soul must detect its own divinity and, thus, at the end of this learn-
ing process will at some point find its way back to God. In such conceptions
of full responsibility, the outer appears as a mirror of the inner. As a result,
everything that happens in life (e.g., people you meet, accidents you have,
money you earn, illnesses you have and so on) is a message to yourself about
what you did right or wrong in this life and/or the previous ones. That is why
Senta talks about reasons for illnesses and says that the fungal infection of her
client’s liver is needed for something. In this sense Senta told an audience at
a presentation of her work, “You can believe me: We are not at the mercy of
illnesses. That is the false assumption of Family Constellation therapy. There
are no family problems! Everyone has his own topic, his own problem. Before
you are born you have already prepared a scheme of life. You have chosen
where you are born. And if your problems are mirrored onto you through
your parents and grandparents, then you need this to understand your prob-
lem. You are in your family because you have a special problem, not the other
way round”. Against this background, the situation in the family she was
born into and all her own suffering are interpreted as meaningful experiences,
which are ultimately caused by her own behavior in previous lives and which
were necessary “on the one hand to break an endless pride that is two hundred
years old, and on the other hand to accept the full responsibility for my life”.

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 122 Ehler Voss
But how does the concept of full self-responsibility go together with the
belief in guiding spirits? In this argumentation, all entities conceptualized as
entities outside of the subject become a helpful instrument for the subject
in its process of development towards more self-consciousness. The appear-
ance of spirits is thus guided by the subject, consciously or unconsciously.
It therefore does not matter whether the spirits are conceptualized as “real”
or as imaginary. Through the metaphor of the mirror of the inner self, spiri-
tual beings lose their autonomy because they are guided by an autonomous
subject.
Thus, we can see the same principle concerning the justification of one’s
own action as in the previous example concerning science. Again, the hege-
monic idea is accepted and it is again claimed that mediumistic healers are
fulfilling the hegemonic norm better than the majority. According to this
argumentation the mediums and their followers are not unfree individuals as
they appear in the sectarian discourse of the church. Quite the contrary, the
majority of people do not assume full responsibility for their lives because
they count on doctors to regain their health, depend on consumption and let
their desires be dictated by commercial advertisement. From the perspective
of the majority of the mediumistic healers, they think they are free, but in
fact they are not. Also, people involved with churches are not free, because
they have to believe in the pre-given religious belief system of their church.
Senta stated: “Religions originate in the attempt to accumulate prestige and
power. . . . The priests are saying this and that, and they work with anxi-
ety. . . . The church refuses the idea of reincarnation and tries to maintain
its power”. Mediums instead do not have to believe what somebody claims;
they can verify the truth on their own. The question of freedom leads to the
question of democracy. The priests of a church guard access to the other
world. Due to the spiritistic dictum that every human being is a medium,
everybody is able to have access to the other world. This is why mediumship
appears as a real self-determined democratic practice.

INVOLVEMENT IN POWER: GENDER

The acceptance and annexation of hegemonic values and assumptions can

also be seen concerning images of gender. Even if in Europe there is a long
history of feminism’s attempt to emancipate women and even if nowa-
days it is common in academic and feminist discourse to refuse naturalis-
tic approaches and to point out the cultural and historical contingency of
gender roles, classical naturalized stereotypes concerning masculinity and
femininity are still present in the public sphere.
One aspect of the symbolic order that is relevant in the context of medi-
umistic healing is the characterization of men as active and women as pas-
sive, as it could already be found in the nineteenth century, the golden age
of Spiritualism in Europe. Passivity here has an ambiguous character: on

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 From Crisis to Charisma 123
the one hand it describes and justifies the subordinate position of women in
social life; on the other hand, it receives subversive strength in Spiritualism
through the identification of passivity and mediumship. “Spiritualist medi-
ums became the ‘repositories’, the ‘vessels’, the bearers of the spiritual mes-
sage and channels for the Divine communication. And what is vital here is
that spiritualists assumed that it was innate femininity, in particular, female
passivity, which facilitated this renunciation of self and cultivation of medi-
umistic powers. Passivity, or the lack of masculine will-power, might have
been construed as that which made women the gentle, retiring creatures
of prescriptive literature—but it was also, for spiritualists, the very quality
which facilitated spirit communication. They therefore privileged passivity
and sought to develop it. Passivity became, in the spiritualist vocabulary,
synonymous with power”.18
Among contemporary mediumistic healers in Germany, who are, at least
in my field, predominantly women, the common assumption of female pas-
sivity in opposition to masculine activity is also accepted. But again, this idea
is redefined in a sense that lets the heterodox position appear in a better light
than the hegemonic. With the background of hegemonic values, activity usu-
ally is more respected than passivity. But, like their spiritualistic ancestors of
the nineteenth century, the mediumistic healers turn the tables. According
to them, it is true that women are more passive. But in the context of medi-
umistic healing, this turns out to be an advantage. Even if it is questionable,
mediumship is usually defined as a primarily passive practice due to the fact
that you have to partly relinquish control. And because women are defined
as primarily passive, they are believed to be more capable of being a medium
than men.

CONCLUSION: A QUESTION OF ASSIGNING AGENCY

As presented in this paper, most of the mediumistic healers in Germany

refer to themselves as part of a minority that does not participate in the
hegemonic cultural canon. This minority is usually labeled as “religious”
or rather “esoteric”—even if this category is filled with a huge variety of
definitions. Among mediumistic healers in Germany as well as among their
followers, the acceptance of their own deviance is combined with the accep-
tance of the values and norms of the majority, especially concerning the
relationship of science and religion, the conception of subjectivity, freedom
and self-authority, and also the attributions of gender.
This observation could be interpreted in different ways. From the per-
spective of a critical intellectual, it confirms the study of Bourdieu, which
demonstrated that the values of the repressors are generally shared even by
the repressed. The healers and their followers appear as a kind of victim of
hegemonic ideas that they uncritically adopt. The emerging inconsistencies
through their orientation towards hegemonic ideas and the simultaneous

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 124 Ehler Voss
promotion of their own deviance are solved by defining themselves as an
elite minority that fulfills the norms and values much better than the major-
ity. Instead of opposing neoliberal and masculine hegemony, they confirm
and stabilize it in trying to gain charisma through over-accomplishing the
norms and values of the majority.
This perspective can be changed through attributing a bit more agency
to the social actors. In doing so, the healers could be regarded as versa-
tile mediators between hegemonic and non-hegemonic positions. The main
charismatic ability can be found in the ability to translate and correlate
both positions: the discourse of spirits and spirit-possession and the dis-
course of modern subjectivity and psychology, in which the driving forces
of personal behavior are traced back to an autonomous self or at least the
unconscious—either way the origin is found within the subject. One effect of
this translation is to radically think through the consequences of the modern
ideal of subjectivity, which often leads to an entanglement in contradictions.
From this perspective it is the ability to translate and change between dif-
ferent discourses that leads to a charismatic power of persuasion—for the
healer’s clients and sometimes even for the healers themselves.

NOTES

1. Cf. Ehler Voss, Mediales Heilen in Deutschland: Eine Ethnographie (Berlin:

Dietrich Reimer, 2011).
2. Cf. Ehler Voss, “The Struggle for Sovereignty: The Interpretation of Bodily
Experiences in Anthropology and among Mediumistic Healers in Ger-
many”, in Encounters of Body and Soul in Contemporary Religious Prac-
tices. Anthropological Reflections, ed. Anna Fedele and Ruy Llera Blanes
(New York: Berghahn, 2011), 168–178.
3. The biography of Senta and a description of her practices can be found in more
detail in Voss, Mediales Heilen in Deutschland, 198–208. All English language
citations of German language references have been translated by E. Voss.
4. In psychology, “dissociation” is generally interpreted as a defense mecha-
nism of traumatized people and thus as a typical symptom of victims of
sexual abuse.
5. Cf. Helle Johannessen and Imre Lázár, eds., Multiple Medical Realities:
Patients and Healers in Biomedical, Alternative and Traditional Medicine
(New York: Berghahn Books, 2006).
6. Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the
Sacralization of Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
7. Matthew Wood, Possession, Power and the New Age: Ambiguities of Author-
ity in Neoliberal Societies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
8. E.g., Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences
humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexu-
ality, vol. 1, The Will to Knowledge (1976; repr., London: Penguin, 1998).
9. It should be mentioned that Foucault does not speak of power in an essential-
izing way, but as a relation: “One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power
is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we
are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategic
situation in a particular society” (Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, 93).

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 From Crisis to Charisma 125
10. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, in The Foucault Reader,
ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1984), 87–88.
11. Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2001), 1–2.
12. Max Weber, Economy and Society (1922; repr., Berkeley: University of Cal-
ifornia Press, 1978), 241.
13. Michael Harner, The Way of the Shaman: A Guide to Power and Heal-
ing (New York: Harper & Row, 1980); cf. Ehler Voss, “Von Schamanen
und schamanisch Tätigen: Peinlichkeit und ihre Vermeidung im Kontext des
modernen westlichen Schamanismus”, in Ethnologische Religionsästhetik:
Beiträge eines Workshops auf der Tagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für
Völkerkunde in Halle (Saale) 2005, ed. Mark Münzel and Bernhard Streck
(Marburg: Curupira, 2008), 131–143.
14. Michael Harner, “Wissen erlangen durch Reisen”, paper presented at the
1st Congress of the World Council for Psychotherapy, Vienna, July 3, 1996.
http://www.fss.at/Page/ID/100 (accessed September 4, 2012).
15. Allan Kardec, Le livre des esprits contenant les principes de la doctrine Spir-
ite contenant les principes de la doctrine spirite sur l’immortalité de l’ame,
la nature des esprits et leurs rapports avec les hommes: Les lois morales,
la vie présente, la vie future et l’avenir de l’humanité. Selon l’enseignement
donné par les esprits supérieurs à l’aide de divers médiums (Paris, 1857);
Allan Kardec, Spiritisme expérimental: Le livre des médiums ou guide des
médiums et des évocateurs contenant l’enseignement spécial des esprits sur
la théorie detous les genres de manifestations, les moyens de communiquer
avec le monde invisible, le développement de la médiumnité, les difficultés
et les écueils que l’on peut rencontrer dans la pratique du spiritisme (Paris,
1861).
16. Helmut Zander, Anthroposophie in Deutschland: Theosophische Weltan-
schauung und gesellschaftliche Praxis 1884–1945, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Van-
denhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 1:82.
17. It is this assumption that leads some researchers of the New Age to claim a
realm of self-authority.
18. Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late
Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 10.

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 7 Spirituality, Charisma and Gender
in a Jewish Spiritual Renewal
Community in Israel
Rachel Werczberger

The young woman standing in the center of the room, surrounded by mem-
bers of Ruach-HaLev Jewish community, was distraught with emotion.
Speaking quickly, her words punctuated with sobs, she described an experi-
ence that to most of her listeners was unthinkable, untenable—a sexually
abusive relationship with no other than Rabbi David V., the beloved charis-
matic leader of the community. “He robbed me of my womanhood, my intu-
ition, my womb”, Zoe murmured,1 her eyes filling with tears. As she spoke,
some of her close friends drew near her, touching her shoulder, embracing
her. The crowded room was eerily silent.
The emergency meeting of Ruach-HaLev (literally: Spirit of the Heart)
community in Tel Aviv had been called earlier that day, at only a few hours’
notice. Some forty members arrived at the designated location, the base-
ment of the Sea and Wind youth hostel, speculating as to the reason for
the unusual gathering. But they were not kept waiting long: as soon as the
room was full, a few of the leading teachers in the community addressed
the group, informing them that four female members of the community had
pressed charges against Rabbi David for sexual assault. Consequently, the
teachers reported, the board had decided to release him from all his duties
as teacher and leader.
The first reaction of Ruach-HaLev community members was one of anger
and resentment. “This is a kangaroo court!” one of them shouted. “How can
you make these accusations behind the rabbi’s back?” another demanded.
But then one of the community members stood up abruptly, and asked for
permission to speak. She told the shocked community that she was one of
the four women, and that she had had a five-year-long abusive relationship
with Rabbi David. The room fell silent, as the members struggled to come
to terms with the fact that there may be more than a grain of truth to the
accusations.
But the reality of their beloved rabbi’s transgressions did not hit home
until Zoe stood up. Emboldened by her friend’s testimony, she went on to
describe her own disastrous relationship with Rabbi David. Zoe was rela-
tively new to the community—she had been a member for only a year—but
the young American had impressed everyone with her glowing smile, and

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 Spirituality, Charisma and Gender 127
with her eagerness to take an active part in the community. Her melodious
voice was often heard chanting in the community’s retreats.
But now, as she walked into the middle of the room, there wasn’t a hint
of a smile on her face. She stood crying as she recounted to those around her
the story of how she came to Israel in search of a teacher who would teach
her “about sacred femininity” and help her to find “my voice, my intuition
as a woman”. She went on to describe how Rabbi David had abused her
trust, and had seduced her into a sexual relationship that she hadn’t planned
or wanted. He then swore her to secrecy, using Kabbalistic invocations.
By the time Zoe finished her story, there was not a dry eye in the room.
The atmosphere was subdued. Even those who were skeptical at first as to the
rabbi’s culpability now seemed convinced. The moderator announced that
they would meet again the following week to discuss the matter further, and
that the meeting was adjourned. But the members of the community refused
to leave. They stood huddled in small groups for hours, trying to come to
terms with what they had heard, and trying to understand the impact of these
events on them and on the community that had been such a central part of
their lives.
In the follow-up meeting five days later, the community members were
informed that Rabbi David, upon learning of the allegations against him,
had returned—or rather escaped—to the United States. His only form of
communication with the community was an e-mail in which he admitted
that he now realized that he was “sick”, and therefore had decided to resign
from all teaching and leadership positions in the Jewish Renewal move-
ment,2 in order to “get help”. In his letter he apologized to all those he had
hurt unintentionally.
But for Ruach-HaLev community, the rabbi’s message was too little, too
late. Although the remaining teachers expressed their hopes that the com-
munity would be able to reorganize and continue with its regular activities
of study sessions and prayer services, it didn’t take long for the community
to fall apart. By the end of that spring Ruach-HaLev community had ceased
to exist. Lessons in Kabbalah3 and Hasidism4 were not taught and its cel-
ebrated ecstatic prayer services were a thing of the past. The building that
had been rented for the congregation was returned to its owner, and the
community members dispersed. It was as though the heart of a living organ-
ism suddenly failed, leading to the body’s collapse. Without the charismatic
figure of Rabbi David—the heart and soul of Ruach-HaLev community—
there was nothing to hold its members together—not even the ambition of
bringing spiritual renewal to Israeli Judaism.
In this paper I will use the case of Ruach-HaLev community and its leader,
Rabbi David V., in order to argue that the chain of events just described was the
result of the juxtaposition of three forms of authority: charismatic leadership,
the authority of Jewish tradition and morality and New Age spirituality’s creed,
which emphasizes the authority of the self. The unique intersection of these
forms of authority in Ruach-HaLev community and the inherent contradictions

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 128 Rachel Werczberger
between them, which resulted in the dramatic events just described, are related
to the unique disposition of the Jewish Spiritual Renewal (JSR) movement, to
which Ruach-HaLev community belonged, and its attempt to integrate Jewish
tradition and New Age spirituality.
The paper will depict the ways in which Rabbi David’s idiosyncratic com-
bination of New Age spirituality with Jewish mystical tradition resulted in
a controversial form of New Age Judaism. R. David’s mystical theology
of sacred Jewish sexuality and feminist spirituality5 and ideas on spiritual
self-development were articulated via concepts drawn from Jewish mysti-
cism and Kabbalic images and metaphors. The religious/spiritual bricolage
offered by New Age Judaism legitimized, at least within the social circles of
the community, Rabbi David’s frequent allusions to these issues.
Concomitantly, R. David’s community, Ruach-HaLev, was constituted
around his charismatic figure, whose relationship with his students was not
unlike the relationship of a guru with his disciples. The intersubjective con-
struction of the charismatic authority facilitated by Rabbi David’s charis-
matic abilities combined with his contentious discourse regarding ‘sacred
sexuality’ may have later paved the way for the rabbi’s transgressions.
This study is based on anthropological fieldwork that took place between
2004 and 2006, in two JSR communities in Israel: Ruach-HaLev and
HaShevet. As part of my fieldwork, I participated in many of the commu-
nities’ activities, such as weekend retreats, holiday workshops and classes.
In addition, I conducted interviews with members of the two communities,
and analyzed the numerous textual essays, books and webpages written and
published by the two leaders. In an unexpected turn of events, my fieldwork
in Ruach-HaLev community was conducted at the very same time that the
Rabbi David scandal broke and the community fell apart. The crisis revealed
some of the underlying social and cultural tensions of a Jewish New Age
community centered on charismatic leadership.

CHARISMA AND AUTHORITY IN A JEWISH

NEW AGE COMMUNITY

A pastiche of Jewish tradition and New Age spirituality, the Jewish Spiri-
tual Renewal (JSR) movement is an ongoing attempt to renew Judaism by
incorporating New Age philosophy and practices into Jewish tradition.6 In
doing so, it fuses contradictory elements, such as the concept of universal
spirituality versus the particularity of the Jewish faith and the Jewish people;
or the nonhierarchical, networked and gender-equal structure distinctive of
contemporary spirituality, versus the authoritative, hierarchical and patri-
archal social construction of traditional monotheistic religions, Judaism
among them.
Indeed, the unique case of JSR challenges the dominant scholarly distinc-
tion between religion and spirituality.7 Most research on New Age spiritu-

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 Spirituality, Charisma and Gender 129
ality tends to perceive the contemporary religious-cultural shift in Western
culture in terms of a transition from ‘religion’ to ‘spirituality’ and thus as a
move from institutionalized, hierarchical religious forms of religious orga-
nizations, to a noninstitutional, nonhierarchical spirituality that focuses on
the inner self as the ultimate source of authority.8 However, this perspective
not only ignores the fact that all social relations are embedded in power
structures but also overlooks spiritual groups and organization in which
doctrines of subjective spirituality are incorporated in hierarchical organiza-
tions and/or are presented by an authoritative spiritual teacher.
Studies regarding the authoritarian structural organization and charis-
matic leadership of such groups are inclined to apply the analytical perspec-
tives of new religious movements,9 nontraditional religious movements10
or the cult movement11 and not that of New Age spirituality. Hence, they
often overlook the incongruities between New Age rhetoric of subjective
spirituality and the actual social hierarchical, authoritative organizational or
charismatic leadership structure where these ideas are socially implemented.
Ruach-HaLev is such an instance.
In Ruach-HaLev community, New Age–style notions regarding Jewish
spirituality were taught and disseminated by the exceptionally charismatic
Rabbi David V. Rabbi David’s charismatic authority—formed through
his interactions with his community members and their recognition of his
‘extra-ordinary qualities’—was a crucial element in the success of Ruach-
HaLev and later on in its breakup. His charisma was actively constructed,
cultivated and managed via the relationships between him and his followers.
I would like to suggest the use of the concept of charisma, as first articu-
lated by Max Weber12 and later elaborated by S. N. Eisenstadt,13 in order
explore the case of Ruach-HaLev community. In this community, charismatic
leadership proved to be the crucial element in the creation of its innovative
Jewish New Age spirituality. According to Eisenstadt,14 pure charisma “has
some antinomian and anti-institutional dispositions”. In his major essay on
the subject, Eisenstadt stresses the connection between creativity, potential
innovation and change and charisma. He writes: ‘It is in the charismatic act
that the potential creativity of the Human spirit . . . is manifest. . . . Such
creativity by its very nature and orientation tends to undermine and destroy
existing institutions and to burst limits set by them”.15 In the case of Ruach-
HaLev community, Rabbi David’s charisma was vital not only in assembling
the community, but also in forming JSR’s creative, religious, philosophical
bricolage, which was accompanied by anti-institutional and at times anti-
nomian messages.
I argue that the very same charisma—created and nourished through a
set of interactions with his devotees and granting him the authority of an
enlightened leader—led Rabbi David to his downfall and to the breakup of
his community. The fact that this charisma operated in a social setting in
which New Age thought and practices were incorporated within traditional
Jewish authority structures adds to the complexity of the matter at hand.

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 130 Rachel Werczberger
On the one hand, Jewish culture, and moreover Hasidic culture—a salient
source of influence on JSR—has long held a patriarchal, authoritative theo-
logical and social structure. In classical Jewish Hasidic culture, the religious
leader, the charismatic male rabbi (known as the Tzaddik—literally a saint),
acts as intermediary between God and his disciples. On the other hand, a
salient feature in JSR in general, and in Rabbi David’s writings and rhetoric
in particular, was his frequent references to New Age themes such as feminist
spirituality16 and sacred sexuality—articulated through the Kabbalistic con-
cept of the Shekhinah (the feminine aspect of the Godhead) and the figure
of Lilith. This discourse, which stresses the empowering role of spirituality
for women and reveres women and nature, challenges the hierarchical and
patriarchal nature of Jewish tradition.17
In order to comprehend how the inconsistencies and contradictions
just mentioned were played out in Ruach-HaLev community, one needs to
examine the multifaceted characteristic of this community, as well as of the
overall Jewish Spiritual Renewal project. JSR, or “Jewish Renewal” as it is
known in North America, emerged in the United States in the beginning of
the 1980s as an organized network of communities offering an alternative
countercultural form of Judaism for spiritually inclined liberal Jews. The
movement emphasizes spirituality as an approach to the transformation and
renewal of Judaism, and one of its main tenets is the quest for an experien-
tial relationship with the divine. It describes itself as neo-Hasidic, drawing
flexibly on traditional—especially Hasidic and mystical—Jewish texts and
practices, as well as on other spiritual traditions, such as Buddhist medita-
tion and yoga. Furthermore, charismatic leadership has been central to the
movement since its inception, as members drawing on the Hasidic tradition
recognize the importance of charismatic leadership for achieving spiritual
exaltation.18
The two Israeli communities I studied, Ruach-HaLev and HaShevet, were
founded in Israel in the late 1990s, almost thirty years after Jewish Renewal
communities were first formed in North America. One can point out several
social and cultural phenomena that took place in Israel and led to the suc-
cessful inception of such communities at that time. The first of these is the
New Age movement, which gathered momentum in Israel in the beginning
of 1990s. In the contemporary Israeli New Age scene, one may find vari-
ous New Age workshops and classes of all types: from yoga and Vipasana
meditation retreats to Shamanic and channeling lessons—all of which have
become tremendously popular. Moreover this scene is characterized by sev-
eral local cultural manifestations such as the ‘spiritual’ festivals taking place
every year, usually coinciding with the Jewish holidays.19 The other two
contributing factors to the success of the communities are the growing quest
among secular middle-class Israelis for new definitions of their Jewish iden-
tity20 and the large number of young Israelis traveling to the Far East every
year.21 Additionally, as Kabbalah scholars Jonathan Garb and Boaz Huss
note, the renewed interest in Jewish mysticism—that is, in Kabbalah and

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 Spirituality, Charisma and Gender 131
Hasidism—prevalent these days in Israeli society, as in other parts of the
Western world, can be attributed to the New Age influence. The JSR com-
munities in Israel (and North America) are a part of this growing cultural
trend.22
By the year 2001, several key figures emerged in the Israeli JSR scene, one
of whom was Rabbi David V. Rabbi David is an American-born, self-defined
Jewish Orthodox, who established Ruach-HaLev community in 2001 as an
urban community and led the community up to its breakdown in the spring
of 2006. At its peak, the community included over a hundred members,
most of whom were from a nonorthodox/secular background. The activities
of the community included regular lessons and talks by several teachers on
Kabbalah and Hasidism, Sabbath-Eve prayer services and weekend retreats,
held usually in the rural parts of the country. Rabbi David was particularly
dominant in the planning and implementation of all of these activities.
As in the overall JSR project, it is possible to identify quite a few features
of New Age spirituality within the ideas and practices of Ruach-HaLev
community, such as religious syncretism, ritual eclecticism, the sanctifica-
tion of the self, use of meditative and healing techniques to achieve per-
sonal development and transformation, and psychological renderings of
Jewish notions.23 Furthermore, in order to affect a change on the traditional
Jewish categories, R. David drew on several New Age conceptualizations,
among them notions of feminine spirituality24 and neo-Tantra—or “sacred
sexuality”.25

NEW AGE JUDAISM, FEMINIST SPIRITUALITY

AND SACRED SEXUALITY

As mentioned, Jewish Spiritual Renewal, as a form of New Age Judaism,

is replete with New Age notions, ideas and concepts. One aspect of this
inclination may be perceived in New Age Judaism’s effort at creating a Jew-
ish version of ‘feminist spirituality’.26 This endeavor is achieved in a dual
manner: first, by incorporating feminine talents, insights and experiences
into the Jewish tradition and especially into religious leadership roles, and
second, and more importantly, by extending this into the theological realm.
JSR draws on the Kabbalic myth of the Shekhinah—the feminine aspect of
the Godhead—in order to create a feminine Jewish spirituality, according to
which women’s voices are perceived as the expression of the divine feminine.
Moreover, some Jewish Renewal members understand women as possess-
ing intuitive knowledge and a connection to the natural cycles that are also
bound up with their connection to Shekhinah. Jewish feminists attempt to
reconstruct a Jewish sacred history, or myth, as a time when women or
female forces were respected for their feminine power.27 By reviving these
ancient myths and legends—such as myths regarding the figure of the Shek-
hinah—Jewish women who are active in the feminist spirituality movement

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 132 Rachel Werczberger
can articulate and celebrate their Jewish womanhood in a spiritual fash-
ion.28 This theology espouses practices such as “tribal sisters”, sacred femi-
nine rituals and even a Jewish priestesses (Kohent) training program.29
In Rabbi David’s writings, ideas regarding the association between the
quest for Jewish renewal, feminine spirituality and Eros were especially
salient. However, in his unique theology, notions of feminist spirituality
were not applied in order to advance a gender-egalitarian approach to Juda-
ism but instead fused with ideas on self-transformation via the concept of
‘sacred sexuality’.
‘Sacred sexuality’, more often referred to in academic scholarship as ‘neo-
Tantra’, is, according to Hugh Urban, emblematic of New Age spirituality. It
is a brand of spirituality ideally suited to the social and economic situation
of late twentieth-century consumer capitalistic culture.30 The neo-Tantric
union of spirituality and sensuality unites hedonism and transcendence, self-
realization and this-world prosperity. Moreover, the new image of tradi-
tional Tantra it offers fits in with contemporary Western attitudes towards
sexuality and its liberation.
In Rabbi David’s writings, spirituality, Eros and sexuality were explored
as symbols for revitalizing Judaism—for promoting a balance between the
erotic and the ethical within Judaism—and for the quest for self-transformation
and healing. Rabbi David advocated bringing back to Jewish practice what
he called the “Holy Eros”—the ecstatic sexual fervor embedded in the ‘col-
lective pagan consciousness’. By incorporating practices such as medita-
tions, ecstatic rituals and exaltation of the divine into the Jewish practice of
his community, Rabbi David proposed to reintegrate the rationalistic ethic
of Judaism with the pagan Eros, and to create what he called “a purified
Jewish Eros”.
Moreover, in his book Lilith’s Wrath Rabbi David explores the arche-
typal figure of Lilith31—Adam’s demonic first wife in Jewish mystical writ-
ing—in order to reclaim the “wholeness of feminine existence”. By drawing
on Neopaganism, New Age spirituality and Jungian psychology,32 Rabbi
David claims that Jewish culture has created a rift between the figure of
Eve—the demure and obedient mother figure—and the figure of Lilith, who
represents the depraved, brazen and sexual woman. Contemporary women,
Rabbi David suggested, are forced to choose the model of Eve. Using Jung-
ian terminology, the book urges women to reclaim the “shadow” aspects of
womanhood, symbolized by the figure of Lilith, and to incorporate them
within their ‘sacred feminine self’. By doing so, Rabbi David claims, intimate
sexual relationships between men and women will be healed and society will
be redeemed.
In other works, Rabbi David goes beyond the images of the Shekhinah
and the myth of Lilith, and introduces two other Kabbalic images in order to
extrapolate a model of Jewish sacred sexuality: Igulim (circles) and Yosher
(a linear line). According to this model, the circle stands for feminine con-
sciousness, and the line represents masculine consciousness.33 Both images

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 Spirituality, Charisma and Gender 133
are derived from the Kabbalic myth of creation. In contrast to traditional
readings of this myth, Rabbi David rereads the dual image of Igulim and
Yosher in a New Age perspective: one that acknowledges the existence of
masculine and feminine energies and qualities, refers to them as equal and
proposes their fusion. The circle, according to this reading, represents not
only the feminine aspect of God (the Shekhinah) but also a human-feminine
consciousness—characterized by the qualities of softness, flow and a lack of
hierarchy. The linear, on the other hand, stands for the masculine conscious-
ness: active, direct and goal-oriented. Contrary to the linear-masculine,
which always attempts to move forward and upward, and to develop and
evolve, the true nature of the circle, or the feminine, is the state of being in
the present with no regards to the future or the past.
Basing his model on the essentialist conceptions regarding gender differ-
ences and the Kabbalistic image of the divine unification of the feminine (the
Shekhinah) with the masculine (Godhead), Rabbi David argues that a true
and sacred sexual union between man and woman—the Circle and the Lin-
ear—transcends the illusion of duality, and simulates unity. Recognizing the
difference between the masculine and feminine allows the powerful physical
union of the opposites—the male and the female. According to Rabbi David
one should acknowledge and celebrate the sensual and physical pleasure
involved in this scared union.
It is important to note that R. David’s writings on these issues of Eros
and sexuality were highly controversial. Within the context of traditional
Jewish theology and even Jewish mysticism, references to concrete sexual
matters are rare. By openly promoting sexual relationship between men and
women with no reference to marital arrangements or to family life, R. David
breaches some of the fundamental traditional Jewish norms regarding these
issues.
Thus, one might infer a link between Rabbi David’s contentious version
of Jewish spirituality and sacred sexuality and his alleged actions with his
community female members. However, I would like to argue that his deeds
were related to the issue of his charismatic authority as well. Based on a
social constructive perspective of charisma, I suggest that the intersubjec-
tive construction of Rabbi David’s charisma in Ruach-HaLev is a crucial
constituent for understanding the events that took place in the community.

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF CHARISMA

In this section I would like to explore Rabbi David’s charismatic authority

through a social and cultural perspective and discuss the ways in which this
charisma was constructed, cultivated and managed. As mentioned, Rabbi
David’s role was central not only in the formation of Ruach-HaLev com-
munity but also in most of its undertakings. Rabbi David stood at the helm
of all of the community’s activities, intellectual as well as ritualistic. Even

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 134 Rachel Werczberger
personal projects, such as his television show, book publications and a
personal journey to Daramsallah in India to meet the Tibetan leader the
Dalai-Lama, were considered an integral part of the community’s activi-
ties. His lessons were the most popular in the community, and his teachings
were revered. Photos of Rabbi David adorned the walls of the communi-
ty’s study hall, and placards with quotes from his writings were hung on
the wall, at times giving the impression of a ‘cult of personality’. Perhaps
the most telling detail regarding Rabbi David’s central position in Ruach-
HaLev was the community’s name itself: it was formally titled Ruach-HaLev
Community—Headed by Rabbi David V.
Furthermore, although Rabbi David’s physical appearance and demeanor
countered the conventional stereotype of a rabbi—his hair was relatively
long, his face beardless, his demeanor informal and friendly—he insisted
on receiving an attitude of respect from his followers. Even his closest stu-
dents never referred to him by his first name, or as ‘Rabbi David’—only
as ‘Rabbi’ or as ‘Rabbi V’. Rabbi David demanded total loyalty from his
students. At times when he felt a threat to his authority, he did not hesitate
to confront the offender. In one incident he removed a student from the rab-
binical ordination program because he felt that the student refused to accept
his authority.
Rabbi David’s insistence on total devotion from his followers follows
the pattern of other charismatic leaders described in the different studies on
charismatic leadership and authority.34 These studies point to the precari-
ous nature of charismatic authority, and its constant need to be reinforced
and maintained; hence the charismatic leader’s need for recognition and
total acceptance by those around him. Less than complete commitment, the
leader believes, amounts to denial of his status.
Moreover, while Max Weber defined charisma as the extraordinary quality
of an individual, whether real or presumed, he also acknowledged that char-
ismatic authority involved a social relationship between leader and follow-
ers, based on their attributions of extraordinary (supernatural, superhuman
or awe-inspiring) qualities to the leader.35 Hence, in order for a charismatic
person to be recognized as such, his charisma needs to be recognized by the
subjects of his authority and played out in a social interaction in which two
people or more take part.36
Indeed, the charismatic authority of Rabbi David was the result of the
interactions between him and his community members and their recognition
of his ‘extraordinary qualities’. A salient feature in Rabbi David’s construc-
tion and management of his charisma was his accomplished performances
during lessons, rituals and prayer services. A skilled performer, Rabbi David
always succeeded in leading his audience to emotional exaltation. His prayer
services were renowned for their fervent and joyful atmosphere, and as the
services progressed and emotions ran high people would sing and dance
ecstatically to the tunes of the prayers. Skillfully using various dramaturgic
techniques, such as music and rhythm, Rabbi David, the sole performer of

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 Spirituality, Charisma and Gender 135
these collective dramas, never failed to arouse his audience. Often, after
the service ended, one could hear his students discussing and reviewing the
rabbi’s performance in hushed voices.
Thus, Rabbi David’s gift for constructing effective dramas can be ren-
dered as one component in his charisma, recognized and acknowledged by
his followers. To this, one may add their recognition of his extraordinary
personal qualities, and especially his ability to inspire them emotionally
and even to heal. In many of the interviews I conducted, members of the
community mentioned Rabbi David’s storytelling skills, and the emotional
impact that these stories had on them. Says Ohad, one of the community’s
members and an ardent admirer of the rabbi: “[by telling stories] He [Rabbi
David] had the ability to connect [you] to the power of the story, to evoke
you emotionally. To touch where it hurts”. Hence, Rabbi David’s frequent
reference to Hasidic tales served not only to embellish his spiritual teachings
with Jewish and Hasidic tones, but also to awaken (at least the semblance
of) self-therapeutic processes among his followers.
Storytelling as a vehicle for religious and spiritual instruction is a well-
known cultural construction. Christian preachers tell stories, Burmese Bud-
dhist monks improvise teaching tales based on folk traditions, and Hasidic
rabbis tell hagiographic tales about the great Hasidic masters.37 In our case,
Rabbi David’s ingenuity allowed him to integrate Jewish components such
as Hasidic tales with the contemporary spiritual quest for healing via self-
therapeutic processes. Through the creative amalgamation of the notion of
spiritual healing with traditional Jewish themes and practices, R. David estab-
lished his charisma in the eyes of his Jewish-spirituality-seeking followers.
It is interesting to note that by attributing to Rabbi David the ability to
heal, his followers unknowingly pursued patterns of relationship typical to
contemporary spiritual gurus. Sudhir Kakar38 notes a shift in the contem-
porary image of the guru, from that of a teacher to that of the healer of
emotional suffering and its somatic manifestations. This psychotherapeutic
function, claims Kakar, can be found in well-known modern gurus, whose
fame depends on their reported healing capabilities, rather than deriving
from any mastery of traditional scriptures, philosophical knowledge or even
great spiritual attainment.
Another example of the interplay between the charismatic leader and the
recognition of his charisma by his followers is presented in the following
quote from an interview I conducted with Hagit—a community member
and staff person. This is how Hagit described to me her first meeting with
Rabbi David:39

I arrived in Ruach-HaLev for one of those weekend retreats, like every-

one else. . . . I came with a friend who heard about the retreat by chance.
Although I heard before about Rabbi David but I never really connected.
It was Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement) and it was a very
very strong [experience]. I went through a very strong experience with

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 136 Rachel Werczberger
myself, but I still didn’t think that I’ll end up with a very strong con-
nection with the community. And in the end of the prayer service I just
went up to the rabbi to thank him, which is something I don’t usually do
(laughs). And that was it. He looked me in the eyes and said “We didn’t
meet by chance. We were meant to do something together”. Looking
back, I know now that he chose me. He really chose me. He must have
discovered some sort of quality in me, and therefore singled me out. I
wouldn’t have chosen this [working in Ruach-HaLev] myself in any
rational or logical way. Being in Ruach-HaLev is much more than just a
workplace for me. I feel spiritually inspired just by being here. I attend
the lessons. I have many talks with the rabbi. He rehearses with me.
There is something in him that expands you. Because the way he lives is
so very very great. To be here is to be near a person who is in some way
greater than life, so obviously it influences you very much.

There are two notable aspects in Hagit’s description of her initial meeting
with Rabbi David. The first is her perception of being chosen by the rabbi.
By looking in her eyes, she felt the rabbi recognized her hidden talents and
qualities and singled her out to accompany him. The second aspect is that
of admiration, bordering on reverence. Hagit sees Rabbi David as a man
“bigger then life”. Being in his proximity affects her. She says, “There is
something in him that expands you, because the way he lives is so great”. It
is as if just by being in the proximity of the charismatic leader that his aura
or vitality attaches itself unto his followers.
This perception may begin to explain how some charismatic religious,
spiritual or political leaders succeed in abusing their followers. Often the
adherence to the leader’s charisma and the commitment to him are trans-
lated by the follower to affective relationships and to feelings of love. This
aspect is especially significant from a gendered perspective, since in many of
these religious groups female devotees have to cope with a religious hierar-
chy that is primarily male dominated, and patterns of socialization encour-
age women to define their devotion in terms of love and romantic allusion.40
In a finding that seems is particularly relevant to the case of Ruach-HaLev,
Janet Jacobs states that the majority of women involved with nontraditional
religious groups expressed a strong willingness, even desire, to engage in
sexual relations with the spiritual teacher. This willingness seemed to arise
partially out of the desire to be intimate with the men in power, partially
out of a deep feeling of love for the teacher, and partially out of the belief,
stressed in the teachings, that the promise of enlightenment might be that
much closer to fulfillment if one were to have a physical relationship with a
godly being. To experience his love intimately is to experience God. Thus,
the desire for sexual intimacy with the leader is often expressed as the desire
for spiritual fulfillment.41
Moreover, Hood and Hall42 argue that due to the fact that in most mysti-
cal traditions the mystical union of man with God is described by the meta-

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 Spirituality, Charisma and Gender 137
phorical images of a sexual union, Western women tend to perceive their
own personal experience in erotic imagery that is receptive in nature (i.e.,
union with an ultimate reality is experienced as reception of the spiritual
object of unification). Accordingly, engaging in sexual relations with spiri-
tual leaders allows female devotees the opportunity to actualize the erotic
dimension of spirituality.
As noted earlier, Jewish mysticism, like other forms of mysticism, is replete
with erotic imagery.43 In Kabbalic writings, the unification of the Shekhinah
with God is described in erotic metaphors and images. Therefore it is pos-
sible postulate that given Rabbi David’s emphasis on the themes of feminine
spirituality and sacred sexuality, similar dynamics to those described here
were present in Ruach-HaLev community. Indeed, there is evidence that
Rabbi David actively encouraged his image as a spiritual guru. Perhaps some
of the women who developed an affective relationship with him may have
had a conscious (or unconscious) desire to be nurtured by this image.
However, in contrast to the groups described by Jacobs, in which there
was a consensus (albeit a silent one) regarding the role of the women as the
sexual partners of the leader, in the case of Ruach-HaLev, such consent did
not exist and the relationships were kept secret. The demand made by Rabbi
David attests to the fact that both the women involved and Rabbi David
himself were aware that these relationships were extremely controversial.
Only after Zoe—the American community member described in the begin-
ning of this paper—revealed to a friend that she was sexually involved with
the rabbi did the other women come forward and confess.
I would like to argue that this chain of events—beginning with the sexual
relationships between the rabbi and his female disciples and ending with
the breakdown of the community—may indicate the inherent instability of
charisma and its cultural constraint when confronted with contradictory
forms of authority and moral discourse. As noted earlier, S. N. Eisenstadt
has pointed out the antinomian and anti-institutional dispositions of pure
charisma and its propensity to creativity, potential innovation and change.
Charisma by its very nature and orientation tends to undermine and destroy
existing institutions and to exceed their boundaries.44 Rabbi David’s cha-
risma seems to match these definitions. Using his creative, intellectual, rhe-
torical and dramatic skills, Rabbi David succeeded in forming an innovative
and controversial configuration of New Age Judaism. He used his charisma
not only to blur the social and cultural boundaries, such as those between
Jewish and non-Jewish ideas and practices, but also to challenge socially
conventional norms regarding Judaism, spirituality and sexuality, both rhe-
torically, through his writings, and in practice.
As long as these contentious ideas remained in writing, they were accepted
as legitimate or at least tolerated. However, once these notions were put into
practice and later revealed, his community was forced to reevaluate them
from a Jewish and a normative perspective. Based on the women’s testimo-
nies, Rabbi David’s relationships with the women of community were not

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 138 Rachel Werczberger
perceived as a legitimate fulfillment of his philosophy but as power abuse
and sexual misconduct. Consequently, Rabbi David was no longer perceived
as a spiritual leader but as a charlatan. In this sense, the authority of the
charismatic leader opposed the authority of Jewish tradition and morals,
leading to the downfall of the leader and the breakup of his community.

CONCLUSION: THE CLASH OF AUTHORITIES

IN A NEW AGE COMMUNITY

Most social scientist agree that issues of power and authority are by and
large intrinsic to all social forms and order and that they are present in all
social configurations.45 However, nearly all of the scholarly works on con-
temporary New Age spirituality conceptualize it as an un-institutionalized,
individualized form of religiosity, in which the locus of authority is located
within the self and not society.46 Even studies that recognize the communal
and social aspects of contemporary spirituality rarely discuss issues of lead-
ership, power or authority.
The case of the JSR movement and Ruach-HaLev community is even more
intricate, since it presents also another type of authority—that is, the author-
ity of Jewish tradition. The JSR amalgamation of New Age subjective spiri-
tuality with Judaism generates unintentional tensions and conflicts, some of
which are related to issues of authority and ethics. The scandal in Ruach-
HaLev community, which was the result of Rabbi David’s charismatic lead-
ership, is such an instance. On the one hand, Rabbi David’s combination of
New Age spirituality with Jewish mystical tradition resulted in a controver-
sial form of New Age Judaism, in which ideas of spiritual self-development
and sacred sexuality were articulated through concepts drawn from Jewish
mysticism. On the other hand, influenced by Hasidism, as well as new reli-
gious movements, the community was constituted around the figure of the
charismatic male rabbi, whose relationship with his students was not unlike
the relationship of a guru with his disciples. Unfortunately, as in other simi-
lar cases of powerful male leaders, Rabbi David could not resist abusing his
power over the women in his community and took advantage of them.
The culmination of the affair—the disclosure of the affair by the women
and the swift action taken by the board of Ruach-HaLev, dismissing Rabbi
David from his position as leader and a teacher—reveals that the authority
of Jewish ethical tradition prevailed over other forms of authority. The board
members’ choice to believe the women’s accusations and to dismiss Rabbi
David was based on the Jewish moral position regarding the appropriate
behavior of a religious leader. “We do not believe that a man who acted in
such way should be in the role of our rabbi or spiritual teacher”, said one of
the teachers of the community, during the long hours of the unhappy com-
munity meeting in which the rabbi’s behavior was first revealed. Vacillating
between the power of charisma, the moral universe and discourse of New

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 Spirituality, Charisma and Gender 139
Age spirituality and Jewish tradition and ethics, it seems that ultimately
Ruach-HaLev took a decisive Jewish moral stand.

NOTES

1. In order to protect their privacy of the people mentioned in this paper, all
names of people, communities, places and published works were changed.
2. Following these events, the board of Ruach-HaLev community had taken
care to notify all Jewish-American organizations with whom R. David was
involved of his misconduct. He was promptly dismissed from all his teach-
ing positions within the Jewish Renewal movement in the United States.
3. Kabbalah is the comprehensive name for a body of esoteric texts, oral tradi-
tions and ritual practices written by rabbis and Jewish mystics from medi-
eval times onwards. In recent years, there has been remarkable growth in
the interest in Kabbalah, among Jews and non-Jews alike.
4. Hassidism (literally “piety”) is a Jewish revitalization movement that devel-
oped in the mid-eighteenth century in Ukraine and Poland. Hasidism popu-
larized and psychologized Kabbalist literature, rendering it understandable
to lay Jews. Hasidism is also marked by aspiring to emotional exuberance
and joy, within the framework of traditional Rabbinic Jewish study and
observance.
5. While some differences between ‘feminine spirituality’ and ‘feminist spiritu-
ality’ exist, in this paper I will use the two terms interchangeably.
6. Rachel Werczberger, “Memory, Land and Identity: Visions of the Past and
the Land in the Jewish Spiritual Renewal Movement in Israel”, Journal of
Contemporary Religion 26, no. 2 (2011): 269–289.
7. For instance, Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution:
Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
8. Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and
the Sacralization of Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Matthew Wood,
Possession, Power and the New Age: Ambiguities of Authority in Neo-
liberal Societies (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007).
9. James Beckford, Cult Controversies: The Societal Response to New Reli-
gious Movements (London: Tavistock, 1985); Bryan Wilson, The Social
Impact of New Religious Movements (Barrytown: Unification Theological
Seminary, 1981).
10. Janet Jacobs, “The Economy of Love in Religious Commitment: The Decon-
version of Women from Nontraditional Religious Movements”, Journal for
the Scientific Study of Religion 23 (1984): 155–171.
11. Thomas Robbins, Cults, Converts and Charisma: The Sociology of New
Religious Movements (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1988).
12. Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H.
Gerth and C. W. Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958).
13. S. N. Eisenstadt, introduction to Max Weber: On Charisma and Institution
Building, by Max Weber, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1968).
14. Ibid., introduction, xix.
15. Ibid., introduction, xx.
16. Cynthia Eller, Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality
Movement in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
17. Ibid.; Susan Sered Starr, Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister: Religions Domi-
nated by Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

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 140 Rachel Werczberger
18. Chava Weissler, “The Meanings of Shekhinah in the Jewish Renewal Move-
ment”, Nashim 10 (2005): 53; Chava Weissler, “Women of Vision’ in the
Jewish Renewal Movement: The Eshet Hazon [‘Women of Vision’] Cer-
emony”, Jewish Culture and History 8, no. 3 (2008): 62–85.
19. Mariana Ruch-Midbar, “The New-Age Culture in Israel” (PhD diss.,
Bar-Ilan University, 2006) (Hebrew); Dalit Simchai, “Resistance through
Hugging: Paradoxes of Social Change in the New Age” (PhD diss., Haifa
University, 2005) (Hebrew).
20. Rachel Werczberger and Na’ama Azulay, “The Jewish Renewal Movement
in Israeli Secular Society”, Contemporary Jewry 31, no. 2 (2011): 107–
128; Talia Sagiv and Edna Lomsky-Feder, “An Actualization of a Symbolic
Conflict: The Arena of Secular Batey Midrash”, Israeli Sociology 8, no. 2
(2007): 269–299 (Hebrew).
21. Daria Maoz, “Young Adult Israeli Backpackers in India”, in “Israeli Back-
packers: From Tourism to Rites of Passage, ed. Eric Cohen and Chaim Noy
(New York: SUNY Press, 2005), 159–188.
22. Jonathan Garb, The Chosen Will Become Herds: Studies in Twentieth-
century Kabbalah (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Boaz Huss,
“The New-Age of Kabbalah: Contemporary Kabbalah, the New-Age and
Postmodern Spirituality”, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 6, no. 2 (2007):
107–125.
23. Heelas, The New Age Movement; Wouter Hanegraaff, New Age Religion
and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Leiden:
Brill, 1998).
24. Eller, Living in the Lap.
25. Hugh B. Urban, “The Cult of Ecstasy: Tantrism, the New Age, and the
Spiritual Logic of Late Capitalism”, History of Religions 39, no. 3 (2000):
268–304.
26. Eller, Living in the Lap of the Goddess.
27. Jody E. Myers, “The Myth of Matriarchy in Recent Writings on Jewish
Women’s Spirituality”, Jewish Social Studies 4, no. 1 (1997): 1–27.
28. Weissler, “The Meaning of the Shekhinah”.
29. For an instance of such attempt see Tel-Shemesh—a web resource “com-
mitted to exploring traditional Jewish practice and to creating ritual that
combines Jewish symbols and ceremonies with feminist, shamanic and
nature-based insight”. Tel-Shemesh organizes a week-long Jewish women’s
retreat named “Sisters of the Red Tent”, accessed October 12, 2011, http://
telshemesh.org.
30. Urban, “The Cult of Ecstasy”.
31. According to the legend based on the discrepancy between the creation nar-
rative in Genesis 1, in which God created male and female simultaneously,
and Genesis 2, which describes the creation of Adam and then Eve, oral
traditions and written tales posited the creation of a woman prior to Eve,
identified as Lilith. According to the tale, Lilith demanded full equality with
Adam. More specifically, she insisted being on top of Adam during sexual
intercourse. By uttering God’s name she was able to escape the Garden of
Eve and was replaced later by a more submissive Eve. According to the
legend, Lilith lives on eternally as a demon that kills newborn babies and
sexually torments men—she seduces them in their dreams and causes noc-
turnal emissions, which, in turn, produce more demons.
32. See also Trulsson and Hegner in this volume.
33. According to the myth, two qualities of divine light: the line—Yosher—and
the circle—Igulim—appear at the dawn of the creation, and wind down
into the empty space created by withdrawal of the Infinity/God. The myth

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 Spirituality, Charisma and Gender 141
describes how these two types of light or qualities create the different layers
of reality. Throughout the centuries, the two concepts have received differ-
ent interpretations in Jewish philosophy. Traditional renditions of the myth
suggest a hierarchical ordering, according to which the linear is always posi-
tioned on a higher spiritual plane than the circular.
34. Thomas Robbins, Cults, Converts and Charisma: The Sociology of New
Religious Movements (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1988); Roy Wallis,
“The Social Construction of Charisma”, Social Compass 29, no. 1 (1982):
25–39.
35. Weber, From Max Weber, 295–296.
36. Lucy DuPertuis, “How People Recognize Charisma: The Case of Darshan in
Radhasoami and Divine Light Mission”, Sociology of Religion 47 (1986):
111–124.
37. Narayan Kirin, “On Nose Cutters, Gurus, and Storytellers”, in Creativ-
ity/Anthropology, ed. Smadar Lavie, Kirin Narayan and Renato Rosaldo
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 30–53.
38. Sudhir Kakar, The Analyst and the Mystic (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1991).
39. The interview was conducted in Hebrew. The translation to English is mine.
40. Janet Jacobs, “The Economy of Love in Religious Commitment: The Decon-
version of Women from Nontraditional Religious Movements”, Journal for
the Scientific Study of Religion 23 (1984): 155–171.
41. Jacobs, “The Economy of Love”.
42. Ralph Hood and James Hall, “Gender Differences in the Description of
Erotic and Mystic Experiences”, Review of Religious Research 21 (1980):
195–207.
43. For instance, Moshe Idel, Kabbalah and Eros (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2005).
44. Eisenstadt, introduction.
45. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writ-
ings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Random House, 1980);
Weber, From Max Weber.
46. Heelas, The New Age. Cf. Wood, Possession, Power.

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 8 Urban Witchcraft and the Issue
of Authority
Victoria Hegner

A journalist friend of mine who knew I was doing research on Neopagan

witchcraft in Berlin recently called me on the phone. As she told me, she
had talked to the chief editor at the national public radio station about my
research topic. Both had decided that this was “interesting stuff”, worth
doing a radio feature about. I myself was a bit hesitant. The expectations
of journalists, researchers, and Neopagan witches themselves regarding
how witchcraft and its practitioners should get portrayed to the general
“public” might be too complex to make the prospected radio documen-
tary a success. Thinking about it a bit longer, I started to develop fanta-
sies that the ‘Neopagan field’, which I had finally gained access to with
great effort over the last year, would close its gates as a result of such a
documentary if some of the witches did not like the ways in which they
were presented. Unsure what to do, I asked Luna, one of the witches
with whom I had been intensely involved during the last year and who
regularly organizes Neopagan rituals for women, what she thought about
a documentary on witchcraft in Berlin; she was very excited: “I think
that is very important for us. We have to be open. Our message has to be
heard. We are not a secret association. I see it as a political task to bring
our belief to the public”. As my friend and I came to one of the rituals at
Luna’s place to do the recording, Luna took the lead. She, rather than us,
started to tell the women who had gathered there about our project. She
asked whether the recording would be acceptable for everybody. It was
a delicate issue. For some women—in contrast to Luna—it was impor-
tant that their practice of witchcraft was not public, as they were afraid
of discrimination. Luna was aware of this. That evening she stated pas-
sionately, “I hope that all of you here will agree to the recording. But, if
not, that is also fine and no documentation will take place. However, it is
central that our belief gets to the public. . . . I think everybody would con-
sent to this”. She looked around. She had made clear that the recording
depended on every woman’s agreement, yet her statement left little chance
for a veto. The women bowed their heads in acceptance and Luna smiled
at us. She had used her authority to ensure that the recording would take
place and that the ‘message’ spread. (Field notes, March 2011)

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 Urban Witchcraft and the Issue of Authority 143
Since the end of 1980s, Berlin has developed into one of the centers of Neo-
pagan witchcraft within Germany. The number of Neopagan witches in
the city seems so high that the Berlin esoteric journal Body—Spirit—Soul
claimed that the German capital has the “highest concentration of witches
in all of central Europe”.1 Here the term “witch” refers to a wide range of
manifestations of Neopagan religiosity/spirituality.2 It comprises followers
of neo-Germanic groups as well as practitioners of a more specifically femi-
nist spirituality (Goddess spirituality) with a pantheon not bound to a spe-
cific locale.3 The unifying idea is the worship of nature, which is seen as an
immanent expression of the sacred. Within this context, Neopagan witches
often claim to follow and thus preserve an “old”, pre-Christian religiosity.
Their practice and theological outlook, however, appear on the other hand
quite new in the sense of modern or postmodern; Neopagan witchcraft is
characterized by being highly individualistic, centering on personal needs.
Dogmas of practice are wholeheartedly thrown overboard and religious
cosmologies are intensely eclectic.4 Institutionalized forms of Neopagan
witchcraft are thus rare or unstable. The self is taken as the last and only
‘authority’. It is the ‘internal authority’ that always presides over ‘external
authorities’ such as social institutions and conventions.5
Within scholarly accounts, the specific structure of internal versus exter-
nal authority has long been established as one of the characteristics of new
religious phenomena.6 The ideas of a dichotomous principle of author-
ity and of the dominance of the self point out a significant feature in the
development of religion and spirituality in postmodern times. However, this
approach often ignores the fact that the self, and thus the internal author-
ity, is in and of itself a product of social configurations and thus the inter-
play of different external authorities.7 Furthermore, by concentrating on the
supremacy of the self, studies on new religions and spiritualities hardly take
into consideration social structures among new religious practitioners and
the ways in which they have been shaped by the exercise of authority. There
are only a few exceptions, such as Sarah Pike’s studies on Neopagan festivals
in the United States. As she shows, Neopagan festivals are envisioned as a
place where everybody is equal and free to explore the self. This egalitarian
concept and emphasis on the self—the internal authority—however, in fact
disguise “old forms of power”. Thus, within those camps one finds central
decision makers, “secret chiefs”—authorities who are not officially declared
as such, but whom nonetheless must be obeyed.8
The term authority is not to be mistaken as a code name for coercion. On
the contrary, authority as I see it is a social position that can be ascribed to
persons as well as social or cultural systems that make people subordinate
themselves without coercion.9
Based on ethnographic field research carried out in 2010–2011 at Luna’s
apartment and among the Neopagan women witches who gather there, I
want to explicate the dynamics of authority that are formative for this group
in its spiritual practice as well as its social composition.10 Since Luna is the

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 144 Victoria Hegner
central figure among the women, I particularly focus on her and her spiri-
tual authority: the accepted dominance of her interpretation of Neopagan
witchcraft within the group. How does she acquire and exercise this author-
ity? How do the other women grant her spiritual authority and thus also
employ their own form of ‘power’? How stable is Luna’s authority or is
her authority supposed to be? As my research made clear, the local cultural
context—the city—played a decisive role in shaping Luna’s authority, and
the particular interplay between the cityscape and the witches will be a key
component of the analysis. This essay will thus focus on the ways in which
these Berlin witches interact within the wider context of Berlin, exploring
how the issue of authority comes into play in these interactions. Here, I draw
attention to the modes of choosing and using public ritual sites as a way of
empowerment of women. Rituals in this context turn into a public contes-
tation of external authorities—patriarchy in general, and the Berlin local
government in particular. Within their highly politicized spiritual practice,
Neopagan witches negotiate a fine balance between the authority of the self
and the authority outside of it.
Throughout the essay, I experiment with a style of representation that is
inspired by one that Sabina Magliocco developed in her work on Neopagan
witchcraft in the United States. Each chapter of her book Witching Culture
opens with a paragraph in which she relates her own spiritual experience.
It is visually separated from more interpretive passages by a different font.
I work with two different typefaces as well. The text in italic typeface is
meant to give insight into how I myself move within the field. Furthermore,
it provides a space to listen more extensively to the protagonists’ voices.
The passages in the other typeface depict a more analytical text. Through
this style of representation, I try to relativize ‘ethnographic authority’ and
make transparent the fact that, in describing the phenomenon of witchcraft
in Berlin, I am constructing the latter according to my own sociocultural
positioning within the field.11

‘OLD WISDOM’ IN THE CITY

It is a sunny day at the end of April. Ingeborg and I are sitting together
at her balcony . . . We know each other from an Ostara ritual at Luna’s.
Ostara—Spring Equinox—is one of the eight Sabbaths that witches
observe during the year.12 On this day, they celebrate the prosperity
of life. Winter is over. Every living organism is supposed to grow and
to procreate. Ingeborg had heard that I am doing a study on urban
witchcraft and had invited me to her home. She had enthusiastically
approached me, explaining that she would love to tell me how she came
to be interested in “all that stuff” and what witchcraft means to her,
how a witch’s home actually looks, and other interesting things. Now

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 Urban Witchcraft and the Issue of Authority 145
that we are sitting together, Ingeborg is all churned up inside. She tells
me that she talked to Luna as she would like to attend the retreat for
Beltane. For almost 10 years Luna has arranged ritual gatherings in the
countryside. However, Luna told her: This year, she can’t go. Ingeborg
feels hurt—deeply hurt. “I wanted to join the retreat . . . so badly”. “But
last year [at the retreat]”, she continues, “I had a lot of prob— . . . Well,
whenever I am with Luna, all my neuroses come out. I have a friend
who always says: ‘You are under Luna’s thumb’. Whatever . . . I never
used to talk about intensive and intimate things, but with Luna, I can’t
hide anything. . . . it is unbelievable. Luna changed my—my life has
changed deeply through her. That is a beautiful experience and yet
so painful . . . I don’t know whether you read the email-newsletters
that she writes regularly. Last time, she wrote about the green man. I
really internalized the magic of it—the joy and the glory of it. At least
I thought so and I thought: Well, maybe I can come to the retreat. And
what did Luna say? ‘Ingeborg, it would be better if you . . . don’t come
along’. Well, she noted how much it hurt me and right away she added:
‘Ingeborg, this does not mean a rejection of you as a person. You are a
precious person. But, you are not ready yet’. I was furious at first. She
wrote me an email afterwards asking me stupid things, organizational
stuff for our next ritual. I thought: Why the hell is she asking me these
things? She knew exactly how much she hurt me. So she wrote this
helpless email. This is crazy. Well, I calmed down. Now things are fine.
I have undergone a personal transformation through this experience. It
is the sort of transformation that she [Luna] always talks about”. (Field
notes, April 26, 2011)

Since 1997 Luna has called herself a witch. She has opened a center called
the “Lion’s Moon” for the celebration of “Old Wisdom”, located in the for-
mer West Berlin. There she offers her spiritual healing abilities to interested
women. She treats light physical as well as psychological problems. In addi-
tion, she organizes the eight Neopagan festivals of the year. Furthermore,
she regularly invites women to perform moon rituals and to celebrate the
Great Goddess.13 For Samhain and Beltane she organizes a retreat into the
countryside near Berlin. These trips are only for “spiritually experienced
women”, as Luna says, since there “you will meet your inner dark side. Some
are not yet spiritually ready for it”.14 The cast of the group changes con-
stantly. There are some core attendees, but even they do not come regularly.
As open and dynamic as the group is, Luna’s position is not. She always
takes the lead. Hence, she designs and conducts the rituals. She decides who
can join the retreat and who cannot. In addition, she is the owner of the
space where most of the rituals are performed: a three-bedroom apartment
that is used exclusively for spiritual gatherings. Luna herself lives three sto-
ries above it. Last but not least she chooses the ritual sites outside of the

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 146 Victoria Hegner
apartment and in the ‘public’ sphere. Hence, she is the central decision maker
within the gathering group and is openly acknowledged as such. She is the
‘official’ and not the ‘secret chief’ of the group. People trust her and delib-
erately subordinate themselves to this organizational structure. The women
who gather at Luna’s place experience the rituals as a kind of service. In the
hustle and bustle of the everyday Berlin life, caught between their profes-
sional work, family routines and other highly individualized commitments,
they don’t find the time to immerse themselves as wholeheartedly into Neo-
pagan witchcraft as does Luna. All of the women call themselves witches.
However, the term is often one among several spiritual identifications. As
Gudrun, who is now in her sixties and one of the core attendees, says: “I am
a witch now and then. . . . I am witch when I am at Luna’s” (interview, May
2010). Gudrun, for example, is also interested in Hare Krishna and a regular
at the monks’ place of worship as well. Since she likes “spiritual singing”,
she additionally attends church whenever the “spiritual singing class” takes
place. She is thankful for Luna’s regular e-mail newsletters. They remind
her of the moon rituals and the Neopagan high holidays, which she would
otherwise forget in her busy calendar. Those newsletters—or moon-letters,
as Luna calls them—do not only include the dates for the rituals at Luna’s
place. They also include explanations of the religious/spiritual meaning of
the ritual as well as directives for the ritual’s dress code. Sometimes Luna
makes suggestions for “spiritual preparation”—that is, memorizing and
thinking about a specific saying that she created and that will be used dur-
ing the ritual. Luna also writes about the Great Goddess in general in those
letters. She includes news on political events or natural catastrophes like the
accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in March 2011, interpreting
them within the framework of Goddess spirituality. For her, the accident was
the “price” we had to pay for our irresponsible behavior towards “mother
earth”. “However”, she concluded, “we can all gather our wits and cel-
ebrate the living, wild, and old wisdom and the magic of the full moon, our
Great Goddess. We thus raise our voices and free our female bodies. We no
longer follow our dominant father figure. . . . We know what we do and
we know whom and what we support through our consumerist behavior”
(e-mail newsletter, March 21, 2011). Those newsletters often read like tran-
scripts of free-flowing thoughts, sometimes without commas and dots. Once
the women come together at Luna’s place, they are usually dressed as the
newsletter suggested and are often spiritually well prepared, having learned
Luna’s ritual sayings and absorbed her latest thoughts on the Great Goddess.
Ingeborg always arrives first. She welcomes the women at the door. “Ciao,
Bella, you look awesome”, she likes to call out, and then effusively hugs
whomever is at the door. Newcomers are shown around. Ingeborg explains
the ‘usual procedures’ (which door to use in order to enter the ritual room;
when Luna will arrive; where to get tea and cookies). For a while the women
sit together in the dining room, chatting. Once Luna comes down from her
apartment, she briefly says hello and then goes straight to the altar room, the

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 Urban Witchcraft and the Issue of Authority 147
actual location of the ritual, and sits down. Once you hear a Chinese gong,
everything is ready. The women follow Luna eagerly into the room.

Authority as a Performative Act

In this context Luna’s spiritual authority can be read as a performative
act. ‘Performative act’—as I use the term here—includes a rather abstract-
reflective level of representation—that is, something written or said—as well
as forms of representation through more immediate bodily experience and
practice. These forms of representation are hardly distinguishable from one
another and often coincide. In this context, they serve to produce a certain
normativity and thus to suggest, mold and give reassurance of a specific
self-understanding.15
The performative act of establishing Luna’s spiritual authority begins
long before the actual get-together at her place and does not only include
the regular e-mail newsletter. It comprises as well the way in which Luna
develops and presents her biography via the Internet. Her spirituality is the
central topic of her resume posted on her webpage. Against a background
picture of a rising sun at the Pacific coast, she describes central events and
phases in her life, elaborating on her “near-death experience”. In 1996 she
had a car accident. She writes:

I experienced a near-death experience with severe injuries through a car

accident. I left my body. An endlessly loving maternal power revealed
the source of life to me. During the following years: intensive body
work, discovery and development of Daoistic healing exercises. Access
to the archetype of the Great Mother.16

Although here Luna describes her spirituality in terms of a painful initia-

tion process, her being a witch is in part also hereditary. As one reads on
the Internet, her grandmother passed the craft on to her and “thus a lot of
responsibility”. What follows in her resume is an extensive list of the spiri-
tual training that Luna completed in order to learn how to use her craft. The
list is remarkable, since it contains the names of people who are well-known
figures within the German context of Neopaganism, Goddess spirituality
and Western Buddhism.
Women who come to her place the first time often read Luna’s CV before-
hand. It gives them an idea of Luna’s spiritual skills and abilities, and thus
serves to motivate them to join the ritual. Once they sit down in the din-
ing hall for the very first time, they convey the sort of social unease that is
usual when meeting people for the first time. However, it is not so much this
behavior that sets them apart from the core attendees and those who are
‘fairly new’, meaning those who have come two or three times to the gather-
ings already. Rather, their distinguishing characteristic is the way in which
they abide by the suggested dress code for the ritual. What becomes clear

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 148 Victoria Hegner
to me: the longer you are ‘with Luna’ the closer you follow her directives
and yet the more creative you are in interpreting those directives. Hence,
newcomers seldom follow completely Luna’s suggestion of the color to
wear, whereas core attendees strictly do. Yet, only the core attendees also
bring attractive accessories such as scarves, hair ornaments, and jewelry.
These witches practice the rules so often that they begin to play with them—
complying with their limits yet at the same time constantly pushing against
them. Hence, Ingeborg, for example, once wore a necklace with a lavaliere
that depicted a rainbow. She complied with the rule to wear pastel colors.
Yet the lavaliere was a symbol of the Angel Light Healers, a group that Luna
deeply despises—something that Ingeborg surely knew.
It might be Luna’s CV that originally motivates women to come. How-
ever, it is during the ritual performance itself that Luna’s authority unfolds.
The performative character of the ritual and thus Luna’s authority in this
context encompasses all of the bodily senses. The performative act itself can
be roughly divided into three parts.
The ritual begins as soon as the women step through the apartment’s door
and thus out of their daily routine and into something that exists outside
of it. Here they are supposed to get into the right ‘spiritual mood’; they can
literally smell it. One can detect the incenses that are burned and the tea
that has been prepared. These smells intermingle with an aroma of decay
and mustiness. This is an old apartment, and Luna has left all of her aunt’s
old furniture in the flat. Her beloved relative had lived there for more than
twenty years before moving away in 2000. In a way, in the ritual space
you smell her and thus Luna’s ancestor. Since the worship of predecessors
is central in practicing Neopagan witchcraft, the apartment conveys a cor-
responding ‘spirit’. And it is once again Luna’s biography that is central and
thus authoritative. The women hear as well music in the background. Some-
times Luna puts on chants by Starhawk or some kind of meditative music.
Occasionally, Ingeborg is drumming. Finally, the women see the ritual room.
The place is plunged into a dim, bluish light. Objects that symbolize the
four cardinal points lie in the room’s center. The room thus conveys both a
cozy and at the same time exclusive atmosphere. One can almost feel that
some things that go on behind these doors will remain secret, known only
to the women who gather here. The ritual experience is made tactile as well,
through the fur that is spread out on the floor in the dining hall as well as in
the ritual room. You feel the warmth and softness of the fur through your
feet under the table in the dining hall. In the ritual room women lie or sit
down on the fur and experience its comfort. Finally, the group immediately
experiences the taste of the ritual—through the tea that is offered. The latter
is made of herbs grown in the apartment’s backyard. Luna had explained
the particular ‘energies’ of the herbs in her newsletters beforehand. Those
‘energies’ will be used during the ritual.
The second part of the ritual starts once the women enter the ritual room.
The senses are sharpened. Women are encouraged to close their eyes. Inge-

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 Urban Witchcraft and the Issue of Authority 149
borg shuts the doors. Luna casts the circle, meaning that she invokes the
‘spirits’ of the earth, air, water and fire, and she calls upon the Goddess.
The structure of the ritual is always the same. First, the women experi-
ence an abstract-reflexive discussion of the ritual’s meaning, as the talk-
ing stick makes the round. Luna gives the formula for speech. She starts.
The gathering women say something when the talking stick is passed to
them. It is a scenic-mimetic repetition of Luna’s phrase. They use this phrase
and thus literally incorporate Luna’s words. Yet they insert their individual
words into the phrase and thus mold the latter into something of their own.
Under Luna’s directives they all start to sing, dance, rattle and create differ-
ent sounds after the talking round. They take great joy in doing so. These
movements and sounds are supposed to verbally and bodily mark and foster
personal as well collective transformation. In dancing through the room, the
group follows Luna’s advice yet the women move, sing and sound in differ-
ent ways. Here the group’s social structure becomes obvious. Newcomers
often feel a bit uneasy about dancing around. They closely watch Luna. In
a form of mimicry, they reproduce her movements. Out of a moment of
insecurity, a situation of great synchronicity of movements among them and
with Luna develops. Core attendees in contrast seem to be well versed in
this form of dancing, singing and rattling to the extent that they constantly
improvise on Luna’s directives, playing with them in a highly creative way.
They jump, laugh and find their own rhythms. Yet they always move within
the limits of the rules so that the ritual never threatens to ‘fall apart’. Finally,
the women lie down for a guided meditation by Luna. This part of the ritual
comes gradually to an end with some yoga exercises followed by jointly
uncasting the ‘circle’. Luna leaves the room first. That is the signal that the
other women should leave as well.
The third part of the ritual can be described as the process of slowly step-
ping back into the daily routine. All of the women gather in the dining hall
and have a “witch soup”—Luna cooks the potage according to her own
recipe. It is a “magic soup”, meaning that all of the ingredients are supposed
to bring about a transformation. Women eat the soup and chat about their
families, the ways in which they use tarot, as well as about their last visit to
the hairdresser. Slowly they start to leave, waving good-bye to each other.
By the time everybody has left, Luna has been in her apartment upstairs for
a long time. Ingeborg cleans up the table and locks the apartment. She is
always the last to leave.
During the ritual, women submitted to Luna’s role as the one who takes
the lead. They followed her rules and thus produced her spiritual authority.
They experienced this authority bodily and thus deliberately. Ingeborg, occu-
pying the role of an assistant to Luna, clearly emphasizes Luna’s authority.
Her person is a central part of this particular performative act. However, it
is important to note that Ingeborg, as well as the other women in the ritual,
appears not only submissive to Luna’s authority. Since they produce her
authority, giving it to her, they at the same time themselves appear powerful.

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 150 Victoria Hegner
There is always the possibility that the women would not agree to certain
things, and that they as a result might no longer attend. Luna’s authority is
clearly not stable. In particular Ingeborg, as her assistant and thus the closest
to her, likes to challenge it. Sometimes she openly questions Luna’s spiritual
authority. She holds a particular power in her ability to do so. Here, the
way in which Ingeborg became Luna’s assistant is significant. As Ingeborg
describes it, it happened on a day that they both went shopping. Luna sud-
denly became totally helpless. She felt sick and started to vomit. Ingeborg
took the lead and drove her home. She stayed half a day until Luna got better.
As Ingeborg says, they both sensed that Luna had the “shamanic disease”.
A sickness of diverse symptoms, this affliction is interpreted as a decisive
moment within a shaman’s initiation process.17 Thus in a situation where
Luna placed herself under Ingeborg’s care, giving her the authority to decide
what to do, Luna’s spiritual authority in fact became manifest. Ingeborg’s
significance in testifying to Luna’s initiation process, and thus her spiritual
authority, gives her, again, the capacity to challenge the latter not only in
subtle ways but also sometimes quite openly. Hence, Ingeborg sometimes
subverts the dress-code instructions radically, wearing, for example, a white
outfit instead of the prescribed black one. Ingeborg even criticized Luna in
front of everybody during a ritual for her way of guiding meditations. Luna
did not want to debate the issue at the time. However, later she called Inge-
borg over the phone, discussed the situation, and renegotiated her spiritual
authority with one of her most important witnesses. However, now and then
even Ingeborg seems to ‘overstep’ her comparatively broadly set limits. Luna
at those moments puts Ingeborg in her ‘place’ and dramatically confirms her
own spiritual authority (e.g., excluding Ingeborg from the retreat).
Core attendees seem to take a kind of joy in challenging Luna’s spiritual
authority as well, although in less obvious ways. For example, Luna is strict
about serving only organic food at the rituals. For Luna, the consumption
of organic food represents a strong part of a ‘holistic life’ and therefore of
her spirituality. Core attendees love to bring along homemade sweets that
are shared among the women. Ingeborg or Luna always asks whether the
women used organic ingredients and they are always reassured that this is
so. Yet, when Ingeborg or Luna leaves for the kitchen, the women like to
smile complicitously within the round, sometimes laughingly rolling their
eyes. Those gestures make clear that, despite all their honesty, the women
might not have told the truth, and that we all will eat ‘unknowingly’ con-
ventional, nonorganic food. To a certain extent, Ingeborg and Luna seem to
know about the potential misinformation. However, they never verbalize
their doubts, instead continuing to play along with the ‘game’. Luna submits
to the women’s word at the moment of questioning. In doing so, her spiri-
tual authority might have been challenged, yet it is confirmed at the same
moment. We might not eat organic food, but we do pretend to do so.
Another time, Luna enthusiastically described her “spiritual revelation”
that her stuffed animals had a soul and seemed to contain different spirits.

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 Urban Witchcraft and the Issue of Authority 151
She went on, saying that a friend of hers reported a conversation with one of
those spirits. The spirit had told him that her stuffed animal had a relation-
ship with his stuffed animal in “another sphere”. Still listening to the story,
Michaela, one of the core attendees, slowly turned her head to the side. In a
gesture unseen by Luna and directed towards the other women, she intensely
tapped her forehead. This sounded “too wacko” to Michaela. She did not
verbalize her thoughts. However, it clearly pushed the limits of Luna’s spiritual
authority. Luna risked losing the latter. The provocative gesture, as well as
the complicit reactions of the other women (slowly bowing their heads, softly
giggling) did not go unnoticed. The situation had such a strong impact that
she refrained from telling those stories again. In this sense she complied—this
time—with Michaela’s as well as other women’s spiritual understanding—in
order to maintain her authority.

The City
As a performative act, Luna’s spiritual authority is an issue of negotiation
and thus always dynamic and instable. Taking the wider context into consid-
eration, it is particularly dynamic in a city such as Berlin, where the variety
of practitioners and offers of new religions is so big that even “insiders”—
new religious practitioners themselves—seem to have lost an “overview”.18
Activists such as Luna have to compete for spiritual authority. It is cer-
tainly not an exclusive authority that Luna strives for. On the contrary, she
welcomes the fact that people have multiple spiritual authorities that they
follow. For her, this multiplicity reflects the city’s definitional character of
cultural and social variety and openness—a principle that corresponds with
her own values. In this context, she draws particularly on the idea of the
city as a multicultural locale with a large population of migrants. As she
explains, so many religions and their different traditions arrived in the city
via migrants, finding a ‘home’ in Berlin, that one is almost forced to use
them—coerced to submit to these various authorities. “They came with the
people. We . . . have to use those spirits and deities. Some of them are very
powerful”, she once explained to me.
In order to understand this specific situation, within which there is a
strong emphasis on not having a singular authority, but rather multiple
authorities that give shape to a group or individual, the sociologist Mat-
thew Wood suggests the term ‘non-formativeness’, thus moving away from
a dichotomist model of authority (inner versus outer). ‘Non-formativeness’
as he sees it in his study on New Age movements and the issue of neolib-
eralism and authority is a central characteristic of new religious practices.
He explains that ‘non-formativeness’ is a tendency, and has to be under-
stood in relational terms. Hence, “. . . churchly, denominational, sectarian
and cultic forms of religion have strong tendencies towards formativeness,
although multiple authorities are found within them and within the lives
of their adherents. In other words, there exists across the religious field a

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 152 Victoria Hegner
formative-non-formative tension . . . Where this tension tends to the former,
clearly identifiable religious traditions, groups and subjectivities emerge, but
where it tends towards the latter, traditions, groups and subjectivities cannot
be easily identified”.19 All of the women at Luna’s identified themselves as
witches and all saw themselves as part of the group. However, this identifica-
tion appears situational. “I am a witch when I am at Luna’s”, Gudrun said.
It is one among many other identities. Here, the non-formative character
stands out, mirrored in the ever-changing cast of the group itself.
Luna’s spiritual self-allocation tends at first sight to be more formative,
although she as well submits to various authorities within her spirituality
and outside of herself. Hence, she follows concepts and practices of Western
Buddhism or, for example, she interprets ‘existence’ according to ideas of
North American Indian shamanism and mythology. In this context, it should
be mentioned that she completely rejects Christianity as an expression of
patriarchy. As she likes to say, The church is the enemy. On the other hand,
she accepts and draws on some forms of Christian religion as well. Hence,
when my friend and I made our recordings for the radio feature, we met
Luna’s husband, Lars. He works as a physicist. As a natural scientist he has
in some ways a different approach to the idea of ‘existence’ from Luna, the
witch. As Luna told us, some people find them an unlikely couple. Curi-
ous, we asked him how a physicist and a witch would meet and marry. We
received an unexpected answer:

Well, we had a Catholic wedding, although I had been evangelically

baptized, and Luna had not been baptized at all. . . . Out of her own
accord she went to the Catholic Church. For her it was the way the
Catholic wedding ritual is put on stage and how it goes. That’s why we
had a Catholic wedding. I mean, they [the church] really do set up the
ritual in a beautiful way—with a bit of incense and chants. (Interview,
March 2011)

Luna and her husband deliberately submitted to the forms, structures and
contents of a Catholic ritual; she even underwent baptism. They took these
religious actions as authoritative. However, it must be emphasized that only
certain such actions were thus recognized. As Luna told me, “We had our
own singers who did the chants. Lars’ friends waved the incenses. We did
not say: Till death do us part, but: blablabla. It was a great happening”. As
she explicated to me over the phone, most important for her, when decid-
ing on a Catholic wedding, was—as she called it—its spiritual seriousness
(interview, May 17, 2011).20
As open and situational as Luna’s relationship towards a multiple set of
spiritual authorities is, it is also in many ways quite inflexible and strict,
particularly towards the field of new religions. There she makes a clear dis-
tinction between legitimate new religious practices—those that have author-
ity—and illegitimate ones—those that don’t. Indeed, when we first met she

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 Urban Witchcraft and the Issue of Authority 153
was explicit about the fact that one must be wary of “weirdoes” such as the
Angel Light Healers, and stay away from them (interview, September 2010).
Drawing the line between legitimate and illegitimate forms of new religious
practices is a constitutive element of her authority. Here she takes up a cen-
tral discourse on new religions in general that questions the legitimacy of the
latter, locating them at the societal margins. This discourse—as an expres-
sion of power relations—is decisive for the whole field of new religions
in the urban context of Berlin. It constitutes the field’s ‘boundaries’. They
become extremely dynamic and temporary, maintaining their sociocultural
significance in defining new religious self-understandings.21
Because of this, whenever I mentioned my research topic to new reli-
gious practitioners outside of witchcraft, they would, like Luna, respond
by drawing a line between legitimate and illegitimate spiritual practices,
then elaborating on the legitimacy of witchcraft. As I visited one of the ten
esoteric stores in Berlin and mentioned witchcraft, for example, the owner
made me aware that:

. . . everyone should do as it pleases her or him. When young girls come

in and ask for Neopagan witchcraft, I send them over to Heidi’s witch
shop. However, I am afraid of witches. That is because of the Burning
Times. Our body saved those memories. I learned that those women
were innocent. Still, and it’s not only me who thinks so, I don’t feel
comfortable with this kind of spiritual practice. (Field notes, May 2010)

Again, one of the representatives in the house of shamans remarked,

when I asked him about witchcraft in Berlin, “This is solely manipulation.
For example, love magic. This is solely manipulation. It follows the logic:
you get something, so you have to give something” (field notes, May 2010).
The discourse on legitimate versus illegitimate new religious practices,
and thus on who does and does not possess spiritual authority, is deeply
intertwined with the specific urban context and its variety and density of
new religious offers, as well as its highly individualized urban dwellers who
make use of those offers. The concrete geographic-cultural locality matters.
It matters particularly when new religious practices and thus also witchcraft
become political and challenge external authority.

A FINE BALANCE

For Luna rituals have one primary goal—to empower women and free them
of patriarchal patterns of thought. Here she mainly draws on ideas of the
American witch and Neopagan activist Starhawk as well as of the Ger-
man witch Luisa Francia. Starhawk, like Francia, represents a branch of
witchcraft that is radically socialist and feminist. Starhawk’s understanding
of authority and—closely related—of power clearly follow the distinction

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 154 Victoria Hegner
between an external versus internal authority.22 According to her spiritual
thinking, the “autonomous self”—the “power from within”—has almost
dissolved through patriarchal oppression. Women have had to suffer the
most. Their inner “old wisdom”—the “craft” of the wise women (the
“witches”)—could survive only in secret, transmitted by a few. “Craft” is
“the art of sensing and shaping the subtle, unseen forces that flow through
the world”.23 The idea of magic is central. Magic “opens the gate between
the conscious and unconscious”.24 In Starhawk’s thinking, magic is highly
political. As she wrote, it is the art “of evoking power-from-within and using
it to transform ourselves, our community, our culture, using it to resist the
destruction that those who wield power are bringing upon the world”.25
Luna echoes this idea when she writes in one of her regular moon-letters:

The . . . full moon makes us think of our old power. It stimulates us

to connect to women worldwide in order to dream anew a loving
world . . . As we confront reality we notice how patriarchal and capital-
ist structures shaped us. We see the oppression and rape of our female
power . . . the rough nights (“Rauhnächte”) are the time for female inner
power, the time of freedom, the time of truth. We name the evil and thus
we ward it off. We name the oppressors, the rapists of our mother earth
and thus we ward them off. We name the murderers of our daughter’s
and son’s souls and thus we ward them off. We name the institutions
and power relations which consume us and thus we ward them off. We
name our inner destroyer and thus we ward him off. (E-mail newsletter,
December 2009)

As clear-cut as the distinction between women’s internal authority and

patriarchal external authority might appear in her writing, the distinction
blurs as soon as the group performs rituals for empowerment and enters and
thus produces urban public space. Most of the ritual locations are designed as
sites of withdrawal from the hustle and bustle of city life and as a retreat into
nature. Luna’s favorite location is situated along the lake Krumme Lanke.
This is an area she used to play in as a child. However, this retreat into
nature is far from complete. The ritual site is a communal and city-sanctioned
swimming area. City dwellers come here in order to ‘get away’, relax and to
leap into the lake. In this sense it is deeply urban. The space, with its people,
specific landscape and administrative category (“official swimming area”),
decisively shapes the ritual. Hence, particularly during the summer, Luna
and the group often have curious bystanders. Sometimes they interact. People
ask about the ritual or make some comments and receive replies. In a way,
the witches have to share their (sacred) site of worship. However, they hope
that their perception of the space will acquire as much recognition as other,
mainstream public conceptions of it. Hence, the group became more active in
their quest to transform the place into a formal ritual site for witches—not by
using their “power from within” but by trying to communicate with city offi-

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 Urban Witchcraft and the Issue of Authority 155
cials. By writing a letter to the Berlin senate, they confronted outwardly social
structures of power, moving within them and using them to gain spiritual
power within and a space for women witches. Hence, while their feminist
spiritual agenda might inspire them to try to transform external authority, it
did not require that they seek to abolish it. As ambivalent as this power might
be, the witches acknowledge it as a legitimate and effective force with which
they are deeply intertwined. In other words, they construct a ‘fine balance’
between external and internal authority.
The site at the Krumme Lanke is still not recognized as a ritual place
by the local government. Luna and the women will not push any further
the process of its possible recognition. As much as they claim their right
to publicly and thus officially practice the worship of the Goddess, official
recognition is still a ‘double-edge sword’ since it would partially remove the
‘secretiveness’ of the worship and thus its exclusivity as well as its subversive
character. A constitutive element for the witches’ self-understanding would
thus be missing.

SUMMARY

Victoria: The radio feature will be aired at 4:30pm. Luna, I want to

say that its style is very journalistic—sometimes humorous. I hope you
don’t get the wrong impression. We had to pick up and play with some
clichés of the witch in order to get people to listen. I am a bit afraid that
you might not find yourself represented in the way that you wanted to.
Luna: Don’t worry, I know the mainstream’s mentality and I know
that journalists have to comply with it. I am sure that things are fine.
The message will be spread.

Within the social scientists’ debates over new religious practices, it has
become an established paradigm that one of the characteristics of new forms
of religion is the dominance of the inner self. It is the ultimate authority that
always presides over external authorities. However, this approach towards
new religions/spiritualities reproduces the internal discourse of new religions
on power itself without moving beyond it. It fails to consider the fact that
the ‘inner self’ is itself a product of external authority. Furthermore, it leaves
out the fact that ‘authorities outside the self’ are highly formative for the
social structures among the new religious practitioners themselves. In order
to broaden this analytic lens, I suggest the idea of authority as a performa-
tive act. Through the ethnographic deep description of a group of Neopagan
witches in Berlin, I traced the ways in which Luna acquires spiritual author-
ity among them—a social position that is ascribed to her and that people
subordinate themselves to without coercion. The advantage of a ‘performa-
tive approach’ is that it reveals that authority is to a great extent established
through bodily experience where all senses come into play. Furthermore, it

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 156 Victoria Hegner
becomes obvious that the women who submit to Luna’s authority are not
themselves powerless. On the contrary, since they give and thus produce
Luna’s authority, they appear powerful. Luna’s authority, rather than being
stable, is constantly (re)negotiated, challenged and dynamic.
By taking up Matthew Wood’s ideas on the ‘non-formativeness’ of new
religions, I showed that Neopagan witches’ religious practice are ‘non-
formative’ in the sense that they tend to follow multiple (spiritual) authori-
ties. At this point, I broaden Wood’s approach by adding the dimension
of geographic-cultural locality. I argue that even in the age of “geographi-
cally deterritorialized” realities such as in the Internet, locality matters. The
fact that Neopagan witches in Berlin can easily choose among a variety of
spiritual authorities is closely linked to the specifically dense and historically
emergent structure of new religions within the city.
I want to note here that particularly the production of the radio feature
made obvious the fact that different authorities come into play in shaping
my own research on and representation of Neopagan witches. I tried to
negotiate between them—the journalist’s expectations, Neopagans’ interests
and my own academic goals and principles. Those external authorities no
longer functioned on the level of deliberate subordination. On the contrary,
they clearly operated on the principle of coercion. I had to submit to them,
although I sometimes did not want to.
Hence, Neopagan witches formulated strict expectations for the docu-
mentary. For them, it was imperative that we portray Neopaganism as a
religion that was much older than Christianity. This was a way to claim via
a “long history” their right of recognition as a legitimate religious practice.
My journalist friend and I tried to meet their request. However, while
editing the gathered material, her expertise on audio productions and my
academic principles collided dramatically. Thus, she radically reformulated
the spoken text that I had written. As she explained to me during a heated
debate, I had to leave behind ‘my’ academic style of representation. It did
not produce “clear statements” that were easy to grasp. She reminded me
that we were supposed to produce an infotainment. People should get infor-
mation and at the same time feel entertained. My writing style obviously did
not meet these requirements.
The dilemma of being caught between different expectations during the
production of legitimate forms of ethnographic representations is promi-
nently analyzed in the essay collection When They Read What We Write.26
Here, cultural anthropologists draw upon the “writing culture” debate,
scrutinizing ethnographic authority on representation of moments when
the “natives talk back”.27 Furthermore, they show how it is that journalis-
tic (mis)representations of ethnographic studies challenge the relationship
between researchers and natives.28 Some of the contributors suggest that
there should be a dialogue between the researcher and the “field” on ways
of publishing ethnographic descriptions.29 In producing the radio feature, I
closely followed this idea. Before the documentary was aired, I made cop-

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 Urban Witchcraft and the Issue of Authority 157
ies of it and distributed it among the witches. Some of them had strongly
insisted on this step. Surprisingly, there was hardly any comment on the final
product. Whenever I inquired about Luna’s and others’ opinions of it, and
problematized the documentary, they admitted that they had not yet listened
to it. The “dialogic principle” ultimately turned out to be a burden for the
latter.30 Natives did not want to talk back. One of the reasons for this might
be simply trust. The way in which we gathered material made Neopagan
witches feel that we acknowledged their authority over the data that they
had provided. They did not worry about misrepresentation. Additionally,
the radio feature gave rather general insights into Neopagan witchcraft.
Neopagan witches knew beforehand that we would not touch on contro-
versial issues such as the level of heteronormativity within Neopaganism.
Hence, the radio feature might not have appeared inspiring to them, and as
a result they did not listen.
Although the feature did not foster dialogue between us and the witches,
it did stimulate the media’s interest. On the basis of our documentary, jour-
nalists called Luna and asked for further information. Ultimately Luna was
invited to a talk show of a national public TV channel. As an expert, she was
asked to explain her beliefs to the German public.31
Luna’s wish was fulfilled: the ‘message’ was spread.

NOTES

1. Haidrun Schäfer, “Kreativ oder reaktiv?” Körper, Geist, Seele, February

2010, 31–33.
2. See also Fedele and Trulsson in this volume.
3. Stefanie von Schnurbein, Religion als Kulturkritik: Neugermanisches Hei-
dentum im 20. Jahrhundert (Heidelberg: Winter, 1992); Barbara Bötsch,
Leben mit der großen Göttin: Biografien, Glaubensweisen, Hintergründe
zur Göttinreligion in Deutschland (Regensburg: Lipa, 2005); Britta Rens-
ing, “Der Glaube an die große Göttin und den Gott: Theologische, rituelle
und ethische Merkmale der Wicca-Religion, unter besonderer Berücksichti-
gung der Lyrik englischsprachiger Wicca-Anhänger” (PhD diss., University
of Jena, 2006).
4. Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan
Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 415.
5. Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the
Sacralization of Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
6. For one of the earliest conceptualizations of “new religions” see Thomas
Luckmann, The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern
Society (New York: Macmillan, 1967). I take up Gordon Melton’s rather
broad definition of new religions. Accordingly, the ‘lowest common pos-
sible’ of new religions is the rejection of dogmas within their religious
practices; Gordon Melton, “Toward a Definition of New Religion,” Nova
Religio 8 (2004): 73–87. I use the word ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ synony-
mously. In so doing, I avoid the hierarchical schema that those words imply.
7. I follow Foucault’s notion of power as a “complex strategic situation
within a particular society”, where economic conditions, social systems and

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 158 Victoria Hegner
educational institutions bring about subjects that internalize specific power
relations. Michel Foucault, Sexualität und Wahrheit, vol. 1, Der Wille
zum Wissen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), 113f; Michael Ruoff, Foucault-
Lexikon (Paderborn: Fink, 2007), 150.
8. Sarah Pike, Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the
Search for Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 43.
9. The notion of authority comes close to Weber’s concept of charisma: Max
Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Studienausgabe (Tübingen: Mohr, 1976),
140; See as well Stefan Rademacher, “‘Makler’: Akteure der Esoterik-Kultur
als Einflussfaktoren auf neue religiöse Gemeinschaften,” in Fluide Religion,
ed. Dorothea Lüddeckens and Rafael Walthert (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010),
119–148.
10. Throughout the article I use pseudonyms for the people I met in the ‘field’.
11. Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture: Folklore and Neopaganism in Amer-
ica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 17.
12. Those festivals are Yule: December 21; Imbolc: February 1; Ostara: March
21; Beltane: April 30; Litha: June 21; Lammas: August 2; Mabon: Sep-
tember 21; Samhain: October 31. Neopagans celebrate the yearly change
of seasons as a symbol of the endless circle of life—birth, death, re-birth.
See Gerald B. Gardner, Witchcraft Today (London: Rider, 1954); Gerald B.
Gardner, The Meaning of Witchcraft (London: Aquarian Press, 1959).
13. I use the word ‘ritual’ in the way that Neopagan witches do. Accordingly,
it is an event that stands out of the ‘everyday life routine’ and brings about
some form of individual and collective transformation. For an introduc-
tion into ritual theory see Catherine M. Bell, Ritual Theory and Practice
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
14. If not otherwise indicated, I quote from my field notes from 2010–2011 in
the following passages.
15. For a detailed discussion on definitions of ‘performative act’, see Christoph
Wulf and Jörg Zirfas, “Die performative Bildung von Gemeinschaften: Zur
Hervorbringung des Sozialen in Ritualen und Ritualisierungen,” in Theo-
rien des Performativen, ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte and Christoph Wulf (Berlin:
Akademie Verlag, 2001), 93–116. The authors provide an instructive sum-
mary on ritual theories as well as performance theories.
16. “Löwenmond”, accessed March 18, 2012, http//www.loewenmond.de.
17. Anzori Barkalaja, “Shamanism as Information Design,” in Shamanism in
the Interdisciplinary Context, ed. Art Leete and R. Paul Firnhaber (Boca
Raton, FL: Brown Walker Press, 2004), 21–55.
18. Nils Grübel and Stefan Rademacher, eds., Religion in Berlin: Ein Handbuch
(Berlin: Weissensee-Verlag, 2003), 600.
19. Matthew Wood, Possession, Power and the New Age: Ambiguities of Author-
ity in Neoliberal Societies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 71.
20. On the power of tradition among Goddess worshippers in Glastonbury see
Trulsson’s illuminating analysis in this volume.
21. For the concept of the ‘religious field’, see Pierre Bourdieu, “Genese und
Struktur des religiösen Feldes,” in Religion, ed. Franz Schultheis and
Stephan Egger (Konstanz: UVK-Verlagsgesellschaft, 2009), 30–90.
22. Starhawk is one of the leading figures in Reclaiming, a particular branch of
Neopagan witchcraft which emerged from the United States (San Francisco)
at the end of the 1970s. For a study on Reclaiming’s theology see Jone Salo-
monsen, Enchanted Feminism (London: Routledge, 2001).
23. Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Religion of the Great God-
dess (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 27.
24. Ibid., 123.

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 Urban Witchcraft and the Issue of Authority 159
25. Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1982).
26. Caroline B. Brettell, ed., When They Read What We Write: The Politics of
Ethnography (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1993).
27. Ibid., 9–14.
28. Ofra Greenberg, “When They Read What the Papers Say We Wrote,” in
When They Read What We Write: The Politics of Ethnography, ed. Caro-
line B. Brettell (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey), 107–118.
29. Richard P. Horwitz, “Just Stories of Ethnographic Authority,” in When
They Read What We Write: The Politics of Ethnography, ed. Caroline B.
Brettell (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey), 132–143.
30. I want to thank Regina Bendix for the comment on the dialogic principle as
a possible burden for the field.
31. Griseldis Wenner and Axel Bulthaupt, Unter uns. Geschichten aus dem
Leben (TV talkshow), produced by Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, aired Octo-
ber 21, 2011 (private recording).

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 9 Gender and Power
Brahma Kumaris Spirituality
and Hinduism in Portugal
Inês Lourenço

Religion and spirituality can both play a role in the processes of acquisition
of power by women and lead to the construction of new gender identi-
ties; both can serve as channels for achieving personal realization and the
creation of power spheres. This chapter will explore these dynamics on the
basis of two ethnographic researches carried out in Portugal, more specifi-
cally in the Greater Lisbon area. It is useful to contrast spirituality with
traditional religion in order to highlight the differences between them, as
well as the growing tendency to replace the second by the first. However, this
does not mean that both can be completely differentiated. The ethnographic
data analyzed in this paper demonstrate that spirituality is an alternative to
religion. Spirituality favors, according to the involved social actors, greater
openness and creativity. I therefore propose an analysis of these dynamics
centered in the categories of gender and power.
The first ethnographic research focuses on the Hindu community resid-
ing in Santo António dos Cavaleiros—municipality of Loures, district of
Lisbon—and on the key role of women in the process of cultural reproduc-
tion in their community. Religion is the vehicle through which these women
accede to new female statuses, developed while reformatting Hinduism itself.
The second ethnographic case focuses on women who are members of
the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University (BKWSU), belonging to
two centers in the city of Lisbon—in the neighborhood of Ajuda, where the
national headquarters of the movement is, and in Santa Apolónia. Central
to this case is an analysis of the processes of identity redefinition that these
women undergo in their encounter with spirituality.
The choice of these two groups was due to the fact that in both cases the
women’s opinions about their own status and on their central role within the
religious or spiritual movements that they integrate are based on the same
stereotypes. They also have a common philosophical background with roots
in India. The comparison of the two empirical works allows us to locate two
central axes through which the women construct their discourses on self-
realization. These are based on functions associated with their female condi-
tion: service and motherhood. As we will see throughout this text, in both
cases, these two functions emerge associated with the idea of womanhood.

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 Gender and Power 161
According to several authors the difference between religion and spiritu-
ality resides in the fact of the former conditioning the liberty attained by the
women according to its theological and liturgical corpus, while the latter
allows a greater openness to individual discovery of their own ways of find-
ing internal balance.1 The case studies presented here will reinforce this idea.
This article aims to explore how religion—communitarian—and spiritu-
ality—individualistic—deal with gender issues, particularly with regard to
female agency. Therefore, I intend to reflect on the possibilities of women
empowerment based on a comparison between religion and spirituality.

HINDU WOMEN IN PORTUGAL: THE CASE STUDY

OF THE HINDU COMMUNITY OF SANTO
ANTÓNIO DOS CAVALEIROS

This case study focuses on the religious practice of a group of Hindu women
resident in the area of Greater Lisbon. They form part of a community of
around thirty-three thousand2 Hindus resident in Portugal, distributed around
Coimbra, Oporto and Lisbon, although it is in the capital—Lisbon—that the
great majority congregate, in particular geographic areas. It was in one of
these places of Hindu spatial concentration that the ethnographic research
project that forms the base of this case under study was carried out: the district
of Santo António dos Cavaleiros.
The methodology applied throughout the extended fieldwork was that
of participant observation, which involved participation in various religious
events, in public and private spaces, and informal interviews carried out with
a broad selection of women belonging to the community under study. This
fieldwork was undertaken in Portugal, the United Kingdom and India, accom-
panying the transnational movement of the informants. The Indian population
began to settle in Portugal at the end of the 1970s,3 during the postindependence
period of the former Portuguese colonies in Africa, with particular emphasis
on Mozambique. The vast majority of Indians established in Portugal started
a process of migration from India in the seventeenth century, particularly from
the state of Gujarat, to Mozambique.4 This population can be divided into
Hindus, Muslims—both Sunni and Ishmaelite—and some Christians. The
Hindus reproduced the spatial congregation strategies that they had initiated
in Mozambique throughout the process of establishment and of concentration
in specific areas of the Portuguese territory, mainly in Lisbon.
In the early 1980s, there was a substantial intensification of the arrival
of Hindus to Portugal. In addition to this immigration, which is directly
related to trajectories resulting from a distant Portuguese colonial process,
in the 1990s Hindus coming directly from Gujarat lengthened the process of
migration started in the previous two decades.5
The Hindu community living in Santo António dos Cavaleiros is very
heterogeneous at social, economic and cultural levels. Professionally, despite

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 162 Inês Lourenço
some diversity, this community is mainly dedicated to commerce. It consists
of about four hundred families, scattered across the district, concentrating
mostly in the Cidade Nova neighborhood. Composed of individuals from the
state of Gujarat, the community is internally diversified; all people trace their
origins within the state of Gujarat but related to different historical pasts:
Portuguese and British colonial occupations. Therefore, a socioreligious
multiplicity is expressed in the distinction between people originating from
Diu—divesha—and people originally from the rest of Gujarat—non-divesha.
This heterogeneous nature impels this community to the development
of strategies for maintenance of internal identities, which are in permanent
conflict and have to be continuously managed. The management of the
internal conflicts is mediated through religion, which, while ensuring cosmic
order, allows the maintenance of the unity of the community.
The public religious activity takes place in the Shiva Temple, the most
visible symbol of the presence of Hindu religious practices in this area.6
Daily religious activities occur in the temple, as well as the great festivals of
the Hindu calendar, receiving not only the surrounding community but also
Hindus belonging to other communities of the Greater Lisbon area. In addi-
tion, weddings and cultural programs are sponsored by the Shiva Temple.
This is also the meeting space for groups that develop religious and cultural
activities: the youngsters group, the Gujarati school, the dance rehearsals,
the women’s group and the board committee of the temple itself.
Apart from its religious and identity coding functions, the temple is the
center of actions that contribute to the revitalization of the group and for
the reproduction of its identity, which unfolds in the areas of education and
culture and in which the contribution of women is indispensable.
Within a community comprising around two thousand Hindus, one group
of women stands out for their centrality in the public performance of the Hindu
religious rituals, and it is this group that the present analysis will examine. The
so-called satsang group7 or simply the “women’s group” is largely responsible
for the religious and cultural activity of their community, as the women are the
main initiators of both the day-to-day religious events and the great festivities
of the Hindu calendar. Other women outside the group also play a fundamen-
tal role both in the cultural reproduction process of the group and in the devel-
opment of new female statuses: the widows of Brahmins that act as priestesses,
and the women who incorporate goddesses through possession.
The “satsang group” is composed of an average of twenty-five women, as
their participation is not fixed given the frequent mobility of these Hindus
between Portugal and various other countries, including India, Mozambique
and the United Kingdom. Their migratory histories, cultural backgrounds,
caste membership and geographic origins in India all differ. What they have
in common is the fact that the great majority are older than fifty.
The age factor reveals that these women entered into a phase of their
lives in which domestic activities have ceased to be their competence and
in which their children have reached an age that frees them from the fam-

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 Gender and Power 163
ily obligations traditionally attributed to Hindu women. Furthermore, their
age grants them a status of freedom from the behavioral conditioning to
which they had been subjected throughout their youth, as bodily discipline
is progressively transformed in accordance with the roles that are attributed
to them during the different phases of their lives. Throughout their youth
their bodies had to be contained in view of the dangers that could result
from too much exposure. As soon as they reach the age that they were no
longer fertile, their gender identity changes, while their movements in space
also begin to alter.8
Given this, it is possible to demonstrate the centrality of the women in the
process of religious transmission and cultural reproduction, and the way in
which the dynamics of the reformatting of Hinduism in the diaspora facili-
tate the maintenance and, at the same time, the reformulation of gender sta-
tuses. In this context, the women are representative of a stereotyped image
inspired by the patriarchal perception of Indian femininity while, paradoxi-
cally, they challenge those very same structures.
The diaspora facilitates the changing of gender roles, leading to the
capacity and responsibility progressively attributed to women in the cultural
reproduction of their communities. The Hindu diaspora has been a fertile
ground for clear transformations in female statuses at the level of formal
organization and in the public domain,9 in the arts, in political mobilization
and also in the religious field.
When questioned about their importance in the process of cultural repro-
duction of the group,10 the women state that it is essential and that, other-
wise, identity references would disappear among future generations. This
way, women are conscious of the relevance of their role and the valorization
of their status, resulting from strategies of adaptation of Hinduism to the
diaspora context.
It is in this sense that Aparna Rayaprol describes the process of cultural
reproduction through which the migrant populations transmit identity refer-
ences to their descendents. Rayaprol observes that “One of the ways immi-
grant groups cope with the alien environment is by remaining allied to the
values and ideologies of their original cultures”, and further she argues that
“immigrants are primarily concerned with ‘cultural reproduction’ or the
process by which they seek to transmit their knowledge, values, belief sys-
tems, and behavioral norms to the next generation”.11
Cultural reproduction should be seen not only as a process of replication,
but also of inclusion of new cultural elements, as highlighted by Jenks: “This
idea of reproduction cannot be conceptualized merely as a mechanistic repli-
cation, but as a generative process involving innovation and creativity”.12 In
fact, the diaspora condition simultaneously provides for the revitalizing of
traditional elements and for innovation through the inclusion of new refer-
ences that confer the expression of cultural reproduction with a character of
flexibility and transformation. It is in this sense that women are found to be
directly involved in processes of religious and cultural transmission.

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 164 Inês Lourenço
The function of religious leadership, traditionally attributed to male priests,
has become an eminently female exercise among the Hindu community living
in Santo António dos Cavaleiros. Only two male priests are regularly active in
the area of Greater Lisbon, the older, since the arrival of the Hindu diaspora
to Portugal, and the younger, only in recent years.13 However, among the
women, only some of them have a key role in the context of the leadership of
Hindu ritual performance, namely in the function of ritualists, the knowledge
of sacred texts and the performance of possession.

“THIS IS OUR SEVA”: GENDER AND

HINDUISM IN THE DIASPORA

In Portugal, Hindu ritual practice, traditionally male, includes activities

such as the reading and the ritualization of katha14 or the performance of
hawan,15 carried out by two widows of Brahmins, who travel either to the
residences on the request of the members of the community to officiate at
ritual ceremonies, or to the temple to direct ritual community performances.
These women act as priestesses, exhibiting adornments typically associated
with Brahmin ritualists, such as necklaces (mala) of rudraksha seeds,16 and
receiving payments in money and food in exchange for their ritual perfor-
mance at the devotees’ houses. Doing this, they challenge both male exclusiv-
ity in the enactment of rituals, and their own status as widows (widowhood
is considered to be extremely inauspicious within Hinduism, and normally
results in the exclusion of widows from the ritual field).17
The satsang group in particular is led by women who take on roles of
leadership in the organization of the religious and cultural activities of the
community. As representatives of the female nucleus and as figures who are
revered by the other members of the community due to their dominance of
the sacred texts, these women carry out the task of the public reading of
sacred texts, as well as the recitation of hymns and the intonation of canticles.
During the public religious celebrations, the satsang group occupies the
place closest to the temple sanctuary, directing the devotional moments and
ritual activity. Apart from this directing task, this group also assumes the
responsibility for undertaking religious and cultural activities, from the
preparation of the space and the acquisition of materials in accordance with
the festivity in question, to the confection of food. They have acquired a
prominent status, not only because of their age but also through the religious
knowledge they have accumulated over the years.
This privilege allows us to distinguish them from the other women, even
if they are of the same age or of a higher social status. This group has a par-
ticular power, as their religious knowledge is considered by most Hindus to
be the reservoir of their cultural identity.
Also publicly visible are the possessions by the Goddess performed by
some women. This auspicious status, which derives from the close relation-

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 Gender and Power 165
ship between women devotees and goddesses,18 is expressed in the capacity to
incorporate goddesses who communicate with devotees through their words
and their bodily expressions in specific ritual situations. This is described as
“having mataji” or as “the Goddess descending”, with their body function-
ing as a means of communication of the divinity with her devotees through
performances of possession. These performances take place in public spaces,
with particular intensity during Navratri, but also in smaller groups in a
domestic setting.19
It is believed that the women who incorporate the goddesses have qual-
ities that result from their great proximity to the divine. Therefore their
behavior should also be oriented around exemplary moral conduct. Apart
from the symbolic power they represent, even when they are not incorporat-
ing goddesses, they are potential manipulators of the actions of the group
in general and of individuals in particular: they are asked questions, and
requested to give blessings and suggestions for the resolution of concrete
problems, and to provide solutions. This particular power allows the man-
agement of anxieties, the clarification of doubts and the provision of solu-
tions that condition the lives of individuals.20
The ethnographic data shows that from the domestic space to the public
sphere, these women have assumed increasing visibility among their com-
munity since their arrival in Portugal. Initiated in Mozambique, where the
great majority are to be found, and abruptly interrupted, this female privi-
lege has become a main characteristic of the performance of Hinduism in
Portugal. Of the three Hindu temples located in the Greater Lisbon Area,
only the Radha-Krishna Temple has a resident priest, whose ritual activity
is exclusively circumscribed to this location. On the other hand, at the other
two temples located in the Greater Lisbon area, Jay Ambe Temple and Shiva
Temple, the religious activities are carried out by women.
Thus, women take on the dharmic task21 of religious transmission, while
they also carry out solid processes of consolidation of power through religion.
The female code of conduct, the stridharma (stri = woman; dharma = duty),
seeks to regulate female behavior based on the idea that the unstable, weak
and impure nature of the woman should be controlled. Manu’s Laws, the
oldest Hindu legislative code, clearly defines women’s obligations: they should
marry and be exemplary wives, without allowing themselves to be controlled
by their nature.
On the one hand, religious transmission is open to negotiation and
change, and can result in forms of resistance and opportunities for power for
the women. However, on the other hand, they help to spread the orthodox
perspectives on the duties of women propagated by forms of diffusion, such
as television and the Internet.22
In accordance with these female stereotypes the woman is considered
responsible for the maintenance of the family, as the married woman’s fer-
tility is the guarantee of the continuity of their group. According to Rosa
Maria Perez, not only is the woman responsible for social continuity, but

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 166 Inês Lourenço
also this responsibility is the reason why the female status seems to be dis-
paraged.23
In fact, feminist social scientists observed since the 1970s that invisibil-
ity of women’s importance in the social life of the group was a privileged
strategy to dominate and subordinate them. The silencing of nondominant
social groups such as women was referred by Ardener as “mutedness”. This
process in which “muted groups” can express themselves only through the
prevailing ideologies leads to their silencing and thus to their subordination
by the dominant structures. Moreover, the reduction of women’s power to
their ‘natural’ capacities of giving birth and child raising is one of the major
topics of feminist anthropology, according to which this would be the main
cause that facilitated the universal subordination of woman.24
Apart from their reproductive role, Hindu women should also convoke
the divine protection of their house and family, making vows (vratas) in
order to achieve family stability. In exchange for these requests, they carry
out vows, making offerings and fasting.
Placing the responsibility for the family’s survival in the hands of women
forces them to control their destiny and that of their family through negotia-
tion with the gods.25 Hindu women perpetuate the making of vows as a way
of achieving their desires, at the same time as they safeguard their honor,
thereby fulfilling their duty as women and wives.
As we have seen before, the married woman’s fertility is the guarantee of
the social continuity of the group, and the power of the woman and conse-
quent disparagement of the female status reside in this fact;26 the capacity
for cultural reproduction of the community is the central axis of her power.
The capacity of systems of male domination to omit female power is less
effective in the diaspora given the public visibility of South Asian women, as
well as the roles taken up by them in the new society where they established.
Therefore, the liberation from male control further allows for religion to
be seen as a possibility for female socializing. The religious moments that
these women organize allow them to establish a harmony between socializ-
ing and the fulfillment of religious duties, occupying significant places in the
ritual context of Hinduism, transforming their gender statuses and challeng-
ing male supremacy in the religious sphere. However, simultaneously, they
accept and promote the foundations of the patriarchal ideology.
Gender patterns are susceptible to undergoing changes in the diaspora;
the transformation of the female status in cooperation with the sphere of
religion seems to be a recurrent.27 In this sense, migration and resettlement in
new social and cultural spaces promote the reconfiguration of gender roles.
However, in this case, the status reformatting occurs in many cases within
a conservative patriarchal structure, the values of which are perpetuated by
the women themselves. Apart from this, the reestablishment of cultural tradi-
tions promoted in the diaspora is often under the women’s control, creating
new forms of female representation and negotiation, the reconstruction of
identities and the emergence of a new woman that the diaspora facilitates.

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 Gender and Power 167
As my research among Hindu women in Portugal shows, the interaction
between gender and religion offers new status possibilities, an example of
which is the adoption by women of ritual tasks traditionally exclusive to the
male domain. The transposition of the religious activity of women from the
domestic space to the outside allows, as well as the transformation of their
statuses, a greater openness to socializing and to a less controlled expression
of their actions. This openness is provided by moments of female exclusivity
that ally devotion and recreation in which liberation from male control is
more visible.
A concrete set of women was subject to more intense research. Their atti-
tude to my presence revealed a world of female complicities and their expres-
sion of autonomy and will. Dancing, singing and joking are expressions of
divine love (bhakti) and, at the same time, of freedom from male domination
and from behavioral rules, taking advantage of the female auspiciousness
that is explicit in the cult of goddesses (mataji) and in the maternal figures
of Hinduism. The term mataji means mother and is often attributed to the
Goddess and her various manifestations ritually incorporated by some of
these women. Motherhood, associated with the function of support of the
group, is the motor of their actions, going beyond the barriers of the domes-
tic and family space to the public sphere. In this context new interpretations
of Hinduism emerge from the balance between the traditional ideology on
gender patterns and the process of renewal of female roles.
The production of strategies of power and resistance, which generates
negotiations legitimized by mobility, reveals ancient and new oppressions,
but also opportunities to challenge them through the reclamation of citizen-
ship. These dialects produce new men and women who redefine territories
attributed to regional, national and individual identities, producing new his-
tories with various agendas.28
With regard to the ethnographic case discussed, we may conclude that
women are central to the process of Hindu cultural transmission in the
domestic and public spheres. However, it is also important to comprehend
what the motive is that brings them to the task they consider as their own.
The older women, negotiating new responsibilities in the field of religious
activity, claim for themselves the function of giving continuity to the reli-
gious tradition of their ancestors through transmission to their descendents.
Transcending the function of the domestic space and carrying it out in a
public space, the women assume the dharmic task of ensuring the cultural
continuity of the group, at the same time as they claim for themselves new
ritual roles and new community responsibilities.
The functions of stridharma overflow the domestic sphere, ensuring the
well-being of the family, as well as guaranteeing the well-being of the entire
community, through service (seva).
Therefore, the interaction of gender with the religious sphere simultane-
ously brings with it the acquisition of autonomy and the acceptance of ste-
reotyped female roles in the discourses of the legitimization of the patriarchal

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 168 Inês Lourenço
system. In this way Portuguese Hindu women move within a structure that
attempts to keep them authentic through stereotypes that make the Hindu
women into a symbol of the essence of Indianness.

ACHIEVING SELF-REALIZATION THROUGH BRAHMA

KUMARIS: DISCOURSES ON FEMALE SPIRITUALITY

The ethnographic example that I shall present now focuses on the perspec-
tive of the women who have become members of the Brahma Kumaris spiri-
tual movement in Portugal, based on a research undertaken in two centers
located in the city of Lisbon.
The empirical material is based on the collection of the statements of
women through informal interviews that particularly relate to personal
experiences associated with the spirituality experienced in this movement.
In this way, I tried to understand the processes of redefinition of gender
roles vis-à-vis the dominant social and family female standards in order to
identify new gender identities and new forms of power.
The foundation of this community in Portugal dates back to 1986. In
1998 they were attributed the status of a public utility institution by the
Portuguese state. Distributed around various schools in various cities and
towns in the country, this organization organizes workshops, conferences
and Raja Yoga introductory courses, with the aim of helping individuals to
find practical spirituality that improves personal performance and promotes
self-transformation in order to create a peaceful and harmonious world.
According to Paul Heelas, the main difference between religion and spiri-
tuality resides in the fact that the first implies a relationship of obedience
in relation to a hierarchical authority, while the latter views the sacred as a
means of improving the internal lives of the devotees.29 This case study is
consistent with Heelas’s proposal since Brahma Kumaris philosophy allows
the development of a deep spirituality through meditations that seek to facil-
itate the individual in discovering his or her true identity.
In this process of self-discovery, the individual constructs his journey on
his own, centered on himself, based on the principle that only after improving
himself can he contribute to improving the world. In this case, the ethno-
graphic data fits with the typology of Heelas; the autonomy and individuality
offered by the spirituality may be, according to this author, the basis of the
process of the replacement of the traditional and institutionalized religions
with spiritual holistic alternatives.30
Theoretically the distinction between religion and spirituality may be
summarized this way: while the first implies a process of institutionalization,
supported by relations of power, based on doctrines, theologies and rituals,
the second prioritizes individual and intimate processes that are opposed
to conformity among the group of members of a specific religion.31 Thus,
religious individualism and the authority located in the inner self promoted

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 Gender and Power 169
by spirituality lead to the enhancement of personal and direct experiences
with the sacred.32
Despite the fact that it considers itself a spiritual movement and not a
religious movement, Brahma Kumaris has a Hindu cultural base, dubbed
“Hindu-based NRM” by Puttick33 and considered by Ramsey, Manderson
and Smith to be a movement that is “tightly organized and rule-bounded and
certainly fits with any definition of a religion, with its scriptures, rituals, and
criteria for membership”.34
According to the testimonials collected among the Brahma Kumaris
women in Portugal, this movement rejects the designation of religion, opting
to consider itself a “movement”, a “philosophy” or a “university”, which
has the objective of transmitting knowledge through Raja Yoga. Despite the
cultural base associated with India and the system of beliefs from Hinduism
itself, Brahma Kumaris prefers to contextualize itself within the New Age
movement, in the sense that they that seek to redirect the soul towards what
is considered to be its origin, in a process of spiritual transformation.
The ascetic possibility, denied to women in many religions, becomes
accessible to women by joining Brahma Kumaris: this is one of the few
spiritual movements in which women have positions of leadership and in
which they are offered the possibility to combine their daily activities and
responsibilities with a spiritual deepening.35 Elizabeth Puttick develops the
question of gender equality, based on an idea of the inversion of gender roles
proposed by Skultans, according to which the Brahma Kumaris movement
is composed of women who control men, occupying positions of power
and status, in a context in which men are subordinate, leaving the superior
spiritual tasks to women.36
My empirical research allows us to state that the Brahma Kumaris mem-
bers, men and women, postulate an ideology of gender equality that facili-
tates a peaceful relationship between everyone, in a context in which the role
of leadership is indeed destined to a greater part for women, as instituted by
the founder of the movement. However, despite this discourse, the observed
reality leads me to agree with Puttick with regard to Brahma Kumaris’s
female superiority.
The emergence of the Brahma Kumaris movement generated a phenom-
enon of confrontation and rupture with family structures and with tradi-
tional gender patterns. Founded in India—in Hyderabad, Sindh, currently
part of Pakistan—in 1936, this organization had as its main impact the chal-
lenge to the patriarchal structure through empowerment given to women
in a context in which their status was deeply disparaged.37 The founder of
this movement, a jewelry merchant named Dada Lekhraj, began practicing
cyclical devotional meetings after a period of visions and spiritual experi-
ences that led him to cease his activity and place his entire fortune in the
hands of some women, to whom he attributed the task of the leadership of
the spiritual community, initially called Om Madali, and afterwards, from
the 1960s onwards, Brahma Kumaris.

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 170 Inês Lourenço
Deeply revolutionary for the era, this movement created an opportunity
for women to declare their independence in relation to the role that tradi-
tional society attributed to them. Freeing themselves from the authority of
their parents and husbands, they had the opportunity to acquire an auton-
omy that provided them with an alternative life, dedicated to spirituality
and asceticism.
The roles of leadership of this organization as well as a celibate life gov-
erned by rigid standards of purification intensified the self-esteem of women,
giving them strength to resist to the domination and threats of the men in
their families. The repercussions of these new female positions resulted in
persecutions and even in court cases.
After settling for fourteen years in Karachi, the group moved to Rajast-
han, and opened up the campus in Gyansarovar in 1955 and subsequently
that of Shantivan in 1981. After Brahma Baba’s death, then known as Dada
Lekhraj, in 1969, three of the first leaders formally assumed leadership,
initiating a process of expansion abroad, establishing their first center in
London in 1971 and receiving the status of NGO from the United Nations
in 1981.
The Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University is currently an inter-
national organization that promotes activities and courses with the inten-
tion of providing a transformation of the individual through the search for
his internal peace and through spirituality. Based on the visions of Brahma
Baba, this movement believes in the existence of a repetitive and eternal
cycle of five descending ages, which are subsequently renewed at the end
of the cycle. In accordance with this theory of the ages of the world, loss of
purity decreases as the world passes from the Golden Age to the Silver Age,
thence to the Copper Age and finally to the Iron Age. Before the renewal and
the beginning of a new Golden Age, the world goes through an era of transi-
tion called the Age of Confluence, at which point, according to the vision of
Brahma Kumaris, the current world is to be found. The proof of this lies in
the present catastrophic events. In this sense, it is necessary for individuals
to initiate a process of purification that will allow them access to paradise
on Earth, the Golden Age.38
This purification has the final objective of self-knowledge, recogni-
tion of the importance of the soul and encountering the Supreme Being
through meditation. The meditation technique used by Brahma Kumaris
is that of Raja Yoga, through which the individual should manage to
achieve a level of communication with the divinity, frequently known as
Shiva, the Supreme Soul, considered the father of all souls, the Supreme
Being.39 Raja Yoga meditation allows the individual to reach conscious-
ness of his soul, a glowing point of energy, at the basis of this medi-
tative practice. This meditation technique, independent of Hinduism, is
described in practical terms as the study of the essence, the soul, the way
of reconnecting the soul to God through the remembrance of that which
has been forgotten by each being, the light of the soul, divine energy, and

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 Gender and Power 171
values. Raja Yoga is an exercise in remembering this power on a daily
basis.

“The Majority of Us Are Mothers”: Discourses

on Gender and Spirituality
According to my research the process of detachment from material world
among women who attempt to access this transcendent reality does not
eliminate the qualities regarded by themselves as intrinsic to women. These
remain significant factors in the construction of their new spiritual path.
Various forms of discipline must be followed by all of the members of this
movement: apart from meditation, daily spiritual classes, abstinence from
alcohol, tobacco and drugs, strictly vegetarian food and celibacy. Many of
the members of Brahma Kumaris must follow these principles while fulfill-
ing family and social obligations in their daily lives.
The phenomenon of adherence to these spiritual disciplines with daily
obligations assumes particular interest if it is related to the question of gender.
My data shows how the great majority of the members of Brahma Kumaris
are women, and as this is an organization led by women, the importance of
the combination of spiritual activity with the day-to-day sphere and female
domesticity should be an element of analytical focus.
In this sense, I turned to the Brahma Kumaris movement in an attempt
to deepen my understanding of female agency in the context of spirituality.
Information collected among this group allowed me to demonstrate the way
in which this type of spirituality offers women the possibility of taking advan-
tage of their personal experiences, resulting in feelings of self-realization.
In the Portuguese case, like in the Polish context described by Koscianska,
motherhood is the basic reference for the spiritual mission of the Brahma
Kumaris women. Taking on the task of being mothers of the world as well as
physical mothers,40 these women discovered in this philosophy new forms of
being a woman, many of them juggling entry into a new spiritual dimension
with social and family activities.
The discovery of the spiritual universe offered by Brahma Kumaris was
described to me by the women who became members of this organization
in Portugal as an entry into a new dimension, through which they begin a
new personal experience that allows them to find a happiness that over-
comes the previous experiences of their lives. This transformation is viewed
as a rebirth, an awakening to spiritual consciousness that influences their
ways of thinking, seeing themselves and seeing others. This entire process
of self-discovery is viewed as a journey of internal purification, and the
daily disciplines and the principles proposed by this philosophy—such as
vegetarianism or celibacy—are seen as a form of maintenance of a peaceful
consciousness and connection with the divine.
The discovery of internal potential through meditation allows the women
to achieve the primary objective of this process of individual perfection,

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 172 Inês Lourenço
which is to love themselves. After this internal revolution, they subsequently
experience an encounter with God and total submission to the maternal
mission of informing people who do not know about this form of conscious-
ness, in order to transform the world into a terrestrial paradise.
Through this philosophy women gain self-esteem and personal fulfill-
ment. The work of meditation and internalization of positive thinking
results in an internal transformation, without women needing to subject
themselves to any form of isolation from family and social life. This enables
them to juggle this spiritual aspect with the remaining activities of their daily
lives, one of the great advantages of this movement. Positive thinking is seen
as generating positive attitudes and positive relationships, due to the power
of thinking in the transformation of the way in which each person sees
him- or herself and sees others. This way, it is possible to create new ways
of life that result from the improvement of self-esteem, seen as the recovery
of imprisoned values.
According to the women who participated in my research, daily disci-
pline, as well as the principles of vegetarianism and celibacy, is considered a
way towards moving up to a higher level of energy, a supersensory pleasure
that results from a profound internal development, a process of sublima-
tion of the experience of an energy that is so heightened that it supplants all
other energies previously experienced. Once someone knows this reality, the
adoption of these principles becomes as natural as the act of breathing, and
to contact with weak and inferior energies again is unthinkable for these
women.
Therefore the decision by many married women to cut themselves off
from a sexual life has generated, from the foundation of this movement, great
family and social frictions, and this continues up to the present.41 However,
despite these frequently generated family divisions, some couples remain
married and men are also attracted to this movement, which, although being
mainly composed of women, also has some male participants.
The analogy between motherhood and what they view as its vital func-
tion and also the source of their power is a recurring theme in the discourse
of the Brahma Kumaris women, with their spiritual objective viewed as a
maternal mission to nourish souls.
The act of spiritually feeding their unknowing children is compared to the
activity of mothers that many of these women know from their own experi-
ence. The maternal register is what allows them to receive dispersed souls
and gives them understanding, patience and acceptance—according to them
these are things only a mother has the ability to learn. Despite the soul being
seen as genderless, it temporarily occupies male and female bodies, and it
is in female bodies that it manifests itself in the most sensitive form and is
most open to spirituality. It is surely this type of ideology that attracts a great
number of women to this philosophical school.42
The foundation of this movement was, as we have seen, revolutionary in
the sense of attributing to women the responsibilities that are traditionally

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 Gender and Power 173
male from the point of view of contact with the divine, which was forbid-
den to them for centuries. This phenomenon is viewed as an intervention
of the universe in order to balance equality between men and women, with
leadership attributed to women as the manifestation of this repositioning of
the logic of equality.
The female leadership of this movement—despite not being exclusively
so—is also connected to the experience of motherhood, and an example of
this is the fact that the majority of the women in charge of Brahma Kumaris
centers in Portugal are mothers. The expression “the majority of us are
mothers” discloses the sharing of an experience that has revealed itself of
great use to many of the women in the new role they are called on to play:
that of functioning as instruments of God, to give birth to new souls and to
nourish their consciousness through knowledge.
As a fifty-five-year-old Brahma Kumari woman explains:

At the centers in Portugal and all over the world, the majority of us
are mothers. Because mothers know everything. And when they make
decisions it is because they know, not because they are told. A spiritual
mother knows what she is doing and knows the submission that she had
and why she had it. It was a conscious submission. It is not a question
of devotion or vocation; it is related to the heart, with the feeling that
comes from the soul. You like to be an instrument to give birth, to give
life, because the soul is life and sometimes we are lifeless. If we are under
the influence of negative forces what will become of our lives? . . . I can
be an instrument for the light of God to flow and bring new conscious-
ness to those who are unconscious.

In the same way, the life of the Brahma Kumaris philosophy in Poland
reveals motherhood as a female identity that goes beyond the biological
fact of being a mother, stretching to, as well as daily family obligations, a
process of spiritual purification that generates new forms of female identi-
ties: “Gradually women redefine their roles as wives and mothers. A new
way of motherhood is practiced—spiritual motherhood, which goes beyond
nuclear family and kinship network. All maternal obligations and skills,
like feeding, nurturing, loving and many others, are used to serve global
family”.43
As the Portuguese case suggests, the idea of service to this global fam-
ily—the unknowing souls of the entire world who need to be nourished
with knowledge—contributes to the intensification of self-esteem and self-
realization of women, at the same time as it generates new forms of female
identity and agency.
According to another woman who follows this philosophy, women also
find a source of internal strength and personal realization in this form of
spirituality. The female and maternal character is reinforced by the murli,44
where you can read: “Greetings to the mothers! You, children, should place

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 174 Inês Lourenço
your mothers first because they have already been through a lot”. The same
woman quoted earlier says:

I discovered that God exists and God is a reality in my life, just like
breathing for my body, and without this energy I cannot live. It is a
question of the relationship of you counting on a Being who listens, who
knows you, who is your companion, you share your life with, you are
understood and loved, and when this happens, self-realization is there
and life has its true value for you.

The increasing popularity of Eastern spirituality in contemporary Western

society reveals disenchantment with the West.45 This alternative spirituality
enables women to overcome disenchantment and, in this case, new gender
roles that replace the traditional feminine patterns. The development of the
female potential, whose qualities are often praised—especially through the
metaphor of motherhood—is reflected not only in personal achievement but
also in their roles as spiritual guides and leaders of this movement.
Interestingly, most of these women, who cut some of their family ties and
obligations—as demonstrated by the vow of celibacy—appeal to the patriar-
chal model of maternity as a natural condition of women in their narratives
of feminine power. The creativity of this process lies in the significant fact
that women replace physical motherhood with spiritual motherhood. Thus,
if on the one hand they make use of maternal stereotypes, on the other they
create a woman’s role alternative to the traditional Western standards: one
of spiritual guide and leader, which keeps them away from the family obliga-
tions that the patriarchal model implies.

CONCLUSION

The two ethnographic cases analyzed present different strategies with dif-
ferent objectives but with a common rhetoric, characterized by two central
topics: motherhood and service.
As we have seen, the functions of the Hindu women of Santo António dos
Cavaleiros go far beyond the family and domestic circle. The stridharma has
been expanded to religious performance and transmission and to responsi-
bility for the survival not only of the family but also of the entire group: “it is
our seva (service). Seva is also our dharma.46 We must continue it”, explain
the women of the satsang group when I ask them why they have this task as
their mission. In the same way, the Brahma Kumari women take on service
to the global family as their mission, transcending the female tasks of the
family circle to arrive at a universal context in the sense of serving souls and
nourishing them with the light of knowledge.
In this sense, motherhood takes on a central importance. In the case of
the Hindu women of Santo António dos Cavaleiros, the values associated

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 Gender and Power 175
with motherhood are a reference not only in their own family but also in
a broader perspective, as proved by their concern with the education of
the younger members of their community. Motherhood, associated with the
function of support of the group, is the motor of their actions, overcoming
the barriers of the domestic and family space to reach the public sphere, in a
universe in which new interpretations of Hinduism emerge from the balance
between traditional ideology on gender patterns and the process of renewal
of female roles.
In the case of the Brahma Kumaris women, motherhood is likewise a
central concept, both at the level of discourse, as an explanatory and met-
aphorical form, and in relation to personal realization, whereby physical
motherhood and spiritual motherhood are two gratifying experiences,
enhancing self-esteem.
In both cases the use of essentialized ideas of femininity—with moth-
erhood as the central reference—is evident in the discourses on women’s
power. The ideological structure of Hinduism and the patriarchal family
model impose limits on the actions of women, inscribed in a rationale of
female subordination in which the women themselves cooperate, stereo-
typed in the central characters of the Hindu narratives. In the case of the
Brahma Kumaris spirituality, in which authority is located in the inner self
and contact with the divine is a personal rather than a community experi-
ence, women’s access to power is more direct, manifested in the leadership
of the movement, either in administration or as spiritual guides.
To conclude, it is important to note in both cases that women can find
mechanisms of self-realization that generate new gender identities. Despite
the differences between religion and spirituality, both motherhood and ser-
vice propelled women’s spheres of power.
Among the many similarities that can be detected between the two groups
discussed, the main one is the centrality of gender and power in both cases.
Similarly, the reproduction of certain patriarchal models—while others are
challenged—also takes place. Both cases depict how women accept stereo-
types that reduce them to mothers, while creatively using this stereotype to
justify their spiritual charisma.

NOTES

1. See Paul Heelas, “The Spiritual Revolution: From ‘Religion’ to ‘Spiritual-

ity’”, in Religions in the Modern World: Traditions and Transformations,
ed. Linda Woodhead (London: Routledge, 2002); Paul Heelas and Linda
Woodhead, eds., The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way
to Spirituality (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Adam Possamai, “A Profile of
New Agers: Social and Spiritual Aspects”, Journal of Sociology 36, no.
3 (2000): 364–377; Tamasin Ramsay, Leonore Manderson and Wendy
Smith, “Changing a Mountain into a Mustard Seed: Spiritual Practices and
Responses to Disaster among New York Brahma Kumaris”, in Journal of
Contemporary Religion 25, no. 1 (2010): 89–105.

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 176 Inês Lourenço
2. According to the Report of the High Level Committee of the Indian Dias-
pora (L. Singhvi, et al., eds., Report of the High Level Committee on the
Indian Diaspora (New Delhi: Ministry of External Affairs, 2001)), there are
around thirty-three thousand Hindus living in Portugal.
3. The Report of the High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora (2001)
states that the Indian community resident in Portugal comprises around sev-
enty thousand individuals, including five thousand Indian citizens. The data
of the Indian Embassy in Portugal indicate around sixty thousand Indians,
of whom around seven thousand have an Indian passport.
4. Luís Antunes, “O Bazar e a Fortaleza de Moçambique: A Comunidade
Baneane do Guzerate e a Transformação do Comércio Afro-asiático (1686–
1810)”, (master’s thesis, Lisbon New University, 2001).
5. Jorge Malheiros, Imigrantes na Região de Lisboa: Os Anos da Mudança:
Imigração e Processo de Integração das Comunidades de Origem Indiana
(Lisbon: Edições Colibri, 1996), 143.
6. The Associação de Solidariedade Social Templo de Shiva (Shiva Temple
Solidarity Association), the entity that assumes the leadership of the temple,
was established in 1984 in Santo António dos Cavaleiros, with the aim of
bringing together the Hindu population of the district and promoting the
development of religious and social activities. The Hindu community living
there grew substantially, making it urgent to purchase its own space to allow
its congregation and socialization. In 1991, the association was legalized,
and it began the project that lasted the following ten years: the construction
of a Hindu temple in Santo António dos Cavaleiros, in a plot of land ceded
by the Municipality of Loures, in the area of Torres da Bela Vista. In 2001
the process of constructing a temporary building began, preceded by the
auspicious ceremony of inauguration of the land for the construction of the
sacred place (bhumipujan) by Swami Satyamitranand.
7. Satsang is a devotional meeting where people congregate to listen to or read
the scriptures frequently accompanied by chants (bhajans) and dances (garbo).
8. Sarah Lamb, White Saris and Sweet Mangoes: Aging, Gender, and Body in
North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 204.
9. Aparna Rayaprol, Negotiating Identities: Women in the Indian Diaspora
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).
10. By cultural reproduction I mean the creation of new cultural forms as a
product of interaction generated by the movements of people through dif-
ferent places, enabling the convergence between local and global.
11. Rayaprol, Negotiating Identities, 61.
12. Chris Jenks, ed., Cultural Reproduction (London: Routledge, 1993), 5.
13. It was as a consequence of the lack of Hindu priests in Portugal, and the
economic incapacity to bear the costs of the potential establishment in Por-
tugal of a Hindu priest coming from India, that the phenomenon of ritual
prestige was progressively attributed to women.
14. Narrative with a moral lesson, the recitation of which usually accompanies
the ritualization.
15. Vedic fire-cult ritual.
16. Seeds of the tree Elaeocarpus ganitrus, which has sacred properties, associ-
ated with Shiva.
17. The female role in India that they most approximate in their performance
in Portugal is that of “temple attendants” or “pujarini” (see F. A. Marglin,
Wives of the God King: The Ritual of the Devadasis of Puri (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 54) in certain tasks, where the participation
of widows of a postmenopausal age is recorded in assistance in religious
tasks in the temple, which they are allowed to do because, despite the fact

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 Gender and Power 177
that they are widows, their advanced age grants them a status of purity.
These tasks are secondary and never attain—similarly to what is seen in
Portugal—the office of rituals that require the presence of a male priest.
18. See Vanaja Dhruvarajan, “Hinduism and the Empowerment of Women”, in
Gender and Society in India: Theme Papers and Urban Studies, ed. R. Indira
and D. Behera (Delhi: Manak, 1999), 47.
19. Navratri is a festival of nine (nav) nights (rat) dedicated to the Mother God-
dess. The Navratri is celebrated twice a year, the first being observed in the
month of Chaitra, and the second in the month of Aaso. These two periods
respectively mark the beginning of summer and winter season. The worship
of the nights of Navratri is held by dances around the garbo, an octagonal
wooden structure illuminated and decorated with images of various manifes-
tations of the Goddess (traditionally with a central lamp) placed in the middle
of the circle of devotees. The celebration of Navratri is the preferred time for
the ‘descent’ of the goddesses in some women’s’ bodies. The women who have
the power to embody the Goddess dance in a frenzy and unevenly, shaking their
bodies, groaning and shuddering. They are assisted by other women close to
them, who loosen their hair, making them more similar to the female deities
they embody. The mataji (mother, goddess) subsequently incorporated in these
women is quickly surrounded by devotees who ask for blessings and advices.
20. For deeper information on Hindu possession in Portugal, see J. G. P. Bastos
and S. P. Bastos, De Moçambique a Portugal: Reinterpretações Identitárias
do hinduísmo em Viagem (Lisbon: Fundação Oriente, 2001).
21. From dharma, the duty of compliance with universal law.
22. TV shows, such as the Ramayana serials, transmit a conservative image of
women, of which Sita is the main model.
23. Rosa Perez, Kings and Untouchables: A Study of the Caste System in West-
ern Gujarat (Delhi: Chronicle Books, 2004), 100.
24. See Louise Lamphere, “Strategies, Cooperation and Conflict among Women
in Domestic Groups”, in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Rosaldo
and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974); Sherry
Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?”, in Woman, Culture,
and Society, ed. Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1974); Michelle Rosaldo, “Woman, Culture, and Society:
A Theoretical Overview”, in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle
Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974).
25. Kim Knott, Hinduism in Leeds: A Study of Religious Practice in the Indian
Hindu Community and Hindu-Related Groups, Monograph Series (Leeds:
University of Leeds, 1986), 23.
26. Perez, Kings and Untouchables.
27. See Knott, Hinduism in Leeds; Kim Knott, “Hindu Temple Rituals in Brit-
ain: Reinterpretation of Tradition”, in Hinduism in Great Britain: The Per-
petuation of Religion in an Alien Cultural Milieu, ed. Richard Burghart
(London: Tavistock, 1987); Kim Knott, “Hindu Women, Destiny and Strid-
harma”, Religion 26 (1996): 15–35; Kim Knott, “Hinduism in Britain”, in
The South Asian Diaspora in Britain, Canada and the United States, ed.
Harold Coward, John Hinnels and Raymond Williams (New York: State
University of New York Press, 2000); Aparna Rayaprol, “Gender Ideologies
and Practices among South Indian Immigrants in Pittsburgh”, Sagar, South
Asian Graduate Research Journal 2, no. 1 (1995): 268–270; Rayaprol,
Negotiating Identities; Aparna Rayaprol, “Can You Talk Indian? Shifting
Notions of Community and Identity in the Indian Diaspora”, in Commu-
nity and Identities: Contemporary Discourses on Culture and Politics in
India, ed. Surinder Jodhka (Delhi: SAGE, 2001).

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 178 Inês Lourenço
28. Sonita Sarker and Esha Niyogi De, “Introduction: Marking Times and Ter-
ritories”, in Trans-Status Subjects: Gender in the Globalization of South
and Southeast Asia, ed. Sonia Sarker and Esha Niyogi De (London: Duke
University Press, 2002), 2.
29. Heelas and Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution; Heelas, “The Spiritual
Revolution”.
30. Heelas, “The Spiritual Revolution”, 358.
31. See Ramsay, Manderson and Smith, “Changing a Mountain into a Mustard
Seed”, 90.
32. Possamai, “A Profile of New Agers”.
33. Elizabeth Puttick, “Women in New Religious Movements”, in New Reli-
gious Movements: Challenge and Response, ed. Bryan Wilson and Jamie
Cresswell (London: Routledge, 1999).
34. Ramsay, Manderson and Smith, “Changing a Mountain into a Mustard
Seed”, 91.
35. Puttick, “Women in New Religious Movements”, 160.
36. Ibid., 144.
37. See Lawrence Babb, Redemptive Encounters: Three Modern Styles in the
Hindu Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Agnieszka
Koscianska, “On Celibate Marriages: Conversion to the Brahma Kumaris
in Poland”, in On the Margins of Religion, ed. Francis Pine and João de
Pina-Cabral (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008); Tamasin Ramsay and Wendy
Smith, “The Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University”, IIAS Newsletter
47 (2008): 3–5.
38. Lawrence Babb, “Glancing: Visual Interaction in Hinduism”, Journal of
Anthropological Research 37, no. 4 (1981): 387–401.
39. See R. K. Braz, “A Reinterpretation of Bhakti theology: From Pustimarg
to Brahma Kumaris”, in Devotional Literature in South Asia Current
Research, 1985–1988, ed. Ronald McGregor, 298–313 (New York: Uni-
versity of Cambridge Oriental, 1992), 303–304.
40. The expression is inspired by the self-description of the Portuguese women
who pioneered the institutionalization of Brahma Kumaris in Portugal.
41. Despite the rupture with socially instituted family norms, celibacy is also a
source of spiritual power (Koscianska, “On Celibate Marriages”).
42. Such features as the female essence contradict the idea that the individual
has no body (is only soul), and consequently has no gender. This idea, based
on the opposition between body and soul, converts the gender, as it is an
attribute of the body, to a secondary aspect. Silva discusses gender issues in
the Brahma Kumaris philosophy as follows: “The question of performative
identity of the pure and genderless, however, has to live with the weight of
the contradiction. After all, if we consider, for example, the idea that the
paternal law, represented by the figure of Dada Lekhraj, who has attributed
the existence to the kumaris, the pure daughters, then we realize that gender
is not secondary as well” (Daniel Silva, “Identidades e performatividade de
Gênero nas práticas discursivas da Brahma Kumaris”, Cadernos de Lingua-
gem e Sociedade 9, no. 1 [2008]: 5–37).
43. Koscianska, “On Celibate Marriages”, 181.
44. Basic teachings of the Brahma Kumaris movement, of divine inspiration and
proclaimed by Brahma Baba.
45. T. Phillips and H. Aarons, “Looking ‘East’: An Exploratory Analysis of West-
ern Disenchantment”, International Sociology 22, no. 3 (2007): 325–341.
46. Universal law, compliance with which is the main objective of the life of a
Hindu.

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 10 Obscuring the Role of Power
and Gender in Contemporary
Spiritualities
Kim Knibbe

Contemporary spiritualities often conceive of themselves as a critique of

institutionalized religion, the ways in which these religious organizations
are ‘contaminated’ by a close association with power and all the ways in
which power can be abused. Furthermore, they see themselves as providing
an alternative to the usually male-dominated hierarchies of more traditional
religious organizations that are closely linked to a male-dominated social
order. In contrast, contemporary spirituality is often promoted (not only
by practitioners but also by researchers) as empowering, individualistic and
not biased in terms of gender. For this reason, contemporary spiritualities
have received much interest from scholars working in the tradition of the
study of religion as well as some anthropologists. Especially on Paganism, a
number of good monographs are available.1 As noted in the introduction to
this volume, the processes of power and gendering that take place in these
contexts, other than those intended by spiritual practitioners themselves,
have not yet received much explicit attention. Furthermore, there is a ten-
dency among sociologists to classify contemporary spiritualities as marginal,
a ‘symptom of secularization rather than a counterforce’.2 In a recent publi-
cation, Aupers and Houtman have criticized the study of contemporary reli-
gion for its lack of recognition of so-called New Age as a social and cultural
phenomenon, caused by the lingering influence of secularization theories in
the sociology of religion that relegate these phenomena to the private sphere
and thus consider them to be marginal.3
An ethnographic approach, however, dispenses with such distinctions
between private and public, and recognizes that even the sphere classified as
private and therefore ‘marginal’ according to the grand theories is a product
of shared cultural notions and practices.4 In this chapter I will furthermore
depart from the recognition that also in contexts that explicitly encourage
individualism and wish to separate the links between religion and power, the
ideas and practices promoted are shared, and therefore cultural and social
phenomena subject to social processes involving power and gendering. In
order to be able to maintain that this is not the case, spiritual practitioners
have to make an effort to ‘neutralize’, purify or obscure these processes.
How is this accomplished?

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 180 Kim Knibbe
This question is related to the question of how spirituality can be analyzed
as a ‘lived religion’ in the tradition of the anthropology of religion. Within
this tradition, several strands can be recognized: the interpretative tradition
following the work of Geertz,5 but also a strong Marxist tradition6 as well as
many authors drawing on the work of Bourdieu7 and Foucault.8 The ques-
tion of how to address power and gender has much to do with the agency/
structure debate: are people agents of their own destiny, or are they largely
determined by societal and cultural structures? Both Bourdieu and Foucault
have pointed towards the importance of the body to understand how social
structures (or discourses, in Foucault’s terminology) constitute the habitus
(or subjectivities) that enable people to act on their circumstances.
Within spirituality, embodiment and subjectivity are the main site of the
‘work’ that spirituality assigns to people to be done: one has to ‘relax’,9 to
‘let go’, to ‘find oneself’, to ‘listen to one’s inner voice’, remember dreams,
interpret bodily symptoms in terms of psychological and spiritual develop-
ments. In terms of Bourdieu’s conceptualization of habitus, this means that
spirituality is working on the ways that individuals are reconciled with their
position in society, the bodily hexis: “Bodily hexis is political mythology
realised, embodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable man-
ner of standing, speaking and thereby of feeling and thinking”.10 In Bour-
dieu’s view, this bodily hexis is mostly invisible to our conscious awareness.
However, the ‘work’ that is being done on this bodily hexis can hardly be
seen as something that is hidden from people themselves. Indeed, one of
the central programs encouraged by spiritual practitioners is to become
‘more aware’ of the ways society has formed us, in order to ‘let go’ and
return to one’s ‘authentic self’. Still, one could argue that although the
work on the habitus and bodily hexis is quite explicitly encouraged, the
ways in which it reconciles people with society remain hidden from us.
Many authors have commented on the fact that spirituality seems to fit in
quite well with the demands of a neoliberal society.11 Other authors have
argued that contemporary spiritualities constitute a sacralization of moder-
nity in the Durkheimian sense: the central values of modernity are set apart
and made sacred, invested with a special aura.12 Yet spiritual practitioners
hardly see themselves as dupes of a capitalist world order, and usually they
see themselves as acting on the ills produced by modernity rather than as
the sacralizers of modernity.
In summary, there are two areas in which issues of power and gender par-
adoxically reveal themselves while at the same time becoming obscured: (1) the
tension between people’s own perception that they are developing groups,
practices and a consciousness that act critically on gendered hierarchies and
the ‘fact’ that in any sociocultural setting power and processes of gendering
are at work; and (2) the tension between the work that people themselves are
doing on their ‘bodily hexis’ and the ways in which this bodily hexis, accord-
ing to Bourdieu’s conceptualization, reconciles people to their position in an
unequal society. Through an analysis of two ethnographic vignettes I will

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 Obscuring the Role of Power and Gender 181
attempt to reveal the dynamics around these paradoxes of power. I will first
describe the context of fieldwork and the self-understanding of the role of
power and gender within the groups and networks where my fieldwork took
place. I will then describe two particular situations in which processes of
power and gendering become visible that are different from those intended
by the spiritual practitioners themselves, and then discuss how these pro-
cesses are obscured from direct awareness to the very people who wish to
act critically on gendered hierarchies and the ills of modern society. Further-
more, I will situate the gendering going on within the context of the south
of the Netherlands.

THE CONTEXT OF FIELDWORK

Between 1999 and 2002 I carried out various stints of fieldwork in net-
works of people who call themselves ‘spiritual’ in the Netherlands. The first
period of fieldwork (lasting six months) was with the visitors of a spiritual-
ist medium, called Jomanda.13 In the 1990s, she used to attract thousands
of people to her ‘healing services’. During these services, she claimed that
‘the other side’ could work through her and perform operations on people.
The hope for a miraculous healing earned her much scorn in the national
media, but also great popularity among a particular public. A survey con-
ducted with a fellow student showed that many people in her public were
of a Catholic background, the majority consisted of women and many had
only minimal schooling (only primary school or only a few years of second-
ary school). Although the media depicted these people as gullible fools, the
life history interviews that we conducted with regular visitors showed that
they felt empowered by what they learned through attending the healing
services.14
From 2001 until 2002 I participated in a so-called ‘spiritual society’ in
the south of the Netherlands.15 Before she became famous, Jomanda used to
tour these spiritual societies as a medium. One of the ethnographic vignettes
offered here analyzes another of these mediums, not quite so popular or
famous as Jomanda used to be, but nevertheless someone who was known
and respected within the network of spiritual societies, psychics, mediums,
magnetists and seekers.
One can find these spiritual societies all over the Netherlands, often the
heirs of the spiritualist societies established in the nineteenth century when
spiritualism became popular among the upper classes.16 The founders of
these societies were dedicated to the research of paranormal phenomena.
Present-day members, in contrast, usually gather to teach each other about
paranormal phenomena, or to practice their powers of paranormal per-
ception and healing. Nowadays, one can still recognize spiritualism as the
underlying discourse of the practices in these societies, although they are
open to anything that is related to spirituality, esotericism and healing.17

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 182 Kim Knibbe
CREATING A NONHIERARCHICAL, FREE
AND CREATIVE CONTEXT

The spiritual society where I did my fieldwork prided itself on being very
‘free’ and open. This was in contrast not only to ‘the church’, which was
routinely criticized as being stuck in dogma and empty rituals, spiritually
unaware and oppressing, but also to other spiritual societies in the region,
which are usually organized around a particular medium. The abuse of
power by mediums was a topic often discussed by people at the bar, after the
regular meeting of the spiritual society was over. In interviews people told
me their personal experiences in groups with mediums who were so manipu-
lative that they broke up people’s marriages, estranged children from their
parents and in other ways ‘preyed’ upon weak people by forcing them to cut
their social and emotional ties to people because these were seen as ‘holding
them back’ and not supportive of their spiritual growth. Because these medi-
ums claimed to have a direct link to the ‘beyond’, these pronouncements
carried great weight with people. These groups often operated in secret,
because of the disapproval they expected to meet within the Catholic south
of the Netherlands. It was only when spirituality became more ‘mainstream’
and less secretive, since the early 1990s, that people were able to explore
themes around spirituality in a freer and more individualistic manner and
start rejecting the interference of ‘power-mad’ mediums in their lives.
This was the background against which this society was formed by its cur-
rent informal leader. She wanted to work very differently, and did not claim
to have any paranormal abilities herself. Rather, she made a point of not
claiming any special abilities, and she was quite motherly in her demeanor
to people, saying that everybody has his own path; we should not judge each
other. And of course, men and women should feel free to develop themselves
equally and in partnership.
The society organized different types of events, characterized as ‘open’
(anybody who was interested was free to come) and ‘closed’ (members only).
The open nights often consisted of a lecture, a séance with a medium, or a ses-
sion with a psychic who would pick out members from the audience and give
them messages or advice based on what they saw paranormally—for example,
in someone’s aura.18 Evenings with a psychic or medium were especially popu-
lar, although some lectures also drew quite a crowd, depending on the topic.
During the closed nights, the idea was that members trained each other
in developing their paranormal abilities. For example, one closed night we
had a series of workshops by members. Everybody had been asked to bring
something, or to choose a skill he or she wanted to teach someone else. A
few persons, known psychics or other kinds of experts, were asked to give
plenary workshops. In the first workshop everybody was guided to draw
a clown and this drawing was then interpreted by a psychic. In the second
workshop, someone demonstrated a dream interpretation, for which I vol-
unteered to tell a dream. After this, someone demonstrated a ‘family con-

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 Obscuring the Role of Power and Gender 183
stellation’19 exercise that actually caused the person for whom this family
constellation was enacted to break out in tears. Next, we were all paired to
do a card reading20 or aura reading for each other. After ten minutes, we all
had to find another partner to learn from each other.
On one night, a dizzying array of techniques and ideas could pass by, and
there did not seem to be a touchstone for which ideas and practices were accept-
able and which were not. However, after longer participation it became clear
that underneath this eclecticism and formlessness, some quite strong boundar-
ies prevailed that were enforced in subtle and not so subtle ways. As usual, the
times when things seemed to go wrong were the most revealing.21 Ahead, I will
describe two instances in which things threatened to go wrong in the sense that
people came with interpretations that were deemed unacceptable. In the first
vignette, someone who crosses the unwritten boundaries of interpretation is
called to order by the informal leader of the group. The second vignette shows
how a discourse and practice aimed at the empowerment of women simultane-
ously produce the disempowerment of other ways of being.

A DISCUSSION AT THE BAR22

As usual, people went to the bar to have a drink and chat after the main
event of the night, which had been a sound healing. There was a newcomer
who stayed on with the regulars: Beth23 and her husband, Jeff; an herbalist
and dream interpreter with her husband and a friend of theirs; and a silent
lady of Indonesian background with her daughter.
It became clear that the newcomer needed to talk. He told us that his wife
died recently, but that he had received two messages via the medium Maria
Bemelmans. He asked about the other associations in the area, and if those
mediums were any good. There was the usual veiled discussion, with the
people ‘in the know’ implying that they did not want to make any explicit
statements, while making it clear they did not approve of those associations
because this or that medium was power-mad, or charged people for every-
thing or only tapped into the ‘lower astral sphere’.24
The stranger then introduced the subject of ‘out of body experiences’,
saying he had been experimenting with them. This received a lot of disap-
proving attention: ‘You have to be careful not to get lost due to your fascina-
tion with the paranormal’. Beth admonished him:

It’s the spiritual that counts, not all those nice little miracles. That’s the
problem with those people who just come to the séances and never come
to a lecture; they just want a message from the other side, thinking that
will solve all their problems, or to experience something spectacular.

The talk went on like this for a while, with the other regulars agreeing in
their disapproval of this passive and sensationalist attitude.

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 184 Kim Knibbe
But then the newcomer managed to get everybody’s attention back onto
his case: he told them how he once heard two of his spirit guides arguing
with each other while he was urinating. Everybody fell silent in astonish-
ment.
After this silence, a storm of protests arose among the other participants
in the discussion: “From up there, you mean? But that’s impossible, they
don’t argue!” The newcomer then explained the whole situation: at the time,
he was living next to a house inhabited by a heroin addict. Other addicts
often came over, and they would play loud techno music and generally make
his life miserable. When he went to pee, he had come to the point that he
was thinking: ‘Now it’s enough, I’m going to kill that man’. And that’s when
he heard the two voices arguing. He couldn’t hear what they were saying,
though. He was especially angry with his neighbors because of his wife,
who was often alone at home with that ‘scum’ just next door. She had bone
cancer so she was always in pain. After years of living in that hell, he came
to the point that he thought ‘scum like this should not be allowed to walk
the earth; it’s just too much to bear’.
When he finished his story, the regulars all began talking at once: ‘No,
you shouldn’t think like that! You can’t decide something like that for some-
one else’ [when somebody should die]. Beth frantically searched for words:

Just look at it from an esoteric point of view! That addict wasn’t living
next to you by accident! Apparently, the two of you had something to
teach each other. You can’t say for him what his lesson should be. But
you can say for yourself: ok, I will figure out why this is happening—I
will learn the lesson in it.

Defensively, the stranger replied: “I know all that, somewhere, but at a

moment like that you can’t think that way. Because I’m sure that’s why my
wife got cancer. Out of pure frustration”.
The others exchanged meaningful glances: ‘See, that’s it, it’s the frustra-
tion’. They did not go into the subject, but it was clear that according to
them, his wife should have dealt with the frustration by ‘learning her lesson’
and then she wouldn’t have had bone cancer. Of course, that would be a very
insensitive thing to say to a man who had just lost his wife. To close down
this line of reasoning, An said, “Never mind. Everybody has his or her own
time, your wife too”. The husband of the herbalist enigmatically held up his
hand to the stranger: “It’s all in here”.
The stranger looked intently at the hand. After a tense moment he said,
“But I don’t see anything!” Nobody cleared up his confusion. I was also
confused for a second, until I realized that the husband of the herbalist
was showing the lines in his hand, meaning that everybody’s time of death
is already engraved at birth. However, the stranger expected an ‘image’ to
appear in the hand, projected there by ‘the other side’ to give him a clue to
the meaning of all the things that happened in his life. These kinds of images

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 Obscuring the Role of Power and Gender 185
were generally expected to appear to people around powerful mediums,
such as Jomanda.
When Beth noticed he still did not understand what they were telling him,
she tried again:

Why do babies inexplicably die in their cribs? Because that soul had
to finish a lesson before going back to the Light. And the parents and
grandparents of that baby also had to learn a lesson. If you understand
that, everything becomes much clearer. Why did Hitler exist, why was
Pim Fortuyn shot?25 There is always a perpetrator and a victim. Look,
my son was eighteen when he died. He went on a holiday for the first
time without us, with a friend. Three days after he left, a drunken driver
ran him over and killed him. Well, I can tell you, you think of every pos-
sible way to avenge. I was so angry that I thought: I will send that man a
postcard every single day with the message: “This postcard was sent to
you by the mother of the boy you killed”. But it doesn’t work like that.
Without Judas, there would not have been a Jesus. Every human was
meant to be, was meant to exist and live the life he lives. That insight
was the start of my spiritual development.

After Beth’s tale of grief, which certainly equaled his own, the stranger was
apparently properly chastened and the talking relaxed.
The unwritten rules of interpretation in these circles do not allow for clas-
sifying things in terms of absolute good and evil, or for ‘spirit guides’ that
argue. The stranger tried to find ‘spiritual’ support for his emotional churn-
ings, but was instead quite severely reprimanded for thinking in the wrong
way. The fundamentals were very clearly outlined and applied: people are
here to learn a lesson and progress spiritually throughout the cycles of rein-
carnation. Everybody you meet, everything that happens, is part of a larger
pattern. Other religious repertoires can be drawn on to fit into this frame-
work. For example, the wisdom of the gospels and the resurrection of Christ
are deemed very important, but do not exclude a belief in reincarnation and
in other ‘masters’, who can be equal in importance to Jesus: during another
session a medium transmitted messages from ‘master Morya’ to every per-
son present. Master Morya was described as a very high ‘intelligence’ who,
among others, had incarnated as the Moses of the Old Testament. Blavatsky
also claimed to receive messages from a ‘master Morya’. According to her,
he was one of the ‘masters of the Himalaya’ who helped her formulate the-
osophy. Supposedly, the Morya whose messages were transmitted during
one of the evenings of this association and the Morya of Blavatsky are one
and the same.26
Within this framework, all the sources of wisdom in the world can be
translated to refer to the same universal reality, which can be known and
understood by developing spiritually. Of other, less inclusive religions or
ideologies members would say, shaking their heads with pity, “They are

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 186 Kim Knibbe
unawakened”. Or: “They didn’t get there yet”—that is, a certain level of
spiritual development and insight.
This framework in a sense is quite harsh and moralistic; the fate that
people who came to these meetings had to deal with could have occurred
in any age : death, terminal illness, sometimes abuse or other trauma. And
every time, it was made clear that this was part of ‘the lesson’ one has to
learn in this incarnation. This is not the idiosyncratic framework developed
by one group. On a larger scale, this interpretational framework was propa-
gated through Jomanda’s healing services, and via countless other spiritual
practitioners connected via spiritual societies, paranormal markets and the
countless workshops, meditation groups and seminars organized within
these networks.
The group dynamics in this formal discussion were also interesting: the
informal leader took it upon herself to correct the stranger, but she was
vigorously supported by other members and regulars of the spiritual society
meetings. They all referred to the same underlying interpretational frame-
work, belying the first impression of eclecticism and ‘anything goes’ that the
occasional visitor might have.

A SESSION WITH A MEDIUM

In the foregoing ethnographic vignette, the stranger was brought in line and
accepted the authority of the informal leader and her supporters as people
who were apparently more knowledgeable on spiritual matters than he. On
another occasion, however, the propagated interpretational framework was
not accepted by the person to whom it was applied. Interestingly, the rea-
sons why she did not accept this framework had everything to do with her
embodiment of traditional gender roles.
It was again a Wednesday evening. When I arrived, the meeting had
already started. I found a seat at the back, careful not to disturb anyone.
There were about forty people present, men and women, many couples. In
front, the leader of the night’s event was telling the audience what he was
going to do: some people would be invited to sit on a chair in front of the
audience.

I warn you, it will not be spectacular. But you will hear from these
people after their treatment that what they have experienced goes very
deep. The audience will only see them sitting still, while I pass my hands
around their bodies to unblock their energies. Sometimes I whisper
something in their ears.

He stopped to talk to one woman and she opened her eyes (the others
remained seated with their eyes closed). He commented that she probably
did not feel so much, because she couldn’t let go of her thoughts to “return

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 Obscuring the Role of Power and Gender 187
to herself”. She answered, “Yes, it seems to be so simple, but somehow I
cannot manage to do it!” The medium left it at that, and she returned to the
audience. He turned to An, one of the regulars, who was just opening her
eyes. He told her:

You are a very levelheaded person but you should learn to love yourself
more. You have been raised with a heavy emphasis on doing your duty,
but you have to learn to arrange you own priorities. Maybe at first
people will be a bit angry when you say no to their requests, but they
will not mind later on, and come to understand.

She nodded, and confirmed his description of how she was raised. But
when he told her she should give more weight to her own priorities, she
protested, “I thought I was doing that already!” “Perhaps, but you still take
other people’s needs more seriously than your own”.
He then turned to another woman, someone that I had not seen before.
First he told her that she was a very good person, always doing everything
she could for other people. “But you don’t get the gratitude you think you
deserve. And that is painful for you”. At this, she almost burst out in tears
and just nodded her head. Then, he told her that the only way to deal with
this was to learn how to give without expecting anything in return. She
protested indignantly that she did not expect anything in return. He tried
again, saying that she obviously did, because she felt hurt by the ingratitude
of people, but she refused to accept this interpretation of her feelings, and
she returned to her friends in the audience feeling offended.
What happened here? Contemporary spirituality is often criticized for
being obsessed with the self.27 Yet here a woman who clearly lived for other
people was criticized for being selfish, and told to give without expecting
anything in return! This was not an isolated incident: many times before,
I had heard women being criticized for being over-caring, suffocating their
children and loved ones by worrying too much about them. They were told
that this was a form of selfishness. Often, these ideas were repeated and
applied during the informal conversations after the ‘official’ meetings, like
the one described earlier. This same medium advised us during the meeting
that before going to sleep at night, we should put a hand on the lower part
of the stomach, where the emotions having to do with the ‘care for the self’
are seated. In this way, he said, he was able to sleep like a baby every night
while his wife was lying awake next to him. Over-caring and not caring for
the self are clearly related to each other in this framework. How can we
understand this?
In the south of the Netherlands, where this fieldwork took place, a strong
Catholic ethos prevails that particularly focuses on the role and sexuality of
women. The pre–Vatican II Catholic church strongly encouraged women
to sacrifice their own well-being for the well-being of their family, never
showing fatigue or chagrin, to be the ‘angel in the home’.28 In fact, birth

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 188 Kim Knibbe
control was seen as ‘selfish’, putting the pleasure of husband and wife before
their duty to obey God’s will.29 This ethos is still very much embodied by
women in Limburg, despite the fact that churches have emptied since the
early 1970s. Until the late 1960s, it was quite common for a woman to quit
her job (or get fired) after she married, since her husband was assumed to
take on financial responsibility for her and any children to come, while she
was assumed to be fully occupied with caring for them.
While doing research with the visitors of Jomanda, it became clear that
many of them were women with this kind of background and very little
schooling (sometimes only elementary school).30 After their children left
home, they suddenly found themselves in a society that had very little appre-
ciation for the kinds of lives they had lived, either by choice or by necessity.
This caused low self-esteem and sometimes a veritable crisis, including all
kinds of physical complaints. In a search for meaning and answers to specific
problems, some of these women enter the ‘paranormal circuit’ as the people
of the spiritual society call it, going from one medium or psychic to another.
Paradoxically, women who were accustomed to seeing themselves in
terms of service to others are introduced to a subtle underlying evaluation
of this kind of behavior in these circles: that they were in fact ‘over-caring’.
They are told that caring is a way to ‘bind’ people to them; that they are rely-
ing on gratitude and the sense of being needed to reinforce their own sense
of self-worth. The message to these women is very clear and explicit: they
should learn to care for themselves first, and stop relying on being needed
to find meaning in life. An, the first woman addressed by the medium, had
clearly understood this message. When the medium told her that she was
on the right track but needed to take care of herself more, she accepted the
underlying message, and only remarked that she thought that she was doing
this already.
The second woman, however, resisted the message. Clearly, she was not
happy to be told that her unselfishness, an intrinsic part of her gendered
identity, was actually a form of selfishness. But she was alone in resisting this
message; it was quite accepted among the audience. Her resistance was neu-
tralized by the universally applicable interpretation that she was ‘not ready’
to see that she was actually relying on other people to confirm her sense of
self-worth. A new way of being was here modeled by a man, who used his
own wife as a bad example. Clearly, in the area of self-love, women should
take their cues from men. The ideal he was trying to transmit to her was that
she should be confident enough of herself and her path in life to give her love
freely, without expecting gratitude in return to boost her self-esteem.
The essentializing gendering that underlies these ideas is quite com-
mon across contexts in which people define themselves as spiritual, as was
remarked in the introduction, and becomes clear across most of the contri-
butions in this volume. Moreover, the gendering going on in this context
was backed by considerable authority. The medium, as someone literally
mediating between heaven and earth, male, told a woman who was prob-

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 Obscuring the Role of Power and Gender 189
ably experiencing a crisis in her life that the life of sacrifice crucial to her
identity was utterly wrong and misguided. In this way, a choice was created:
either she submits to this diagnosis and finds a solution within the interpre-
tational framework offered, thereby becoming one of the many consumers
of services and goods of this field, or she goes away still feeling offended,
determined never to return, and tries to find recognition for herself in some
other way.
According to Sointu and Woodhead, contemporary spirituality particu-
larly appeals to women because it provides them with the means to balance
the ‘double bind’ of their position in society: still the primary caretakers at
home, but also expected to make a career.31 In contrast, the woman repri-
manded here was past the career-making stage, and had never had a career.
The discourse that was intended to empower women to prioritize their own
needs over those of others created its own antithesis, embodied by this par-
ticular woman who was looking for affirmation of her role as caregiver.

OBSCURING THE ROLE OF GENDER AND POWER

How do discourses of contemporary spirituality work so powerfully, while

at the same time managing to hide this from view? Based on my fieldwork
and on a reading of the literature I think we can isolate several related ways
in which the working of power and gender is obscured. First, there is the fact
that within these circles, power and gender are thematized explicitly. There-
fore, it seems that our job as academics has already been partly done; all
we have to do is translate what spiritual practitioners say to a more accept-
able academic language.32 When practitioners say that they want people
(men and women) to find their own true path, follow the inspiration from
their ‘higher self’ independently from the ‘masks’ and roles that society has
assigned to them, academics translate this as ‘expressive individualism’, and
show how this is part of a wider cultural turn.33
As outlined in the introduction, there is also a much more critical per-
spective on spirituality, showing how it creates a work ethic, or habitus,
that fits very well with the demands of modern workplaces.34 Especially in
the second ethnographic vignette, we can discern the discourse of expressive
individualism. However, we can also see that this discourse turns oppressive,
and comes to turn on an unequal power struggle between a practitioner
(the medium) and a (prospective) client. Expressive individualism did not
appeal to this lady; she wanted recognition for her ‘traditional’ caring role.
Sadly, the oppositions created within this discourse do not allow for the
appreciation of a life lived according to those values. In this case, a discourse
of empowerment for some women means the disempowerment of another
group of women.
While the discourse of empowerment clearly helps some women to deal
with the new demands on their role in society, combining caretaking roles

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 190 Kim Knibbe
with the necessity of making a career, as Sointu and Woodhead have shown,
it does not help the women for whom it is too late. Rather than reconciling
them with their position, the emphasis on expressive individualism (in an
extreme form) devalues the life choices of this woman.35 While the spiri-
tual practitioners involved focus on the empowering aspect of this interpre-
tational framework, as well as academics such as Sointu and Woodhead,
the effects of the stereotype of a disempowered, unawakened, dependent
woman created through the series of oppositions of this framework remain
hidden from view.
Within this discourse, as in society in general, there is no place for women
who conceive of themselves solely as caretakers and wish to be appreciated
as such. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim have argued that the individualization
of modern society means that we are all ‘forced’ to constitute ourselves
as empowered individuals. However, the individualization of society in the
structural sense does not automatically result in the production of individu-
ated individuals in the psychological sense.36 In this case we saw that a
woman, and many women like her, had constituted herself through a very
different, anti-individualist discourse that was strongly enforced within the
Catholic South. However, the societal order that shored up the identity as a
caregiver has evolved towards an individualized society with very different
demands and valuations.
Another way of obscuring the working of power has to do with a funda-
mental split between the level of ‘official’ discourse and ‘unofficial’ means
of criticizing and correcting power, such as gossip. Even these unofficial
means employ the official discourse to criticize the working of power and
gender inequalities. The tool is informal: gossip creates in-group and out-
group, displacing onto others the processes of power and gendering that also
happen within the group. The official view is maintained through continu-
ous split-offs, renewal and experimentation, characteristic of networks in
contemporary spirituality:37 what ‘we’ are doing here is always freer, less
hierarchical and purer than what ‘others’ are doing.
Despite the various calls of authors such as Aupers and Houtman, Wood
and Hammer, there is still a general failure to realize the fundamental ways
in which power works in these circles.38 This becomes especially clear in
Wood’s notion of non-formativeness.39 Although he discusses quite lucidly
the ways in which Bourdieuan and Foucauldian approaches might contrib-
ute to developing insights into the operation of power in the New Age, in
the end he shies away from consistently thinking through the implications
of these perspectives, inadvertently upholding the ‘folk models’ of New Age
he so sharply criticizes, by introducing the concept of non-formativeness. In
short, he argues that because people draw on diverse authorities, none of
these authorities is formative. In this way he distinguishes the field of New
Age from more ‘coherent’ traditions such as Paganism. However, authors
such as Bourdieu and Foucault developed the concepts of habitus and dis-
course precisely to show how power does not work through the exercise

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 Obscuring the Role of Power and Gender 191
of a single authority, but through the exercise of all kinds of subtle cul-
tural scripts that are ultimately embodied in such a way that they structure
the apprehension of the world, diffusing power. Clearly, these concepts are
exceptionally suited to analyze power and gendering in contexts in which
no one wants to claim ‘official’ authority. The question then is why Wood
insists that the diffused authority he observed during his fieldwork is non-
formative, because the reasons he gives for this are not convincing within
the conceptual framework he himself proposes.

CONCLUSION

The descriptions in this chapter reveal how the working of power and gen-
dering is both consciously acted on and obscured in circles that formally
detest hierarchies and reject traditional gender roles. The first ethnographic
vignette shows that despite the diffuse appearance of the practices and the
myriad interpretational directions taken during the meetings of the spiritual
society, there are in fact quite strict boundaries that are immediately enforced
whenever someone breaks the unwritten rules for interpretation. Power is
inscribed within the knowledge assimilated via participating in these circles,
applied to newcomers. The only way that the authority exercised in these
situations can be ‘non-formative’ is if the person decides to stay away (and
of course, this is always possible). The second ethnographic vignette shows
how the discourses and practices that are presented to ‘empower’ women
while helping them to reconcile conflicting roles in society result in the dis-
empowerment of other ways of being a woman that emerged out of a soci-
etal order now defunct.
In the introduction I outlined two areas of paradox in which processes
of power and gendering are both revealed and consciously acted on, and
obscured: (1) while spiritual practitioners attempt to act critically on the
gendered hierarchies of society in general and crusty ‘religion’ in particular,
they are often blind to the processes involving power and gendering in their
own groups. And (2) while spiritual practitioners are working on their own
‘bodily hexis’, and thus seem to belie Bourdieu’s conceptualization of bodily
hexis as something that eludes our consciousness, the ways in which even
this very work on the self reconciles people with their position in society
remain hidden from view.
With regard to the first area, we may conclude that the obscuring of
processes involving power and gendering is accomplished mainly through
the displacement of critique onto other groups. This may account for the
numerous fissions that take place within these networks. With regard to the
second area of paradox, the conclusions of this chapter are more specula-
tive. As we saw, the medium encourages women to work on themselves, via
bodily techniques such as laying a hand on the chakra of self-love. Clearly,
this is intended to work on the bodily hexis, the very ways in which we

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 192 Kim Knibbe
apprehend the world, constitute our relationships with people and move
around in it. The ways in which this empowerment is simultaneously a way
of reconciling women with their position in society becomes clear only when
we look at the women who refuse to follow this advice. Within modern soci-
ety, we are all expected to constitute ourselves as individuals who are able
to give direction to our own lives. The women who applied the discourse
on not making one’s self-worth dependent on gratitude for the caring one
provides for others will be able to meet the demands on the individualism
expected from women and men in modern society. Those who fail to do so,
who do not wish to constitute themselves as empowered individuals taking
charge of their lives and cling to other ways of being, risk being classified as
badly functioning ‘leftover’ individuals, or in the language of this particular
context, as people who are ‘unawakened’.

NOTES

1. E.g., Cynthia Eller, Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spiritual-
ity Movement in America (New York: Crossroad, 1993); Sabina Magliocco,
Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-paganism in America (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Sarah M. Pike, Earthly Bodies,
Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Åsa Trulsson, Cultivating
the Sacred: Ritual Creativity and Practice among Women in Contemporary
Europe, Lund Studies in the History of Religions 28 (Lund: Lund Univer-
sity, 2010); Jone Salomonsen, Enchanted Feminism: Ritual, Gender and
Divinity among the Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco (London: Rout-
ledge, 2002); Tanya M. Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual
Magic in Contemporary England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1989).
2. David Voas and Steve Bruce, “The Spiritual Revolution: Another False
Dawn for the Sacred”, in A Sociology of Spirituality, ed. Kieran Flanagan
and Peter C. Jupp (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 43.
3. Stef Aupers and Dick Houtman, Religions of Modernity: Relocating the
Sacred to the Self and the Digital (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 10.
4. Kim Esther Knibbe, Faith in the Familiar (Leiden: Brill, 2013), chap. 1.
5. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York:
Basic Books, 1973).
6. E.g., Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolu-
tion: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Michael Taussig, “The Genesis
of Capitalism amongst a South American Peasantry: Devil’s Labor and the
Baptism of Money”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 19, no. 02
(1977): 130–155.
7. Sherry B. Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the
Acting Subject (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
8. E.g., Jonathan Xavier Inda, Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Gov-
ernmentality, and Life Politics (Malden: Blackwell, 2005).
9. See Courtney Bender, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the Ameri-
can Religious Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010) on
an analysis of how ‘relaxing’ is in fact hard work.

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 Obscuring the Role of Power and Gender 193
10. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Esquisse D’une Théorie
De La Pratique), trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), 93–94.
11. E.g., Jeremy R. Carrette and Richard King, Selling Spirituality: The Silent
Takeover of Religion (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2005).
12. Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the
Sacralization of Modernity (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996); Aupers and
Houtman, Religions of Modernity.
13. Jomanda is not her real name, but a ‘stage name’ that she invented herself
for her public performances. Her own website is currently under construc-
tion, but Wikipedia has a short description of her biography and the con-
troversies that surrounded her practice.
14. Kim Esther Knibbe and Iti Westra, “Van ongeloof naar ‘zeker weten’: Betek-
enisgeving en legitimatie in de context van het fenomeen Jomanda”, Sociale
Wetenschappen 46, no. 2 (2003): 75–93; Kim Esther Knibbe. “An Ethnog-
raphy of a Medium and Her Followers: How Learning Takes Place in the
Context of Jomanda”, in Meister und Schüler in Geschichte und Gegenwart:
Von Religionen der Antike bis zur modernen Esoterik, edited by Almut Bar-
bara Renger, 383–398 (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2012).
15. Knibbe, Faith in the Familiar.
16. Leonieke Vermeer, “‘Als de tafel danst, dan wankelt de wetenschap’: De relatie
tussen spiritisme en wetenschap rond 1900”, GEWINA / TGGWNT 30, no. 1
(February 21, 2012): 26–43; Derk Jansen, “Op Zoek Naar Nieuwe Zekerheid:
Negentiende Eeuwse Protestanten En Het Spiritisme” (PhD diss., Groningen
University, 1994); Jan Hendrik Sommer, Spiritisme (Kampen: Kok, 2001).
17. See especially chap. 6 of Knibbe, Faith in the Familiar.
18. Within these circles, the aura is commonly accepted as a colored field of
energy surrounding the body that can be ‘seen’ paranormally. The shape
and colors of the aura can be ‘read’ to find out about a person’s health,
psychological and spiritual developments. Furthermore, certain shapes in
the aura are thought to indicate the presence of ‘spiritual guides’ or angels.
These spiritual guides can sometimes be a deceased family member.
19. Family Constellation therapy is a quite popular technique developed by Bert
Hellinger. The idea is that people are to a large extent determined by their
position in the family and the interactions that result from family patterns.
In order to trace how this pattern creates certain problematic behavior,
people other than the patient are asked to enact a family situation described
by the patient. See also the chapter by Ehler Voss in this volume.
20. Different types of cards were used: of course tarot cards, but also goddess
cards, angel cards, shamanic cards and Lenormand cards (a type of fortune-
telling cards used by Madame Lenormand, whose advice was apparently
popular with Josephine, Napoleon’s wife).
21. C.f. Edward L. Schieffelin, “On Failure and Performance”, in The Perfor-
mance of Healing, ed. Carol Laderman and Marina Roseman (London:
Routledge, 1996).
22. These descriptions are adapted from my PhD thesis: Kim Esther Knibbe
“Faith in the Familiar: Continuity and Change in Religious Practices and
Moral Orientations in the South of Limburg, the Netherlands” (PhD diss.
VU University, 2007).
23. All names of individuals are pseudonyms. The names of the mediums men-
tioned are those they use in their public performances, and are often stage
names (e.g., Jomanda). In some cases, I do not know their real names.
24. This is the same accusation Blavatsky used against the spiritualists. The
astral sphere is that of the spirits who got lost between the worlds because

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 194 Kim Knibbe
of unfinished business or because they do not believe they have died or that
there is a heaven.
25. Pim Fortuyn was a populist politician who was shot in May 2002, the first
Dutch politician to be killed for his political convictions in more than two
hundred years. His sudden popularity, his subsequent murder and the out-
pouring of emotions afterwards provoked a crisis in the political landscape
of the Netherlands and much debate, with politicians and intellectuals ask-
ing themselves how it was possible they were so out of touch with popular
sentiment.
26. See also Voss, this volume.
27. Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1985); Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life
in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978); Robert
Sennett, “Narcissism and Modern Culture”, October, 1977, 70–79.
28. Marga Kerklaan, ed., Zodoende Was De Vrouw Maar Een Mens Om Kin-
deren Te Krijgen, 300 Brieven over Het Roomse Huwelijksleven (Baarn:
Ambo, 1987).
29. Hanneke Westhoff, Geestelijke Bevrijders (Nijmegen: Valkhof Pers, 1996).
30. Knibbe and Westra, “Van Ongeloof Naar ‘zeker Weten’”.
31. Eeva Sointu and Linda Woodhead, “Spirituality, Gender, and Expressive
Selfhood”, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 47, no. 2 (June
2008): 259–276.
32. Cf. the introduction of Aupers and Houtman, Religions of Modernity, and
Hammer in the same volume; Matthew Wood, Possession, Power, and the
New Age: Ambiguities of Authority in Neoliberal Societies. Aldershot: Ash-
gate, 2007.
33. Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion
Is Giving Way to Spirituality (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005).
34. Marjolein Lips-Wiersma, Kathy Lund Dean and Charles J. Fornaciari,
“Theorizing the Dark Side of the Workplace Spirituality Movement”, Jour-
nal of Management Inquiry 18, no. 4 (December 1, 2009): 288–300; Emma
Bell and Scott Taylor, “The Elevation of Work: Pastoral Power and the New
Age Work Ethic”, Organization 10, no. 2 (2003): 329–349.
35. Cf. Knibbe, “An Ethnography of a Medium and Her Followers”.
36. Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization: Institution-
alized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences (London:
SAGE, 2002).
37. Michael York, The Emerging Network: A Sociology of the New Age and
Neo-pagan Movements (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995).
38. An exception is the literature on spirituality and the workplace—e.g., Bell
and Taylor, “The Elevation of Work”; Lips-Wiersma, Lund Dean and Forna-
ciari, “Theorizing the Dark Side of the Workplace Spirituality Movement”.
39. Wood, Possession, Power and the New Age.

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 11 In Search of Spirituality in
Northeastern Mexico
Religious Change and Masculinity
among Addicts in Recovery
Ethan P. Sharp

This chapter is an exploration of the role of spirituality in addiction treat-

ment for men in Monterrey, Mexico, where both references to spirituality
and experiences of addiction have become increasingly common. On most
days, residents of the city can pick up dozens of leaflets that are distributed
along the streets and in other public spaces. Many leaflets promote the ser-
vices of specialists in “healing” (sanación) or other possibilities for healing,
like courses that provide training in spirituality or mystical practices. These
advertisements reveal the influence of movements that some social scientists
have classified as “New Age”.1 In addition, there are leaflets, as well as
signs posted throughout Monterrey, that publicize the programs of “reha-
bilitation centers” (centros de rehabilitación), where men who are suffering
from drug addiction or alcoholism can reside for several weeks or months
and receive treatment that can lead them through a recovery. The treat-
ment is often based on the twelve-step programs of Alcoholics Anonymous
(AA). Advertisements for rehabilitation centers often indicate that “spiritual
therapy” or “spirituality” is an important element of their programs. In this
way, they appeal to an increasing awareness of the spiritual dimensions of
health and willingness to pay, if necessary, for spiritual assistance. At the
same time, however, the advertisements appeal to notions that are promul-
gated in Catholic and Protestant churches, as well as AA, and are widely
accepted in Mexico, such as the notion that an essential step in the process
of turning men away from addiction and other destructive behavior is to
awaken in them a consciousness of God.
Among social scientists, spirituality is often associated with a turn
towards the “inner life” or the “autonomous self” as a result of shifts in
the religious landscapes in Europe and North America during the course
of the twentieth century.2 According to historian Leigh Eric Schmidt, influ-
ential spiritual “seekers” contributed to these shifts and fostered pursuits
of “excitedly eclectic, mystically yearning, perennially cosmopolitan” prac-
tices.3 Many sociologists and anthropologists have investigated these types
of practices in contemporary societies, but to make the study of spirituality
into a more comprehensive and coherent field of inquiry, social scientists
must also take into account and investigate a wider variety of ways in which

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 196 Ethan P. Sharp
people have defined and cultivated spirituality. For many people in Mexico,
for example, spirituality is identified with traditional Christian practices,
through which practitioners pursue personal transformations and commu-
nion with God.4 In addition, it is more often associated with “healing” than
with the “seeking” or “questing” that Schmidt describes. In these cases, in
which traditional religious beliefs and the urgent need for restoration are
guideposts for spiritual practices, the turn to the inner life or the autono-
mous self may not constitute a “spiritual revolution” of the kind that social
scientists have described in other parts of the world. By studying the case of
addicts in recovery in Monterrey, Mexico, this chapter aims to contribute
to an appreciation of the diversity of interpretations and applications of
spirituality worldwide.
In 2009, intrigued by the advertisements for rehabilitation centers that
I had encountered, I began ethnographic research in a rehabilitation center
that former addicts had opened in Monterrey in 2006.5 The initial pur-
pose of this research was to document the interactions that take place in
the center, and to trace the ways in which spirituality figured into these
interactions. In addition, I sought to relate the kind of spirituality that men
talked about and practiced in the center to developments beyond the center,
including the escalation of the drug wars, competitions and convergences
between religious groups, the growth of a market for spiritual healing, shifts
in gender orders, and the restructuring of civil society by neoliberal regimes.
Over the course of eight months, I completed more than one hundred hours
of observations of different therapeutic sessions in the center. During these
months, the center housed between twenty and forty residents. In the ses-
sions that I observed, many of the men shared details of their lives, and in
the sessions dedicated to “anniversaries”—for which former residents who
had completed one year, two years or three years of abstinence from drugs
and alcohol returned to the center to receive a small medal—mothers, wives
or girlfriends of the men who received medals often talked to the residents
about their experiences. My research also included interviews with ten men
who had achieved a successful recovery in the center or an affiliated center,
including the men who were administering the center. In addition, I gathered
additional information from employees of the state government who had
collaborated with the center, administrators of other centers and addiction
treatment programs, evangelical Protestants who were involved in minis-
tries that targeted drug addicts, and human rights activists in the Catholic
Church.
Centers like the one where I conducted my research can be found through-
out Mexico, and while they play important roles in contemporary Mexican
society, by assisting large numbers of men with their drug problems, they
are also sources of public concern. Some rehabilitation centers are “infor-
mal” enterprises or facilities, and have not been inspected by public health
officials or received authorization from the government to provide treat-
ment. In 2009 and 2010, informal facilities were the sites of massacres in

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 In Search of Spirituality in Northeastern Mexico 197
the state of Chihuahua, presumably because drug traffickers were using the
facilities as hideouts from rival drug traffickers. Because there have not yet
been any other published studies about rehabilitation centers, a large part
of this chapter is dedicated to providing an introduction to the spaces and
events within the center, by incorporating different ethnographic details that
I recorded. At the same time, I show that the kind of spirituality that is
talked about and pursued in the center is most closely linked to the tradi-
tional practices of AA, popular Catholicism and Protestant evangelicalism,
and has very little to do with New Age movements or related spiritual move-
ments. As a result, men who live in the center do not “challenge traditional
representations of masculinity” through their interactions and talk about
spirituality in the center.6
Twelve-step programs have proliferated amid the drug wars because
they can easily garner support from government agencies, other elements of
civil society and consumers who participate in other markets for healing by
emphasizing their commitment to spiritual transformations, while remain-
ing unattached to any kind of religious institution or spiritual movement.
In this chapter, I begin to develop the argument that although the center
introduces men to a more individualistic, reflexive way of life through talk
about spirituality and prayer, successful recovery from addiction and long-
term abstinence from drugs involves integration into a form of male socia-
bility that reinforces “hegemonic” masculinity. Drawing on linguist Jennifer
Coates’s discussion of masculinities, I understand hegemonic masculinity
to be an ideology that “maintains, legitimates, and naturalises the interests
of powerful men, while subordinating the interests of others, notably the
interests of women and gay men”.7 The hegemonic masculinity that was dis-
played in the center, although it insisted on abstinence from drugs, is closely
related to the ethics of the drug wars.

DRUG WARS IN THE NORTHEAST

In the 1990s, many cities and towns in the northeastern Mexican states of
Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas became important sites in the net-
works of entrepreneurs that move cocaine and other drugs through Mexico
into the United States, and to expand their networks, drug traffickers cul-
tivated alliances with officials in government agencies across the region.8
As the supply of cocaine in Mexico increased, drug traffickers began to
distribute and to sell crack cocaine in Monterrey and cities along the border.
After the inauguration of President Felipe Calderón in 2006, the military
and other federal forces—with logistical and monetary support from the
US government—assumed a greater role in the disruption of drug traffick-
ing networks. Mexican federal forces have made their presence felt in the
Northeast by patrolling public spaces in heavily armed groups, setting up
checkpoints on roads, and carrying out raids of homes and businesses. In

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 198 Ethan P. Sharp
addition, the presence of federal forces has aggravated conflicts between
drug trafficking organizations, which have exposed people throughout the
region to extraordinary spectacles of cruelty and carnage. By 2010, drug
trafficking organizations had taken over a wide range of enterprises within
the informal economy, and relied on gangs of young men to serve as look-
outs and informants throughout the region.
Amid these unsettling events, residents of the northeastern states have
participated in different kinds of religious change. For example, leaders of
the Catholic Church and others inspired by a Catholic faith have publicly
decried the violence of drug trafficking organizations and federal forces,
and helped to create a fledgling social movement that may strengthen the
Church’s position in Mexican society as an advocate for the disenfran-
chised. In addition, evangelical Protestants have campaigned for converts
with apocalyptic fervor, and developed influential ministries that target the
increasing numbers of drug addicts in the region.9 Furthermore, former alco-
holics and drug addicts who achieved recovery in organizations modeled on
AA have established rehabilitation centers across the Northeast. Most of the
centers are registered with state governments as nonprofits, but in my view,
they are actually forms of social entrepreneurship. They are not integrated
into the health care or criminal justice systems, and they seldom cooper-
ate with other kinds of organizations in civil society. They are concerned
almost exclusively with providing a kind of addiction treatment based on
their personal experiences with and connections to the networks of AA. This
treatment typically involves secluding addicts for several months with other
addicts in a kind of carceral institution and creating therapeutic communi-
ties based on the principle of “mutual help” (ayuda mutua).
The search for religious or spiritual transformations in churches and
rehabilitation centers—although it has intersected with and gained momen-
tum from the anxieties caused by the spectacles of the drug wars—is often
rooted in concerns about deteriorating relationships in families. In 2010, in
the center where I have conducted research, I recorded a comment by the
mother of an addict that illustrates how concerns about family life have
influenced people’s interpretation of recent events and become interwoven
with discourse about God. She notes,

Over where I live, I would like for you to see the scenes that I see, kids,
thirteen, fourteen years old, in their gang, and the things that they do in
front of everyone. The kids don’t have any dignity, and their mothers,
well, who knows? I always ask God to take care of them, now more
than ever, with things how they are, because people don’t have the fear
of God anymore.

The behavior of young men in gangs and many other violent aspects
related to the drug wars can be considered extreme forms of “machismo”,
a set of “traditional” expectations about how Mexican men should behave

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 In Search of Spirituality in Northeastern Mexico 199
when they interact with women and other men.10 The mother’s comment,
however, places the responsibility for at least some of the unsettling events
upon women, because they have not complied with their traditional roles as
mothers in steering their sons away from more extreme and violent forms
of machismo. This interpretation of the drug wars, which is itself a form of
sexism, is interconnected with a broader and deeper set of concerns about
shifting gender orders.
In Mexico, and in countries around the world, increasing numbers of
women have pursued employment beyond the domestic sphere, and many
women have achieved positions in which they are responsible for supervis-
ing men.11 At the same time, employment for men has become more difficult
to find and less reliable than it once was, requiring that many men depend
on the informal economy for income or become migrant laborers. The “fem-
inization of household survival” in Mexico has coincided with three decades
of neoliberal governance and growth of the drug trade.12 Amid changes in
the labor market, neoliberal ideologies have insisted that laborers be more
flexible and entrepreneurial. Increasing involvement in male-dominated,
transnational enterprises in the informal economy, such as drug trafficking,
is one of the ways in which some men demonstrate maximum adaptability.
Involvement in drug trafficking can reinforce a traditional sense of what it
means to be a man, as it draws on and reinforces the men’s entrepreneurial
skills.

SPIRITUAL DIMENSIONS OF TWELVE-STEP PROGRAMS

By opening markets for crack cocaine in Monterrey, drug trafficking organi-

zations increased their income and power. They created distribution chains
that needed to be defended from interventions from government agencies
and rival cartels, and they were able to incorporate consumers of crack into
their networks of distributors. The different dangers of drug problems in
Monterrey have made treatment a very urgent enterprise, and AA can offer
some ready-made and straightforward solutions. For example, many people
involved in AA contend that alcohol and drug problems are profoundly
spiritual, that submission to the “will” of a “higher power” and a regime of
discipline and mutual support constitute the first step in treatment, and that
a lifelong commitment to abstinence from alcohol and drugs is essential to
recovery.13
Middle-class white men in the United States founded AA in the 1930s,
a program that seemed to restore the ideal of the “self-made man” amid
the anxieties of the Great Depression.14 In the following decades, twelve-
step methods became part of the “drug industrial complex”, as a form of
treatment substantially supported by the federal government and insurance
industries in the United States, and became the basis for other influential
interpersonal support networks.15 AA had been able to find a market for its

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 200 Ethan P. Sharp
brand of spiritual therapy because of the trends that had unraveled spiritu-
ality from Christianity, and made it into a separate realm that offered new
paths to self-knowledge and healing. The early success of AA depended in
part on the diverse and fluid New Thought movement of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. AA did not adopt any of the exotic beliefs or
practices that circulated among spiritual practitioners of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, but the formation of small groups for the pur-
poses of engaging in conversations about spiritual matters and cultivating
self-healing replicated aspects of the New Thought movement. In contrast
to the New Thought movement, AA allowed for the establishment of groups
by men, exclusively for men.
Social scientists have more often linked AA with Christian traditions, espe-
cially evangelical Protestantism, than with alternative spiritualities. Bill W.,
one of the founders of AA who led AA throughout its first decades of exis-
tence, overcame his alcoholism through an “encounter with God” that resem-
bled a religious conversion.16 Shortly thereafter, he began to develop a vision
for AA, drawing on his contacts and experiences within the Oxford Group, a
small but influential network of evangelical Protestants, in which these types
of encounters with God were common, and abstinence from alcohol was a
normal consequence of conversion. He and the other founders drew on the
Oxford Group’s six principles in order to formulate the twelve steps, and the
influence of evangelical Protestantism in the twelve steps is easily recogniz-
able. Many of the steps require making appeals to God or a higher power.
AA reached Mexico in the 1940s, and the number of support groups
affiliated with AA steadily increased in subsequent years. In the 1970s, some
men formed separate groups that could provide more intensive support for
alcoholics, and several of the new groups also opened facilities where alco-
holics could live and receive treatment, which became models for the reha-
bilitation centers that proliferated in Monterrey in the 2000s.17 According
to anthropologist Stanley Brandes, the growth and multiplication of AA net-
works were due in part to an affinity between AA and popular Catholicism,
especially the practice of forswearing alcohol for a period of time as an act
of devotion to a saint, a markedly masculine act of devotion.18 Further his-
torical analysis of the growth of AA and related support groups in Mexico
is needed, but its impact is clear: the twelve-step recovery has become the
standard form for treating alcoholism and other drug problems in Mexico,
as it is in the United States.
The twelve steps employed in the rehabilitation center where I conducted
my research were the same steps that Bill W. promoted in the 1930s. A full
list of the steps could be found in workbooks that were distributed to men
living in the center. They were as follows: (1) We admitted that we were pow-
erless over our addiction, and our lives had become unmanageable. (2) We
came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to san-
ity. (3) We decided to put our wills and our lives in the care of God, as we
understood him. (4) Without fear, we made a detailed moral inventory of

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 In Search of Spirituality in Northeastern Mexico 201
ourselves. (5) We admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being
the exact nature of our defects. (6) We were entirely available to allow God
to liberate us from these defects of character. (7) Humbly, we asked God to
liberate us from our defects. (8) We made a list of all those people that we
had offended, and we prepared ourselves to make amends for the harm that
we had caused. (9) We made amends as much as possible directly with those
we had offended, except when doing so would cause injury to them or oth-
ers. (10) We continued making our personal inventory, and when we were
wrong, we admitted it. (11) We sought through prayer and meditation to
improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood him, asking only
to know his will for us and to have the strength to carry it out. (12) Having
experienced a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to take
the message to others and to practice these principles in all of our affairs.
Talk about spirituality in the center, then, not only was entangled with
the residents’ experiences with traditional Christianity and other elements of
their personal circumstance, but also had become very much interconnected
with the histories and ideologies of AA, which both enhanced and limited
its possibilities. For example, it benefitted from the notion of spirituality as
a relatively free and separate sphere, yet it refused to be drawn into novel or
alternative practices. Their spirituality also borrowed many elements from
evangelical Protestantism; however, it insisted upon being inclusive and
stood apart from evangelical networks and the life changes that it requires,
such as giving up coarse language, smoking and a sense of sexual freedom.

SPACES AND PRACTICES OF REHABILITATION

The center in which I conducted most of my observations is located on a

typical block in the historic center of a densely populated Mexican city.
Walking along the street, one experiences the lonely sensation of walls rising
on either side, but discovers that gates in the walls can lead into a surprising
and welcoming mix of homes and open spaces. Behind one of these gates,
which are usually locked, the center occupies three small interconnected
buildings and an open space, or courtyard, where clothes are hung to dry,
and friends and family members gather on days when residents are allowed
to receive visitors. The largest building, where residents sleep and conduct
many of their daily activities, sits beyond the courtyard, the furthest from
the street. The doors to the building, which are almost always locked, lead
into a kitchen and dining area, a large meeting room and a bathroom with
several showers and toilets. On the second floor of the building, there is a
cramped dormitory, filled up with bunk beds.
Drawing on a small network of benefactors, a group of former addicts
opened the center in 2006. The founders had begun their recoveries from
addiction in other areas of Mexico, and sought to implement what they had
learned in Monterrey, where there were relatively few resources for treating

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 202 Ethan P. Sharp
addiction. Because of growing public concern about drug problems, the new
center was able to enter into a partnership with the agency committed to
“social development” in the state of Nuevo León. For several years, the
agency provided small grants that would cover the expenses of residing in
the center during three months for men in the poorest neighborhoods in
and around the city who desired treatment. Residents who did not receive
support from the state government were expected to pay for treatment.
Although the cost of treatment was not very high, families who were very
poor sometimes received a reduction in the cost. Throughout its short his-
tory, the center consistently housed dozens of residents, despite competition
from a growing number of rehabilitation centers. In addition to seeking sup-
port from the state government’s agency for social development, the center
has collaborated with state and federal public health agencies and complied
with relevant regulations.
For most of the center’s existence, the director was a middle-class man
who had studied for a few years in a university and had a modestly successful
career before his drug use spiraled out of control. In the center, the director
was known as the “godfather” (padrino), and the style and content of his
utterances—often concerned with the nature of addiction, and the ways of
overcoming it through “discipline”, “action” or “service”—achieved a rec-
ognizable imprint on talk among the residents. He also administered the cen-
ter’s routine, and designated a small group of younger men as his assistants.
Two or three of the assistants held formal positions, for which they received
modest compensation. All of the assistants were former addicts, who had
successfully completed treatment in the center or similar centers, and most of
them lived in the center among the residents. The director and his assistants
received requests from and offered advice to people, mostly women, who
sought treatment for men in their families, and participated in the retrieval
and internment of the men. In consultation with friends and families of resi-
dents, the director and his assistants also determined when someone had suc-
cessfully completed treatment, and some of the residents were encouraged or
required to stay in the center for more than three months, the standard period
of treatment. In many respects, the center resembled a carceral institution,
but internment was ultimately negotiable and depended on mutual agree-
ments among administrators, the families of residents, and the residents.
The activities in the center included group sessions in the morning, after-
noon and evening on each day of the week, except for Saturday and Sun-
day. During the sessions, residents typically sat straight up in metal folding
chairs, arranged closely together in rows, and faced a coordinator who sat
behind a table, beside a lectern. There were also two or three men serving
as guards, who stood along the wall or circulated around the men who
were sitting. The guards helped to enforce discipline, by calling to attention
residents who slouched or dozed off, and escorting residents out of and
back to the room whenever one of them needed to step out. In most ses-
sions, the coordinator began by reading from the literature of AA, offering

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 In Search of Spirituality in Northeastern Mexico 203
a reflection on the reading, and then calling one of the residents to address
the others from the lectern. The routine of talking behind or from the lec-
tern is an important feature of AA in Mexico, and can serve to “contain
the problem” of addiction, to “make it manageable”, and “put it to use via
talk”.19 Invariably, each resident began his address by introducing himself
and declaring, “I am an addict in recovery”. He then was expected to exam-
ine his experiences and feelings for a period of time that could range between
ten and thirty minutes. The residents were called to the lectern in constant
rotations throughout the day and week; a resident usually received at least
one opportunity to speak from the lectern each day, through which he could
explore any particular aspect of himself and his addiction that he considered
relevant. To conclude all of the sessions, the residents stood, formed a circle
that incorporated everyone present, and recited the “serenity prayer”. Origi-
nally composed by the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the prayer
is the hallmark of AA. It is: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things
I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to
know the difference. Amen”.
According to the director, “sharing” from the lectern was supposed to
include an act of giving thanks, an honest exploration of the “depth” of the
resident’s suffering, and an accounting of the “hurts” that he had caused
friends and family, but the content and style of the performances varied
widely, while intermingling with and replicating the language of previous
performances. Adolescents, for example, tended to render performances that
were indistinguishable from one another. They employed stock phrases and
did not incorporate fully developed narratives that could provide a better
understanding of their experiences. Older men also employed stock phrases,
but tended to interweave them with more fully developed narratives that
clearly revealed aspects of their dilemmas and could support some kind of
cathartic display. For example, in a performance in 2010, a young man com-
mented on a hurricane that had recently moved through the city, destroying
roads and flooding many homes. He then began talking about his relation-
ship with his grandmother, and crying, he explained that he had wanted to
leave the center to help his grandmother after her house had flooded. He
added, “But I said, ‘I am going to carry on. . . . I came here to help myself.
What do I care about you?”
Some of the sessions each week were dedicated to studying and respond-
ing to the workbooks on the twelve steps, which the center’s founders had
compiled. In these sessions, residents who passed to the front of group
offered responses to a series of questions for each of the twelve steps, rather
than engage in a free-ranging examination of themselves and their problems.
The more than sixty questions for the first step include: “How has my illness
affected me physically, mentally, spiritually and emotionally?” and “Am I
ready to dedicate all of my efforts to recovery?” Because the people who
served as coordinator varied from session to session, and week to week, the
use of the books was uneven. One of the director’s assistants, a resident who

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 204 Ethan P. Sharp
had shown exceptional progress, or a former resident who had returned to
the center to carry out an act of “service” often assumed the role of coordi-
nator. Sometimes the coordinator was indifferent, a variation that depended
on the person’s mood as much as the person. Sometimes he was talkative
and friendly to the extent that he turned attention away from the book.
The residents who achieved a good grasp of the twelve steps usually did
so through study on their own, or through the advice of a former resident.
Sessions dedicated to the workbook often provided the only opportunity
for residents to participate in discussions about spirituality. Questions in the
book for the eleventh step, which were fewer than they were for other steps,
included, “What are the differences between religion and spirituality?” and
“Do I have a specific spiritual path?” One resident responded to the latter
question that it was “to see God as my God”. All of the responses to ques-
tions about spirituality that I observed were very similar; they were brief and
made references to God. In this way, they were consistent with the bulk of
the questions for the eleventh step, which were about God, a higher power
or prayer. Responding to the questions, residents could pursue personal
interpretations and applications of traditional religious beliefs and practices,
without reestablishing a commitment to a particular religious doctrine or
institution. In some cases, this pursuit could reaffirm elements of Catholi-
cism that do not require a close relationship with the Church. To the ques-
tion, “What do I do to improve conscious contact with God as I conceive
of him”, one noted that he recited an “Our Father” and an “Ave Maria” at
night. I observed a few residents, however, who engaged in slightly longer
reflections about religion and spirituality, describing their previous involve-
ment in the Catholic Church or evangelical churches, especially because of
pressure from their parents. One of them memorably concluded that he
wanted nothing to do with the church of his parents and to “have my God,
nothing more”. Other residents offered similar conclusions to discussions
of spirituality, in both performances at the lectern and interviews with me.20
The practice that residents most readily associated with spiritual therapy
was prayer. Prayer is an autonomous exercise, one that can take place in
and out of religious institutions. Like many other spiritual practices, it can
lead to a greater consciousness of oneself and one’s circumstances, and it
can often easily adapt to secular spaces, without directly impinging on any-
one’s religious rights or challenging anyone’s beliefs.21 Although the center’s
director talked frequently about his commitment to prayer, explaining that
he prayed every morning and regularly throughout the day, there were no
sessions dedicated to prayer, and there was no training in prayer offered in
the center. The result is that prayer did not figure prominently in most of
the men’s accounts of their experiences. One middle-aged man who had
achieved recovery in the center and continued to assist with the center’s
programs explained in an interview, “God brought me here, and when I
asked him from deep inside my heart, that’s when he started to work in my
life. But there are so many things that keep one from getting close to God as

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 In Search of Spirituality in Northeastern Mexico 205
one should”. He noted that prayer and meditation are requirements for the
eleventh step, but added, “Many times we don’t do it”.

REINFORCEMENTS OF HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY

The men residing in the center during any given week varied, in terms of
their symptomatologies, personalities, aptitudes and commitments to the
program, as well as in other respects. Most of the residents were young
single men who wrestled with an addiction to cocaine or crack, or older
married men who sought treatment for either alcoholism or addiction to
cocaine. Other residents were adolescents, and some of the residents arrived
to the center from the poorest neighborhoods in the metropolitan area. The
drug problems that afflicted adolescents and poorer families the most were
inhalant abuse and alcoholism.
Despite the diversity of the residents, they all received the same treatment,
and were expected to comply fully with the discipline and routines of the
center. Even though they occasionally recognized differences in age, class,
ethnicity and religion, the center’s administrators subjected residents to the
same treatment because, as the director repeatedly noted, the “sickness was
the same”. The widespread acceptance that the “sickness was the same” not
only ensured equal treatment of all residents, but also provided the basis for
the consistent use of discourse among residents that reinforced hegemonic
masculinity. This discourse bolstered traditional expectations about how
men should behave in order to be successful and respected, and thereby per-
mitted very little variation in the ways in which a resident achieved control
over his body and engaged in interactions with other men in the center.
One of the features of this discourse that marked the center as a set of
spaces created by men for men was verbal aggressiveness, including bouts of
shouting and vulgar expressions. Shouting and the use of vulgar expressions
or “expletives” are more often associated with men than with women, and as
a result, serve as “symbols of masculinity” that reinforce gender divisions.22
To take one of the least offensive and most significant examples of this linguis-
tic behavior, men in the center made use of a variety of vulgar expressions that
incorporated references to testicles (huevos). They informed other residents
that they could no longer follow the ley de los huevos (the law of their tes-
ticles), or the custom of doing whatever they wanted without regard to anyone
else, and, resorting to a different configuration of the term, the men in the
center also frequently affirmed that they must commit to abstinence a huevo
(by the testicle), an expression suggesting that there was no other option.
Although verbal aggressiveness is considered appropriate for men and
expected from men in certain contexts within Mexico, this kind of talk was
put to new uses inside the center. Men often discovered this fact on their first
day of entering the center. After passing through a brief period of evaluation
by the center’s administrators, the residents who had recently arrived took

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 206 Ethan P. Sharp
their place right in front of the lectern during group sessions. The coordi-
nator and residents making their rotations at the lectern were expected to
“welcome” the new residents and to prepare them for the “discipline” that
awaited them. In one session that I observed, the residents at the lectern
emphasized repeatedly in loud, sharp voices and coarse language that the
new residents must respect the division of labor and hierarchies within the
center, and act humbly in interactions with the director and his assistants.
One of the phrases that they shouted was, “Your only purpose, or job, is to
look up here (towards the lectern)”. Another was, “Here your damn testicles
are going to take the right shape”. Residents provided similar treatment to
residents who had violated the rules of the center, or to men who had com-
pleted treatment but broken their commitments to abstinence and returned
for another period of treatment in the center. If the violations were severe,
these sessions could last for hours on end, reinforcing the commitment of
residents to recovery and each other within their network of mutual help, as
much as it corrected the person who committed the violation.
References to God and spirituality, especially when they occurred out-
side of the sessions in which residents were formulating answers to the
workbook, also tended to reinforce a hegemonic masculinity. Many of the
residents, for example, referred to God as “The Boss” (El jefe), a term that
distinguished their relationship with God from the relationships that were
possible in religious institutions, while making it more consistent with the
language and hierarchies of the drug trafficking world, in which jefes exer-
cise tremendous power. Speaking from the lectern, residents often credited
God for their survival, despite a reckless life, and recognized him as the
force that was responsible for their removal from the environment where
they consumed drugs and their placement in the center. In this sense, God
moved through and was identified with the center. In one session, a young
man who regularly returned to the center to find support for his recovery
and offer service to other addicts in recovery asked permission to speak from
the lectern. He began by declaring, “God brought me here because here it is
fucking great”, and then launched into a long and teary talk about breaking
up with his girlfriend. Later in the session, a middle-aged man spoke and
recounted his health problems, including infection with HIV, and concluded
by noting, “Locked up and reprimands, all of it is a blessing. Everything that
I have here is a blessing”. He explained, “I arrived through the work of The
Boss. . . . I am a believer in him, even that I learned here”. Like other resi-
dents, he began to conflate God with the spaces and routines of the center.

CONCLUSION

Twelve-step methods, through their emphasis on spirituality, can lead

addicts through a reconstruction of the inner life and into experiences of
wholeness, but in some circumstances, there are factors that inhibit or pre-

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 In Search of Spirituality in Northeastern Mexico 207
vent this kind of development. Clearly, the application of the twelve steps in
the rehabilitation center in Monterrey where I conducted my observations
provided opportunities for spirituality to become an important dimension
of recovery. In general, however, spirituality did not achieve the level of
importance that advertisements about the center seemed to give it, and it
was not necessarily a determinant of a successful recovery, as research in
some twelve-step addiction treatment programs in the United States has sug-
gested.23 The first and perhaps most critical step of the twelve steps that resi-
dents of the center were required to take was to surrender to forces beyond
themselves, forces that physically limited their autonomy and made them
focus their daily activities on the restoration of their physical and emotional
health. This first step often involved achieving a strong identification with
the spaces and structures of the center, as well as with the men who work
in and move through the centers, and accepting that they were essential to
recovery. In this way, the language and practices of mutual support—by
which men have strived for and reinforced traditionally masculine values
of discipline and competitiveness—took precedence over the inner life and
self-directed, reflexive practices.
Most residents, however, did not experience freedom from alcohol and
other drug problems after their first period of residential treatment. The
administrators of the center estimated that less than a quarter of the resi-
dents who completed the standard period of treatment in the center would
abide by their commitments to abstinence. Through my observations and
interviews, I have been able to determine that many of the men who have
achieved a recovery, by abstaining for several years from the drug or sub-
stance to which they had been addicted, were successful because they moved
away from the circles of friends that led to drug use and into the networks of
support offered by the center. They constantly returned to the center to meet
with friends that they had made during the course of their treatment, shared
their frustrations from time to time from the lectern, occasionally spent the
night in the center, and got to know some of the men who were undergo-
ing treatment for the first, second or third time. For the men who remained
attached to the center, then, the most important components of recovery
were submitting to and reinforcing the routines of the center, continuing to
engage in talk about themselves and their relationships, and interacting with
other addicts in recovery.
The quotes from different residents that I have included in this chapter
indicate that recovery has also typically involved achieving and demonstrat-
ing a greater awareness of God, but these quotes—taken together with the
details that I have provided about the sessions and interactions that occurred
in the center—suggest that the processes of discovering and affirming a belief
in God were not important in and of themselves, but deeply interconnected
with the other, more mundane aspects of treatment, especially discourse
about being a man. The restyling of religious beliefs within the center helped
to ensure that the center would be a space where men, and men only, could

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 208 Ethan P. Sharp
find support and refuge as the drug wars escalated and their prospects for
employment diminished. At the same time, it tended to recommit men to
a hegemonic masculinity as a point of reference by which they evaluated
themselves and charted their future as another generation of self-made men,
like the founders of AA. As a result, for addicts in recovery within the center,
spiritual transformation was accessible through and manifested itself only
in the specific sets of practices and institutions that supported new yet ulti-
mately traditional forms of male sociability.

NOTES

1. Miguel Hernández Madrid, “Entre las emergencias espirituales en una época

axial y la mercantalización contemporánea de los bienes de sanación”,
Desacatos: Revista de Antropología Social 18 (2005): 22.
2. Wade Clark Roof, “Religion and Spirituality: Toward an Integrated Analy-
sis”, in Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, ed. Michele Dillon (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 138. See also Paul Heelas and
Linda Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to
Spirituality (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 95; and Eva Sointu and Linda
Woodhead, “Spirituality, Gender and Expressive Selfhood”, Journal for the
Social Scientific Study of Religion 47 (2008): 259.
3. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality
(New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 6. These kinds of practices are largely
consistent with the “holistic activities” or “mind-body-spirituality” activi-
ties that Paul Heelas focuses on in his studies. See Paul Heelas, Spirituali-
ties of Life: New Age Romanticism and Consumptive Capitalism (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2008), 5.
4. Cheslyn Jones, preface to The Study of Spirituality, ed. Cheslyn Jones, Geof-
frey Wainwright and Edward Yarnold (New York: Oxford University Press,
1983), xxii.
5. I use the terms ‘addicts’ and ‘addiction’ because they are terms that are
employed in rehabilitation centers and other contexts in northeastern Mex-
ico to refer to drug users of different kinds and the behaviors associated
with drug use. The use of these terms deserves careful critique.
6. Sointu and Woodhead, “Spirituality, Gender and Expressive Selfhood”, 261.
7. Jennifer Coates, “Pushing at the Boundaries: The Expression of Alterna-
tive Masculinities”, in Language across Boundaries, ed. Janet Cotterill and
Anne Ife (London: Continuum, 2001), 3.
8. See, for example, Luis Astorga, Seguridad, traficantes y militares: El poder
y la sombra (México City: Tusquests Editores México, 2007), 243.
9. See Ethan Sharp, “Waging the War on Drugs: Neoliberal Governance and
the Formation of Faith-Based Organizations in Urban Mexico”, in Bridg-
ing the Gaps: Faith-Based Organizations, Neoliberalism, and Development
in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Tara Hefferan, Julie Adkins and
Laurie Occhipinti (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009).
10. Howard Campbell, Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets
of El Paso and Juárez (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 60. See also
Matthew Guttmann, The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City,
2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 14–15.
11. Agustín Escobar Latapí, “Men and Their Histories: Restructuring, Gen-
der, Inequality and Life Transitions in Urban Mexico”, in Changing Men

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 In Search of Spirituality in Northeastern Mexico 209
and Masculinities in Latin America, ed. Matthew Guttmann (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2003), 89.
12. Agustín Escobar Latapí and Mercedes Gónzalez de la Rocha, “Girls, Moth-
ers and Poverty Reduction in Mexico: Evaluating Progresa-Oportunidades”,
in The Gendered Impacts of Liberalization: Towards “Embedded Liberal-
ism”?, ed. Shahra Razavi (New York: Routledge, 2009), 268.
13. Jeff Sandoz, Exploring the Spiritual Experience in the Twelve Step Program
of Alcoholics Anonymous (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), 36.
14. Trysh Travis, The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recov-
ery Movement from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 65.
15. Ibid., 44.
16. Stanley Brandes, Staying Sober in Mexico City (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2002), 28.
17. Haydée Rosovsky, “Alcóholicos Anónimos en México: Fragmentación y
fortalezas”, Desacatos: Revista de Antropología Social 29 (2009): 13–30.
18. Brandes, Staying Sober in Mexico City, 36.
19. David Robinson, Talking Out of Alcoholism (Baltimore, MD: University
Park Press, 1979), 74. See also José Palacios Ramírez, “La construcción del
alcóholico en recuperación: Reflexiones a partir del estudio de una comuni-
dad de Alcóholicos Anónimos en el norte de México”, Desacatos: Revista
de Antropología Social 29 (2009): 47–68.
20. In an interview, one man who continued to be involved in the life of the cen-
ter more than a year after completing treatment summed up his relationship
with God with this comment: “I have realized that God is concerned about
me and that he really exists. I really needed to believe in God. . . . But I don’t
go to church. Why should I make up excuses, I don’t like church.”
21. See Courtney Bender, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the Ameri-
can Religious Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010),
24.
22. Vivian de Klerk, “The Role of Expletives in the Construction of Masculin-
ity”, in Language and Masculinity, ed. Sally Johnson and Ulrike Hanna
Meinhof (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 147.
23. Douglas Longshore, M. Douglas Angler and Bradley Conner, “Are Reli-
giosity and Spirituality Useful Constructs in Drug Treatment Research?”
Journal of Behavioral Health Services and Research 36 (2009): 181. See
also William Miller, “Researching the Spiritual Dimensions of Alcohol and
Other Drug Problems”, Addiction 93 (1998): 979–990.

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 Contributors

Monica Cornejo is a Spanish anthropologist and an assistant professor in

the Social Anthropology Department of the Universidad Complutense de
Madrid. She holds degrees in philosophy and social anthropology from
the University of Deusto. In 2007 she received the National Award in
Culture Research from the Education and Culture Ministry of Spain,
Marques de Lozoya XVI for her PhD thesis. She has done research on
popular Catholicism since 2002 and is the author of La Construcción
Antropológica de la Religión: Etnografía de una localidad manchega
(Ministerio de Cultura, 2008). Since 2009 she has been engaged in
research on contemporary spiritualities in Madrid.

Anna Fedele is a research fellow of the Centre for Research in Anthropology

(CRIA) at the Lisbon University Institute and a chercheure associée of the
Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale of the École des Hautes Études
en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Her research focuses on the intersections
of gender and religion and especially on issues of corporeality and ritual
creativity. She is the author of Looking for Mary Magdalene: Alternative
Pilgrimage and Ritual Creativity at Catholic Shrines in France (Oxford
University Press, 2012) and has edited with Ruy Llera Blanes the vol-
ume Encounters of Body and Soul in Contemporary Religious Practices:
Anthropological Reflections (Berghahn, 2011).

Victoria Hegner received her PhD from the Institute for European Ethnol-
ogy at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her urban ethnographic thesis
focused on the recent Russian Jewish migration to Chicago and Berlin.
Since 2009 she has worked as a senior lecturer at the Institute for Cultural
Anthropology/European Ethnology at the University of Göttingen. Since
April 2012 she has been the head of the research project called Neopagan
Witchcraft within the Urban Context (exemplary site Berlin), funded by
the German Research Association, at the Institute for Cultural Anthro-
pology/European Ethnology, University of Göttingen.

Kim Knibbe is a university lecturer in the Faculty of Theology and Reli-

gious Studies at Groningen University. She received her PhD in cultural

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 232 Contributors
anthropology from VU University Amsterdam. She has done research on
religious change and religious pluralism in the Netherlands and coordi-
nated an international research project on Nigerian-initiated Pentecostal
networks in Europe and published widely on these topics. An ethnography
on religious change in the Netherlands will be published by Brill in 2013.

Inês Lourenço obtained her PhD in anthropology from the Department of

Anthropology at ISCTE/IUL, Lisbon University Institute. She is a post-
doctoral fellow at CRIA—Center for Research in Anthropology—with a
postdoctoral grant from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Tech-
nology. Her research focuses upon the Hindu Diaspora in Portugal, and
she has carried out fieldwork in Portugal and in India since 2000. Cur-
rently she is especially interested in exploring issues related to the con-
sumption of Indian commodities, such as those related to the Bollywood
industry, and in the related social uses of culture in Portuguese society.

Eugenia Roussou received her PhD from University College London in 2010.
She has conducted extensive ethnographic research on the amalgamation
of religion and spirituality in the context of everyday ritual practice in
Greece. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at CRIA/FCSH, New
University of Lisbon, where she is working on ‘New Age’ spiritualities,
religious pluralism and spiritual creativity in present-day Lisbon.

Ethan P. Sharp received his PhD in folklore at Indiana University in 2004. He

has held teaching positions in Latin American studies and anthropology
programs at different institutions, including the University of Texas–Pan
American and Agnes Scott College. He is the author of the book No Longer
Strangers: Mexican Immigrants, Catholic Ministries and the Promise of Cit-
izenship, to be published by Indiana University Press. In 2009 and 2010, he
conducted ethnographic research in Monterrey, Mexico, with a Fulbright-
García Robles Fellowship. Currently, he is a visiting scholar in Latin Ameri-
can studies at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia.

Viola Teisenhoffer is a PhD candidate in anthropology (Université Paris

Ouest Nanterre—La Défense / Laboratoire d’Ethnologie et de Sociologie
Comparative). She conducted fieldwork in Paris in two groups that prac-
tice Umbanda, an Afro-Brazilian religion recently introduced in France,
as well as in the Brazilian shrine houses that originated them. Her research
explores the formal characteristics of the ritual practice of Umbanda
among French ‘spiritual seekers’ and also focuses on the particular self-
transformation it effects, in order to contribute to a better understanding
of contemporary New Age and Neopagan religious orientations.

Åsa Trulsson is currently a lecturer in religious studies at the Linneaus Uni-

versity in Sweden. Her fields of interest include ethnographic practice,

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 Contributors 233
ritual studies, negotiations of power and authority within contemporary
spiritualities, as well as gender and embodiment. These issues are explored
in her doctoral dissertation “Cultivating the Sacred: Ritual Creativity and
Practice among Women in Contemporary Europe” (2010).

Ehler Voss obtained his PhD in anthropology in Leipzig (Germany) and is

currently researching nineteenth-century European spiritism at the Uni-
versity of Siegen (Germany) within the research project “Social Innovation
through Non-hegemonic Production of Knowledge: Occult Phenomena
at the Intersections of Science, Media History, and Cultural Transfer
(1770–1970)”, funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG).

Rachel Werczberger received her doctorate on Jewish spiritual renewal in

Israel in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology in the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. She is a research fellow in the Shalom Hartman
Institute and teaches in Tel-Aviv University and Ben Gurion University in
the Negev. Her research interests include the sociology and anthropology
of contemporary Judaism, New Age spirituality and gender and religion.
Her recent publications include “Memory, Land and Identity: Visions of
the Past and the Land in the Jewish Spiritual Renewal in Israel”, Journal
of Contemporary Religion 26, no. 2 (2011), and “The Jewish Renewal
Movement in Israeli Secular Society” (co-written with Na’ama Azulay),
Contemporary Jewry 31, no. 2 (2011).

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