Contemporary Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Europe : Colonialist and Nationalist Impulses

Pagan and Native Faith movements have sprung up across Europe in recent decades, yet little has been published about them compared with their British and American counterparts. Though all such movements valorize human relationships with nature and embrace polytheistic cosmologies, practitioners’ beliefs, practices, goals, and agendas are diverse. Often side by side are groups trying to reconstruct ancient religions motivated by ethnonationalism―especially in post-Soviet societies―and others attracted by imported traditions, such as Wicca, Druidry, Goddess Spirituality, and Core Shamanism. Drawing on ethnographic cases, contributors explore the interplay of neo-nationalistic and neo-colonialist impulses in contemporary Paganism, showing how these impulses play out, intersect, collide, and transform.

Kathryn Rountree is Professor of Anthropology at Massey University. She has published on contemporary Paganism in Malta and New Zealand, feminist spirituality, animism, shamanism, pilgrimage, the contestation of sacred sites and, more broadly, between religion and science. Her books include Embracing the Witch and the Goddess: Feminist Ritual-makers in New Zealand (Routledge, 2004), Crafting Contemporary Pagan Identities in a Catholic Society (Ashgate, 2010), the edited volume Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and Modern Paganism (Palgrave, 2017) and the co-edited Archaeology of Spiritualities (Springer, 2012).