The paper draws on three years' fieldwork and twelve years' familiarity withfeminist witches in New Zealand. These women are thoughtful and articulate about their magical practice, and it is their theories about how magic works and the function of ritual‐making which are the paper's central concern. Scholarly theories and debates about magic and ritual have frequently been dichotomously constructed: science versus magic, the symbolists versus the intellectualists, causality versus participation, ritual as action versus belief as thought, and so on. The (...) witches who are the focus of this study do not explain their ritual practice in such dichotomized terms. Their spells, forexample, incorporate expressive, dramaticand aesthetic components and values, along with an explicit instrumental purpose. For these witches, magic is not anti‐science or pseudoscience: it sits alongside science as another wayofaddressingaproblem. The paper discusses feminist witches' theories and practices in the light of anthropological theories about ritual and magic, explores the role of symbols and energy in magic, and demonstrates how these witchesuse ritual for empowerment and healing. (shrink)

This article discusses Neo-Pagan journeys to archaeological or heritage sites (such as ancient temples and stone circles) associated with pre-Christian religions and deities. It argues that within the rationale of a Neo-Pagan worldview, several common binaries dissolve and reveal themselves as continuities at sacred sites: human body and earth body, the past and the present, inner and outer worlds, self and other, human and deity. In the course of Pagans’ bodily performances at sites, inner and outer landscapes co-create and flow (...) into one another: the lived body becomes a fundamental text and starting point for knowledge. Through somatic modes of attention - by attending to and with their bodies in surroundings that frequently include the embodied presence of others - Neo-pagan pilgrims experience themselves not as isolated subjectivities but as sharing an intersubjective milieu with other pilgrims and with the Earth itself. For women in particular, journeys to sacred sites potentially contribute to a radical re-inscription of the female body by exposing women to alternative representations of the feminine and by providing contexts in which the feminine can be re-imagined, re-experienced and performed differently through symbolic activity and ritual. In Butlerian terms, women potentially perform gender differently at sacred sites. (shrink)