Magic and the Postsecular: Disenchantment and Participatory Consciousness

Abstract

This paper examines postsecularism, magic and disenchantment in the West with an emphasis on Wicca. Following a discussion of postsecularism, it provides a critical overview of the Weberian notion of disenchantment which describes the decline in magic in modernity. Magic, far from disappearing in the postsecular, has been transformed through a process of psychologization. While there is substantial evidence for the persistence of magic in modernity, the question is how it persists. The notion of participatory consciousness is deployed to account for its persistence. Participatory consciousness allows us to understand the ways that everyday life blends secular, spiritual, and religious aspects—a central theme of the postsecular condition. This paper deploys secondary ethnographic data pertaining to phenomenological studies of Wiccan rituals. Wiccans demonstrate an interest in spirituality that aligns with nature. There is a complex relationship between secular and religious ideas with a blending of spiritual practices with modern technology and individualized spiritual paths. Through the performance of rituals, practitioners transition from an ‘ordinary’ to a ‘magical’ worldview—a form of participatory consciousness involving analogical thinking, imagination, meaning and affect associated with an holistic and enchanted worldview where there are meaningful connections between people, events, and objects.

1. Introduction

This paper examines magic and the postsecular. The main focus here is to account for the persistence of magic in modernity. Anthropology has had a long and complex relationship with magic, with Western science, and rationality deeply impacting our understandings of it. To date, much of anthropological theorizing on magic has focused upon its rational aspects, seeing it as a set of beliefs and asking how individuals could hold magical convictions in the face of ‘obvious’ empirical failure (Luhrmann 1989; Boyer and Liénard 2008; Subbotsky 2014). In contrast, theories of magic have recently adopted a more experiential perspective.

I will draw upon the anthropological notion of participatory consciousness to explain its persistence. Anthropologist Stanley Tambiah (1990) has argued for two complementary orientations to the world–causal and participatory. Both exist in all societies and in all historical periods. The two orientations are entwined rather than forming a dualism. The causal orientation emphasizes logical thinking and is primarily associated with science.

The participatory orientation is intrinsic, analogical, it includes all the senses and emotions and involves a worldview in which the boundaries between the subject and object and between the individual and the external world are less distinct. It is primarily associated with art, religion and magic. This mode of consciousness is characterized by a holistic and interconnected view of reality. Causes and effects are associated, or merging, to the point of identity or consubstantiality. Here consciousness is not as an isolated, individual experience, rather, is inherently relational and interconnected with the world surrounding it. Participatory consciousness sees the human mind as part of a co-creative process that interacts dynamically with the world rather than a self-contained entity.

Participatory consciousness is a given and immediate datum of human experience which does not require further explanation (Hanegraaff 2003). It illustrates the ways in which everyday life blends secular, spiritual, and religious aspects—a central theme of the postsecular condition. It underlies the tendency to experience magic. Before discussing magic and disenchantment in contemporary Western society, I shall briefly digress to examine postsecularism.

2. Postsecularism and Magic

The postsecular connotes ‘the societal moment in which we supposedly find ourselves, a time when societies globally have not secularized as some expected, people have not abandoned religious belief and practice, and religion has not disappeared from public life, a time when, to the contrary, religions are plural and persistently present throughout modern societies globally.’ (Robinson 2023, p. 51). Adam Possamai (2017, p. 822) argues that the term postsecularism ‘emerged in various disciplines, including sociology, to reflect religion’s move back into the public sphere and the need to take into account the voice of religious actors in any contemporary analysis of society.’ It challenges the traditional linear narrative of secularization, that modernity leads to a decline in religion (e.g., Wilson [1966] 1969; Berger 1967; Bruce 2011). It argues that secularism does not inevitably replace religion. From the postsecular perspective, rather than disappearing, religion and spirituality have adapted and now manifest in new forms in modern-day society. By modernity, I refer to the rise in scientific reasoning, rationalism, and individual autonomy.1

The term postsecularism was popularized by German philosopher and social theorist Jurgen Habermas who defines postsecular society as ‘the continued existence of religious communities in a continually secularizing environment’ (Habermas 2009, p. 63). For Habermas, modernity does not result in the disappearance of religion but rather its transformation. In his view the resurgence of religion is able to address the socio-political anxieties of the current age; secular reason is lacking, in that it is unable to provide what religious culture once supplied or sustained. Specifically, religion offers moral and ethical resources that rational thought cannot satisfy by itself and additionally it offers emotional and cultural depth for addressing moral crises. In his view modernity’s emphasis on technical rationality fragments human experience and individuals are disconnected from moral and existential concerns.

Habermas (2010) calls for a productive dialogue between religion and secular rationality and advocates for reforms ensuring the co-existence of religion and reason and argues that they can co-exist in modernity, enriching public debate and can contribute to a just democratic society. This postsecular turn is most visible publicly in urban public space, governance and civil society. Religious and secular ideas can co-produce new forms of governance through partnerships between government agencies and religious organizations (Beaumont and Baker 2011). On a more political philosophy level, postsecularism sees religion and the secular as intertwined and mutually influencing each other rather than polar opposites.

Hodkinson and Horstkotte (2020, p. 318) note how the distinctions between religion and secularity, at one time conceptually stable, are now increasingly blurred. Merz and Merz (2017) refers to an ‘ontological penumbra’—a space or zone of ambiguity in which religious and secular identities are both taken seriously and exist in a state of co-existence.

While academic work on postsecularism has focused upon religion, much less has been written on the persistence of magic, which is the focus of this paper. What of magic and the postsecular? In the postsecular age, there is an intertwining and overlapping of secular and religious aspects whereby traditional dichotomies break down, resulting in the emergence of new spiritualities. Religion and secularism interact and merge thereby creating new spiritual forms. Postsecularism argues that while traditional religious institutions may have declined, there are new spiritual forms which persist and reflect the complex interplay between secularization and the human need for connection and meaning (Dawson 2007). The persistence of magic is seen as more than a ‘survival’ from the past. Rather it is understood as part of an ongoing negotiation between secular and spiritual ways of seeing the world.

Anthropologist Kennet Granholm (2012) has argued that the postsecular has relevance for esotericism and in relation to popular culture the esoteric may be popularized in such a way as to be unprecedented in the history of Western religion. But he makes the important point that ‘Considering that most discussions on secularization and the postsecular relate to “religion” in fairly narrow and “old-school” ways, focusing on main-line religious institutions, “beliefs” and “convictions”, and community-establishing functions, one may wonder if there is any relevance for something as apparently unorthodox as the esoteric.’ (p. 321).

3. Magic, Religion and Participatory Consciousness

Given that the term magic is widely used in anthropological discourse, it has proven difficult to define and is used in a myriad of ways in anthropological literature. Bernd Christian Otto and Michael Stausberg (2013) assert that there is no unanimously agreed academic definition of it, despite the fact that the term occurs in all modern Western European languages. In a similar vein Wouter Hanegraaff (2016) notes, the term magic resists all attempts to define its exact nature. Academic definitions of magic are legion and there is often semantic confusion concerning its meaning. This author discusses how there are three main theories which impact definitions of magic: Tylor and Frazer’s intellectualist approach focusing upon the role of mental activity, Mauss and Durkheim’s functionalist approach which emphasizes the social function of magic, and Lévy-Bruhl’s participatory approach whereby individuals and objects are not distinctly separated but, rather, are interconnected through a shared, sometimes unconscious, identification. Academic definitions are often variations of these three highly influential theories. It is this third approach—participation—which will be the central concern here and is discussed below.

Much anthropological discourse on magic has focused upon two areas: relationships between magic and religion and the rationality of magical beliefs and practices.2 Distinguishing between magic and religion has been a longstanding concern in anthropology and many scholars disagree about how to distinguish them. Durkheim recognized that religion and magic overlapped empirically in complex ways (Durkheim [1912] 1915, pp. 39–44). Magic is often defined in terms of what it is not, i.e., religion or science.

While space does not permit further discussion, power dynamics have significantly impacted this distinction and interactions between the two. Colonial contexts have deployed religious beliefs like Christianity to justify domination with magic being associated with the ‘other’ or marginalized groups and was seen as ‘primitive’, ‘backward’, superstitious or even demonized. Magic could separate the colonialist from those colonized.

Graham Jones (2018) examined how anthropology and popular entertainment magic shaped the concept of magic and their mutual influence on each other. He notes how both developed at the same time with similar stances towards rationality and modernity. Early anthropologists understood non-Western cultures through magic and drew parallels with Western entertainment magic with both focusing upon disbelief. Non-Western ritual performers were seen as charlatans in a similar way to how stage magicians are viewed. This author argues against anthropologists dismissing the concept of magic but argues for the need to examine its colonial origins and its role in shaping anthropological thought. For him, belief in magic amongst less technologically advanced cultures justified their oppression and supported the colonial project. He notes how indigenous people maintaining beliefs in magic were seen as ‘childish’ and underdeveloped and therefore needed parenting, education, and supervision.

Anthropology, more than any other academic discipline, has significantly influenced our understandings of and attitudes towards magic. The term is often deployed to denote the other as irrational. Some, like anthropologists Edward Tylor (1871) and James Frazer (1951), saw magic as pre-modern and primitive and predicted its demise, with a move away from magic and superstition in modern culture. Both deploy categories of magic, religion and science in organizing their thinking. Tylor (1871) speaks of the existence of magic at the time in which he wrote as a ‘survival’ and as a ‘primitive science’. Rationality and science have been deployed to judge the reality of magic.

Second, anthropology, with its secular rationality, has generally seen magic as unreal. It has often been understood through social or psychological reductionism reflecting psychological and social catharsis (Malinowski), a functional component of social life explaining misfortune (Evans Pritchard) or an expression of unconscious codes (Levi Strauss). Like religion, magic has been explained away through a materialist framework that repudiates alternative interpretations. Richman (2019, p. 7) notes how anthropology generally views religion as ‘epiphenomenal to “real” underlying political, economic or sociological causes’. The same may be said about magic. This has thwarted any efforts to understand and respect native belief systems. We see ourselves as different from those who do not hold ‘modern’ orientations and are held to be ‘premodern’ by contrast. The secular becomes itself a form of religious orthodoxy.

Certain beliefs, while they appear illogical, might be based on flawed initial assumptions (premises) or on the other hand fulfill psychological needs. The traditional view emerging early in the twentieth century by cultural anthropologists (Lévy-Bruhl [1923] 1966; Frazer 1951; Tylor 1871; Mauss [1903] 1972) and developmental psychologists (Piaget [1929] 1971) is that beliefs in magic are old fashioned, existing in previous generations and can only be found in children and superstitious adults. It was the antithesis of modernity.

The position I adopt is that magic is based upon a participatory worldview, an integral aspect of consciousness which can produce knowledge of or alternative conceptions of reality, an experience comprising emotion, imagination, and intuition rather than an epiphenomenon of social or psychological aspects or its relationship with science or religion.

4. Disenchantment: From Participatory Mode to Instrumental Causality

‘Magic’ for Weber denotes both the belief in forces which are separate from the natural material world, this includes demons, spirits, gods, and ghosts, as well as the power of charismatic individuals to affect these entities (Green 2005; Weber [1917] 1962). Weber saw the premodern world as infused with mystery and unseen forces which could be coerced. Importantly Weber’s thesis implies a unilineal transition from the religious to the secular, the validity of which is questionable.3^,4

The term disenchantment (German: Entzauberung) refers to the de-magification of the world; magic and myth retreat from social life. Clearly, ideas of the postsecular were not available to Weber but nevertheless his writing emphasizes the persistence of religious beliefs and practices in modernity and his insights relating to secularization, bureaucracy and the enduring power of religious ideas persist in informing discussions about religion’s public role, the nature of contemporary society, and ongoing debates about postsecularism. The concept of the postsecular emerged from the process of disenchantment. Rather than the disappearance of religion, it is a critique of secularism recognizing religion’s persistence, albeit in a changed form.

Weber discusses how as ‘mysterious and incalculable’ powers diminish, nature is managed rather than enchanted, everything can be explained rationally, and the spiritual loses its social significance. Magic and mystery, under his thesis, would be replaced by systematic calculation and the world would be controlled through technical processes. Magical means of understanding the world would become obsolete, for Weber, science, with its promises of certainty and empirical measurability, replaces religion, resulting in a modernized, bureaucratic, secularized Western society. Hanegraaff (2003) argues there is a tension between a participatory or magical worldview and a secularly rational, disenchanted worldview. But the participatory worldview cannot be eliminated through rationalization and continues to exert its influence despite a cultural ideology favoring instrumental causality. Marotta (2023) argues that the notion of disenchantment has had a significant impact in sociology and religious studies. Weber’s concept of disenchantment is closely identified with the secularization process.

Disenchantment for Weber did not inevitably imply religion’s decline, but rather its transformation into new forms. In a similar vein, Kippenberg (2011) argues that disenchantment catalyzed new forms of religion and spirituality rather than resulting in religion’s decline per se and the advent of a godless culture in modernity. In these new religious forms, institutional religion, it is suggested, is replaced by individual religiosity.5^,6 Christopher Partridge (2009) speaks of a renewal of alternative spiritualities like new age practices, and beliefs, Paganism and cyberspirituality.

As will be elaborated upon below, disenchantment provides the cultural background against which modern forms of Paganism like Wicca have emerged, and such traditions are a form of re-enchantment through which individuals turn back to experience spiritual forces. The disenchantment process results in a move from a collective belief in a transcendent world to a personal search for meaning in a secular modern environment. Wicca may be a manifestation of this modern condition with an emphasis on individual embodied subjective experience and prioritizes ritual and direct spiritual experience rather than belief.

5. Contemporary Magical Thinking and Re-Enchantment

The relationship between postsecularism, magic and disenchantment is nuanced and complex rather than linear or causal. It could be argued that postecularism opens up an interdisciplinary and suggestive platform by which to look at the ‘reemergence’ of religion and spirituality in areas hitherto not really explored—namely psychology, wellbeing and consciousness. Re-enchantment could be seen as a manifestation of this broader postsecular trend, involving a search for connection and meaning in a world that seems increasingly disconnected. This results from a sense of alienation deriving from increased rationalism and industrialization in modernity and a prevailing yearning for something beyond mechanistic explanations. Magic provides an alternative way of finding meaning in the world and is a response to the anxiety and challenges of a rapidly changing world. Finally, the rise in magical thinking blurs the boundaries between science and the occult and challenges existing norms and power structures.

With this in mind, Josephson Storm (2017) questions whether scholars have misunderstood Weber’s thesis. In his view, Weber did not describe the disappearance of magic in modernity but rather its persistence in a rational form. In his view, Weber did not argue for the complete disappearance of magic and spirits in modernity. On the contrary, he was fully aware of the persistence of these phenomena at the time he wrote. He asserts that the narrative of decline is a ‘myth’ and magic, far from disappearing, has been transformed into other forms like the fantasy worlds found in modern culture.

There is indeed evidence that Western culture is undergoing a process of re-enchantment. Bever and Styers (2017) point out how, compared to the nineteenth century, magic and supernaturalism are stronger today. Bruno Latour (1993) claims that magic belongs to modernity. For Latour, modernity, which emphasizes reason and science, far from eliminating ‘magical’ thinking, has incorporated it into its own framework and redefines it. Interest in religious, spiritual, and transcendent experiences has been renewed. These scholars reject the disenchantment narrative characterized by a disenchanted, magicless modernity.

Landy and Saler (2009) provide an excellent overview of the secular strategies deployed to re-enchant the world that is compatible with secular rationality and able to fill in a ‘god shaped void’. What is considered magic and enchantment in modernity may involve escapism in fantasy or scientific wonders. For these authors, the withdrawal of religion from any realm of experience resulted in a secular strategy for re-enchantment and functioning to replace the benefits enjoyed by religious faith. This secular strategy should be imbued with mystery and wonder, order and, possibly, purpose and possess the ‘allure of the sacred.’ Such wide-ranging strategies include modern science which generates and restores the sense of the marvelous, stage magic and its deceptive self-delusion, ‘fantastic’ literature, gardens of the homeless, the Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence and the philosophy of William James. As Andrea Nightingale (2009) notes, modern science is just as likely to restore mystery than extirpate it through the technological marvels it produces, but also through contemplation on the wonder of the natural world which replaces the divine and the revelation of the insufficiency of all previous knowledge.

There has been a resurgence of magical, occult, and esoteric thought in North America and Europe—a form of magical re-enchantment (Bell 2012; Bever and Styers 2017; Ivakhiv 1996). Examples of modern magic include witchcraft and Paganism, its central role in popular culture where it shapes the imagination (see for instance Partridge on occulture) and its role in social and political movements. Benussi (2023) notes that in late modernity organized religions and magic have undergone a resurgence. Magic’s do-it-yourself and experimental character is congruent with the twenty first century postsecular spirituality. Witzgall (2018) notes that especially in Western societies, a renewed and keen interest in magical practices and occult knowledge can currently be seen in the arts, science, and popular culture. Contemporary Western witchcraft practices in the context of the postsecular intersect with a society increasingly seen as both secular but one that remains open to various spiritual and supernatural beliefs.

Egil Asprem (2012) notes how ritual magic has migrated to new locations in the past thirty years or so and is deeply impacted by the emergence of new media, feeding back to other aspects of popular culture ‘Secular witchcraft’ online and in various communities involves individuals discussing and engaging in witchcraft practices for personal growth, healing, or creative expression without holding to traditional religious frameworks or beliefs about deities. Individuals may construct their own practices which derive from various witchcraft traditions, resulting in individualized spirituality.

6. How Does Magic Survive in Modernity? Psychologization and Participatory Consciousness

How does magic survive in modernity? I specifically address Wicca here. Hanegraaff (2003) argues for the psychologization of magic to account for its survival in the wake of secularization.7 Hermeticism, a syncretic system of thought attributed to legendary Egyptian philosopher Hermes Trismegistus, has deeply influenced Western esotericism and modern-day Wicca. This philosophical system stresses ‘As above, so below’, quoted in the Hermetic text the Emerald Tablet, and involves a theory of correspondences. According to this, there is a relationship between the laws and phenomena of different planes of existence. He notes how Hermetic magic was transformed through processes of secularization.

For him magic changed its methods, theories of efficacy, and strategies for legitimation. There was a move from Pre-Enlightenment practices to modern forms of psychologized occultism which focus upon personal transformation and the power of the mind. There has been increasing emphasis on magic as a technique to exalt consciousness. The earlier emphasis on learning to use the external forces of nature has been replaced by using the internal psychological forces. Magic becomes legitimized by relating it to modern psychological theories and a worldview involving the ‘magical plane’ rather than through demonic forces. These ideas are more compatible with a secular and disenchanted world. He illustrates this hypothesis through the psychologization of the Hermetic traditions.8

Post-Enlightenment magic was able to adapt to the new social and cultural conditions in the wake of the conditions of disenchantment and secularization. This move to the ‘subjective’ allows magicians to suspend their disbelief on account of the fact that magic is confined to a place where it cannot be empirically verified. Magic exists in a rarified world of the imagination—a separate but connected magical plane accessed by the imagination. It is insulated from critical inquiry, and its validity is confined to realm of purely subjective experience where the everyday rules of rationality and science are not applicable. Thus, the cognitive dissonance arising from the rational and scientific ideology magicians face is reduced.

Hanegraaff argues that modernity is characterized by a downplaying of the participatory mode, hence the need to legitimize magic through psychology. But, asks Hanegraaff (2003), why do those practicing magic not abandon it for psychology? To answer this question, I elaborate on the theory of participatory and instrumental consciousness and argue that it is quite unsurprising that magic has survived the process of disenchantment. This is based upon the idea that participation is a spontaneous tendency of the mind. Influenced by the seminal work of Maurice Lienhard in New Caledonia and Emile Durkheim’s work on collective representations which argued that different mentalities corresponded to different social types. Anthropologist and philosopher Levy-Bruhl in his (1923) How Natives Think, postulated two basic ways of thinking: primitive and modern (Throop and Laughlin 2007). For him the ‘primitive’ worldview did not differentiate supernatural from reality and saw ‘participation’ as a unity of thinking. It is a psychic unity that creates associations between things via unseen forces and energies. This type of thought is characterized by analogic rather than logical thinking and includes meaningful coincidences, the association of ideas and symbols. For him ‘primitive’ mentality, unlike modern thought, was governed by a ‘law of participation’ in which objects and beings could be understood as participating in each other, even if appearing illogical or contradictory to modern standards. Individuals and objects could exist in seemingly contradictory states simultaneously.

Building on his work, Stanley Tambiah (1990) employed Levy-Bruhl’s notion of participation to assert that all cultural groups have two co-existent worldly orientations which are entwined. First, causality involves logical thinking, and sees reality as separated. Second, participation comprises analogic, holistic thinking and works through patterns and connection and can be found in myths, rituals and symbols and communicates through metaphor. For him participatory thinking draws upon all of the senses and emotions and can be found in poetry, narrative, and ritual. The universe is perceived as a coherent, meaningful, and unified whole which is suffused by spiritual forces. In his view magic involves techniques deployed to bring about a participatory state of consciousness, as well as the insights and personal transformations deriving from this. For Tambiah altered states range from dreams and light trances to more dramatic dissociative states where individual are cut off from self and become merged with another consciousness.

But as Sabina Magliocco (2012) notes, both orientations, the causal and the participatory, are deeply intertwined. Emotion and belief are never completely separate. Belief, experience, and context run closely together. Spiritual beliefs are based upon real somatic experiences and are attempts to understand this experience. For her narratives and practices are the anchors of belief, they transmit information and emotions and shape our understanding of the world. David Hufford (1995) distinguishes between an experience-centered approach and a belief-centered hypothesis, according to which experience is prior to belief. Spirits are real phenomenologically; they can be experienced. As Honko (1964, p. 10) notes:

‘Belief in the existence of spirits is founded not upon loose speculation, but upon concrete, personal experiences, the reality of which is reinforced by sensory perceptions. In this respect, spirits are empirical beings. Although the investigator himself is unable to see the spirits, he must admit that his informant really saw them. In general, informants react critically to supernatural experiences. They want to consider true only that which they themselves saw or which some acquaintance experienced’.

This idea of participatory magic, as we have already noted, is increasingly recognized by anthropologists (Magliocco 2012). As Magliocco (2015) argues in a later volume, contemporary anthropologists have begun to see magic as participatory consciousness which is available to everyone in all societies. It co-exists with logical causal modes of thought, but it cannot be examined scientifically. In this participatory consciousness the universe is animated by spiritual forces and exists as a unified, meaningful, and coherent whole. It involves altered states of consciousness which differ from the normal waking state-dreams and light trances. For her magic can include techniques for developing participatory states of consciousness, providing personal transformations and novel insights that derive from such experiences. Magic aims to generate a set of emotional responses that result in altered consciousness and allows practitioners to switch to a participatory worldview (Magliocco 2012). In her view, participation involves altered states of consciousness which she holds to be the main aim of most Pagan rituals alongside personal transformation. For modern occultists ritual practice becomes a psychological technique for ‘exalting individual consciousness’ (Regardie 1969, p. 44).

I argue that the disenchantment process associated with Western epistemologies of modernity has focused too much on magic as an irrational process and not enough on the experiential aspects (and therefore verifiable—to some extent) of magical practices. Magical performances may cultivate desirable affective states alongside new imaginative and cognitive skills. William Mazzarella (2017) proposes that reality becomes more pleasurable and enjoyable through the performance of magic with a positive impact for the sorcerer’s self. He suggests that we need to look at how magic is enacted, the experiential claims of embodied practitioners and relationships between praxis, embodiment, self-boundaries and interpretations of reality.

As Hanegraaff (2003) asserts, magic survives because of the presence of feelings of participation which have been threatened by the rise in instrumental rationality. The persistent attraction of magic in a disenchanted world can be accounted for by participatory consciousness, but more so, the experience of disenchantment itself actually brings about an effective need to restore the participatory mode.

Relatedly, Bever and Styers (2017, p. 4) argue: ‘In its many forms, magic explicitly foregrounds questions concerning the nature of the self and its boundaries, the capacities of the will, and the relation of the self to external powers.’ For them, magic expands boundaries of the self and their interconnections with the external world. This is in contrast to the non-magical self which is internally directed, physically isolated, and constrained in agency and power. In their view, the conscious rejection of magical thinking in modernity has facilitated the development of distinct forms of ‘rational’ subjectivity existing in modern selfhood. They postulate that those adopting magical practices are dissatisfied with norms of modern subjectivity which they consider thin and sterile. Additionally, as historian Karl Bell (2012) cogently argues, modern magic should not be viewed as erroneous belief, anachronism, or make-believe. Rather it is a powerful resource which facilitates meaning-making.

I will now examine anthropological work focusing upon participatory consciousness and Wicca.

7. Wicca

How do these ideas on participatory consciousness pertain to Wicca? While there is some debate about its origins, the creation of Wicca is commonly attributed to Gerald Gardner in the 1950s. He was influenced by a Pagan group in the New Forest who claimed to be passing down an oral tradition predating Christianity. However, there is no convincing evidence that the modern-day Wiccan movement is an unbroken lineage from ancient Paganism. Rather, Wicca is a modern religious reconstruction deriving from various historical, folkloric, occult and esoteric practices and can be seen as a new religious movement. The rise of Wicca and its public visibility in media and online forums illustrate the evolution of spirituality outside of secularism (Rowley 2022).

It is a syncretic, duotheistic earth-centered religion venerating both a horned god and triple goddess. Rituals and other practices, rather than textual interpretation, serve as gateways to the direct experience of the divine and involve participatory consciousness. Nature is held to possess its own consciousness and Wiccans can participate, build relationships with it and feel connected to it thus demonstrating participatory consciousness. There is an emphasis on upon individual spirituality, direct, personal experience rather than abstract thought, involving feelings, sensations, and it stresses the necessity of profound interconnection with nature, all of which resonate with postsecular ideas and call into question the binary distinction between the secular and the religious. There is a lack of dogma which reflects postsecularism’s acknowledgement of the evolving and fluid nature of spiritual and religious beliefs. Finally, for its practitioners, Wicca is more than a set of practices. It is a spiritual path through which they can connect with the divine or other unseen forces. Postsecularism, implicitly or explicitly, allows them to explore these spiritual dimensions without the constraints of traditional religious frameworks. Of interest, a 2014 Pew Research Study found that the number of those identifying as Wiccan or Pagan in the USA climbed to close to a million people (Rousselle 2018). The 2021 England and Wales census indicated that approximately 13,000 people identified as Wiccan.9

In Wiccan traditions reality is affected through a focused alteration of consciousness. Participatory consciousness refers to the fact that individuals can actively engage with and influence the world, including the spiritual world, through their thoughts, intentions, and imagination. This concept is linked to the Wiccan worldview, which emphasizes a connection with nature and the divine through ritual, symbolism, and a heightened awareness that all things are interconnected. Imagination plays a key role in this experience and Wiccans deploy imagination in ritual and spellcasting. Symbols, elements and intentions are visualized (Thorp 2021). As Benussi (2023) notes, pertaining to the imagination: ‘Rather, doing magic entails a degree of irony, and a valorization of the imagination. Fantasy is not dismissed as mere ‘pretend’, but valorized as a ‘serious play’, a realm in which things and events are meaningful and wondrous’.

Going into altered states of consciousness allows individuals to connect with energies, becoming a conduit for them by focusing the mind (Hume 1998). Energy is contained both in the physical body as well as externally and it can be raised and then projected outwardly for healing or magical purposes. Magic involves the combination of using subtle energy forces together with the practitioner’s will. Through imagination, practitioners can undergo spiritual journeys with rituals bridging the physical and metaphysical worlds. Rituals unite participants and strengthen their beliefs. They include chants, songs, aroma, color, and costumes to awaken the psyche. Ritual is the outer form which acts as a catalyst to transform inner processes.

Wiccan rituals basically follow a similar routine. After positioning the candles at the four cardinal directions, the alter is set up and the witch’s tools (athame, sword, water, salt, fresh flowers, and figures of a God and Goddess) are placed upon it. A circle—a sacred place for magical work—is cast at the beginning of the ritual. This circle is held to be a place between two worlds, the sacred space acts to protect practitioners from negative energies. The circle functions at two levels: physical and imaginary. Intent, will and, strong powers of visualization are deployed to manipulate or summon invisible powers as aids for magical work. The circle links this world and the next and itself contains magic power. In accord with Hermetic philosophy ‘as above so below’ actions performed in the physical world are linked to actions in the astral world.

8. Anthropological Studies of Wicca

Here I discuss several ethnographic studies of Wicca which focus upon its experiential aspects, and which deploy the notion of participatory consciousness to account for this experience. Following the postmodern turn in the humanities and the social sciences in the 1980/90s, there was an emphasis upon experiential and reflexive methods (McLennan 2017). Merz and Merz (2017) note how it is now becoming more acceptable for anthropologists to write about their own acceptance or rejection of the existence of various religious phenomena, as well as their experiences which are not empirically or scientifically provable. These authors argue for reflexivity pertaining to how anthropologists own religious/secular backgrounds impact their fieldwork.

Ethnographic studies in the past thirty years have deployed participant observation, interviews and theoretical analysis to examine the lived experience of diverse Wiccan groups. The focus of research ranges from focusing on the feminine divine (Coleman 2009), the role of rituals in transforming worldviews (Magliocco 2004; Luhrmann 1989; Greenwood 2000; Lycourinos 2017) conversion processes in Wicca (Harrington 2025), and the links of Wicca with feminism and goddess movements. Recent ethnography has explored online Wiccan communities like WitchTok (Anderson 2021).

Tanya Luhrmann (1989) examined a Wiccan coven alongside several ceremonial magic orders in London, UK. Her informants were middle class and educated. Rituals transformed consciousness for her informants and cultivated a heightened awareness whereby practitioners perceived magical forces as real, through active participation rather than purely through passive observation, as a form of participatory consciousness rather than intellectual understanding. For her, there is an intense embodied experience whereby Wiccans develop feelings of connectedness to spiritual forces. The boundaries between individual and spiritual worlds become blurred and there is a move from mere intellectual understanding of the spiritual world to a felt reality.

This author notes how meditation and visualization are important techniques for becoming practitioners of magic and changing their phenomenological experience. Through actively participating in rituals, she came to realize that magicians perform rituals to make themselves feel that they are in a different sacred world. She comments on the elaborate fantasy life of many of her informants and how magic re-enchants the world with myths, images, and imaginative ambiguity. Rather than a need for power they perform magic because they are having fun.

She argues for a relationship between the performance of magical activity and the interpretation of reality for practitioners. Her theory of ‘interpretive drift’ describes a process in which individuals’ interpretations change incrementally, resulting in the adoption of new beliefs and practices involving emotional, perceptual, and intellectual shifts. Practitioners are taught to interpret the world in novel ways (Luhrmann 1989, p. 322). We may argue, however, that the reality of magic for its practitioners is undervalued in her approach.

Susan Greenwood (2000), an anthropologist with a background in Hermetic Quabalah and a practicing witch, sees magic as an integral aspect of human consciousness and as an alternative ideational system of thought found in all societies. In her view, magic can only be understood by experiencing it, rather than just analyzing it. For her, magical consciousness is a mode of perception rooted in myth and legend, an alternative mode of consciousness and a way of experiencing the world in which everything comes alive with possibilities, the everyday boundaries of thought break down through imagination. It is a way of gaining knowledge and an alternative way of knowing separate from logic. She argues that magic is not irrational nor is it tied purely to non-Western cultures. She defines magical consciousness as:

… a mythopoetic, expanded aspect of awareness that can potentially be experienced by everyone; it is expressed in myriad varying situations and contexts, and it informs both the shaping of cosmological realities and individual behaviour as well as social structures … Thus magical consciousness is an aspect of mind that occurs in a multiplicity of ways in varying individuals and cultural contexts, and through time.

(Greenwood 2009, p. 4)

She examined the ‘otherworld’ through experiential and reflexive fieldwork in a Pagan group in London as an ‘insider’. For her magic involves communication with an otherworldly reality. The ‘otherworld’ is a spiritual domain which co-exists with the everyday mundane world. It is both inner and outer, is associated with spiritual beings, and involves a shift of consciousness, and is associated with a space and time distinct from, but also very closely aligned to everyday reality. In Western magical beliefs it is closely linked to dreams. Greenwood was opposed to studying witchcraft through the lens of Western rationalism, her theoretical approach favored phenomenology and reflexivity. The Pagan community approached the otherworld through rituals, altered states of consciousness and acts of visualization. They understood it as a realm of spiritual energy connected to the imagination and to dreams. Greenwood argues that witches learn the language of this alternative reality through their experiences and use mythology as a cognitive map which structures their otherworldly experience. Importantly Greenwood points out that anthropologists who study societies maintaining belief in the power of magic need to tentatively accept the existence of an otherworld and recognize that the methods used to study the ordinary world are inappropriate for the study of this alternative reality. In her view her insider status does not threaten her objectivity.

Magliocco (2004) conducted fieldwork among several Wiccan groups in the San Francisco Bay area in the USA, including Coven Tresmegiston. Her focus was on understanding magic and on the development of identity. Through participant observation she experienced altered states of consciousness through full participation in the rituals. She stressed the role of interpreting visions and dreams as ways of interpreting life. To understand magic, she argues that it is important to take informant’s experiences seriously and the importance of training the imagination. For her, the magical practices are art forms that re-animate the universe and stimulate practitioners’ imaginations. In a later paper she notes how ‘Pagans do not so much believe in the Goddess but connect with her, […] through the moon, the stars, the ocean, the earth, through the trees, animals, through other human beings, through ourselves’ and argues for participatory consciousness achieved through ritual (Magliocco 2012, pp. 71–72).

Damon Lycourinos (2017) notes how participant observation of modern Western magic remains rather infrequent and argues for the importance of understanding how modern ritual magic is enacted and becomes meaningful for participants rather than seeing it in the abstract. His research question pertains to how practitioners deploy distinctive modes of performance to produce, experience, and represent magic as a participatory process which transitions them from an ‘ordinary’ to a ‘magical’ worldview of meaning and effect.

This author sees the practitioners of magic as the main focus of inquiry and examines the lived experience of modern magicians through participant observation of five magicians. He asks how does the magician’s ritualized body become a site of interaction with entities and forces presented in primary and secondary sources of magical literature? He describes how a distinctive mode of embodiment and consciousness as a participatory processes facilitate a transition from an ordinary to a magical worldview.

9. Conclusions

This paper has examined the growth and survival of magic in contemporary Western society. The concept of postsecularism emerged from critiques and developments of Weber’s work. While a process of disenchantment has occurred, religion or spirituality have not been eradicated by it. Their forms have been transformed, and this has resulted in a re-enchantment of society with a return to spiritual experiences, even occurring within secular contexts. Rather than existing in a purely disenchanted world, we in the West appear to increasingly inhabit a world where religious and spiritual beliefs and experiences occur alongside, and interact with secular, rational, and scientific perspectives

To this extent the traditional linear narrative of modernity and disenchantment is not supported. While modernity has traditionally been associated with disenchantment, through reason, secularism, and science, new forms of enchantment—magic, superstition, and spirituality—are fostered. But the relationship between disenchantment, rationality and re-enchantment is complex and dynamic. The ability to inhabit fictional worlds, as in science fiction literature and video games, provides an avenue for enchantment that is compatible with a secular worldview (Fragoso and Reis 2016).

So how are modernity and enchantment related? Saler (2006) differentiates the binary from the dialectical position:

‘In the binary approach, modernity is inherently disenchanted, a situation viewed with regret as well as hope; in the dialectical approach, modernity is explicitly enchanted, in the negative sense, its universal promises exposed as self-interested ideologies, false consciousness, and bad faith’.

(p. 698)

Since the 1990s, scholars have tended to move beyond this either/or slants of both of these positions to what he refers to as the Antinomian approach involving antinomies. In recent years it has been increasingly recognized that modernity: ‘is defined less by binaries arranged in an implicit hierarchy, or by the dialectical transformation of one term into its opposite, than by unresolved contradictions and oppositions, or antinomies’ (Saler 2006, p. 700). As this author notes, modern elites were not unified in their opposition to enchantments in the past two hundred years. Some argued for disenchantment, others held that modernity resulted in irrational forms of disenchantment, while some asserted how enchantment was totally congruent with various aspects of modernity: consumerism, secularism, rationality, and individualism. This is in agreement with the idea that modernity and enchantment have complex relationships with each other.

In terms of psychology, I have argued that magic has as much to do with affective and sensory experience as with the notion of belief. In the phenomenological sense, magic is empirically real although it cannot be validated by scientific means. To this extent Weber’s disenchantment thesis, with its intellectual focus on rationality, is not supported. Future anthropological research should focus upon the cross-cultural universality of participatory consciousness, in which individuals relate to the world through instinct, emotions, and the body.