Modern paganism

By the opening decades of the twentieth century, then, most of the conceptual ingredients needed for modern Wicca already existed somewhere in British culture, even though they had not yet assembled into Wicca itself.

Pagan nostalgia, the romantic revaluation of nature, ceremonial magic, folklore, secret society initiation, the search for ancient survivals, goddess speculation, horn divinity, and comparative religion were all available to a sufficiently eclectic collector, and Gerald Gardner would prove unusually willing to move material between those worlds whenever he believed the pieces belonged to a deeper magical pattern.

Margaret Alice Murray was not an occult pamphleteer working at the edge of respectable scholarship, which helps explain why her influence became so powerful.

She was a trained Egyptologist associated with the University College of London.

That was where Brooke was coming from.

And he and his friends, there was a whole group of them called the Neopagans.

I think that term was coined by Virginia Woolf's sister, I'd have to check that.

But there was a whole group of them who were into pagan or esoteric type spirituality, and they never quite got it together enough to form a group or a sect.

Mm-hmm.

This idea of principalities and powers is understanding that a lot of these world religions, whether it be Islam or Hinduism, um, things like, you know, Neopaganism and wic-

Mm-hmm

... and Wiccan, um-

It's just like any other day.

Um, but like you said, cultures around the world have, and today Neopagans, Druids, Wiccans, et cetera, um, definitely celebrate it as one of eight sabbats.

Sabbats.

Sabbats, I think, right? Like Sabbaths.

You guys are all wrong.

I don't really care what the Neopagans think about it.

The

reason this is so problematic to the alt-right is because when we say that he didn't hate Christ, that he saw him as an Aryan, you now have people who realize, oh, it isn't Christ that's holding us back from becoming nationalistic.

Astrology has returned.

Neopaganism is growing.

Interest in the psychedelic religious experiences is becoming mainstream in the universities and even in counseling practice.

Near-death experiences attract enormous public attention now.