Aloha,

For me, at least, there is a critical or theoretical challenge to this
divergence
between different--but intertwining--streams of Neo-Pagan Craft
(sub)culture.

The divergence involves content (as Caelum said), blandification
(Caroline),
the interactions among various (sub)cultural domains, and the recruitment/
assimilation of new members. And other factors and influences.

Here's how I started off thinking about this divergence.

1.) From the get go, the post WWII Neo-Pagan Craft revival was a popular
culture phenomenon. It didn't emerge from the *high* culture or from
the aristocratic culture of a privileged or powerful few.

1a.) I give some weight to the generally middle class origins and
affiliations of
most of the early Craft revivalists. This is kinda dicey in regard to
cultural
analysis, but I think that it (slightly) supports my assertion that post
WWII
Neo-Pagan Craft did not emerge from *high* or aristo (sub)cultures.

2.) In the immediate post WWII period, witchcraft was a *lowbrow* interest,

even among people of a generally occult bent, and an interest in *doing*
witchcraft
was definitely a *lowbrow* interest.

I'm calling witchcraft *lowbrow* because in Great Britain where the post
WWII
revival emerged, witchcraft was illegal and considered a crime of fraud
under
the 1736 Witchcraft Act.

3.) Doing witchcraft was also an element of Bohemian counter-culture.
I think that this Bohemian quality is another *lowbrow* attribute. But it
is also a potential link to *high* culture.

4.) Many of the early Craft revivalists had reasons--personal, career, and
commercial--to promote witchcraft and their place in it through a range
of mass media outlets. And they did.

5.) The divergence began to develop during the middle period of the Craft
revival,
when there were more witches, more interested newcomers, and more ways
to promote and popularize. And when there had come to exist a substantial
core of veteran witches who could--and did--notice the divergence and
complain
about it.

6.) Using Sabina's schema, I think that part of what we're talking about
has
to do with using popular, commercial mass, and academic (sub)cultures in
a primarily folky setting, and then having this mix, or parts of it, or
riffs off
it re-blended into more general mass and popular culture. Again and again.

It's this fairly complicated and many-stranded relationship between folky
setting, popular culture, mass commercial influence, and how individuals
and
groups balance it out that leads me to suggest that one might look at
Neo-Pagan
Craft's behavior involving this divergence in terms of fans and fads. (As
does
Sabina.)

7.) For me, one result of posting to this thread on pop wicca is that I'm
beginning to think of this divergence as an emerging set or sequence of
movements--pop wicca being more a distinct movement rather than a
part of the Neo-Pagan Craft movement--that happen to share some cultural
resources.

Musing Poppy Wicca Probably Isn't Neo-Pagan Craft At All! Rose,

Pitch




The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.
--Thomas Merton