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Aloha, >On 1/6/2006 at 9:38 AM jason winslade wrote: >Maybe I'm not reading you correctly, but are you placing a value >judgement on a practice being once highbrow or aristocratic as opposed to >popularized? To try to be clear--No, I am not making a value judgement about Neo-Paganism or Neo-Pagan Craft or pop wicca by using cultural typologies like *highbrow* and *lowbrow.* Except that these terms do connote relative superiority and inferiority and possible class affiliations and some other things. I think that something of this sort is going on in a lot of the discussions of pop wicca, that for those of us who are Neo-Pagan Craft practitioners, we tend to see pop wicca as a little less than the Neo-Paganism we know and love. >What is the relevance of such a distinction? As I suggested in earlier posts, I think that post WWII Neo-Paganism drew on a host of *lowbrow* elements but not on many *highbrow* ones. Occultism and occult lore was far more marginal and bohemian not all that many decades ago. Folks who did stuff related to occultism were considered weird, fringe, crackpot, and like that. >Weren't Gardner and Sanders more 'highbrow' than the average Wiccan today? Gardner was an aspiring author and occult museum operator. Sanders, from what little I have gathered, was kind of a hustler and maybe a con-man. He certainly engaged in a lot of media relations and appearances in the English tabloid press. He named himself *King of the Witches* when few if any ordinary English citizens imagined that there were witches to be king of. They didn't emerge from any sort of academic or theological/churchly or literary world (even the literary/occult world). They were, I think, more or less self-made. What I've been turning over myself in this thread is the notion that post WWII Neo-Paganism is far more *lowbrow* altogether than I has figured. Let me add that when I've been saying *lowbrow* I've had in the back of my mind, among other things, the *lowbrow* art movement, which sorta aims to turn *lowbrow* themes into *not-so-lowbrow* art. Neo-Paganism has some of this going on in its own development, transvaluating occult themes and concepts and things. I gotta say that most Neo-Pagans that I've met, observed, or had anything to do with at all haven't stuck me as all that *highbrow.* [I'm not all that *highbrow* myself. For instance, I've written three unpublished comic books but the lyrics for only one unperformed and unscored comic light opera. Honestly, I get a kick out of popular culture and making little contributions to it.] >Even though your earlier style over substance comment might be true for a vast >number of pagans, I still think it is an unfair generalization, especially since many >'intelligent souls' out there are pagan. What I was hoping to hint at with that passage--and I apologize that it didn't work as I intended--was more or less the opposite. I think that Neo-Paganism offers its practitioners and adherents more in the way of steak and sustenance, heady draughts, sound spiritual structures, and intelligence for the soul than most other religions, spiritualities, or self-help methods around today. Musing In The Comic Book Store Of Life I'd Probably Be An Underground Funny Animal As Pagan Myth Comic! Rose, Pitch You can’t walk out of the mountains on your hands. --Kenneth Rexroth, on proper footcare while hiking