Inside The Spiritual Jacuzzi 

Page 4 of 6

Davis was raised a Southern Baptist; when he got fed up with that, he became an atheist. After some apparently mystical experiences restirred his interest in the spiritual, he started investigating the other religions of the world, settling initially on Buddhism. When he learned that some Buddhist sects had imported older Asian deities into their faith, reimagining them as protector spirits or as personified Bodhisattvas, he wondered why he couldn't do the same with Western mythologies. Again he began searching, this time for an appropriate set of spirits. The Norse gods -- Thor, Odin, Freya -- seemed to be a good fit. "I started seeing them as Buddhist protectors," he recalls. "But I wouldn't tell my Asatru friends that."

Today, years later, Davis is less interested in fusing one faith with the other. "That's how I first justified it," he explains, "but now I think Buddhism has its own system, and you have to be true to it for it to work for you." The religions fill different needs in his life, so he keeps them in separate boxes: Asatru lets him be part of a spiritual community with its own collective rituals, while Buddhism is something he does by himself.

And Islam? Davis discovered it through Peter Lamborn Wilson's 1988 book Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy, which isn't exactly your standard romp through the Koran. Here Davis found the idea that, in his words, "the high point of mysticism is freedom from the law within a religion that is rule-constricted." The result, needless to say, was not membership at a local mosque, though Davis did become briefly entwined with the local Ismaili community. Heretical Islam "gives me intellectual flights," he explains; it "fulfills my idea of discovering new things."

It's a personal path, like his Buddhism -- it's just that he pursues one with discipline and the other with a deliberate disregard for it.

It helps that he doesn't take the religions literally, preferring to regard them "as powerful metaphors that you could either read meaning into or derive meaning from. Of course, sometimes those metaphors take on lives of their own."

In Triumph of the Moon, the British historian Hutton argues that neo-paganism is eclectic and protean. It is not just capable of adopting ideas -- gods, rituals, creeds -- from many different sources but is remarkably adaptable itself, allowing very different people to refashion it in their own images. This is true of all long-lived religions, of course, but in this case the evolution has occurred at a stunning pace.

Consider paganism's political dimensions. In Modern Witchcraft (1970), the journalist Frank Smyth observed that the British witches he interviewed tended to be politically conservative. So, Hutton notes, did the founders of the movement, and the figures who influenced them. But in the 60s and 70s -- first in America, but soon in Britain as well -- the religion was altered by feminist and environmentalist currents; in America especially, Wicca was often associated with the political left. The new collection Modern Pagans (2002), an anthology of interviews by V. Vale and John Sulak, reveals a subculture that would have been a bracing surprise to the neo-pagans of 50 years ago: goths, gay activists, anti-globalization protesters, a cyberspace-based "technopagan," even a Buddhist Beat poet.

It is the protean, adaptive quality Hutton identified that allowed these new variations to emerge. When feminists discovered paganism, they were attracted to the idea of goddess worship, and to the implications of a matriarchal past; the Wicca they then developed was very different from the one Gardner created. Green pagans, meanwhile, turned to "Earth-based spirituality" -- and in the process, Hutton notes, they transformed fertility rites into nature worship. Libertarian pagans enjoyed the Wicca's central ethical principle: "An it harm none, do as ye will." Even the radical right found a niche by imposing a racialist gloss onto Asatru, to the discomfort of anti-racist Odinists such as Davis.

As one moves further from the Wiccan mainstream, neo-paganism's eclectic quality -- its status as a religion of appropriation -- becomes yet more obvious. The Church of Aphrodite, founded on Long Island, NY, in 1938, was inspired by the myths of classical Greece as viewed through the lens of one Russian emigre's mind. Subsequent neo-pagans took their inspiration from the Druids, from ancient Egypt, from the Vikings, from Rome. Others looked to traditions that survived to the present day: to Hinduism, to African animism, to American Indian religions, even to Santeria and voodoo.

Inspiration from a particular religious tradition doesn't mean perfect reconstruction. There is often a dramatic difference between those in the original tradition and those appropriating it for their own purposes -- between an ordinary Hindu, for example, and an American witch who has added the goddess Kali to her personal pantheon. One devotee of the Egyptian gods told Adler that he was a Jungian and that his deities "represent constructs -- personifications." Some pagans would leave it at that; others, including Adler's interviewee, would insist that on the other side of those interpretive constructs are forces with an independent existence. Either way, it's a far cry from mainstream Hindu theology.