On one hand, we have a genealogy that traces the term, “magic”, back to an early modern European Christianity trying to understand itself through contrast with an imagined heresy that comes to be personified with a woman’s face. This article examines historically competing categories of magic and religion and their gendered traces in the history of religious studies. Together, Heinlein and Starhawk’s novels demonstrate how fiction can inspire religious practice that then appears again in fiction. Both novels also follow the generic conventions of the American utopian novel, a literary form that has influenced communal and millennial movements of the past. Unlike Heinlein, however, Starhawk is writing from life The Fifth Sacred Thing reflects the developing real-life norms of her San Francisco-based Pagan community. Along with liturgical echoes from Stranger, Starhawk’s novel contains sacred sex practices similar to those Heinlein describes. Robert Heinlein’s 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land has had a major impact on the practice of ethical nonmonogamy in the Pagan community, an impact that is reflected in Starhawk’s 1993 The Fifth Sacred Thing.

Pagans draw inspiration from fiction and also bring their practices to life in popular novels. Whatever terminology we choose to use for them is not the point it is that they existed and have existed in the past.Ĭontemporary Paganism’s emphasis on sacred story and narrative has led to an interdependent relationship with popular media. Matricultures still exist today in some parts of the world, albeit under threat as all Indigenous cultures are. All the heated rhetoric about 'matriarchy' avoids the real issue, which is the existence of cultures that did not enforce a patriarchal double standard or make females legal minors ruled by fathers, brothers, and husbands. It looks at the furor over the work of Marija Gimbutas, Eller's charges of 'essentialism' and 'goddess monotheism,' and theories about whether patriarchal social organization originated among foragers or agriculturalists. It also proposes that patriarchy is a historical development, questions functionalist interpretations of myths (or oral histories) of male takeovers. This article surveys literature on history, archaeology, and ethnography, from Lafitau, Morgan, Marx and Engels to Matilda Joslyn Gage and Barbara Mann, Bachofen to Jacquetta Hawkes.

Ariadne by June Rachuy Brindel