Page 179 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

162 Sarah M. Pike

sites to explore. The ones I have chosen are particularly clear examples of
the dissolution of boundaries between sacred and profane, religion and
popular media, dominant and alternative religions. These “other spaces”
exemplify the shifting focus of the study of religion: (1) alternative religions
on the Internet, (2) shrines and altars in unexpected places, (3) backyard and
roadside religion, and (4) music subcultures and festivals.

Druids and witches in the virtual world

Religious heterotopias tend to push at the boundary between sacred
and secular. This is particularly true for religious communities on the
Internet that allow individuals to move back and forth between real and
virtual identities and practices. In the 1990s, at the same time that online
religious communities first emerged, I began researching Neopaganism,
a new religious movement of men and women recreating ancient nature
religions. In his 1995 article on “Technopagans” in Wired magazine, Erik
Davis observed that online Neopagans “keep one foot in the emerging
technosphere and one foot in the wild and woolly world of Paganism”
(Davis 1995). Even though many Neopagans prioritize intimacy with nature,
Neopaganism was among the first religions to appropriate the Internet to
build online communities and promote online rituals. As an “other” space
in the 1990s, the Internet provided a creative forge in which these religious
outsiders could construct and express their identities together. “Archdruid”
Isaac Bonewits sent out an announcement for a large-scale ritual on July 4,
1995, encouraging “Pagans, as well as Ceremonial Magicians, New Agers,
and all others concerned with freedom in our country—especially religious
freedom—to cast spells this July 4th” (Pike 2004: 126). This July 4 ritual
is one of many examples of electronically mediated communities making
ritual participation possible on an international scale, thus connecting
participants in small religious movements such as Neopaganism, who
would otherwise be isolated from each other. Ritual requires what ritual
theorist Ronald Grimes has called “founded places” that are set aside for
ritual (Grimes 1995: 72). Internet rituals happen over virtually founded
places that are created by the intentions of participants and the physical
actions involved with casting spells.
Though relatively comfortable on the Internet, Neopagans have been
ambivalent about popular media. Though Neopagans criticize popular
stereotypes of their religion, witches advised the makers of the film “The
Craft” and have created fan communities for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” In
2001, anthropologist Kathryn Rountree noticed the increasingly widespread
appearance of “the contemporary appetite for magic” in various forms of
media: