Witchcraft and Paganism in Australia
First edition cover
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| Author | Lynne Hume |
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| Country | Australia |
| Language | English |
| Subject |
Anthropology of religion Pagan studies |
| Publisher | Melbourne University Press |
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Publication date
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1997 |
| Media type | Print (hardback and paperback) |
| Pages | 271 |
| ISBN | |
Witchcraft and Paganism in Australia is an anthropological study of the Wiccan and wider Pagan community in Australia. It was written by the Australian anthropologist Lynne Hume and first published in 1997 by Melbourne University Press.
Hume first encountered the Pagan movement in Canada, before beginning to explore Pagan groups in her native Australia.
Prior to Magliocco's work, multiple American researchers working in the field of Pagan studies had separately published investigations of the Pagan community in both the United States and the United Kingdom. The first of these had been the practising Wiccan, journalist and political activist Margot Adler in her Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today, which was first published by Viking Press in 1979. A second study was produced by the anthropologist Tanya M. Luhrmann in her Persuasions of the Witches' Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (1989), in which she focused on both a Wiccan coven and several ceremonial magic orders that were then operating in London. This was followed by the sociologist Loretta Orion's Never Again the Burning Times: Paganism Revisited (1995), which focused on Pagan communities on the American East Coast and Midwest.
Lynne Hume had been born and raised into the Christian faith but maintained an interest in non-Christian beliefs and societies, becoming a religious pluralist and leading her to study the discipline of anthropology. Hume was introduced to the Pagan movement while in Canada during the early 1990s. Attending a Unitarian church in Calgary, it was here that a group of Wiccans had been invited to give a talk on their magico-religious practices during a Sunday morning service. Intrigued, she joined two separate Wiccan covens; one, known as the Daughters of the Moon, was exclusively for women, while the other was a mixed gender group. She remained in these groups for a year before returning to Australia in 1992. Back in her homeland, she began looking for Pagan groups here as well, encountering several Pagan individuals in Queensland before attending the second annual Pagan Summer Gathering (PSG), which was organised by the Church of All Worlds and held in the rural outskirts of Canberra. Although knowing nobody at the festival, she took part in the rituals which took place over the next five days, including a neoshamanic meditation, an runic women's rite, a tree planting ceremony and a Vodou-inspired ritual devoted to the goddess Oya.
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