Spaces of Spirituality

Spirituality is, too often, subsumed under the heading of religion and treated as much the
same kind of thing. Yet spirituality extends far beyond the spaces of religion. The spiritual
makes geography strange, challenging the relationship between the known and the
unknown, between the real and the ideal, and prompting exciting possibilities for charting
the ineffable spaces of the divine which lie somehow beyond geography. In setting itself
that task, this book pushes the boundaries of geographies of religion to bring into direct
focus questions of spirituality. By seeing religion through the lens of practice rather than
as a set of beliefs, geographies of religion can be interpreted much more widely, bringing
a whole range of other spiritual practices and spaces to light. The book is split into three
sections, each contextualised with an editors’ introduction, to explore the spaces of spiritual
practice, the spiritual production of space, and spiritual transformations. This book intends
to open to up new questions and approaches through the theme of spirituality, pushing the
boundaries on current topics and introducing innovative new ideas, including esoteric or
radical spiritual practices. This landmark book not only captures a significant moment in
geographies of spirituality, but acts as a catalyst for future work.

Nadia Bartolini is an associate research fellow at the University of Exeter. Her work has
looked at how tangible heritage is incorporated in contemporary urban planning in Rome.
Prior to undertaking her PhD, she worked in Indigenous research and policy in the Canadian
Federal Government. Her research focuses on issues surrounding urban cultures, heritage
and the built environment. She has published on spiritualities that lie outside mainstream
religions in London, Manchester and Stoke-on-Trent, in particular how spiritual values are
transmitted through communities and across generations.

Sara MacKian is currently Senior Lecturer in Health and Wellbeing at The Open University.
Her research to date has been driven by a curiosity for how people and organisations interact
around issues of health, wellbeing and meaning making. More recently she has developed
research around alternative spiritualities in contemporary society, based on a fascination with
the relationship between the real and the imaginary, the body and the spirit, this world and
the otherworldly. She is author of Everyday Spirituality (2012).

Steve Pile teaches Geography at The Open University. He has published on issues
concerning place and the politics of identity. Steve is author of Real Cities (2005) and The
Body and The City (1996), which both develop a psychoanalytic approach to geography.
It is through these projects that he became interested in alternative spiritualities and their
relationship to contemporary modernity. His many collaborative projects include the recent
collection, Psychoanalytic Geographies, edited with Paul Kingsbury.
Routledge Research in Culture, Space and Identity
Series editor: Dr. Jon Anderson, School of Planning and
Geography, Cardiff University, UK

The Routledge Research in Culture, Space and Identity Series offers a forum for
original and innovative research within cultural geography and connected fields.
Titles within the series are empirically and theoretically informed and explore a
range of dynamic and captivating topics. This series provides a forum for cutting
edge research and new theoretical perspectives that reflect the wealth of research
currently being undertaken. This series is aimed at upper-level undergraduates,
research students and academics, appealing to geographers as well as the broader
social sciences, arts and humanities.
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/Routledge-
Research-in-Culture-Space-and-Identity/book-series/CSI

Surfing Spaces
Jon Anderson

Violence in Place, Cultural and Environmental Wounding

Amanda Kearney

Arts in Place: The Arts, the Urban and Social Practice

Cara Courage

Explorations in Place Attachment

Jeffrey S. Smith

Geographies of Digital Culture

Edited by Tilo Felgenhauer and Karsten Gäbler

The Nocturnal City

Robert Shaw

Geographies of Making, Craft and Creativity

Edited by Laura Price and Harriet Hawkins

Spaces of Spirituality
Edited by Nadia Bartolini, Sara MacKian and Steve Pile
Spaces of Spirituality

Edited by Nadia Bartolini,

Sara MacKian and Steve Pile
First published 2018
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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© 2018 selection and editorial matter, Nadia Bartolini, Sara MacKian and
Steve Pile; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Nadia Bartolini, Sara MacKian and Steve Pile to be identified
as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
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Contents

List of figuresviii
List of contributorsx

  1 Spaces of spirituality: an introduction 1

NADIA BARTOLINI, SARA MACKIAN AND STEVE PILE

SECTION 1
Spaces of spiritual practices

  2 Spiritual propositions: the American evangelical

intelligentsia and the supernatural order 25
JUSTIN K. H. TSE

  3 Resisting marriage equalities: the complexities of religious

opposition to same sex marriage 37
KATH BROWNE AND CATHERINE JEAN NASH

  4 Building sacred modernity: Buddhism, secularism and a

geography of ‘religion’ in southern Sri Lanka 54
TARIQ JAZEEL

  5 ‘I renounce the World, the Flesh, and the Devil’: pilgrimage,

transformation, and liminality at St Patrick’s Purgatory,
Ireland 67
RICHARD SCRIVEN

  6 Ministers on the move: vocation and migration in the

British Methodist Church 82
LIA D. SHIMADA
vi  Contents
SECTION 2
The spiritual production of space

  7 Suburban miracles: encountering the divine off Highway 99 101

CLAIRE DWYER

  8 Kendal Revisited: the study of spirituality then and now 120

KARIN TUSTING AND LINDA WOODHEAD

  9 The small stuff of barely spiritual practices 135

JENNIFER LEA, CHRIS PHILO AND LOUISA CADMAN

10 Rethinking youth spirituality through sacrilege and encounter 155

ELIZABETH OLSON, PETER HOPKINS AND GISELLE VINCETT

11 Transnational religion and everyday lives: spaces of

spirituality among Brazilian and Vietnamese migrants in London 168
OLIVIA SHERINGHAM AND ANNABELLE WILKINS

12 Life cycles of spirituality, religious conversion and violence

in São Paulo 184
KIM BEECHENO

SECTION 3
Spiritual transformations

13 The magical battle of Britain: the spatialities of occult geopolitics 205

JULIAN HOLLOWAY

14 ‘Where should we commence to dig?’: spectral narratives

and the biography of place in F. B. Bond’s psychic
archaeology of Glastonbury Abbey 221
JAMES THURGILL

15 Categorizing Spiritualism as a shamanism: lessons in mapping 234

DAVID GORDON WILSON

16 Jung’s legacy: the Western Goddess Movement 245

REV. PATRICIA ‘IOLANA
 Contents vii
17 Boundaries of healing: insider perspectives on ritual and
transgression in contemporary esoteric theatre 260
ALISON ROCKBRAND

18 Reading three ways: ask me how! 278

PROFESSOR DUSKY PURPLES

Index297
Figures

1.1 The Hanley Church Bar and Restaurant in 2015. Reproduced

with kind permission of Daniele Sambo. 17
4.1 The Parliament Complex, Sri Jaywardenapura Kotte, Sri Lanka:
architect, Geoffrey Bawa. Source: Rik Jazeel. 55
4.2 The transparent and fluid spatiality of the Guest House at
Lunuganga, Bentota, Sri Lanka: architect, Geoffrey Bawa.
Source: Rik Jazeel. 61
4.3 Columns and terrace leading to outside space at the back of
the Main House, Lunuganga, Bentota, Sri Lanka: architect,
Geoffrey Bawa. Source: Rik Jazeel. 61
5.1 Pilgrims at St Brigid’s Cross one pilgrim stands outstretched
reciting the prayer, while others kneel in prayer before standing
themselves. Source: Richard Scriven. 68
5.2 Lough Derg statue of St Patrick the Pilgrim, with the island in
the background, the lake waters separating it from the rest of the
world. Source: Richard Scriven. 74
7.1 Map of Number 5 Road. Reproduced with kind permission of
Miles Irving, UCL Department of Geography. 102
7.2 Richmond, Evangelical Free Church, Number 5 Road. Source:
Claire Dwyer. 105
7.3 Lingyen Mountain Temple. Source: Claire Dwyer. 105
7.4 Dharma Drum Mountain Temple. Source: Claire Dwyer. 106
7.5 Number 5 Road showing India Cultural Centre (Gurdwara)
[on right] and Az-Zaharra Mosque [on left]. Source:
Claire Dwyer. 107
9.1 Diarist 9, extract of entry from day one. 141
9.2 Diarist 9, extract of entry from day five. 143
9.3 Diarist 11, extract of entry from day four. 145
9.4 Diarist 9, extract of entry from day five. 147
9.5 Diarist 9, extract of entry from day five. 148
9.6 Diarist 11, extract of entry from day four. 149
9.7 Diarist 9, extract of entry from day two. 150
 Figures ix
17.1 Angela Edwards in The Celestial Shroud, ritual skin-
sewing performance at Chronic Illness of Mysterious
Origin III, London 2016. Source: Alison Rockbrand. 265
17.2 Metamorphic Ritual Theatre in performance of Loom of
Lila (2007). Eleven dancers form the face and hands of
Kali-Arachne, a composite form of the Mother Goddess.
Source: Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule. 269
18.1 professor dusky purples in Edinburgh, 2015.
Source: Heather McLean. 282
18.2 The back page of a U.S. Passport. Source: Darren Patrick. 283
18.3 Map of the Path of Balance reading conducted on 30
December 2016. Source: Darren Patrick. 288
18.4 Photo of the Path of Balance reading conducted on 30
December 2016. Source: Darren Patrick. 289
18.5–18.12 Ritual. Source: professor dusky purples. All quotations
as attributed. 290
Contributors

Kim Beecheno is a teaching fellow in Gender and Social Policy at King’s College
London. Her PhD focused on the ways in which Christianity (Catholicism and
Pentecostalism) is addressed in both secular and faith-based centres for female
survivors of domestic violence in Brazil. Her research interests cover intersec-
tions between gender, religion, feminism and violence, with a particular focus
on Latin America.
Kath Browne is a Professor in Geographies of Sexualities and Genders at May-
nooth University. Her research interests lie in sexualities, genders and spa-
tialities. She works with Catherine Nash and Andrew Gorman Murray on
understanding transnational resistances to LGBT equalities. She is the lead
researcher on the ‘Making Lives Liveable: Rethinking Social Exclusion’
research project and has worked on LGBT equalities, lesbian geographies,
gender transgressions and women’s spaces. Kath has authored a number of
journal publications, co-wrote with Leela Bakshi Ordinary in Brighton: LGBT,
activisms and the City (Ashgate, 2013), and Queer Spiritual Spaces (Ashgate,
2010), and has co-edited a number of books, most recently, The Routledge
Companion to Geographies of Sex and Sexualities (Routledge, 2016) and Les-
bian Geographies (Routledge, 2015).
Louisa Cadman (Sheffield Hallam University) has worked within the field of
Foucauldian and poststructural geographies, with a particular interest in ques-
tions of power and resistance in relation to health care and mental health.
Claire Dwyer is a Reader in Human Geography at University College London,
where she is also co-director of the Migration Research Unit. Her research
focuses on geographies of ethnicity, religion and multiculturalism and she is
currently researching suburban religious landscapes in West London. She is
the co-author of New Geographies of Race and Racism, Transnational Spaces,
Geographies of New Femininities, Qualitative Methods for Geographers,
and Geographies of Children and Young People: Identities and Subjectivities.
Julian Holloway is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography in the Division of
Geography and Environmental Management at Manchester Metropolitan Uni-
versity. He has published on the geographies of religion, spirituality and the
 Contributors xi
occult, with a particular reference to spectrality, haunting and monstrosity. His
more recent work interrogates the geographies of sound and the sonic appre-
hension of space and place. Each of these research topics are connected by a
theoretical interest in embodiment, practice, affect and materiality.
Peter Hopkins is Professor of Social Geography at Newcastle University. A key
focus of his research to date has been upon the geographies of religion, faith and
spiritualities which has included work with a diversity of religious faiths, including
Muslim, Christian, Sikh and other religious and non-religious young people.
Patricia ‘Iolana holds a PhD in Literature, Theology and the Arts from the Uni-
versity of Glasgow, and is an ordained Pagan Minister and Interfaith Activ-
ist. She specializes in personal experiences with Goddess, and approaches
this from a psychodynamic methodology called Depth Thealogy. Her publica-
tions include: Literature of the Sacred Feminine: Great Mother Archetypes
and the Re-emergence of the Goddess in Western Traditions (2009), Goddess
Thealogy: An International Journal for the Study of the Divine Feminine 1(1)
(2011), She Rises, Vol 2 (2016), Goddess 2.0: Advancing A New Path Forward
(2016), and the forthcoming Feminine States of Consciousness (2018).
Tariq Jazeel teaches Human Geography at University College London in the
UK. His research explores cultural and aesthetic constitutions of the political,
and his work is broadly positioned at the intersections of critical geography,
South Asian studies and postcolonial theory. He is the author of Sacred Moder-
nity: nature, environment and the postcolonial geographies of Sri Lankan
nationhood (2013), and co-editor of Spatialising Politics: culture and geog-
raphy in postcolonial Sri Lanka (2009, with Cathrine Brun). He is an editor
of the journal Antipode, and is on the Editorial Collective of Social Text.
Jennifer Lea (University of Exeter) has worked on geographies of the body, with
a particular interest in spiritual practices and wellbeing. She has recently devel-
oped an interest in post-natal depression and new motherhood.
Catherine J. Nash is a Professor in the Department of Geography and Tourism
Studies at Brock University, Canada. Her research focus is on sexuality, gen-
der and urban places. Her current research interests include changing urban
sexual and gendered landscapes in Toronto; a focus on digital technologies and
sexuality in everyday life; new LGBT mobilities; and international resistances
to LGBT equalities in Canada, GB and Australia. Her books include Queer
Methods and Methodologies (2010) with K. Browne and An Introduction to
Human Geography (Canadian Edition) (2015) with E. Fouberg, A. Murphy
and H. de Blij.
Elizabeth Olson is Associate Professor of Geography and Global Studies at the
University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. She has worked in areas related
to inequality and religion, and her current research examines the historical and
contemporary ethics and politics of care through the experiences of young peo-
ple who are engaged in informal caregiving in the United States.
xii  Contributors
Chris Philo, Professor of Geography at the University of Glasgow since 1995,
is fascinated by all things geographical. His specialist interests have been the
historical and social geographies of ‘madness’, ‘asylums’ and psychiatry (or
‘MAP’, as he sometimes short-hands it), including a concern for the spaces
of mental health, ill-health, treatment, care and recuperation in the present.
One dimension of the latter has been a concern for spaces of spiritual health,
understood in a broadly existential rather than narrowly ‘religious’ fashion,
and hence Chris was delighted to work with Jen Lea and Louisa Cadman on
an AHRC-funded project addressing what we termed ‘a new urban spiritual’ –
which specifically embraced the spaces, times and practices of yoga and medi-
tation in the city. That project, which officially ran 2010–2012 but continues
to shape our thinking and writing today, was the basis for the chapter in the
present volume.
professor dusky purples has worked and lectured internationally as a reader
and spiritual guide for precarious, misplaced, and tenured akademiks alike.
Her areas of experience-based expertise include tarot, astrology, and crystal-
line storytelling. Though professor purples has spent much of the last decade
on extended sabbatical, she is always available for consultations, conferences,
and private events. You can reach her directly at prof[dot]duskypurples[at]
gmail[dot]com. She’s within reach and ready to help you read, all you have to
do is Ask Her How!
Alison Rockbrand is currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Exeter,
where she studies contemporary esoteric theatre and performance art from
the insider’s perspective. She has worked with numerous esoteric traditions
including witchcraft, chaos magic, western left hand path traditions, demonol-
ogy, satanism, and is an active member of the pagan community. Her theatre
company, Travesty Theatre based in Montreal, Canada (2000–2007) was dedi-
cated to experimental performance, including the use of vaudeville and caba-
ret, Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, collective creation, physical theatre,
clown and dance. After moving to the UK in 2005 she directed Paul Green’s
occult play Babalon, which was subsequently recorded for radio broadcast and
released with a publication of his plays. She has written for Oracle Occult
magazine, Silkmilk magazine, Women’s Voices in Magick and is the author
of a grimoire. Along with Cryptozoologist Richard Freeman, she co-hosts Exe
Files Paranormal Radio on Phonic FM in Exeter.
Richard Scriven is a lecturer in Human Geography at the School of Geography
and Archaeology, National University of Ireland Galway. His research exam-
ines contemporary pilgrimage as an embodied practice, a form of political
action and a spatial therapeutic process.
Olivia Sheringham is a lecturer in Human Geography at Queen Mary Uni-
versity of London. Her research interests span migration and religion, cre-
olization and identity formation, and geographies of home and the city. She
is currently working with Alison Blunt and Casper Laing Ebbensgaard on a
 Contributors xiii
project examining home, city and migration in East London, and was recently
involved in a collaborative project called Globe with artist Janetka Platun. Her
publications include Transnational religious spaces: Faith and the Brazilian
migration experiences (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Encountering Difference
(with Robin Cohen, Polity, 2016), and several peer-reviewed articles in jour-
nals including Ethnic and Racial Studies, Diaspora: a Journal of Transna-
tional Studies and Portuguese Studies.
Lia Dong Shimada is Senior Research Fellow for the Susanna Wesley Foundation,
based at the University of Roehampton. She was awarded a PhD in Geography
from University College London in 2010 and a Masters degree in Theology
and Religious Studies from King’s College London in 2014. Lia is a mediator
and facilitator specialising in diversity, conflict and organisational practice in
faith communities; from 2010 to 2013 she implemented the national diversity
strategy for the British Methodist Church. Lia is the general editor of the forth-
coming book Migration and Faith Communities (Jessica Kingsley Publishers).
James Thurgill is an Associate Professor and cultural geographer at the Uni-
versity of Tokyo, Japan. James received his PhD in Cultural Geography from
Royal Holloway, University of London, where he completed his doctoral the-
sis on Enchanted Geographies: experiences of place in contemporary British
landscape mysticism. James’ work is concerned with spectrality and the phe-
nomenology of absence, spatial narrative, folklore and affective geographies.
His most recent work examines literary geographies of absence in the writings
of M. R. James and Lafcadio Hearn.
Justin K. H. Tse (謝堅恆) is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Asian American
Studies Program at Northwestern University. He is the lead editor of Theologi-
cal Reflections on the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (Palgrave, 2016) and
is working on a book manuscript titled Religious Politics in Pacific Space:
Grounding Cantonese Protestant Theologies in Secular Civil Societies. His
publications can be found in Population, Space, and Place, Global Networks,
Progress in Human Geography, Chinese America: History and Perspective,
Ching Feng, Review of Religion in Chinese Society, Bulletin for the Study of
Religion, Relegens Thréskeia, and Syndicate.
Karin Tusting is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Linguistics and English
Language, Lancaster University. Her research interests include linguistic ethnog-
raphy, workplace literacies, digital literacies communities, language and iden-
tity. Her most recent research project, ‘The Dynamics of Knowledge Creation’,
studies academics’ writing practices, http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/acadswriting/.
Giselle Vincett is a sociologist of religion with a special interest in marginalized
groups, and especially in poverty (or social and economic exclusion) in Britain
and Europe. She is currently Mercator Fellow at the University of Leipzig.
Annabelle Wilkins is a postdoctoral researcher in Geography and Environment
at the University of Southampton. Her research focuses on the relationships
xiv  Contributors
between home, work, migration and cities, and she is currently Research Fel-
low on an ERC project examining the social, spatial and economic dimensions
of home-based self-employment. Her publications include an article in the
journal Gender, Place and Culture, and a book (in progress) entitled Migra-
tion, Work and Home-Making in the City: Dwelling and Belonging among
Vietnamese Communities in London, to be published by Routledge.
David Gordon Wilson is a former partner in a City of London law firm, who
completed a PhD in Religious Studies at Edinburgh in 2011 and has served as
a committee member of the British Association for the Study of Religions; he
currently owns a rare and second-hand bookshop in London.
Linda Woodhead MBE is Professor of Sociology of Religion in the Department
of Politics, Philosophy and Religion in Lancaster University and Director of
the Institute for Social Futures. She holds honorary doctorates from the Uni-
versities of Uppsala and Zurich and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sci-
ences. Here books include That Was the Church That Was: How the Church
of England Lost the English People (with Andrew Brown 2016), A Sociology
of Prayer (with Giuseppe Giordan, 2015), Christianity: A Very Short Intro-
duction (2nd revised edition, 2014), Everyday Lived Islam in Europe (with
Nathal Dessing and Nadia Jeldtoft, 2013), Religion and Change in Modern
Britain (with Rebecca Catto, 2012), A Sociology of Religious Emotions (with
Ole Riis, 2010), Religions in the Modern World (2009), and The Spiritual Rev-
olution (with Paul Heelas, 2005).
1 Spaces of spirituality
An introduction
Nadia Bartolini, Sara MacKian
and Steve Pile

1 Placing spirituality
Writing in 1993, Martha Henderson asked the question ‘what is spiritual geog-
raphy?’ Her question was prompted by the publication of two books, both of
which used spiritual geography in their subtitle: Beliefs and Holy Places (1992)
by James Griffin and Dakota (1993) by Kathleen Norris. Henderson’s response to
the question focuses upon the geography of the spiritual. She argues that spiritual-
ity is a subject that can be approached by people working in many different disci-
plines and, indeed, working in transdisciplinary modes. In this view, the spiritual
is one aspect of the relationship between people, place and the earth. Fundamen-
tally, spirituality is connected to the earth and is, therefore, a part of the human
ecology and history of particular sites and places. Thus, spiritual geography taps
into the long-standing connection that people have with places. Places, as she
puts it, ‘momentarily trap and illuminate [the] supernatural ability of humans to
adapt, create and re-create their surroundings’ (page 470). Supernatural? She does
not explain. However, Henderson is trying to grasp something unquantifiable: the
relationship between the known and the unknown, between the real and the ideal.
So, the spiritual is about more than religious beliefs and practices and the creation
(and recreation) of sacred sites and spaces. It is not, therefore, an analogue for
other ways of thinking about human life, such as the industrial or the biological
or the behavioural. Introducing the spiritual starts to interfere with commonplace
understandings of place by pushing them into a consideration of the ‘supernatu-
ral’: the unknown, the unknowable, the ineffable and the numinous. The spiritual
makes geography strange. Indeed, the spiritual is itself a strange territory: not just
uncharted, but calling into question what can be charted. So, this book is not an
attempt to provide a cartography of the spiritual, as this would be to disavow the
way that the spiritual interferes with geography. Instead, we wish to explore the
many different ways that space and spirituality can be entangled, in ways that are
surprising, challenging and (hopefully) provocative.
While Henderson wishes to approach spirituality through place, Julian Hol-
loway and Oliver Valins argue that spirituality can be explored at a range of dif-
ferent spatial scales, from, for example, the body to the global (2002, page 5; see
also Bartolini et al., 2017). This might imply that spirituality operates within,
2  Nadia Bartolini et al.
and confirms the operability of, nested hierarchies of scale. Yet, Holloway’s and
Valins’ aim is to draw out the different ways that spirituality and space are entan-
gled through notions of scale. Rather than spirituality simply being in evidence at
different scales, spirituality is seen as productive of those scales. Thus, for exam-
ple, the body is itself understood and lived in different and distinct ways through
spirituality. Indeed, spirituality is woven through everyday life. Moreover, as Jen-
nifer Lea, Chris Philo and Louisa Cadman (Chapter 9) argue, the weaving of
spiritual forms through everyday life does not necessarily reveal itself in dramatic
or obvious ways. They focus upon the ‘small stuff’ of spirituality: the ‘micro-
instances’ of other ways of being in the world. They explore the significance of
stillness in spiritual life and how forms of stillness can then infuse everyday life.
Thus, practices learned in yoga sessions can then be used to ‘pause’ or ‘still’ eve-
ryday situations or be used to cope with the ordinary stresses of life. Often, this
goes unnoticed even by the people doing it. And, even if they do, it is unremark-
able and easily forgotten. Yet, these unnoticed micro-instances of spirituality are
part of how everyday life is conducted, sustained and endured.
This makes it hard, perhaps impossible, to disentangle the spiritual from the
production of space in general. Holloway and Valins observe:

‘Religious and spiritual matters form an important context through which the
majority of the world’s population live their lives, forge a sense (indeed an
ethics) of self, and make and perform different geographies’.
(page 6)

Everyday life is infused with practices that carry religious and spiritual connota-
tions, often unthinkingly: this is especially clear in the types of foods that are
eaten or the clothes in which people feel comfortable (or uncomfortable) or the
festivals that people observe; but also in people’s celebration of births and mar-
riages – and how they cope with death and bereavement. More than this, Hollo-
way and Valins argue,

‘religion is a crucial component [of] the construction of even the most “secu-
lar” societies. Through, for example, systems of ethics and morality, archi-
tecture, systems of patriarchy and the construction of law, government or the
(increasing) role of the voluntary sector’.
(page 6)

Religion, and by extension spirituality, do not stand outside of modernity in such

a view, but are fundamental to how it is constructed: whether through the implicit
moral codes that govern people’s conduct or through its explicit laws and their
execution. Seemingly secular decisions about what is right or fair or just are
informed by value systems derived as much from implicit religious and spiritual
assumptions as from the explicit formation of principles by other means. Personal
and shared values, then, are hard to shake from religious and spiritual precepts –
and this is political, too: for it shapes how people think about and treat others; how
 Spaces of spirituality: an introduction 3
they construct and live through collectives, of all kinds; and the values that they
seek to operationalise in their everyday lives.
Yet, it is hard (impossible?) to make universalisable statements about religion
and spirituality, at any scale. There are intense debates about whether Western
societies are post-secular or not, post-Christian or not; about the rise and distribu-
tion of religious fundamentalisms across the planet, though especially where it
becomes evident in acts of violence, terrorism and war; about whether new forms
of spirituality are alternative or mainstream, meaningful or merely a product of
fashion (think, for example, about the appearance and spread of the Jedi religion
in the West); about the meaning and significance of different kinds of clothing;
about the decline or intensification of religious observances; or about the coexist-
ence of laws founded on different religious or spiritual principles. Taken together,
these debates challenge the relentless and ubiquitous assumption that social pro-
cesses are driven by economic, political and cultural logics that have nothing to
do with religion and spirituality.
While the trajectories of the social, in different places, at different scales, can-
not be universalised, what we can say is that religion and spirituality remains
complicit in the production of space and scale. Yet, this is to take religion and spir-
ituality as a singularity: one kind of thing that makes and unmakes geography in
distinctive, perhaps even unique, ways. Too often, spirituality is marshalled under,
or alongside, the heading of religion and treated as much the same kind of thing.
For sure, religions are formed by practices, performances and sacred spaces that
are all designed to evoke the divine – and this marks religion out as different from
other social practices. Indeed, as the divine is beyond geography, religions work
hard to produce a consistency of the numinous across different places, through
highly formalised practices, performances and sacred spaces. Yet, not only are
religions constantly splitting, mutating and syncretizing, creating contact with the
divine is not the only purpose of religious practices, performances and sacred
spaces. They are also spiritual, concerned with the nature of spirit, both human
and nonhuman. Spirituality, and its forms, extend far beyond religion. Spirituality
is therefore not, in this book, a synonym for, nor coextensive with, religion.
Setting spirituality inside, alongside and aside from religion allows us to pose
new challenges for understanding the production of space. These are less to do
with the structure of beliefs and practices, and more to do with how beliefs and
practices play out in, or intersect with, everyday life. Significantly, thinking
through spirituality sets new puzzles and challenges for understanding the pro-
duction of space.

2 Understanding space and spirituality

Paul Cloke and J. D. Dewsbury, writing in 2009, take up the challenge of thinking
through the relationship between spirituality and space. To do so, they introduce
the idea of ‘spiritual landscapes’. Spiritual landscapes, for them, are constituted
by the relationship between ‘bodily existence, felt practice and faith in things’
(page 696). Helpfully, they distinguish spirituality from religion. First, they argue
4  Nadia Bartolini et al.
that spirituality can be experienced in a wide variety of religious and non-religious
forms. To establish this, they use the examples of experiences with nature, of med-
itation, and of ghosts. Second, they argue that formal religion can be practiced and
experienced in un-spiritual ways, but especially where religious institutions and
practices become interwoven with practices of domination and exploitation. So,
while ways of understanding religion – through, for example, ritual, beliefs and
faith – are useful for understanding spirituality, they are not enough. Cloke and
Dewesbury argue for an experiential approach to spiritual landscapes, focused on
people’s personal experiences, their ways of inhabiting, and engaging with, the
world.
Thus, the expression ‘spiritual landscapes’, for Cloke and Dewesbury, is a way
to understand the relationship between the spiritual and the spatial. The spiritual,
for them, is a disposition that involves both faith and an openness to the possibility
of ‘other-worldliness’. Notice that this shifts the terrain of spirituality away from
the divine, as such, onto a much broader set of possibilities for ‘other-worldliness’.
In a sense, this idea harks back to Henderson’s use of the supernatural to evoke
the ineffable. The spiritual implies some kind of world beyond the visible and the
material. Key, for Cloke and Dewesbury, is that this other-worldliness is a pos-
sibility: faith is associated with this possibility and, indeed, comes to be defined
by it. Faith, for example, in Heaven. Or Hell. Or the after-life. Spirituality, how-
ever, is not limited to its faith in the possibility of other worlds. It is practised and
performed – and becomes manifest in its performances and practices. Such per-
formances and practices include, for example, prayer and meditation, retreats and
pilgrimages, singing and chanting, art and music, but also more profane activities
such as ghost hunting and dark tourism.
In Chapter 17, Alison Rockbrand explores the performance of esoteric theatre.
She shows how esoteric rituals are drawn into theatrical performances that include
the audience, enabling them to take part in a spiritual journey. Esoteric theatre
creates a transitional space that enables the transmutation of the self that can be
carried into the world. Esotericism, thus, undermines the boundaries between
worlds (see also Goodricke-Clarke, 2008). Spirituality, through its performances
and practices, proliferates through everyday life, often in ways that go unrecog-
nised and unacknowledged, sometimes in ways that are easily dismissed and disa-
vowed. Significantly, Rockbrand also points to the therapeutic and healing aspects
of spiritual practices (see also Lea, 2008; and, Williams, 2010, 2016).
Arguably, more than through specific beliefs or rules, it is through bodily prac-
tices that people come to live out their spirituality (see Mills, 2012; and, Olson
et al., 2013). As Holloway has shown (2003, 2006), the body is active in the
production of sacred and spiritual spaces. As importantly, it is through the body
that the sacred and spirituality come to make sense. Indeed, religious and spiritual
practices organise the senses and distribute them in specific ways. This can run
counter to the privileging of the visual in Western cultures as spiritual practices
intervene in the whole body and reorganise the senses, through practices such as
yoga, meditation, praying, hymns, chanting, festivals, scents, candles and spe-
cial foodstuffs. All this suggests that ways that we recognise the spiritual and the
 Spaces of spirituality: an introduction 5
spirituality of ordinary life need to be expanded, so as to see better new ways that
spirituality is being expressed and experienced.
As importantly, Cloke and Dewesbury (2009) evoke the entanglement between
space and spirituality through the idea of ‘landscape’. For them, landscape is
about embodied ways of being-in-the-world. Significantly, these landscapes are,
like spirituality, built out of practices and performances as well as lived experi-
ences. There is, then, no spirituality, no landscape, no spiritual landscape that
simply has its own pre-formed intrinsic qualities. Landscape, then, suggests an
indeterminate range of possible spatial relationships and geographical outcomes,
one of which may indeed be ‘a landscape’, but equally it might be a sacred space
or a roadside shrine or a haunted house (see also Olson, Hopkins and Kong, 2012).
Dwyer (Chapter 7) shows how religious architecture has altered the landscape
along Highway 99 in Vancouver. The juxtaposition of religious buildings creates
its own effects. The road becomes a metaphor for the journey towards the divine.
Rather than competing, or undermining claims to the one true path to the divine,
the highway becomes a part of the practice of reaching the divine. As importantly,
it becomes evidence of the divine, with everyday miracles and religious obser-
vances now set side by side (and within easy reach, if you have a car).
Following Lily Kong (2001), Cloke and Dewesbury reaffirm that the task is to
consider the ways in which spaces become entangled with spirituality such that
they become sacred. Sacred spaces are a product of the rituals, performances and
practices that make space sacred. This may sound circular, but it indicates that
spirituality can be understood through the ways that it produces spaces and spatial
practices for itself. Consequently, churches and yoga retreats, pilgrimages and
festivals, all highlight the particular spiritual practices through which spirituality
is itself constituted (see for example Rose, 2010; and, Conradson, 2012). Thus,
spirituality is not simply a matter of personal beliefs, as it is spatially performed
and constituted. Indeed, the spaces and spatial practices of spirituality are reveal-
ing both of their underlying beliefs and also of how those beliefs sustain ways of
inhabiting and producing the world (see Lea, 2009; or, Finlayson, 2012). This is
easily witnessed: for example, in architectural plans for sacred spaces, in plans to
travel to sacred sites, in the transformation of space during festivals, and in politi-
cal activism of all kinds.
Even so, as Richard Scriven shows in Chapter 5, the spatial practices of spir-
ituality are often quite marginal, both socially and spatially, yet can be thoroughly
transformative. Indeed, the seeming marginality of pilgrimage can disguise its
personal effects and affects. What is, then, less easily witnessed is the entangle-
ment between spirituality, personal experience and other ways of being in the
world. Indeed, the pilgrimage itself can often appear, especially in its mass forms,
as if it is only performed, undertaken only so that it can be seen to be undertaken.
Often, spirituality can be seen the same way. In Scriven’s hands, thinking through
the entanglement between the performative and the experiential becomes a way to
understand the significance of spirituality and spiritual transformation.
This performative and experiential understanding of spirituality – and indeed
also of space – can unsettle the distinction between modernity and religion. On the
6  Nadia Bartolini et al.
surface, modernity might appear secular, profane, scientific and rational, while,
on the other hand, religion may appear a legacy of pre-modern beliefs in supersti-
tion, in the supernatural, in animism and in magic. Yet, in this account, spiritual-
ity and modernity would appear entwined, imbricated, embroiled through their
constitution of thoroughly modern sacred spaces and spatial practices. Thus, Tariq
Jazeel (Chapter 4) unpicks the relationship between the sacred and the modern.
He argues that the entwinement of Buddhism and modernity produced, what he
calls, a tropical modern architectural space. This architecture, significantly, is both
modern and spiritual. That is, as he says, that the space performs a secular moder-
nity, upon which modern Sri Lanka relies, but the space is also recognizable as
having a Buddhist structure of feeling. Rather than seeing the modern and the
sacred as in opposition in this architectural space, it must be understood through
its duality: both modern and sacred.
Understanding the sacred and the profane requires us to see them as relation-
ally constituted, but also practised, performed and experienced; not separate, but
entangled. In Chapter 10, Elizabeth Olson, Peter Hopkins and Giselle Vincett
explore the ways that young people engage with religion by testing the limits of
belief and spirituality through, what might be seen as, sacrilege. Olson, Hopkins
and Vincett argue that the dichotomy of modernity and religion is actively unhelp-
ful in understanding how people negotiate their personal and social lives through
religion. Youthful spirituality does not, they argue, fall neatly into the category of
religion. The dichotomy between the sacred and the profane has fallen. And not
just this dichotomy. Thus, an attendance to spirituality also questions the relation-
ship between the material and the immaterial. Taking spirituality into account
radically alters how matter is understood by valorising the immaterial, whether
this is in the form of deities or the divine, or body and soul. This critique of
dichotomies might appear abstract, but it has the effect of broadening the possible
ways that spirituality might be expressed, experienced and discovered. Spiritual-
ity is no longer confined to religious rituals and sacred spaces, but rather spread
through everyday life – indeed, the implication is that spirituality is just as easily
found in ordinary, mundane life as in (for example) churches and church services
(McGuire, 2008). So, exploring the spaces of spirituality means being prepared to
find spirituality in unexpected places, expressed in ways that may not at first sight
appear to be spiritual at all (MacKian, 2012). This book, consequently, takes the
opportunity to look awry at space and spirituality.

3 Religion in, and out of, place

We have argued that taking spirituality as a starting point undermines various
dichotomies, one of which is between the sacred and the profane. This argument
enables us to approach religion in a slightly different way. In our view, religion is
a form through which spirituality is expressed, performed and experienced. It is
not spirituality’s only form, but it is nonetheless a form that we must include in
any exploration of spirituality. Just as we attend to the specific forms that spiritu-
ality takes, so we must resist the temptation to see religion as a universal. That is,
 Spaces of spirituality: an introduction 7
we must see religion as situated in its distinctive contexts. Thus, however much a
religion has its own internal dynamics and trajectories, it is imbricated in and/or
constitutive of wider social processes. Moreover, as Lily Kong has shown, reli-
gion has its own geographies – and these really matter (2010).
Writing in the wake of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre on 11 Sep-
tember 2001 and a seemingly endless procession of bombings since, Kong (2010)
perceptively observed that the rise of Islamic extremism has altered both geopolit-
ical imaginations and understandings of the place of religion. Religion has, in this
view, shifted and altered how we understand the world. It is not just the ways that
events elsewhere suddenly appear in unexpected places, as when suicide bombers
or refugees appear in markets, hotels, beaches, streets and tower blocks, but that
such occurrences draw new geographies of connection and dislocation. Religion
is redrawing the map of the world: revealing connections, contesting and subvert-
ing borders, making new territories (both virtual and real), rendering safe places
unsafe, yet creating new kinds of sanctuary, community and humanity. All these
need new maps to be drawn, yet this need is barely acknowledged.
Kong points to the flows of people that have created greater religious diversity
in many places. She observes that:

‘new sources of migrants, new religions, new conflicts, new territories and
new networks have all become the subject of analyses. [. . .] Different sites
of religious practice beyond the “officially sacred”, different sensuous sacred
geographies, different religions in different historical and place-specific con-
texts, different geographical scales of analysis, and different constituents of
population have all gained research attention’.
(2010, page 756)

Since being written, as Kong anticipates, these trends have only intensified. How-
ever, Kong’s larger point is that religion is not simply a dimension of personal
and social life, it increasingly provides the framework through which personal
and social life is understood and experienced. In this light, it is religion that pro-
vides the nation-state with a lens through which to understand who is likely to be
dangerous or subversive or require special treatment. Thus, religion does not just
enter debates about flows of migrants and refugee crises, it frames them in ways
that allow states to identify wanted and unwanted migrants, good and bad refu-
gees. This can be witnessed as easily in US President Donald Trump’s attempts
to restrict travel from six predominantly Muslim nations (in 2017) as in widely
expressed fears that Islamist terrorists would use the refugee crisis in the Mediter-
ranean to access the European Union (in 2016 and after). Religion is now a means
through which social and political life are being organised.
The paradox is that religious practice is increasingly ‘disorganised’: that is,
being conducted outside of the formal structures that are intended to organise
them. Kong has highlighted how religious practice is to be found in unofficial as
well as official sites. So, beyond mosques and synagogues, religion is conducted
in living rooms, schools, museums, online, on streets, by roads, in banks and in
8  Nadia Bartolini et al.
boardrooms (2010, page 756). The sacred site is supplemented by spiritual places.
Perhaps increasingly so. Shrines are not only spontaneously set up in all kinds of
places, they can also take the most prosaic of forms. An example would be the
Ghost Bikes of New York, where white bicycles memorialise a cyclist that has
been killed in a road traffic accident. Perhaps beginning in St Louis in 2003, the
Ghost Bikes are now in evidence in London and Berlin, Toronto and Seattle. The
Ghosts Bikes are not just an act of memorialisation, nor just a political interven-
tion designed to highlight the lack of road safety for cyclists, they also sacralise
space – by invoking the idea of the ghost: that is, the persistence of spirit after
death. Thus, the Ghost Bikes are a blend of grief, politics and spirit that deliber-
ately punctuate space, but also make space spiritual. The Ghost Bike is but one
of a myriad of possible examples: informal shrines, whether to memorialise the
dead or to offer lucky charms or to mark significant events, are common around
the world.
Similarly, in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire in London in 2017, it was
through nearby churches, mosques and gurudwaras that the first practical help
was organised. The improvised collection and distribution network centred on
St Clement’s Church. Indeed, the seemingly spontaneous expressions of compas-
sion were often couched in spiritual terms, including the creation of shrines, the
use of candles and the invocation of God and angels. On a wall of condolence,
where heartfelt messages had been left as well as requests for information about
missing people, in large colourful letters was written, underneath a heart made
out of twine, ‘Pray For Our Community’; in smaller letters, just above the word
community, ‘our loss is heaven’s gain’ (see www.itv.com/news/2017-06-16/gren
fell-tower-tragedy-shames-us-all/). Such instances not only erode the distinction
between sacred and secular space, they also undermine the separation of different
kinds of religious spaces from one another. More than this, it suggests that spiritu-
ality can lie beyond the formal spaces and practices of religion.
Indeed, religious and sacred spaces can themselves be opened up to reinter-
pretation along alternative religious, spiritual or occult lines of thought. James
Thurgill (Chapter 14) looks at the case of Glastonbury Abbey in Somerset. Glas-
tonbury Abbey was founded in the CE7th and, by the CE14th, grew to become
one of the richest and most significant monasteries in England. The Abbey was
dissolved in 1539 and fell into decline. And now stands as a ruin. Yet, since the
CE12th, Glastonbury Abbey has been strongly connected to Arthurian mythol-
ogy, so said to be the location of Arthur and Guinevere’s tomb. The Abbey is
also connected to Christian legends: not only is it said to be founded by Joseph
of Arimathea in CE1st (living on through the hawthorn), it is also claimed that
he was the last custodian of the Holy Grail. It is said that Joseph is buried
beneath Glastonbury Tor, at the entrance to the underworld. Thurgill shows that
the relationship between place and spirituality creates opportunities for these to
be reimagined and for spirituality to be mobilised in unexpected ways. Thus,
his investigation of the sacrality of place shows the exact opposite of what
we might expect from sacred space: the meaning of place is never immutable,
coherent or singular.
 Spaces of spirituality: an introduction 9
One of the interesting features of contemporary Western societies is the rise
of the so called ‘no religion’ category (Woodhead, 2016). For example, in the
UK, in the 2011 Census about 40% of respondents described themselves as hav-
ing ‘no religion’. In the same census, all the major religions (Christianity, Islam,
Buddhism, Sikhism) showed a decline in both absolute numbers and in propor-
tion of the total population. Given what we have said, we cannot assume that ‘no
religion’ means no spirituality; as importantly, nor does it necessarily mean no
religion in any form. Put another way, the rise of ‘no religion’ cannot simply be
read as being a rise in secularity. Indeed, other evidence suggests that agnosticism
has remained relatively stable – and represents maybe only 5–10% of people in
the West (see Bartolini et al., 2017). Through seeing religion beyond its ‘official’
forms, and by expanding the sensuous registers through which the religious can be
expressed and experienced, it is possible to see how it is that people might think
of themselves as not being religious while at the same time having more and less
deep-seated spiritual beliefs (see also Gökariksel, 2009).

4 Faith, community and identity

Instead of religion just being organised by a sense of the divine, religion can also
be a means through which meanings, affects and identities are expressed. We
can usefully extend this idea. Thus, we need to think not just about what people
believe in, but what spirituality smells like, what it eats, how it looks, what it
sounds like, what spaces it creates for itself, what its bodily regimes, comport-
ments and conducts are, and its defining affects and emotions. We could take any
religion or form of spirituality as an example (see Finlayson and Mesev, 2014;
and, Sanderson, 2012). However, let us think of how Roman Catholicism defines
itself through a specific combination of smells, foods, songs, chants, clothes, ritu-
als, and affectual and emotional performances – that are all heavily circumscribed
and over-determined with meaning, affect and identity. Religious and spiritual
meanings, affects and identities create a means through which people can reaffirm
their faith, create a sense of self, and also form wider communal bonds. This can
be especially significant in places where people feel marginalised or excluded
from ‘normal’ or ‘dominant’ society. Thus, religious and spiritual identities can
provide a way to negotiate, challenge or ignore dominant cultural forms, by pro-
viding alternative forms of affiliation and community.
Consequently, much research explores the relationship between faith, com-
munity and identity. A key aspect of this work is the ways in which migrants
express their faith in the new contexts in which they find themselves, not always
by choice (see, for example, Dwyer, 2000; and, Sheringham, 2010; or, Olson and
Silvey, 2006; Aitchison et al., 2007; and, Hopkins and Gale, 2009). As we have
discussed, there are visible forms such as buildings and practices, but migrants
can also use their spirituality as a means of providing mutual aid in the form of
money, shelter, knowledge and work. Olivia Sheringham and Annabelle Wilkins
(Chapter 11) show how, for Brazilian and Vietnamese migrants to London, reli-
gion permeates every aspect of their experience. Often, migrant experiences are
10  Nadia Bartolini et al.
precarious and uncertain, involving movement from, between and to hazardous
and hostile situations. Religion can provide not only a means through which to
connect to others (see also Holloway, 2012), but also a source of memory, a way
of establishing home and a spiritual reconnection with the world – as deities and
spirits travel along with migrants. Alongside this, faith communities can become
the focus for challenges to the state around injustices, rights and the recognition
of difference. Indeed, much work has explored how faith groups act politically
in different settings (see for example Sutherland, 2014). Similarly, inter-faith aid
can be as significant as faith-centred support. Such inter-faith mutual aid can be a
prompt for faith communities to act together politically, especially around support
for refugees and migrant rights activism.
Of course, negotiating cultural life elsewhere does not always go well. Interest-
ingly, then, it is religion that affords some people the ability to express their social
marginalisation and exclusion. Indeed, religion can be a means to struggle against
mistreatment and injustice more broadly. In Chapter 12, Kim Beecheno reveals
women’s resistance to domestic violence. In Latin America, it is often observed
how religion has become politicised in the struggle against poverty. However,
less recognised has been the use of religion against the widespread physical and
sexual violence within the favelas. Thus, drawing upon religious precepts, per-
haps backed by the authority of the Church, can be a source of empowerment
and provide new ways of negotiating different forms of violence. With relative
ease, religion can become a primary point of identification for the marginalised
and excluded over other forms of social division, such as race, class, gender and
sexuality. Perhaps a better way to say this is that religion provides a means of
organising the harms of race, class, gender and sexuality into a coherent whole, a
singularity that can then be mobilised by a politics of identity centred upon reli-
gion (see also Hackworth, 2012). This is profoundly place-based. And it is about
connection across space, as processes of politicisation and identification stretch
around the world.
There is a paradox, here. Religions, on the one hand, seem to be a repository
of fixed beliefs, rituals and practices. Yet, on the other hand, they are continually
shaped by the worlds in which they find themselves. Perhaps, because of this, reli-
gions remain relentlessly mobile. Indeed, such mobile forms as the mission and
the pilgrimage proliferate continuously. While the pilgrimage can be undertaken
by the devout and be a proper expression of one’s faith through the trial of the
journey itself, it can just as easily be undertaken as a way to discover faith and
spirituality. Instead of the journey being the product of faith, the journey can be a
means through which to discover it. Patricia ‘Iolana (Chapter 16) shows how the
Goddess Movement deploys Jungian ideas to create a spiritual journey. This jour-
ney enables a deep connection between the individual and the world, along a path
known as individuation. At the end of this path is an archetype, anima, which in
some ways lies at the intersection of the collective unconscious, sexuality, mind,
history and the numinous. Here is the Goddess, both a universal principle and
earthly. She combines opposites. This is an important principle, for it allows us to
see both sides of the coin at once.
 Spaces of spirituality: an introduction 11
So, religion has been used to stabilise identity and to sustain fixed political
positions. Browne and Nash (Chapter 3) explain how religion has been used as a
means to resist the legalisation of same-sex marriage in the West, but especially
Ireland. They show how Christianity has struggled with same sex relationships,
both within the clergy and in broader society. Indeed, as the Roman Catholic and
Protestant Churches are both international, these difficulties are compounded by
the differing attitudes of their congregations across different social settings. As
they show, dramatic splits have emerged between more progressive and more
conservative elements within Christianity. Interestingly, these processes of iden-
tification can produce the splitting, or strategic use, of identities, so that people
express themselves differently in different social and cultural settings. People can
“shape shift” from one context to another, deploying religious and non-religious
identities flexibly depending on a variety of factors: such as fitting into dominant
cultural norms or seeking to avoid conflict and tension. Because of this, religious
identity cannot be assumed to be a given (see Hopkins et al., 2010). Instead, peo-
ple are constantly negotiating religion. Religion, in this view, is profoundly schiz-
ophrenic: constantly working to stabilise identity, while at the same time working
within contexts not of its own choosing. This schizophrenia has a geography.

5 Religion is (not) a territory

Religions have territorialised the world in various ways. Most obviously, they
have created bounded and scaled territories, using physical structures to mark the
centre of those territories. The church or mosque, the pilgrimage site, the pilgrim-
age, the mission and missionaries, and the like, all seek to implement, maintain
and extend the territory of a religion. Further, religions have become entangled
with the nation-state, whether this is in Henry VIII’s England or through religious
leadership in countries such as Iran or in other events such as the partition of
India and Pakistan. Further, religions establish a distinction between sacred and
non-sacred space. This introduces a paradox: religion produces a hierarchy of
territories over which it has dominion, yet this tends to ensure that only specific
spaces within that territory are sacred.
Alongside its territorial practices, religion also relies on geographies of connection-
across-space to establish its influence, such as through the development of mega-
churches (see Warf and Winsburg, 2010). An example of this is what is known in
Christian traditions as evangelism, which not only seeks to extend the territory of
Christianity, but also creates and utilizes forms of influence in order to do so. Jus-
tin Tse (Chapter 2) explores Christian evangelism in two University settings. He
shows that evangelism does not necessarily produce a coherent position. Instead,
it is constantly undergoing reappraisal in different settings. Consequently, the ter-
ritorial and connective forms of evangelism need to be critically assessed in the
settings that they emerge. Religious territories and connections can just as easily
overlap with other religions as not. Indeed, religions can interact in unexpected
ways, sometimes producing what are now often described as inter-faith communi-
ties (see also Stevenson et al., 2010).
12  Nadia Bartolini et al.
The complex interaction between territorialised and connective religious geog-
raphies has been revealed by Claire Dwyer, David Gilbert and Bindi Shah’s work
in London’s suburbs (2012). They note the diversity of prominent religious build-
ings in West London: a Sikh Gurdwara, a Russian Orthodox Christian Cathedral,
a Hindu temple, a Mosque and a Jain temple. Scattered amongst these are less
obvious, and sometimes quite hidden, places of worship (see Heng, 2016). This
diversity produces a map of overlapping faith territories. Meshed with the hier-
archically organised spaces of the Church of England – the parish, the diocese –
are the spaces produced by temples, synagogues, mosques, centres, foundations,
cultural societies, missions and the like. It is not simply that this diversity of faith
communities undermines the seeming homogeneity of suburban life; the overlap-
ping territories of faith produce inter-faith interactions that themselves are genera-
tive of new religious practices (Mills, 2012). Indeed, arguably, it is this interaction
between faiths that enables people to identify spiritually with more than one faith,
whilst at the same time detaching themselves from the idea of organised religion
as a singular source of identity: ‘no religion’, in this sense, would be the con-
sequence of multi-/inter-faith interaction. ‘No religion’, in this framing, would
become a thoroughly modern way to be religious: always producing new syn-
cretic forms of faith, belief and spirituality.
In Chapter 15, David Wilson offers a personal insight into the syncretism of
Spiritualist practices by drawing out its relationship to wider shamanic tradi-
tions. He frames the Spiritualist practice of spirit communication by comparing it
with mediumship in Siberian and North American traditions. Significantly, Spir-
itualism has drawn heavily on Native American spirit guides since the 1920s. In
the UK, Spiritualists are especially familiar with Silver Birch, who spoke through
the medium Maurice Barbanell. Wilson makes a plea for examining the processes
through which religious traditions emerge and sustain themselves. Significantly,
this involves looking at how they draw upon, and internalise, ideas and practices
from wider, related traditions. From this perspective, religions’ syncretism can
disguise the ways they contain a diversity of ideas, some of which may appear
esoteric or indeed antagonistic.
Similarly, according to Dwyer, Gilbert and Shah, religion must be considered
in its social contexts. Thus, the “super diversity” of faith communities in London
is a product of migration patterns into and through the city (since always). So,
one way to read the relationship between migration and the city is to witness its
religious buildings and practices. However, migration does not simply happen
over space, it also produces space. For Dwyer, Gilbert and Shah, migration into
London’s suburbs has produced what can be called, variously, ‘semi-detached
faith’, ‘edge-city faith’ and ‘ethnoburb faith’, drawing on the experience of faith
and suburban life across modern Western societies. In part, such terms suggest
that faith communities produce new religious forms and practices in suburbs
(Wilford, 2012): that is, that there is something distinctive about faith in the sub-
urbs, as Dwyer herself argues in Chapter 7. Yet, there is also a hint that faith
has modified the suburb in some way (e.g. Connell, 2005; Hackworth and Stein,
2012). Indeed, there is a hint that the circulation, overlapping and mixing of faiths
 Spaces of spirituality: an introduction 13
is doing something to suburban life that has yet to be fully understood. Dwyer,
Gilbert and Shah rise to the challenge of understanding the place of faith in the
production of suburban life.
The diversity of faith communities is of course not unique to London. All cities,
arguably, evidence this diversity. However, faith communities are not just territo-
ries, they are also networks of connections that trace themselves across the world
in specific ways. People within faith communities can use the wider sense of a
religion to locate themselves in the world. Thus, geographers have shown how
religious identities can be used by people to ‘locate’ themselves in places other
than those where they live. These stretched or detached identities can enable peo-
ple to adopt a wide variety of stances in relation to the social setting in which they
find themselves. It is easy to think that migration is about people moving from
one place to another (whether voluntarily or not), but more moves than people.
Indeed, the world is mobile, too. People can migrate without moving: the world
of social media enables people to ‘travel’ without going anywhere. These worlds
are not simply mediatised social relations, as they become a means through which
people identify and express religiosity and spirituality.
The mobility of religion is still marked by practices such as pilgrimage and by
roles such as the missionary or the volunteer (e.g. Maddrell and Scriven, 2016; or,
Baillie Smith et al., 2013; and Cloke et al., 2007). Moreover, priests and ministers
are not static, but often on the move between different posts within the organisa-
tion. Significantly, in Methodism and Spiritualism, churches do not have a stand-
ing minister. In Chapter 6, Lia Shimada explores the mobility of ministers in the
British Methodist Church. She argues that mobility is woven into the fabric of
Methodist Christianity, causing it to constantly engage with different geographi-
cal and social contexts. Mobility, in a Methodist context, is normal. This mobil-
ity, as Shimada reveals, can create opportunities for spiritual renewal, but also
tensions and conflict. Importantly, this continual mobility installs a geography
of connection (which becomes something specific in Methodist thought, as you
will see), which continually shapes both ministers, their spaces and the spaces of
spirituality.
The missionary, of course, has long been associated with colonialism and
Empire (see Kong, 2010, page 760). It is clear that religions and Empires have par-
allel territorial strategies. There is first contact, then a deliberate effort to occupy
and control people by the creation of territories. Previously existing territorial
arrangements are overwritten as Empire and its religion organise space accord-
ing to its expectations and requirements. The territorial impositions of Empire
and Religion have produced long lasting, and sometimes seemingly permanent,
ongoing, harm. The roots of many conflicts are spawn of this relationship between
Empire and Religion, whether we think of Northern Ireland or Palestine, First
Peoples or Latest Peoples. However, religion has also produced a means through
which colonial processes have been recorded, contested and subverted. Thus, the
territory does not simply stabilise a religion, ensuring its timeless expression of
faith and devotion. Territorialisation also becomes a means of syncretism, muta-
tion and adaptation. Indeed, paradoxically, the means through which religions
14  Nadia Bartolini et al.
seek to stabilise themselves, as they seek to create territories and extend their ter-
ritorial reach, can necessitate adaptation and change.
Religions organise themselves in ways that produce geographical scales: the
parish, the diocese, the nation, international. Yet, they are not limited to these sca-
lar, territorialised logics of organisation. Religion can just as easily be organised
through every modern form of communication, making avid use of television, the
internet, social media and the like. Religion makes geography; religion makes
connections; religion moves. Yet, in this process of producing spaces for itself,
religion also changes. More than this, we can glimpse the production of spaces
for spirituality beyond religion. And the creation of these spaces for spirituality
is profoundly political, as it underpins the logics of community and care through
which people act in the world (see also Williams, Cloke and Thomas, 2012).

6 Acting in the world

There has been much talk of the decline of religion (see Beaumont and Baker,
2011, for an overview; also, Cloke and Beaumont, 2013; and, Tse, 2014). The
decline both in participation in formal religion such as regular attendance at
divine services, especially in (but not only) Christianity and also in people iden-
tifying themselves as belonging to a particular religion in census counts has ena-
bled many to argue that religion is dying (on its pews). This decline is termed
secularisation, because it is assumed that these trends are evidence of people turn-
ing away from religion altogether. On the other hand, others have pointed out that
the state has increasingly had to take account not only of religious views, but of
the sheer diversity of religious views within modern Western nation-states. Thus,
Britain has been described as a “post-Christian” society, most famously by former
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams (in 2014). This term is not intended
to suggest that Britain is no longer Christian, but that Britain contains within it
many significant religions such that it can no longer claim to be only Christian.
An argument has developed that suggests that Western societies are becoming
less and less secular, as nations and states have to take more and more account of
the increasingly diverse expressions of religion in their midst (see Bowman and
Valk, 2012). Indeed, former British Prime Minster David Cameron responded to
the suggestion that Britain is a post-Christian society by claiming that Christianity
suffuses every part of British cultural life, providing it with its moral compass.
An alternative counter-argument to the idea that Western societies are relent-
lessly secularising, is that people are increasingly turning to forms of spirituality
that provide an alternative to, or supplement in a variety of ways, formal reli-
gion. This argument has been most clearly put forward by Heelas and Woodhead
(2005), based on fieldwork in Kendal (in the north of England). In Chapter  8,
Karin Tusting and Linda Woodhead revisit the main findings of the original Kendal
study. In a rigorous re-examination of the original study, they show how markedly
Christianity has declined as a force that shapes spirituality and morality. Indeed,
they argue, Christianity has almost become ‘alternative’ to mainstream cultural
life. Yet, this does not mean spirituality has become marginal. Forms of religion
 Spaces of spirituality: an introduction 15
and spirituality that seemed ‘alternative’ a decade ago have become more famil-
iar, more a part of mainstream cultural life. The decline of formal religion, in
this account, is not evidence of secularisation, but rather of the proliferation of
spiritual forms through every part of society (see, for example, Saunders, 2012).
Religion and spirituality continue to provide a focal point for acting on the
state, or of requiring that the state act in different ways (Jamoul and Wills, 2008;
Williams, Cloke and Thomas, 2012). Religion and spirituality, in this respect, pro-
vide a moral order that can be used to act on, act alongside, act in opposition to,
the normal codes of conduct of governments and nations. And this in turn causes
governments and nations to act in response. Barely a day goes by when some form
of dispute around religion hits the news. It is not just that a list is easily assem-
bled. But that this list is ever-growing. You may wish to create your own list, but
let us think of how governments have sought to regulate the wearing of religious
symbols and dress in airports, classrooms, banks and public (in streets or on the
beach). Or the ways in which particular religious groups get called to account for
themselves after terrorist acts (which are by no means limited to Islamic and Chris-
tian so-called extremists). Each terrorist act forces – or enables – governments
to restrict freedoms of various kinds for people as a whole, and for so-called target
groups in particular.
Julian Holloway (Chapter 13) engages with the idea that there is an entangle-
ment between states, geopolitics and religion. This suggests that geopolitics has a
religious dimension, which can be more and less explicit (see, also, Dittmar and
Sturm, 2010; and, Sturm, 2013). An instance, of this, is the ongoing ‘problem’ of
allowing Turkey, as an Islamic state, to join the Christian European Union. While
the difficulties of allowing Turkey to join the European Union are usually couched
in terms of economic convergence and human rights, these difficulties often track
back to a fundamental disjuncture between Christianity and Islam. This finds
expression, most recently, in fears that allowing Turkey to join the EU would open
Europe’s borders to Islamic terrorists and an unstoppable flood of Muslim refugees
from the Middle East. Holloway reminds us that conflicts between states can be
fought on spiritual, and indeed occult, grounds, too. He reveals a strong connec-
tion between geopolitics and occult thinking in World War 2. (Hitler was famously
interested in the occult, while Churchill was covertly sympathetic to Spiritual-
ism, leading both to consider the possibility of otherworldly influences in fight-
ing World War 2.) Further, Holloway shows the intersection between the British
colonial imagination and occultism, especially through Theosophy. We might also
be reminded of how Nancy Reagan used her astrologer, Joan Quigley, to protect
Ronald Reagan while in the White House. Governments are not – governmentality
is not – cauterised from religious, spiritual and occult thinking.
Government, here, is not simply the nation-sate, but can include transnational
governmental organisations as well as forms of government at more local levels.
This is neither coherent nor integrated. An example is the Sanctuary City move-
ment. Sanctuary Cities are to be found in cities, local governments, in towns, in
universities. This spatial disorganisation can bring it into opposition with state
logics at different levels. Thus, the Sanctuary City movement in the US came
16  Nadia Bartolini et al.
into direct conflict with the migration policies espoused by President Trump.
Importantly, the religious and spiritual idea of sanctuary becomes a means to resist
not only the idea that political space is universal, but also the ways in which the
state reserves the right to act universally. The sanctuary then is a limit on the state
and its capacity to assume the cooperation of people, organisations and the like.
This limit is moral, guiding people to think of their connection to other people
(especially people in distress) differently, but also spatial, creating a demarcated
space which is welcoming and generous. Thus, the Sanctuary City movement
creates ruptures in the supposedly smooth spaces of the state, of the nation and of
government.
The Sanctuary City movement deliberately draws on an idea of sanctuary that
is located in many faiths, including (but not limited to) Christianity, Islam, Hindu-
ism, Judaism and Buddhism. Although not an exclusively religious or spiritual
engagement with the politics of refugees and asylum, the idea of sanctuary pro-
vides a ready idea through which to mobilise political acts, through protest, activ-
ism in elections, enacting sanctuary practices and the like. Religious and spiritual
ideas are not always as overt in political acts as in the Sanctuary City movement,
however. Instead, the mobilisation of religious and spiritual values – whether
by conservative or radical elements – can sometimes require a little excavating.
Arguably, however, such ideas are never very far from the surface, as homilies
such as ‘turn the other cheek’ or ‘an eye for an eye’, for example, get drawn into
modes of civility (see also Cloke, 2011; or, Sutherland, 2014).
While states, elections, censuses provide a means to register the stuff of life
lived religiously and spiritually, in fact acting in the world is far more mundane,
prosaic and ordinary. Once every 10 years, people get to declare themselves as
this or that or nothing in their census return. This tells us little – very little – about
what people do in the meantime. It is the ordinary observances of religious and
spiritual thinking and being that are least easy to grasp, as they can be so fleeting
and therefore seemingly irrelevant. How many times a day might someone say
‘oh my God’ or mutter ‘Jesus Christ’ under their breath, yet think of themselves
as entirely without religion? Does it matter that people pray, believe in the power
of prayer, yet might not believe in God? Angels are intriguing examples of how
people can slide around religious, spiritual and non-religious thinking. Angels can
be invoked as a messenger of God, as a messenger (without the message com-
ing from God), as a figure watching over people, as a guide to future action. The
angel, in the form of a divine messenger, is central to Christian beliefs. Yet, the
angel’s many forms enable it to escape an exclusively Christian understanding.
The angel permeates everyday life: the white feather that says an angel is watch-
ing over you; the loved one that is now with the angels . . . or has become an angel;
the pub/restaurant/bar down the road. These are the moments that do not appear
on the census, yet are remarkably important in people’s everyday lives.

7 Spaces of spirituality
A word about Geography. This book operates at different scales and in different
kinds of spaces and places. It is led by its case study material, connecting the stuff
 Spaces of spirituality: an introduction 17
of spirituality to specific times and spaces. This, we feel, is in keeping with the
idea that it is unwise to make universalising statements about spirituality (or reli-
gion). This is not a global geography, designed to speak from or about everywhere
at once. Instead, we have sought case studies that render spaces and places a little
stranger, a little less familiar, than we first thought. And, for this reason, many of
our case studies are in the West: a strange and curious place that passes itself off,
too easily, as the familiar and the normal. Even so, we hope that this impulse to
make the world a little stranger, a little less familiar, can be productively carried
elsewhere. Not as a way of exoticising or romanticising the world, but as a way
of seeing the extraordinary construction of the ordinary everyday (Figure 1.1).
We have divided the book into three sections: the first considers the spaces of spir-
itual practices; the second examines the production of spiritual spaces in everyday
life; and, the third explores spiritual transformations in and of the world. Each sec-
tion has its own introduction to help readers see themes emerging from the chapters.
This book is not an attempt to close down, or to organise, debates on the rela-
tionship between spirituality and space. It is rather to suggest that we are only at
the beginning of this journey. We are at a moment when a broadened definition of
religion and spirituality can reveal how much more important religion and spir-
ituality are, both in determining the fate of larger social processes – from govern-
mentality to geopolitics, from migration to understanding labour contracts – but

Figure 1.1  The Hanley Church Bar and Restaurant in 2015.

The Hanley Church Bar and Restaurant in Stoke-on-Trent was formerly a Spiritualist Church. Before
that, it was a Methodist Church (built 1860). Every Tuesday night, the restaurant holds very popular
tarot card evenings: partly to maintain a spiritual link to the building’s past, but also so you can find
out what the future holds in store for you, and enjoy a three-course meal. Reproduced with kind per-
mission of Daniele Sambo.
18  Nadia Bartolini et al.
also in shaping the ordinary, everyday lives. We tried to suggest, above, that there
are many ways (and many more ways) to evoke these issues. Thus, in this book,
the authors show us what can be achieved, with an expanded and generative notion
of spirituality. So, we are delighted to end this book with the words of professor
dusky purples (Chapter 18). Professor purples entreats us to ask her how to read
the world differently, offering us a programme through which we might prepare
and orient ourselves, offering us new ways to read and think. Perhaps, dear reader,
you might wish to begin with this chapter?

Acknowledgements
This volume is a direct response to issues arising from our research project, “Spirited
Stoke: Spiritualism in the Everyday Life of Stoke-on-Trent” (2015–2016), funded by
the AHRC Grant AH/L015447/1. During this project, we approached Faye Leerink at
Routledge, who was immediately enthusiastic and supportive of the idea; her enthu-
siasm and support has never flagged. At Routledge, we have been guided through the
process by Priscilla Corbett and Ruth Anderson. We hope we have not been too trying
of their patience! Finally, of course, we must thank the authors: Thank You!

This book is for Ellie, Pippa and Ben.

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Section 1

Spaces of spiritual practices

Nadia Bartolini

‘It’s not easy to be spiritual all of the time; you have to work at it’.

This quote is from a December 2014 diary entry of someone who is hesitant to

define herself within a particular religious affiliation, but who believes in life after
the death of the body. Vivian strives to find meaning and make sense of her life.
This spiritual quest resonates with many people, and does not necessarily align
with religious categories and specific doctrines. Yet, her practices can be under-
stood as being ‘spiritual’ and mapped onto her quotidian life: she meditates with
calming music, she attends a church where she feels welcome, she gets healing,
she sends good thoughts to friends and family, she reads biographies and various
history books to understand societal patterns, and she finds ways to give back to
the community through volunteering and other caring activities.
Part of unfolding spirituality in contemporary life is to appreciate the complexi-
ties involved in defining what we mean by ‘spiritual’. Vivian was brought up in
a religious household, but a number of events and experiences in her life led her
to question her religion. So today, she prefers to talk about her spirituality. But as
the quote suggests, being spiritual is not an easy task. For her, it requires work.
Vivian’s situation might strike a chord with many people. The baggage trans-
mitted from our upbringings may, at some point in our lives, lead us to seriously
question our innermost thoughts and sense of identity. What spirituality does,
then, is capture an essence that moves beyond the confines of organized religion.
This does not negate religion altogether; rather, it provides a means to contextual-
ize how beliefs, and associated tensions, emerge.
In the first section of this book, all five chapters explore practices through a set
of organized religious belief systems, such as Christianity and Buddhism. Yet,
within these clearly defined categorizations lie uncertainties that mask the tensions
inherent in trying to grasp something that is, as Justin Tse suggests, between the
spiritual and the supernatural. To do this, Tse’s chapter explores how these intan-
gible, otherworldly forces can find ‘feet on the ground’ by using propositional
truths. As such, by using a propositional approach, tensions within Evangelical
intellectuals in America find commonalities through the spiritual and supernatural
plane. As the Evangelicals navigate these ‘earthly’ controversies, and establish
22  Nadia Bartolini
political and social relevancy, Tse shows how the mapping of their supernatural
worlds transcend institutional frameworks.
In some cases, tensions between representatives of a religious group are inher-
ent in the face of modern life. Kath Browne and Catherine Nash’s chapter inves-
tigates the 2015 Irish referendum on same-sex marriage when over 62% voted in
favour of amending the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples. This
particular case touches on sexuality and marriage, two issues that juxtapose the
modern and the traditional. If sexuality is being addressed more openly today –
generally, as well as in Catholicism – it nonetheless has a tendency of pushing
moral and spiritual boundaries. The chapter points to the Catholic Church’s nebu-
lous place in contemporary Ireland, which resonates with other traditionally Cath-
olic territories debating value systems (such as Quebec). Along the same lines as
Tse, the authors demonstrate through the use of digital archive data collection the
difference in opinions from representatives. Importantly, their study shows how
the tension is not directed at LGBT rights, but rather toward issues relating to
what could be described as foundational to Irish Catholicism: marriage, family
and Irish identity.
This begs the question, once again, of how tradition – and the heritage of
particular religious groups in a given location  – can ‘fit’ with modern life. If
Browne and Nash capture the ways that the Irish state and the Catholic Church
are entwined, Tariq Jazeel’s chapter is subtler in deploying how the religious and
the secular are understood in the built environment.
Drawing on Raymond Williams’ structures of feeling, Jazeel considers how the
architect Geoffrey Bawa’s parliament complex in Sri Lanka blurs the boundaries
between spaces of secularity and of religiosity. However, this does not preclude the
structures from being devoid of elements that push and pull these terms closer and
wider apart. Instead, Jazeel argues that “sacred modernity in the Sri Lankan context
should be understood on its own terms” (p. 59), and by doing so, he moves away
from the post-secular binaries that make the secular and the religious fixed and sepa-
rate categories where the religious can only be seen as residing outside of the secular.
These chapters query the idea of the modern as is it understood from the Enlight-
enment, and in effect, take seriously the proposition that Charles Baudelaire stated
in 1863 when considering the work of painter Constantin Guys:

‘Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of
which the other half is the eternal and the immutable’.

Similar to Baudelaire, the authors in this first section consider the transitory with
the immutable, the elusive with the permanent as aspects of modernity that go hand
in hand. Whilst the appearance may be conflicting, these ideas are also accepting
of how notions of tradition – and the heritages, identities and nationalisms that
can ensue – can be bound up in wanting to appear ‘progressive’ and address ine-
qualities. In so doing, the authors also merge spiritual matters with practices that
are embedded in politics. Rather than attempt to sever the territories of politics
and religion, the chapters work to unravel how spiritual matters resurface amidst
 Spaces of spiritual practices 23
debates in ordinary life, from social media and academic appointments to archi-
tectural design and state affairs. In this sense, spirituality does not reside outside
the realm of everyday life, even when there are attempts to develop and keep
spiritual life separate from the noise of contemporary society.

Moving, embodying, circulating

Richard Scriven’s chapter deals precisely with the desire to retreat from the chaos
of modern life to seek contemplation as pilgrims travel to Lough Derg in Ireland.
As Scriven points out, it is a place where pilgrims “withdraw from the rest of the
world” (p. 69). Here, the pilgrimage evokes a journey, a traveling and a spiritual
journey. Both journeys are important to consider as they consist in engaging the
body and soul. By traveling away from modern life to embrace the rituals of
this lonely yet ‘very spiritual place’ (as described by a TripAdvisor reviewer in
August 2016), pilgrims willingly accept ridding themselves of the comforts of
their daily lives, such as their mobile phones and their shoes. This stripping away
of material possessions is significant as it is emblematic of releasing the soul so
that the spirit does not get distracted by trivialities. Hence, it is this willingness
to achieve a more spiritual plane – one that casts a hope of inner transformation –
that enables pilgrims to endure bodily pain, as reported by another TripAdvisor
reviewer in July 2015:

‘This was my 10th pilgrimage to this very holy and special place, it is always
a very challenging experience, with lack of sleep, being barefoot and fasting
for three days, but it is worth every minute of the hardships experienced’.

Whilst the concept of pilgrimage might allude to going back in time, or escaping
responsibilities, there is a challenge sought, a certain meaning in the doing where
the practising of ‘hardships’ is something desired time and again. Perhaps it is
akin to what Jane Bennett attests to when considering enchantment:

‘To be enchanted is, in the moment of its activation, to assent wholeheartedly

to life – not to this or that particular condition or aspect of it but to the experi-
ence of living itself’.
(2001: 159–160)

Capturing this moment of awe does not necessarily correspond with the imagery
of bliss and contentment. It can also be associated with bodily pain. This is not
unlike the tensions present in modernity. These terms can indeed encompass a
range of dichotomies that seem disparate, yet in practice, make sense.
Along the same vein, vocational callings could be seen as the spiritual comple-
ment to the chaos of contemporary lifestyles. Callings are considered unique, spe-
cial, supernatural. So, when Methodists in the UK are sent off to serve a particular
community, one could imagine the pleasure and dedication of the ministers.
Yet, Lia Shimada’s chapter specifically attests to how spiritual endeavours are
24  Nadia Bartolini
combined with the mundane, practical geographies of moving every 5–7 years.
The ‘connexional’ structure of governance of the Methodist ministers shapes the
itinerant nature of their spiritual work in ways that one might not have previously
considered. The physical movement and the spiritual devotion are entwined with
the psychological adjustments of ‘fitting in’ and enabling oneself (and sometimes
their families) to cope with the disruption of a transient lifestyle. One respondent
in Shimada’s chapter explains this state of flux through his faith by referring to
the pilgrimage, while another sees it as ‘an expression of social justice’ (p. 91).
Here, both supernatural and earthly worlds collide, where meaning is constructed
through embodied trials and spiritual compassion.
What is important to remember is that all the chapters in this first section pro-
duced work from a spatial perspective. As spiritual practices are exposed through
everyday, contemporary life and from the point of view of their geographies, we
gain a better understanding of the specificities of place, as well as how tensions
and new relationships emerge.

References
Baudelaire, C. 1863. Le peintre de la vie moderne, IV La modernité. Le Figaro. URL:
www.uni-due.de/lyriktheorie/texte/1863_baudelaire.html, accessed 14/04/2017.
Bennett, J. 2001. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics.
Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ.
2 Spiritual propositions
The American evangelical
intelligentsia and the supernatural
order
Justin K. H. Tse

Introduction: mapping the spiritual geographies

of an evangelical intelligentsia
The spiritual geographies of the theological movement known as ‘evangelical
Christianity’ are seldom taken seriously, especially among its intellectual elites
and their critics. Typically conceived as a ‘conservative’ version of Protestant
Christianity – the strand of Christian faith that historically broke with the Roman
Catholic Church around the dawn of modernity – ‘evangelical’ Protestants tend
to emphasize the literal interpretation of the Bible because its pages reveal the
good news – the gospel, the evangel (the root of the word ‘evangelical’) – of
salvation from an afterlife of damnation and a present experience of divine aliena-
tion through faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, considered to be
divinity in human form. Although such an understanding of the Christian Gospel
emphasizes individual faith with few implications for institutional membership,
what might be called ‘spiritual geographies’ are often taken in contrast to the
‘sacred archipelagos’ of evangelicalism’s seemingly organized structures, deep-
pocketed networks, and scripted realities floating in a sea of secularity (Wilford
2012; Bartolini et al. 2017). However, I hope to demonstrate in this chapter that
there are evangelical ways of unfolding spiritual geographies that transcend their
institutional structures that have not yet been fully explored. In other words, there
is a mismatch between the perceived institutional edifices of evangelical Protes-
tantism and the individual spiritualities fostered by its doctrine, and my aim is to
explore the spiritual geographies fostered by this disconnect.
In this account of evangelical spiritual geographies, I want to examine the rhet-
oric of what I call the evangelical intelligentsia, the journalists, academics, clergy,
and other public intellectuals who either speak as self-identifying evangelicals or
as empathetic fellow-travellers offering what Wilford (2012: 7) calls a ‘brother’s
account’ of the movement (Worthen 2014; Sutton 2014; Strachan 2015). What
is intriguing is that both this intelligentsia and their non-evangelical intellectual
critics tend themselves to be shy about discussing their spiritual geographies. Crit-
ics of evangelicalism often take the movement to be ideological cover for more
cynical materialistic endeavours, a marriage of Christ and ‘cowboy capitalism’
(Connolly 2008), with obsessions about amassing megachurch territory (Connell
26  Justin K. H. Tse
2005), imposing their moral values and neoliberal economic ideologies on secu-
lar civil society (Hackworth 2013; Han 2011), and bringing about the end of the
world (Dittmer and Sturm 2010) – precisely the opposite of a liberating spiritual
geography. The response of some in the intelligentsia has been intriguing: their
claim is that evangelicalism is barely coherent at present, as it is constantly under-
going re-definition (Bebbington 1988; Miller 1999; Larsen 2007; Hunter 2010).
I want to perform a counter-reading of these intellectuals, then, to show that
evangelicalism as a term primarily describes an orientation toward the supernatu-
ral, a map of spiritual geographies. I perform a close reading of published online
material about two case studies in evangelicalism where seeming ideological
disagreements among the evangelical intelligentsia end up displaying how much
they actually agree about how to map spiritual geographies: InterVarsity Chris-
tian Fellowship’s (IVCF) (2016) controversial theological position paper about
human sexuality and the 2015–6 dismissal proceedings against tenured political
scientist Larycia Hawkins at Wheaton College for quoting Pope Francis’s state-
ment that Christians and Muslims ‘worship the same God’ (Gleim 2016). My
central argument is that evangelical Protestants tend to orient themselves toward
the supernatural by seeking to understand God, spirits, and spiritual reality by
way of propositional sentences that create ideological worlds. What I therefore
take seriously is that evangelicals believe in a different plane of existence from
the natural one, which can be described as spiritual and supernatural, but the
question is – how do they articulate these spiritual and supernatural worlds in
ideological ways?
Articulated this way, the spiritual geographies of evangelicals defy some of the
common expectations about what holds evangelicals together as evangelicals. By
examining the controversy at IVCF over its theological position paper on human
sexuality, I hope to show that the ideological world created by evangelical propo-
sitions about the supernatural may not be based on the inerrancy of the Bible,
but instead on a biblical narration of a spiritual world that circumscribes every-
day action. I will then use Wheaton College’s attempt to fire Larycia Hawkins to
highlight the difference between institutional spiritual geographies and intellec-
tual convictions about the supernatural that defy the boundaries of an evangelical
institution. Through these episodes, I hope that this paper contributes to the study
of spaces of spirituality by showing that evangelical Christianities are not neces-
sarily always institutional impositions of religion but can also lead to ways of
being that transcend institutions as well.

Gospel sexuality: moving beyond inerrancy with InterVarsity

Christian Fellowship’s theological position paper on sexuality
On 6 October 2016, TIME Magazine reported that IVCF was asking employees
who did not agree with its new theological statement on sexuality to self-disclose
their positions so that IVCF could begin with them the process of ‘involuntary
termination’ by 11 November. Specifically at issue, TIME argued, was any posi-
tion that differed with IVCF’s proposition ‘that any sexual activity outside of
 Spiritual propositions 27
a husband and wife is immoral’ (Dias 2016). Interviewing former IVCF staff
worker Bianca Louie, the TIME reporter found that she and ten others had formed
a queer collective within IVCF and that the word on the street was that IVCF was
purging its staff members of those who privately held that same-sex marriage did
not contradict biblical teaching.
What made this debate distinctively evangelical was that both sides relied on
the veracity of spiritual propositions to make their case. What makes it interest-
ing is that the conversation seems to have progressed beyond an obsession about
the inability of biblical truth to be in error. Historically, struggles over inerrancy
have animated evangelical hostilities over gender and sexuality from the 1970s
to the 1990s. Over this period, some of the founders of the Evangelical Women’s
Caucus (EWC) disclosed that they were in fact lesbians, leading to widespread
distrust among others in the intelligentsia regarding what was being called evan-
gelical feminism, a reading of the Bible that emphasized the equality of women
and men in creation (Cochran 2005; Ingersoll 2005). What was striking about that
era of backlash, the anthropologist Andrea Smith (2008) has noted, is that it was
not really about sex, but about biblical inerrancy, the question of whether every
proposition in the Bible is scientifically true.
On the surface, it might seem that IVCF is shutting down the latest iteration of
this intra-evangelical debate with an inerrancy argument. Indeed, there are still
struggles over inerrancy within evangelicalism; for example, several high-profile
faculty were recently fired from Westminster Theological Seminary because their
writings on Scripture did not neatly conform to inerrancy standards especially
around the Genesis creation stories (Pulliam [Bailey] 2008; Withrow 2014).
Moreover, reports of the IVCF sexuality policy rollout revealed that such a seem-
ing emphasis on inerrancy engendered some very scandalous practices. Religion
Dispatches published a piece shortly after the TIME article detailing some of the
misuse of such theologies of sexuality by some IVCF staff. Particularly jarring
was the opening hook, the story of Michael Vasquez, an IVCF staff worker at the
University of Utah who had reported in 2013 to his supervisor that he was gay.
Vasquez told the press that what happened next was as traumatizing as it was
bizarre: his supervisor at first met with him to pray for his homosexual orientation
to be taken away, and when nothing else seemed to work, instructed him to watch
straight pornography. With what was now being called a ‘purge’ at IVCF, Religion
Dispatches reporter Deborah Jian Lee (an ex-evangelical herself) suggested that
such self-reporting would not only result in emotional trauma, but also a process
of termination that would be less than gracious (DJ Lee 2016).
However, the framework of inerrancy is arguably insufficient for capturing the
spiritual geographies in the offending document in question. Titled ‘A Theologi-
cal Summary of Human Sexuality,’ the authors of the paper pitch their position
on sexuality by appealing to how evangelicals understand sexuality as part of the
larger spiritual reality of God’s grace: ‘As men and women created in the image
of God, relationships with family, friends, and spouses bring us the deepest joy
of human experience. God’s common grace is given to all people (Matthew 5:45)
and evident in every sector of life. He designed the sexual relationship between
28  Justin K. H. Tse
a husband and wife to be enjoyed as a meaningful experience.’ This ‘theologi-
cal foundation – grounded in the character of God’ becomes the matrix whereby
‘human sexuality’ – ‘that particular aspect of God’s creation gift where, in mar-
riage, we engage in physical sexual intimacy that is personal, self-giving, and
spiritual in nature’ – can be understood in the ‘theological categories’ of ‘(1) crea-
tion, (2) fall, (3) redemption, and (4) restoration’ (InterVarsity Christian Fellow-
ship/USA 2016: 1).
The document’s authors then explicate each point by drawing from the Bible
a picture of a larger spiritual reality of divine grace and redemption, in effect
mapping IVCF’s perception of spiritual geographies. The creation of God, they
argue, is premised on a self-giving love that became translated through the words
of Jesus in the New Testament through the Greek word agape, an orientation of
self-sacrifice and other-directed love required of all Christians whether they are
single or married. Deviations from this spiritual geography of agape love and
grace-filled creation are described as ‘The Fall: Not the Way It Is Supposed to Be’:

We live in a world where the common experience of sexuality is broken and

distorted to some extent, sometimes to the extremes of manipulation, abuse,
and violence. There is a striking difference between ‘knowing’ one’s spouse and
using, abusing, or neglecting one’s spouse. We have a sense that it is not intended
to be this way. How did we drift so far from the Creator’s grand design for
human relationships? How did we move from self-sacrifice to self-gratification?
How did we move from meaningful sexual intimacy to casual sex?
(InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA 2016: 6)

The authors then list a variety of ways that the original creation of sexuality has
become spiritually broken, including in sexual abuse, divorce, premarital sex,
lust, adultery, and pornography. However, the longest section is on same-sex
relationships, which is broken down into ‘attraction,’ ‘identity,’ and ‘behaviour’
(InterVarsity Christian Fellowship 2016: 12–14). Regretting that ‘many Chris-
tians have not loved same-sex-attracted people as we ought’ – a failure in its own
right to live out the matrix of grace prescribed by God’s original creation – the
document insists that ‘God’s intention for sexual expression is to be between a
husband and wife in marriage,’ which means that ‘every other sexual practice
is outside of God’s plan and therefore is a distortion of God’s loving design for
humanity’ (InterVarsity Christian Fellowship 2016: 12). IVCF posits a tension in
spiritual prescriptions of God’s creation: to follow the matrix of love with regard
to those who are attracted to persons of the same sex and identify as such while
insisting that that same grid of grace means that practicing same-sex sexual acts
deviate from the original created order. The narrative of redemption, then, posits
that in such a world that has deviated from the order of creation, God sent his Son
to die and rise again so that all creation might be restored to the original matrix of
self-giving agape and other-directed sacrifice.
At face value, these spiritual geographies may seem standard for evangelicals:
they are derived from biblical exegesis, they adopt a propositional approach to
 Spiritual propositions 29
spiritual geographies, they propose a moral order that protests against the fallen-
ness of creation (2016: 13). But IVCF does not rely on the blunt instrument of bib-
lical inerrancy. Resonating with the work of evangelical theologian David Fitch
(2011), IVCF describes an emphasis on the narrative arc of the Gospel that can be
read through Scripture but does not have to be beholden to its every jot and tittle,
one that moves from creation to fall to redemption to restoration. What is being
proposed is a mapping of evangelical spiritual realities within the big supernatural
picture of the Gospel in Scripture, not the scientific veracity of every jot and tittle
of Scripture. No wonder, then, that IVCF vice president Greg Jao says that the
policy is ‘about the authority of Scripture, which leads us to read Scripture in a
certain way’ through this matrix of redemption but never uses the word inerrancy.
The propositions form a story, allowing Jao to point out the lived tensions in this
spiritual geography:

I remember talking with a student who says that it was at InterVarsity that
I was first loved and cared for deeply enough that I could admit to myself
after years of denial that I had same-sex attraction, and it was at InterVarsity
that I encountered Jesus in the Scriptures and gave my life to him, and it’s in
InterVarsity that I feel that I can lay my sexual identity before Jesus and let
him guide me, which in her case, she says, ‘I’m choosing chastity because
that’s what Jesus calls me to, and I’m doing it with joy.’
(CBN News 2016)

Here, Jao maps InterVarsity’s orientation toward the spiritual order. Like Fitch, the
central proposition is that the order of creation is founded on the love that opened
this student up toward self-discovery, but because those same sets of spiritual
propositions proscribe the sexual behaviour that would be part of her identity, she
sacrifices her sexual orientation to maintain this evangelical spiritual orientation.
Discounting as it may be of nonheteronormative sexual practices, the IVCF
position paper on sexuality illumines how IVCF is trying to insist on its reading
of a spiritual geography, one created by grace and premised on agape self-giving
love. Yet it is that same matrix, with the same propositions, that its opponents
within the same intellectual circle contest this mapping. As Bianca Louie told the
TIME reporter who broke the story:

I think one of the hardest parts has been feeling really dismissed by Inter-
Varsity. . . . The queer collective went through a very biblical, very spiritual
process, with the Holy Spirit, to get to where we are. I think a lot of people
think those who are affirming [same-sex marriage] reject the Bible, but we
have landed where we have because of Scripture, which is what InterVarsity
taught us to do.
(Dias 2016)

Read via Fitch (2011), Louie’s comments are in fact far more conservative than
IVCF. IVCF is attempting to elevate the conversation beyond inerrancy and toward
30  Justin K. H. Tse
an explicit discussion of the spiritual geographies proposed by the redemptive arc
of Scripture. Not only does Louie appeal to a process of spiritual discernment –
one that is presumably premised on the same sort of self-giving love that enables
the formation of a community like IVCF – but she emphasizes that it is the very
words of Scripture, not only its narrative matrix, that have informed her under-
standing of how sexuality should be mapped as part of an evangelical spiritual
geography. Louie, in other words, is claiming the evangelical high ground on both
narrative and inerrancy. So too, Vasquez – the University of Utah staff worker
traumatized by attempts to pray the gay away and use pornography while at it –
continues to share a similar theological understanding of space:

Just doing life with college students is enough to bring change to campus. . . .
Just to acknowledge the inherent dignity in LGBT students on campus will
transform their lives and their experience of the Kingdom. So, whether it’s
through a formal ministry or not, my desire is simply to see students encoun-
ter Jesus, no different as it was when I was on InterVarsity staff.
(DJ Lee 2016)

The end goal here is that this spiritual geography is circumscribed by a personal
relationship with Jesus Christ, whose self-giving love is worth the encounter of
students regardless of Vasquez’s institutional affiliation. It is, after all, not IVCF
but Jesus himself who goes beyond creating the world to redeeming it from its
fallenness, which means that he personally encounters students whether inside or
outside of IVCF to make their world from ‘what it is not supposed to be’ to what
it is supposed to be. At heart, then, the debate over IVCF’s articulation of the
supernatural world presents a map of spiritual geographies that can be exported
even outside of the institution. What remains consistent between the institution
and its dissenters, though, is an insistence on propositions in this narrative account
of the Gospel.

Dismissing Larycia Hawkins: race and the spiritual

limits of interreligious solidarity
A similar analysis can be applied to the ideological fissures among the evangeli-
cal intelligentsia on the question of race. In 2015, the dismissal proceedings at
Wheaton College in the Chicago area against tenured political scientist Larycia
Hawkins divided evangelicals. News of this case rippled across the evangelical
intellectual world because Wheaton is an evangelical liberal arts college that
became such a bastion for the neo-evangelical movement in the 1940s that some
even dared to call it the ‘evangelical Harvard.’ Indeed, the spiritual geographies
from which the dismissal originated are seldom noted, as what is remarked upon
more often is the fact that Hawkins was the only African American woman to be
teaching at Wheaton – and as further point of fact, there were only five black fac-
ulty in total, including her. Her firing evoked the sociological analysis delivered
by Emerson and Smith (2001) that American evangelicalism remained divided by
 Spiritual propositions 31
race in an unconscious way – not because white evangelicals tended to be con-
sciously racist, but because their propensity toward individual spiritual practice
often did not account for the structural reasons behind poverty and marginaliza-
tion. Of course, as Deborah Jian Lee (2015) has recently reported, there are also
more nefarious accounts of open racism behind closed doors: Lee highlights how
the historian Randall Balmer (2006) discovered in a closed-door meeting with
evangelical political operatives of the Religious Right that their movement for
moral values touted the story of abortion as the reason for which they mobilized,
but in fact they got together to oppose the desegregation of schools. As such
studies and stories have widely circulated among the evangelical intelligentsia,
Hawkins’s dismissal raised questions about race and gender within evangelical-
ism itself, especially as earlier that same year, IVCF had endorsed the Black Lives
Matter movement at their annual conference in Urbana, Illinois (InterVarsity
Christian Fellowship 2015).
Hawkins’s dismissal was triggered by a Facebook status update on 10 Decem-
ber 2015 in which she advocated her ‘embodied solidarity’ with Muslims in the
face of American Islamophobia, as ‘theoretical solidarity is not solidarity at all.’
Hawkins outlined her plan for her 2015 ‘Advent Worship’ as she prepared for
the coming of Jesus Christ during the Christmas season: ‘I will wear the hijab to
work at Wheaton College, to play in Chi-town, in the airport and on the airplane
to my home state that initiated one of the first anti-Sharia laws (read: uncon-
stitutional and Islamophobic), and at church.’ For Hawkins’s readers, this was
an invitation to ‘all women into the narrative that is embodied, hijab-wearing
solidarity with our Muslim sisters – for whatever reason,’ and she lists off the fol-
lowing as invitees to her embodied solidarity: Muslims who do not ‘wear the veil
normally,’ atheists and agnostics who find ‘religion silly or inexplicable,’ Catho-
lic and Protestant Christians ‘like me,’ and those who already cover their head in
worship ‘but not a hijab.’ All of this was prefaced by a theological justification: ‘I
stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian are
people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same
God’ (Gleim 2016).
Hawkins was immediately placed on administrative leave, which eventually
snowballed into dismissal proceedings even though she had tenure. Although
Hawkins taught political science (not theology) and even though she had tenure
(which should have made firing her difficult), all Wheaton faculty are required to
sign a statement of faith with propositions from which they cannot deviate, high-
lighting again an evangelical propositionalist approach to spiritual geographies.
The theological debate between Hawkins and Wheaton thus became a sparring
match over that statement’s propositions. Following a letter sent to her on 15
December questioning her commitment to exclusively worshipping the Christian
God in an evangelical Protestant way, Hawkins responded with a rigorous point-
by-point treatise defending her faithful adherence to Wheaton’s statement of faith.
A close reading of Hawkins’s reply (as I shall show) reveals that the school not
only questioned her statement that Christians and Muslims worship the same God,
but also whether she was sufficiently Protestant as opposed to being Catholic
32  Justin K. H. Tse
because she had invoked Pope Francis and called for Protestants and Catholics to
share in the ‘embodied solidarity’ of wearing the hijab.
In her response, Hawkins does three things. First, she reviews the evangelical
scholarly literature on whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God
(which means that this has been a matter of scholarly contention for some time),
finds both yes and no answers because Muslims deny the Christian conceptions
of the three-personedness of God and the deity of Christ but affirm with Jews
and Christians that there is only one God, and concludes that ‘my statement is
not a statement on soteriology or Trinitarian theology, but one of embodied piety.
When I say that “we worship the same God,” I am saying what Stackhouse [one
scholar in the evangelical intelligentsia’s discussion of Muslim-Christian rela-
tions] points out, namely that “when pious Muslims pray, they are addressing the
One True God, and that God is, simply, God.” ’ Second, she addresses the conten-
tion around calling Muslims her ‘brothers and sisters’ by affirming the common
creation story among Jews, Christians, and Muslims that all are descended from
the same common humanity bearing God’s image, so this statement is ‘in full
agreement with the Wheaton College statement of faith, identifying each person
as an image-bearer of God.’ Third, she argues that Wheaton’s objections to her
Catholic sympathies because of Protestant-Catholic disputes around the Eucharist
and the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary are misplaced because there
are disagreements about these theological conceptions among Protestants them-
selves (Nazworth 2016).
Still, that Wheaton College filed dismissal proceedings against Hawkins in Jan-
uary 2016 suggested that her rigorous propositional reply explicating her under-
standing of spiritual geographies did not sufficiently overlap with the school’s
institutional understanding of the supernatural map. As a New York Times Maga-
zine report describes it, tensions had always been there between Hawkins and the
Wheaton administration, especially with Wheaton’s provost Stanton Jones; one
memorable account in the article has Jones accusing Hawkins of endorsing Marx-
ism in her laudatory account of black liberation theology in a faith-and-work inte-
gration paper required for all tenure-track faculty (Graham 2016: 53). Dissatisfied
with Hawkins’s theological rebuttal on the Muslim question, Jones recommended
her dismissal in early January 2016, triggering campus-wide protests that put
Hawkins’s face on the front cover of the Wheaton Record for its 14 January 2016
issue and resulted in the faculty pushing back en masse on the administration
for dismissing their colleague. In the face of a disciplinary hearing in February,
Hawkins held her own press conference at the United Methodist Church’s Chi-
cago Temple flanked by an interreligious group of faith leaders in Chicago. With
Wheaton sufficiently embarrassed, the school suddenly pulled back from firing
Hawkins, just as Hawkins decided to leave the school; the result was a ‘reconcili-
ation’ farewell event described as emotional for all parties involved, during which
Wheaton administrators, faculty, students, and staff said good-bye and conveyed
their regrets to Hawkins. Hawkins currently works as the Abd el-Kader Visiting
Faculty Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in
Culture.
 Spiritual propositions 33
While it may be tempting to regard this case solely as one of institutional racism
and sexism – and given Hawkins’s prior clashes with the administration, it cannot
be denied that race was a factor in her struggle – what is perhaps more fascinating
here is how much the spiritual geographies outlined by both Hawkins and Whea-
ton are approached purely propositionally. At issue is a set of propositions about
the spiritual world, Wheaton’s statement of faith. In twelve sentences, the state-
ment’s propositions provide ‘a summary of biblical doctrine that is consonant with
evangelical Christianity,’ reaffirming the ‘salient features of the historic Christian
creeds, thereby identifying the College not only with the Scriptures but also with
the reformers and the evangelical movement of recent years’ and defining ‘the
biblical perspective which informs a Wheaton education’ by casting ‘light on the
study of nature and man, as well as on man’s culture’ (Wheaton College 1992).
For all of the contention around Hawkins’s supposed interreligious inclusivity and
Catholic sympathies, her approach to ‘Advent Worship’ in her Facebook post is
based on the proposition that Muslims are part of a common humanity with whom
everyone should stand in ‘embodied solidarity’ during their persecution. The cita-
tion of Pope Francis is not an entry into sacramental communion with him, but
an affirmation of his proposition that Christians and Muslims worship the same
God. In so doing, Hawkins’s propositions describe a spiritual order in which what
is shared is a common humanity that transcends religious identity politics and
institutional conformity. That Wheaton saw this as threatening indicates that their
propositions present a supernatural world in which religious identities matter in
order to safeguard their institution from incoherence. The fissure between Hawk-
ins and Wheaton, then, is over what evangelical spiritual geographies are for: a
spiritual identity politics (as for Wheaton) or a supernatural pathway to a common
humanity regardless of institutional affiliation (as for Hawkins)?
In other words, the Larycia Hawkins case highlights difference between these
two spiritual worlds dividing the evangelical intelligentsia, much as they agree
that supernatural truths should be approached propositionally. As I noted above,
the conflicts between Hawkins and Jones do not originate with this assertion of
‘embodied solidarity’ with Muslims, but from Hawkins’s usage of black liberation
theology in her required faith-and-work integration paper. It was not just Hawk-
ins’s identity as the only black woman on Wheaton’s faculty that made trouble for
her; it turns out that her understanding of the spiritual world was constituted by a
sensibility that racialization is a form of oppression that needs to be named for the
sake of supernatural restoration. For Jones, the naming of such oppressive racial
and class projects evoked a kind of Marxism from which he had to defend his
spiritual world. In so doing, it is in fact Jones’s spiritual geographies, not Hawk-
ins’s, that are constituted by identity politics, a need in this case to be clear about
what evangelicals as an institutional group believe about the nature of God and his
relationship to the world. Framed this way, it becomes clearer that neither Emer-
son and Smith’s (2001) sociological analysis about evangelical colourblindness
as a symptom of evangelicals’ individualistic spirituality nor Balmer’s (2006)
revelation that the Religious Right was a coalition to preserve racial segrega-
tion applies here. Instead, this is a new fight among the evangelical intelligentsia
34  Justin K. H. Tse
over the constitution of the supernatural order, while using the same propositional
language, with regard to whether Hawkins’s evangelical spiritual map, propo-
sitionally evangelical as it is, should be bounded to an evangelical institution
like Wheaton’s, for a major part of an evangelical institution’s mapping of the
supernatural order is to preserve its own institutional identity, whereas Hawkins is
advancing a spiritual geography that transcends institutional boundaries.

Conclusion
In this chapter, I hope to have shown that despite the evangelical intelligent-
sia’s attempt to nuance the increasingly bizarre political images associated with
evangelicals in the popular imaginary, what is more interesting about evan-
gelical Protestantism in the United States is the intelligentsia’s own spiritual
geographies. Evangelicalism is premised on an orientation to spiritual geogra-
phies known as propositionalism. My contention is that the fractures among an
evangelical intellectual class can also be chalked up to approaches to spiritual
geographies that include politics. An analysis of these recent debates shows that
the contentions within this intelligentsia have been intellectually productive, as
many have moved beyond characterizing their stances with the old fundamen-
talist and evangelical ideological tropes of biblical inerrancy, suspicion toward
Catholic teachings, and individualizing practice. Instead, new propositions are
being used, and therefore new debates are being had about the worlds being built
through evangelical convictions. While some of these debates are being had at
the institutional level, the stakes over which these contentions are being had is
over geographies of the spiritual that transcend institutions through individual
practices of faith.
Such debates add to a broader understanding of spiritual geographies because
evangelicalism is often taken to fall under the category of geographies of religion,
an institutionalized form of theology that may or may not point to supernatural
realities (Wilford 2012; Bartolini et al. 2017). In this chapter, I hope to have dem-
onstrated that evangelicalism is better characterized not as a set of institutions, but
as a network of intellectuals who sometimes reinforce and sometimes undermine
their own institutions, and at the heart of their debate is the constitution of a super-
natural order that is not easily institutionally boxed in. As a popular evangelical
catchphrase goes, ‘I don’t have a religion; I have a relationship!’ The intelligentsia
might cringe at such folksiness, but as I have shown, their debates are articulat-
ing what that relationship is by positing that one’s personal relationship with a
spiritual world is premised on the veracity of propositions, not necessarily by
institutional affiliation. It is this discursive distinction that marks this intellectual
circle as evangelical, showing that what appears to be their fragmentation may in
fact be their greatest marker of spiritual coherence.

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3 Resisting marriage equalities
The complexities of religious
opposition to same sex marriage
Kath Browne and Catherine Jean Nash

Introduction
There can be little doubt that religious orthodoxies play a significant role in assert-
ing that progressive lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and Queer (LGBTQ)1 legislation
and understandings of homosexuality, and increasingly trans lives, are ‘against
God’. Biblical references are used to evidence both the so-called depravity of
homosexuality (‘man should not lie with another man’)2 and also the ‘naturalness’
of God appointed man-woman marriage as the basis for procreation and healthy
families (see Browne and Nash, 2014; Nash and Browne, 2015). These views are
highly visible in many contemporary debates (including education), but one of
the most prominent is around same sex marriage. Various groups and organisa-
tions across the globe, and perhaps most visibly in the Global North (including
the USA, the UK, Ireland and Australia), have sought to resist the implementation
of same sex marriage in part through recourse to religious (mainly specific forms
of Christian) ideologies. We term this form of ideology and associated action het-
eroactivisms, as it seeks to reiterate heteronormative orders (that is male/female
relationships within normative genders that are also classed and racialised). In
the UK, the passage of same sex marriage legislation in 2013 included provisions
expressly barring the Church of England from performing same sex marriages,
in order to assuage worries that churches would be ‘forced’ to perform same sex
marriages against their will.
Although it is often assumed that religion is diametrically opposed to lesbian,
gay, bisexual and trans rights, the situation is far more complex than this easy
assumption allows. Indeed, where we reconsider ‘religions’ and spiritualties
beyond traditional and majority religions, there is evidence that alternative forms
of sexual and gender identities and lives receive some form of acceptance. For
some spiritual communities, inclusions of LGBT people (and other marginalised
groups) are core to their spiritual practices and identities. It is clear that when
exploring the everyday practicing of spiritualties and religions a diverse array
of inclusions/exclusions and reworkings are apparent (see for example Browne
et al., 2010; Hunt, 2016; Rodgers, 1995; Yip, 2008). As Andersson et al. (2011)
and Vanderbeck et al. (2011) show, even in churches where there is vocal oppo-
sition to LGBT rights, members of the congregation often voice more complex
38  Kath Browne and Catherine Jean Nash
understandings and engagements with these issues. Queer spiritual spaces can
also be found in religions whose underpinning theologies and public pronounce-
ments might be described as homophobic, biphobic and transphobic (e.g. Browne
et al., 2010). Yet, it is clear that religious ideologies can pervade state and leg-
islative discourses and play a key role in law making in contexts where there is
ostensibly a separation of church and state (Johnson and Vanderbeck, 2014).
In this chapter, we explore the 2015 Irish referendum on same sex marriage,
where over 62% of voters voted in favour of amending the definition of marriage
to include same sex couples. Our goal is to contribute to the literature that refuses
to dichotomously pit religions, even those vocally opposing LGBTQ rights gen-
erally and same sex marriage in particular, against LGBTQ rights. To do so, we
examine the diversity of views voiced within the Roman Catholic Church in Ire-
land in the lead-up to the referendum. Despite the Pope’s stance against same sex
marriage (as leader of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church), and the Roman
Catholic Church’s official line that supported a No vote in the marriage referen-
dum, clergy in Ireland were found both publically and privately on both sides of
the debate which, as Mulhall (2015) argues, demonstrates the interventions were
‘by no means unanimous’.
The chapter begins by outlining the specific context of the same sex marriage
debate in Ireland focusing on the position of the Irish Roman Catholic Church in
relation to key elements of the debate. It then examines the ‘two sides’ of the argu-
ment presented by Catholic clergy, beginning with the rationale for demanding a
No vote, before examining the ways in which Parish priests in particular sup-
ported a Yes vote. The chapter contends that these debates showcase the complex
and multifarious relationships between sexualities, spirituality and space. Explor-
ing these can, we hope, open up new dialogues between those often-entrenched
positions that pit religious freedom against sexual equalities.

Same sex marriage and Catholic Ireland

Twenty-two years after Ireland decriminalised homosexuality, a national vote was
held on a constitutional amendment to the definition of marriage. Any amendment
to Ireland’s Constitution requires a referendum, and there have been various refer-
enda on social issues such as divorce and abortion. Because of this constitutional
requirement, Ireland was the first country to hold a national referendum on same
sex marriage. On 22 May 2015, the Irish were asked to vote on the question: ‘Do
you approve of the proposal to amend the Constitution contained in the under-
mentioned Bill?’ The proposed amendment would alter the constitutional state-
ment on marriage to read: ‘Marriage may be contracted in accordance with law
by two persons without distinction as to their sex’. All the main political parties
supported a Yes vote. Some 1,949,725 people or 60.52% of electorate voted in the
referendum, with 1,201,607 people or 62.07% voting Yes, and 734,300 people or
37.93% voting No (Elections Ireland, 2015). Reports indicated that many people
living and travelling abroad also returned to Ireland to vote (see O’Leary, 2015;
Mullhall, 2015; Silvera, 2015).
 Resisting marriage equalities 39
The Roman Catholic Church (herein ‘the Church’) was the main opponent
to the proposed constitutional revision to the definition of marriage. Ireland is
understood as a ‘Catholic country’ with some 3.86 million people identifying
as ‘Catholic’ in the 2011 Census, constituting 84.2% of the population. Of this
number, 92% were of Irish descent (Hyland, 2012; Irish Census, 2011). Despite
these figures, adherence to the major precepts of Catholicism, including attend-
ing Mass and other rituals, is in decline with a marked increase in secularism
and liberalism (Breen and Reynolds, 2011; and, Girvin, 1996). Nevertheless, con-
trol of the majority of Irish primary (96%) and secondary schools (51%) remains
very much within the hands of the religious orders (Mulhall, 2015). Indeed, as
Andersen (2010) notes, young people between the ages of 18–29 are embedded
in the culture of Catholicism, but are less institutionalised in their practices and
spiritual beliefs than previous generations. Inglis (2007) contends that individual
identification with Catholicism as a religious heritage is taking the place of more
orthodox adherence to rules and practices, with Irish Catholics mixing Catholi-
cism with other religious and spiritual beliefs.
Paedophile scandals have rocked the Catholic Church in Ireland since the
beginning of the 21st century (see for example Böhm et al., 2014; Crowe, 2008;
and Pilgrim, 2011). Accusations of child sex abuse by Catholic priests and laity
have been met with woefully inadequate responses (Dunne, 2004), causing an
ongoing and painful scandal within the Church and amongst faithful Catholics
(Hogan, 2011; Savage and Smith, 2003). In Ireland, three government-backed
inquires in the 2000s issued detailed reports documenting the specifics of these
scandals and the largely ineffective responses by the Church (Murphy et al., 2005;
Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, 2009; Murphy et al., 2009). The causes
of sex abuse are multifaceted and certainly not limited to the Irish context, indeed
as Terry (2015) notes, accusations of sexual improprieties and abuse are an on-
going, global issue in the Church. However, research highlights the specific fac-
tors that created the conditions of possibility for the form this abuse took in the
Irish context, particularly emphasising the dominant positioning of the Church as
Ireland gained independence from Great Britain as a key factor (alongside poverty
and social exclusions) (see Garrett, 2013; McLoone-Richards, 2012). These scan-
dals, together with the secularisation of Irish society through modernisations and
economic development, weakened the Church’s positioning within Irish social
and political contexts. The ability to harness the electorate from the pulpit has
diminished, which has been attributed to the Church’s lack of control of the media
(Donnelly and Inglis, 2010). The increasing separation of the Church and the Irish
state gained momentum as clergy, and the institutions of the Church itself, has
lost some influence and is arguably ceasing to play a central role in contemporary
Irish society.
The Church’s failure to prevent the constitutional amendment on marriage
might be understood as incontrovertible evidence of the Church’s declining
importance in Ireland. However, as we argue here, this overstates the matter, as
this fails to take into account the multiple and often-conflicting positions of Cath-
olic clergy during the same sex marriage debates nor gives sufficient weight to
40  Kath Browne and Catherine Jean Nash
the potential influence of supportive clergy on the overall result. In what follows,
we provide a more detailed consideration of the arguments both for and against
the constitutional redefinition of marriage made by Catholic clergy in the period
leading up to the referendum. In doing so, we suggest that the Catholic Church’s
opposition was not as monolithic as one might expect and that it is in the details
that a better understanding of the influence and role of the Church in these debates
can be gleaned.

Vote No: marriage, children, and family

In examining the archives of the Irish press,3 we found 48 instances of members
of the Catholic clergy from across the country directly opposing same sex mar-
riage, evidenced through direct quotes in the Irish press or as reported in vari-
ous news articles. These results are in keeping with Mulhall (2015), who asserts
that the interventions of the Catholic Church in the same sex marriage debates
were ‘muted’. This suggests significant opposition within the Church hierarchy
to the passing of the proposed constitutional amendment, and although the argu-
ments are diverse, they often collectively draw on familiar and linked perspec-
tives, that are more accurately named as heteroactivism rather than homophobia
or transphobia. In this section, we will outline some of the key points made in
support of a No vote. Interestingly, and in contrast to those on the ‘Yes’ side, those
quoted as being against the constitutional change tended to be more senior in the
hierarchy of the Church.4
The style and framing of oppositional arguments is important to consider as this
reflects what those on the vote ‘No’ side thought to be their strongest arguments.
Most broadly, and despite the Church’s strong opposition to same sex marriage,
the Church attempted to strike a conciliatory note by arguing even those voting in
support of same sex marriage should not be considered ‘wrong’:

People have to make their own mature decision, be it yes or be it no. I would
hate for people to be voting no for bad reasons, for bigoted reasons, for nasty
reasons, for bullying reasons. People have to make up their own minds and
I’m quite happy that people can do that in front of God, be it yes or be it no.
I don’t doubt that there are many people who are practicing Churchgoers of
whatever Church background who will in conscience vote Yes, and that’s
entirely up to them. I’m not going to say they’re wrong.
(Donal McKeown, Bishop of Derry, quoted in Baklinski, 2015)

As this quote illustrates, Donal McKeown sought not to overtly direct laity on
how to vote, but to frame the decision-making process as a ‘vote of conscience’ in
‘front of God’. At times this conscience vote was presented as a ‘choice’ although
it was clearly intimated that any right thinking person, in good conscience, could
only choose to vote ‘No’. The Church’s more circumspect and less dictatorial
approach reflects its diminished social position arising from the child abuse scan-
dals that seriously undermined its ability to preach political directives from the
 Resisting marriage equalities 41
pulpit (see Donnelly and Inglis, 2010, a point picked up by those advocating a
Yes vote, see below). Such an approach reflects a more heteroactivist stance that
struggles to be defined as ‘homophobic’, but nonetheless seeks to reiterate heter-
onormative orders.
This seemingly softer and more indirect appeal was made not only to the het-
erosexual Catholic population but also directly to ‘gay and lesbian people . . .
together with their parents and family members’ (Bishop John Fleming, quoted
in O’Brien and McGarry, 2015). By encompassing families as well as those who
are most affected by the legislation, the Church sought to appeal to lesbians
and gay men to consider ‘the good of society’ ahead of their personal or indi-
vidual goals. This attempt to connect with the families of those most affected by
the vote mirrors the Yes campaign’s focus on personal relationships to encour-
age solidarity with the aspirations of lesbians and gay men to marry. It also
seeks to reiterate an individual (Christian?) sacrifice for the good of the Church
and broader society. For example, John Fleming, Bishop of Killala sought to
persuade lesbians and gays, as well as those close to them, to vote against the
amendment by claiming that:

The Church’s vision for marriage and the family is based on faith and rea-
son. It is shared by other faith traditions and by people who have no reli-
gious belief. [The proposed amendment] not only redefines marriage in the
Constitution but it also, as a result, changes the understanding of the family
as outlined in the Constitution. Everyone, including gay and lesbian people,
together with their parents and family members, must think carefully on all
the issues involved and vote accordingly.
(John Fleming, Bishop of Killala, quoted in O’Brien and McGarry, 2015)

Although suggesting the matter is one for serious reflection, Fleming’s argument
is clear: the state and the Church are so closely linked that an amendment to the
constitutional (state) definition of marriage would have wide reaching (and nega-
tive) effects on broader understandings of the ‘family’ and marriage. The Church
in Ireland is historically and intricately entwined with the state in ways that make
arguments about their mutual interests more compelling than might be the case
elsewhere.
Throughout the debates, familiar heteroactivist arguments regarding the nature
and constitution of the ‘family’ appear under the guise of religion and care for
society (see Nash and Browne, 2015; Browne and Nash, 2013, 2014). One key
(and recurring) argument against same sex marriage and LGBTQ equalities is the
claim that the fundamental ‘nature’ of marriage is rooted in male-female relation-
ships positioned at the heart of a stable and healthy society:

Society values the complementary roles of mothers and fathers in the genera-
tion and upbringing of children. The differences between a man and a woman
are not accidental to marriage but are fundamentally part of it.
(John Kirby, Bishop of the Diocese of Clonfert, quoted in MacDonald, 2015b)
42  Kath Browne and Catherine Jean Nash
In this claim, the Church suggests that society’s values and Christian values, as
advanced through the Irish Roman Catholic Church, are thoroughly intertwined
such that both require the traditional, heterosexual family be ‘protected’ for the
common good. The loss of this referendum dramatically highlights how the
Church is increasingly distanced from the interests of the state and has lost con-
siderable influence over state social and political policies.
As we have argued elsewhere (Browne and Nash, 2013, 2014; Nash and
Browne, 2015), and as is certainly the case here, another key heteroactivist argu-
ment mounted by the Church is that man and woman are not ‘accidental’ to
marriage. Further, the male-female complementarity is essential for the healthy
rearing of children, thereby providing for the present and future stability of soci-
ety. This reasserts the role of the Church and Christianity, as the moral compass
for Irish societal codes and norms:

We make our position clear not just from a faith point of view but also
because we believe it is good for children, that it’s good for family and it’s
good for society to preserve the uniqueness of marriage as we have tradition-
ally understood it.
(Eamon Martin, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate
of All Ireland, quoted in MacCormaic, 2015)

By linking Church, state and society in this way, the heteroactivist narrative cre-
ates a ‘we’ that needs to protect those ‘traditions’ that ensure society’s future.
These traditions are evoked in ways that see marriage as a timeless and placeless
entity. It is the ‘foundation’ of society and thus any threat to marriage is a threat
to society (and its members):

 . . . common sense alone tells us that every child should have its ‘mammy and
daddy’. This has been the way since the dawn of civilization in every culture
and on every continent. . . . The referendum on 22 May is seeking to change
the very meaning of marriage. It is like removing concrete foundations under
a house and saying that any material will do. In what has turned out to be a
desperately one-sided public debate I hope you will think long and hard about
your decision.
(Phonsie Cullinan, Bishop of Diocese of Waterford
and Lismore, quoted in Towey and Duncan, 2015)

Phonsie Cullinan’s plea to ‘think long and hard’ about this decision, and the equa-
tion of man/woman marriage with the foundations of society, not only places
marriage at the centre of society, it seeks to re-establish the specific Christian
views of the orthodox Catholic clergy as central to the debate. Second, the appeal
to ‘common sense’ returns the focus of the debate to questions of ‘natural’ pro-
creation and genetics. Diarmuid Martin, Archbishop of Dublin, went so far as to
argue that, ‘[e]ven if it were possible to clone a child, that child would still bear
the genetic imprint of a male and a female. Genetic parentage is not irrelevant’
 Resisting marriage equalities 43
(quoted in MacDonald, 2015a). This came in apology for the ‘offense’ that Kevin
Doran caused by suggesting that those who have children by other means ‘are not
parents. They may have children, but you see this is the point, people who have
children are not necessarily parents’ (Kevin Doran, Bishop of Elphin, quoted in
MacDonald, 2015c).
Not surprisingly, denying the multiple ways people become ‘parents’ had the
effect of drawing into the debates a broad range of different types of families,
including single parent families, adopted families, blended families and many
other non-(hetero)normative families. The Church’s official stance on same sex
marriage also reasserted the Church’s ‘traditional’ view of marriage against a
range of contemporary forces visible in a secular and diverse Ireland.
Not only were children seen as an important part of marriage, marriage itself
was understood by definition to entail the ability to procreate:

The reality is that those who wish to change the Constitution are not actu-
ally looking for marriage equality. They are looking for a different kind of
relationship which would be called marriage; a relationship which includes
some elements of marriage, such as love and commitment, but excludes one
of the two essential aspects of marriage, which is the openness of their sexual
relationship to procreation. This is only possible if we change the meaning
of marriage and remove that aspect of openness to procreation. Part of the
challenge for us as a society, of course, is that we (and that includes many
practising Catholics) have to a greater or lesser extent given up on the idea
that sexual intercourse and an openness to procreation are essentially linked.
That makes it more difficult to get our heads around why there might be any
problem about changing the meaning of marriage. There is nothing wrong
with being nice to them, but that is not what the referendum is about.
(Kevin Doran, Bishop of Elphin, quoted in McGarry, 2015)

Doran makes a number of related points about the purpose of marriage, its ‘true’
definition and the relationship between the Church and gays and lesbians. His logic
seeks to extend the Church’s doctrine beyond ‘Christians’ through an appeal to
what is framed as a universal and inevitable ‘truth’ based in ‘reason’. In this ‘real-
ity’, there are marriages that are ‘real’ because they are based on love and a sexual
relationship that can result in children and those that are based in love but do not
include the ‘essential aspect’ of the possibility of procreation. Despite attempts to
move away from just Christians, the argument is of course based in Christianity
and this position reflects the Church’s prohibition against contraception and its
doctrinal concerns about the purported disconnection between procreation and
marriage. Such a view once again asserts a particular form of Christianity that
saw the Church’s traditional Catholic stance on procreation remain at odds with
contemporary gender equalities and women’s freedoms in a modernising Ireland.
Doran suggests there is a need to ‘be nice to them’, that is, to gays and lesbians,
but that the question of marriage and family is a much broader issue. This claim that
the Church is ‘caring’ (or at least not ‘mean-spirited’) was a central rhetorical point
44  Kath Browne and Catherine Jean Nash
within Church arguments in conjunction with the Church’s overall conciliatory tone
described above. Emphasising love as a central Christian value, this heteroactivist
framing sought to soften the hurtful and exclusionary language against LGBT rela-
tionships and was often deployed before a critique of the ‘unnaturalness’ of same
sex relationships and claims about the negative impact of the genderless definition
of marriage. However, it could also be perceived as reflecting the paternalistic voice
of the Church – one that was tough but ‘concerned’ and ‘caring’ in their desire to
exclude same sex attractions, love and relationships from the definition of marriage:

We are not being mean-spirited towards those who have same-sex attractions.
On the contrary, we regard marriage as the central and crucial social relation-
ship, which is of natural law and plays an indispensable part in human life.
Our view of Christian marriage, properly explained and understood, is not
in any way disrespectful of people who experience same-sex attraction. As
a Church, we believe every person is equal in the sight of God and should
always be treated with love, dignity and respect. There is no denying the fact
that marriage faces difficulties throughout the Western world today. These
pressures impinge on all, but particularly on children. Following the Ref-
erendum on Children’s Rights our laws now enshrine the principle that, in
all decisions relating to a child, the welfare of the child must be paramount.
A society that identifies the two parties in marriage as spouse I and spouse
II has lost sight of a deep truth of human nature. Are we going to be the
first generation in human history to say that mothers and fathers don’t matter
anymore in the upbringing of children? Children have a right to grow up in a
family with a father and a mother capable of creating a suitable environment
for the child’s development and emotional maturity. This referendum is not
and should not be about judging the various family types which have always
existed as a reality in Ireland. Married parents and single parents deserve as
much support as possible as they live out the challenging vocation of parent-
hood. [. . .] Despite what we are led to believe this referendum is not about
same-sex relationships or about equality, but about the family.
(Michael Neary, Archdiocese of Tuam, quoted in MacDonald, 2015b)

We quote Michael Neary in depth here to demonstrate how this heteroactivist nar-
rative moves from one of ‘love, dignity and respect’, towards a conceptualisation
of family that excludes same sex couples and suggests that children will suffer
from having same sex parents. Delinking family from same sex relationships and
parenting means that the referendum was not about ‘same sex relationships, or
about equality’ (Drennan, 2015), but instead about family, that is, the only sort of
arrangement that is truly a ‘family’ – the heterosexual, married couple. This view
was shown time and again to be socially and legally inaccurate. The changes to the
Constitution proposed through the referendum had little effect on the legal status
of same sex parents and no effect on laws around adoption, custody or access to
fertility treatments. However, the ‘No’ campaign continually evoked the rights of
children, and the figure of the child as potentially being damaged by the proposed
 Resisting marriage equalities 45
constitutional amendment. Here, the Christian doctrine of love couches this mes-
sage, all are ‘equal in the sight of God’, but family is only created through men
and women, mothers and fathers (even if these are single parents and unmarried).
As we have noted elsewhere, heteroactivists also sought to minimise the potential
impact of excluding gays and lesbians from marriage by retrospectively supporting
civil partnerships rather than redefining marriage (see Browne and Nash, 2014). In
the alternative some sought to reframe the debate not as a human rights issue but to
suggest that while all people are equal, marriage is a ‘unique’ and special institution.
This is supported by the European Court of Human Rights’ 2014 decision declaring
that same sex marriage is not a human right. For example, Philip Boyce (Bishop of
Raphoe, quoted in Harkin, 2015a) argued that, ‘equality and human rights should
be afforded to everyone, but it should be done without sacrificing the institution of
marriage and the family’. Such an argument sought to reposition the Church not as
‘behind the times’ but as a truly caring and innovating institution, seeking to find
respectful solutions to difficult issues while essentially maintaining the status quo:

A pluralist society can be creative in finding ways in which people of same-

sex orientation have their rights and their loving and caring relationships
recognised and cherished in a culture of difference, while respecting the
uniqueness of the male-female relationship. I know that the harshness with
which the Irish Church treated gay and lesbian people in the past – and in
some cases still today – may make it hard for LGBT people to accept that
I am sincere in what I am proposing. Marriage is not simply about a wedding
ceremony or about two people being in love with each other. We are all chil-
dren of a male and a female and this must have relevance to our understand-
ing of the way children should be nurtured and educated.
(Diarmuid Martin, Archbishop of Dublin,
quoted in MacDonald, 2015d)

While Diarmuid Martin is prepared to understand LGBT relationships as deserv-

ing of ‘rights’, he seeks to carve out a special place for marriage based in male
and female procreative relationships. ‘Cherishing difference’ but arguing for
the ‘uniqueness’ of heterosexual marriage is not paradoxical nor does it equate
with treating gay and lesbian people harshly. Rather simplistically equating mar-
riage, sexual procreation and social nurturing and education, Martin suggests that
Church abuse of LGBTQ people is a thing of the past, and that the Irish Church
remains central to decisions regarding families, children and education despite
the exclusion of ‘lesbian and gay people’. In this way, he reconciles a faith that
asks for love with a Church that has power and has abused this power in relation
to ‘lesbian and gay people’.

Vote Yes: priests supporting same sex marriage

Contrary to the official position of the Irish Church, some Catholic clergy broke
ranks and spoke in favour of same sex marriage. Supportive clergy were much
46  Kath Browne and Catherine Jean Nash
less prevalent than oppositional ones, and our search of the mainstream Irish press
found 16 reported statements. Priests who argued in favour of same sex marriage
took a variety of positions, including coming out as gay themselves, as Martin
Dolan did. Those supporting the Yes vote did so from a position that overtly rec-
ognised the weakness of the Church, while seeking to support those who had been
hurt by the Church.
Similar to the paradoxical positions taken by those who argued for a No vote,
some priests who supported a Yes vote did not necessarily approve of same sex
relationships:

It is not what I would see as the ideal, in fact I would disagree with it but
I am willing to allow those that believe to live out their lives. [. . .] It would
be sinful for me [to judge same sex marriage as sinful] but to use that lovely
phrase of Pope Francis, ‘Who am I to judge?’ I might disagree with them and
I wouldn’t be able to participate in such a ceremony I admit that, but at the
same time I am willing to accept the opinion of those who have that view.
[. . .] I am not in any way calling for a yes or no vote, I was simply asked how
I would vote myself. All I am saying is that if a yes vote is carried or if the no
vote is carried it won’t affect me in the slightest, I will still be a believer and
provocateur of catholic values and catholic marriage. Maybe I am a ‘fuddy
duddy’ on this one but I am a believer in marriage for life, in heterosexual
marriage between a man and a woman. I see that as Catholic marriage, that
is the one I believe in but I am willing in civil law, and I am not changing
Church law in any way – in civil law, the state is a secular reality and the
state legislates for all its citizens including those who have different views
on marriage.
(Iggy O’Donovan, Priest, quoted in Hayes, 2015)

Iggy O’Donovan’s position nicely illustrates an interesting paradox. O’Donovan

does not believe in same sex marriage, would not conduct such a ceremony and
continues to regard Catholic marriage as between a man and a woman. Neverthe-
less, as a personal matter he would vote in favour of same sex marriage. He sup-
ports this position by referencing the Pope’s statement that it is not his place to
‘judge’ gays and lesbians. He also supports the separation of state/Church, fram-
ing the Irish constitutional referendum as pertaining to ‘civil marriage’ which is,
in effect, ‘about giving statutory recognition and protection, irrespective of sex,
to the relationships of all people who publicly want such recognition by the State,
nothing more, nothing less’ (Brian Ó Fearraigh, Curate in Gaoth Dobhair, Co
Donegal, quoted in Harkin, 2015b).
As we noted earlier, traditional Catholic orthodoxy holds that anything less
than heterosexual marriage is detrimental to children and to society as a whole.
Nevertheless, some priests did question whether same sex marriage was actually
detrimental to society:

I ask if it [same sex marriage] is in the interests of society, and in this instance
I think it is and that is why I will be voting Yes. There are so many different
 Resisting marriage equalities 47
types of families. From the nuclear ones with a mam and a dad and children
to single parents of children from one father and single parents of children
from different fathers – as well as same-sex couples. I believe in relationships
and family and marriage in all those different types of situations. In every
community there are same-sex couples, and as a priest you get a sense of how
people live, and there is nothing like staying with a same-sex couple and their
families to make you change any preconceptions you might have had about
them. Quite a few male suicides are rooted in the struggle over sexuality, and
anything we can do to de-stigmatise the old thinking and the old prejudices
about sexuality is welcome. My worry is if the referendum is defeated, what
message will it send to people who are struggling with their sexuality?
(Gerry O’Connor, Dublin Priest, quoted in Feehan, 2015)

Gerry O’Connor pushes back against the homogenous portrayal of parents as nec-
essarily only male and female and instead recognises the validity of distinctive
family forms. His quote humanises same sex couples in ways that challenge ‘old
thinking and old prejudices’. These old ways are potentially damaging and hurt-
ful, and a No vote, as O’Connor suggests, may affect LGBTQ people in adverse
and potentially life threatening ways.
Tony Flannery extends this argument by suggesting that denying same sex mar-
riage is ‘morally wrong’ and by drawing on Pope Francis to suggest that a Yes
vote is ‘the Christian thing’ to do:

Pope Francis has brought us back to some of the very basic teachings of
Jesus. He constantly tells us that love, compassion and mercy are fundamen-
tal Christian attitudes. If this country rejects the proposal put before us in this
referendum, I fear that gay people will hear it as a further rejection, another
example of society telling them they are lesser human beings.
[. . .]
Because of the struggle they have experienced, first in coming to terms
with themselves, and then with the negative attitudes in society, they have
developed particularly sensitive antennae to rejection of any sort. For me, the
really Christian thing is to give them a strong and clear message that they are
loved and accepted just as they are, and that they deserve to be treated with
the same dignity as the rest of us.
(Tony Flannery, Priest, suspended from Church, 2015)

One of the key strategies of the Yes campaign was to personalise the Yes vote, that
is, to make the vote about real people whose lives would be severely affected by
a No vote. This strategy included encouraging many prominent Irish celebrities to
come out, and by asking LGBTQ people to come out to their families and friends.
By coming out, LGBTQ people could appeal directly to family and friends to
support a Yes vote, thereby engaging the straight public citizen at a very personal
level (Mulhall, 2015). This campaign tactic was seen as central to the success of
the Yes vote, as it moved the conversation away from abstract ideas of family and
morality towards personal narratives and the lives that could be enhanced.
48  Kath Browne and Catherine Jean Nash
Besides trying to be conciliatory and ‘nice’, the Church also recognised the
potential damage it might suffer in opposing same sex marriage. Brendan Hoban
for the Association of Catholic Priests argued that ‘haranguing’ for a No vote
would have negative implications not only for ‘gay people’ but also for the Church:

Individually or collectively has that triumvirate – the bishops, Iona and the
hard-line fundamentalists – any idea of the damage they’re doing to the
Church they profess to serve with such devotion? For the Catholic Church,
it can be argued that the result of the referendum on same-sex marriage will
matter less than the fall-out afterwards. A positive result for ‘Catholic’ forces
(the defeat of the referendum) could do huge damage to the Irish Catholic
Church. In every Catholic congregation, for instance, there are gay people
and straight people who have gay members of their family and straight people
who have gay friends. And haranguing them into voting No in the referen-
dum, regardless of the substance of the arguments offered, will have the effect
of driving more and more of them out of the church and out of the Church.
(Brendan Hoban, Association of Catholic Priests, 2015)

Rather than just fearing further rejection with a No vote, some priests turned this
around to speak of the positive messages a Yes vote would send:

I believe it’s the right thing to do now. It’s time that gay people had the same
rights as everyone else. The Church has its own rules for marriage within
it . . . but this is something different entirely. The Church cannot lay down its
rules for everyone. The Church has made statements saying that they respect
all people, gay or straight. This is a way for them to show that this is true –
that somebody can come and ask that their love be blessed. Many people in
the gay community feel that the Church is against them, and this would be a
way to show that this isn’t so. . . . We are taught that God is love.
(Pádraig Standún, parish priest of Carna in Connemara,
quoted in Anon, 2015)

The idea that ‘God is Love’ could be demonstrated through the Church’s acceptance
and respect. This was in contrast to not only the damage that might be done to the
Church by a No vote, but also to the controversies that have weakened the Church:

I would be very slow to bring a crowd onto a field where we ourselves are
vulnerable. In view of our recent history, our street credibility in these areas
is not very high.
(Iggy O’Donovan, Priest, quoted in MacDonald, 2015e)

Bringing a crowd to the Church’s field may not have been desired, but these
debates highlighted the Church’s tenuous and uncertain place in a modern Ireland.
Moreover, as these two sections have shown there were significant divergences in
the Catholic Church, with clergy who pushed for a Yes vote directly contradict-
ing those who sought a No vote. This speaks to pluralist positionings of Roman
 Resisting marriage equalities 49
Catholic clergy in Ireland and questions any easy linkage of religious freedom
with rejecting constitutional change.

Conclusion
There can be little doubt that in many ways Ireland remains a ‘Catholic country’
created through a historically central and cultural (if not doctrinal) Catholicism.
The position of the Church has changed significantly over the past century, with
modernising forces acting alongside the secularisation of the state, public life and
citizenship. Most recently, sex abuse scandals have limited the moral ground upon
which the Church traditionally claimed authority. The loss of the working class
vote in the referendum was another blow to the Church, where social conserva-
tism and adherence to Catholicism is expected (see Mulhall, 2015).
Whilst officially the Catholic Church in Ireland opposed any amendments
to the Constitution that made civil marriage available to couples outside of the
binary of male/female, this chapter demonstrates that, as with most research that
explores LGBT and religious relationships, such a view only partially captures the
complexities at the intersections of sexualities and religions. The presumption that
Christianity and its manifestation through the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland
is necessarily and uniformly exclusionary, is problematic. The Catholic Church,
composed of diverse individuals and priests, reflected multiple and contested
views in the national newspapers. This failure to present a thoroughly unified
rhetoric was eventually blamed for the referendum ‘loss’. However, as the chapter
has shown, only some see this as a loss for the Church. In addition to dissenting
priests, during the referendum debates parishioners were reported as walking out
of Mass during sermons which opposed gay marriage and criticised sportspeople
that supported a Yes vote.
Considering sexualities, spiritualties and nationalism, this chapter highlights
the precarious ways in which ‘official’ state and national religions are operation-
alised in relation to sexual and gendered difference. It emphasises the contestation
over the control of religious identities, doctrines and practices in relation to sexual
equalities, challenging a coherent stasis regarding spiritualities and sexualities,
even in a national context such as ‘Catholic Ireland’. In doing so, it has shown
the tensions regarding inclusion of lesbian, gay, bi and trans people that continue
to be a source of conflict within and beyond the Roman Catholic Church. Further
examining the detailed encounters between spiritual and religious discourses and
sexual/gender identities will develop the understandings of these complexities,
opening spaces to new possibilities beyond the dichotomous presumption that pits
religious freedom against sexual/gendered liberations, and thus sees religions gen-
erally, and Christianity specifically, as exclusionary and hostile to LGBT people.

Notes
1 LGBTQ is used here as it is one of the accepted acronyms that represent a variety of sex-
ual and gender differences from heteronormativities. Heteronormativity is the normali-
sation of heterosexuality within normative man/woman, male/female understandings of
50  Kath Browne and Catherine Jean Nash
gender. In this chapter, we use LGBTQ to describe the populations affected by these
discussions, and we use other terms and sets of wording to highlight how LGBTQ peo-
ple are addressed in these debates.
2 King James Bible, Leviticus 18:22, Standard English Version ‘You shall not lie with a
male as with a woman; it is an abomination’.
3 The chapter uses a digital archival data collection method. It uses online material from
the three mainstream Irish newspapers, namely the Irish Times, Irish Independent and
Irish Examiner. The aim of the data collection was to capture public pronouncements
from the Catholic clergy and laity. We used a date range of 1 January 2014–22 May 2015.
This date range covered the entire referendum campaign and avoided post referendum
proclamations, analyses and revisions. Practically, the data collection began with the
Irish Times. We used an online archive search covering key terms such as ‘marriage
referendum’, ‘same sex marriage’, ‘Catholic Church’. Following this, new articles were
added from the Irish Independent, this allowed for data to be corroborated by multiple
sources. It also meant that a broad range of material was gathered, but that duplications
were not counted so as not to inflate the coverage of Roman Catholic clergy in the main-
stream press. When searching the Irish Examiner no new material was found, indicating
saturation. The data was coded and then analysed for the purposes of this chapter. This
followed a for/against categorisation. Key arguments were identified and these were
explored to develop the thinking for this chapter.
4 Parish priests work at the local level and if there is more than one there will be a hierar-
chy here. Overseeing regional districts, or dioceses, are Bishops, and there are 26 dio-
ceses covering the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. These are contained within
four provinces each led by an Archbishop.

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4 Building sacred modernity
Buddhism, secularism and
a geography of ‘religion’ in
southern Sri Lanka
Tariq Jazeel

1
In 1979, Sri Lanka’s most famous tropical modern architect, Geoffrey Bawa, was
commissioned by the United National Party (UNP) government to design and build
a new parliamentary complex in a site just 10 km from Colombo. In a post-colony
that had long since turned its back on its post-independent commitment to the multi-
ethnic accommodation of Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims and Burghers, the geographical
conception of this new parliamentary complex was very much in keeping with Sinhala-
Buddhist nationalist intent to fashion a society in which Buddhism informed the pol-
ity.1 Kotte, the location earmarked for the parliamentary complex, was chosen because
it was a historic Sinhalese metropolitan centre from which a former King, Parakrama-
bahu VI, was reputed to have fought invading South Indian forces in the mid-fifteenth
century in an attempt to re-establish Sinhala-Buddhist rule over the whole island.
Although revisions to the Sri Lankan constitution in 1972 and 1978 respec-
tively were notable for the ways that they, first, accorded Buddhism the foremost
place amongst Sri Lanka’s other religions (Hinduism, Christianity and Islam), and
second, offered it special protection in the national polity (Bartholomeusz 1999,
p. 185), the country still to this day professes a notional secularism through its
commitment to parliamentary democracy and political modernity. Indeed, that
abstract commitment to political modernity has been essential for the state to be
able to pronounce itself a mature institution firmly under the control of human,
not religious, will. As the secularization thesis clearly holds, ‘in order for a society
to be modern it has to be secular and for it to be secular it has to relegate religion
to nonpolitical spaces because that arrangement is essential to modern society’
(Asad 2003, p. 182). Despite the machinations of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism
in mid-1970s Sri Lanka, secularism still continues to perform a valuable operation
for post-independent Sri Lanka insofar as its geographical excision of ‘religion’
from the engine rooms of political decision-making was precisely what produced
the state as a mature and modern political institution.
In this sense then, the choice of Geoffrey Bawa to design the new parliamentary
complex was not incidental. Bawa was a modernist, and as such he held a deep
commitment to the idea of ‘art for art’s sake’. His work can be situated within
the global circuits of international modernism and landscape design, specifically
 Building sacred modernity 55
their tropical variants (Robson 2002, p. 238; Jazeel 2013a; Jones 2011). Having
qualified as an architect from London’s Architectural Association (AA) in 1957,
only thereafter did Bawa return to Sri Lanka to practice professionally. Architec-
turally, the clean lines and sharp edges of many of his early buildings betray his
European training and a range of western influences, including art nouveau, inter-
national modernism and brutalism in particular. If these modernist architectural
sensibilities were to remain integral to his work, Bawa’s story – and the story of
Sri Lankan tropical modernism more generally – can also be understood through
his attempts to adapt to the tropical materialities and demands of a South Asian
environmental context (see Jazeel 2013a). Bawa’s training at the AA coincided
with the establishment in 1953 of Otto Koenigsberger’s newly conceived Depart-
ment of Tropical Studies (Pieris 2007a, p. 64), where he learnt the latest Euro-
pean theories regarding how modernism practised in the tropics might express
regional and national particularities, providing ‘authentic’ reactions to European
and North American Functionalism (Goad and Pieris 2005; Pieris 2007a, 2007b
pps.1–16). As a result, what has become known as Sri Lanka’s own iteration of
the regional modern was gradually consolidated (see Robson 2007).
Bawa’s design for the parliament complex (Figure 4.1) was, as we might expect
then, a striking and sprawling monument to the post-independent nation-state; one

Figure 4.1 The Parliament Complex, Sri Jaywardenapura Kotte, Sri Lanka: architect,
Geoffrey Bawa.
Source: Tariq Jazeel.
56  Tariq Jazeel
resolutely modernist by design, and thus befitting of a mature and notionally secu-
lar post-colonial nation-state. It consists of a series of interconnected pavilions
comprising one main structure surrounded by five satellite buildings, all of which
are separated by a series of walkways and piazzas. The pavilion structures are set
in the midst of an artificial lake, and as Bawa’s chief architectural commentator
David Robson (2002, p. 150) has written, ‘everything below the roof has been
designed in an abstract Modernist mode with a simple elegance’. The debating
chamber was planned as a symmetrical rectangle based on the Westminster model,
containing galleries for MPs and public viewing spaces rendering transparent to
public scrutiny the national political process. Characteristically though, the com-
plex references diverse architectural times and spaces, and has been described as a
cosmopolitan and internationalist edifice gesturing variously toward Mogul Lake
palaces, South Indian temples and Chinese palaces (ibid., p. 148). As Lawrence
Vale (1992, p. 194; also see Perera 2013) has written, ‘Bawa’s capitol complex
stands squarely between the abstract universalism of high modernism and literal
localism’. Indeed, it is the abstract universalism of these architectural referents
that enables a reading of Bawa’s capitol complex as a suitable monument to a
post-colonial nation-state committed to political modernity and free from the
vagaries of religious interference.

2
There is, however, far more to Bawa’s parliamentary complex. Just as the com-
plex’s architectural modernism signifies the kind of secularization key to political
modernity gestured to above, it simultaneously instantiates what, after Raymond
Williams (1977), I refer to as Sinhala-Buddhist ‘structures of feeling’ that are nei-
ther ‘religious’ nor ‘secular’ (in the Enlightenment sense of those terms). These
are what I refer to here, and elsewhere in much more depth (see Jazeel 2013a), as
sacred modernity: structures of feeling in everyday life and in modernity wherein
Buddhist metaphysics and historical resonances are made palpably and affectively
present for and by the subject. As I suggest, sacred modernity is a concept-metaphor
that betrays the existence of Buddhism not as ‘religion’ per se, but moreover as a
problem of difference for scholars attuned to ‘religion’s’ colonial history in South
Asia. That is to say, to stress that Bawa’s parliament complex instantiates Bud-
dhist structures of feeling is not to suggest that Buddhism is present in this space.
It is to provincialize our understandings of what the sacred is positioned to name
in the Sri Lankan context.
To be clear, my point here is not that conceiving of Bawa’s parliament complex
as a straightforward concretization of the secularization thesis is in any sense
wrong per se, but rather that doing so mistakenly implies that if the space is secu-
lar, it cannot at one and the same time be sacred. In other words, if the sacred
and secular exist in a binary relation to one another then spatially the secular
must necessarily exist outside the sacred, outside religion that is to say. However,
to reason as such is to gloss the colonial continuities of self-certain analytical
understandings that portend ‘religion’ to be a universal and stable Enlightenment
 Building sacred modernity 57
category (Asad 2003, p. 35). As such, part of the work of this chapter is to stress
the postcolonial imperative for critical and introspective engagements with ‘reli-
gion’ as a concept in South Asian contexts, for ‘religion’ is itself a knowledge
domain with its own colonial histories (see Suthren Hirst and Zavos 2011, pps.
16–20). To this extent, sacred modernity bears some methodological similarity to
the ways that this volume mobilizes spirituality as shorthand for the everyday and
practical instantiations of religion conceived as an abstraction. However, it also
marks an important difference insofar as my argument is that sacred modernity in
the Sri Lankan context should be understood on its own terms, not through extant
categorical nouns like religion, or spirituality.
The essentialization of the sacred as an external power emerged as European
encounters with the non-European world began to deploy ‘religion’ as a universal
category through which the West could identify and map different variations on
the things the concept was thought to name (Asad 2003, p. 35). In other words,
‘religion’ as a concept, and one which implies a rigid sacred/secular binary, has
since the colonial era (the nineteenth century in particular) been part of an Orien-
talist gaze that has effectively disciplined and organized certain elements of South
Asian culture and society that were not familiar to the European gaze (Suthren
Hirst and Zavos 2011, pps. 18–19). As the anthropologist David Scott (1999,
pps. 53–69) has demonstrated, Buddhism was not simply ‘discovered’ to exist
in place in colonial Ceylon. Its emergence as a formal ‘religion’ in nineteenth-
century colonial Ceylon had everything to do with a ‘comparative science of
religion’ driven by Orientalist scholars whose obsession was to identify, classify
and interpret the existence of ‘other religions’ extant in the world. By ‘other reli-
gions’ we must emphasize that world religion scholars at the time were operat-
ing with a normative, that is to say Enlightenment, conception of ‘religion’ in
which secularism was already implicated (Abeysekera 2002, p. 40). ‘Religions’
came to be – explicitly at first, then tacitly – understood as textualized systems
of doctrines-scriptures-beliefs for which the operation of Christianity provided
a template of recognition. Once other ‘religions’ were identified by these hall-
marks (doctrines-scriptures-beliefs), their truth statuses could be investigated,
compared (implicitly and explicitly against Christianity) and disputed. As Scott
(1999, p. 58) puts it: ‘the emergence of the modern concept of “religion” and its
plural, “the religions”, occurred pari passu with the emergence of the comparative
science of religion. Each was, so to speak, the condition of the other’s possibility’.
What this reveals reaches beyond just the history of organized religious Bud-
dhist orthodoxy in Sri Lanka. (The emergence of a politicized, majoritarian ‘reli-
gious’ community in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ceylon has been
characterized as the rise of ‘protestant Buddhism’ (see Obeysekera 1970; Perera
2002) precisely because its organized institutional structures were derived from
the forms of colonial Protestantism at large in the colony). In terms of a history
of concepts it also reveals ‘religion’s’ contemporary force as an ‘authoritative
categor[y] through which the histories of the colonial and postcolonial worlds
have been constituted as so many variations on a common and presupposed
theme’ (Scott 1999, p. 54). In this sense, one of the fundamental problems of the
58  Tariq Jazeel
straightforward post-secular thesis for any engagement with Sri Lanka is that it
leaves the very taxonomic category of ‘religion’ in place, thus dissimulating the
different ways that Buddhist structures of feeling produce space from the inside
out in the Sri Lankan context. The post-secular implies spaces that some-time,
or somewhere, were once secular and are now ‘religious’. The postcolonial chal-
lenge in South Asia is to think Buddhism beyond the coordinates of the con-
cept ‘religion’. This is the challenge of what, in a similar context, the Sri Lankan
anthropologist Pradeep Jeganathan (2004, p. 197) has referred to as the simple
elaboration of an unravelling, a slow, uncertain immersion into what has become
the ordinary. And it is to those ordinary Sinhala-Buddhist resonances of Bawa’s
parliament building despite its secularism that I turn now; resonances that exist
both iconographically and affectively in ways not reducible to the sacred/secular
binary that inheres in ‘religion’ as a concept-metaphor.

3
Colonial Ceylon’s first parliament building was located in the centre of Colombo.
It was completed in 1929, and built in the Anglo-Palladian style by Austin Woode-
son, chief architect at the time of the Public Works Department (Robson 2002,
p. 146). It was in many senses a concretization of colonial legislative power;
an elaborate colonial edifice deliberately located in the centre of a city whose
preeminence within the colony emerged because of its importance to the planta-
tion economy (see Pererra 1998). In this context, the very decision to relocate
Ceylon’s administrative capitol from Colombo, the colonial city, to Kotte, a site
so resonant historiographically in the Sinhala chronicles, was itself as symbolic
as it was practical. It signified a conscious anti-colonial attempt to step outside
colonial time, and into the pre-colonial temporality of an island that nationalists
thought to be Sinhala and Buddhist historically, and by nature (see Jazeel 2013a,
forthcoming). Nonetheless, this was not in itself Geoffrey Bawa’s decision given
the site was selected well before he was commissioned.
A closer look at the parliament building itself, however (Figure 4.1), reveals
more clearly the forms of neither religious, nor entirely secular, sacred modernity
that Bawa has built at Kotte. Despite the complex’s abstract universalism, it con-
tains a litany of quite deliberate references to non-metropolitan times and spaces,
all of which consciously look away from the (colonial) city, instead referencing
the (pre-colonial) Sinhala village, an agrarian landscape geography and the for-
mer interior kingdom of Kandy. For example, the main building’s double pitched
roof is a direct reference to the distinct roof style characteristic of Kandyan archi-
tecture. The four pillared pavilions surrounding the main building and horizontal
concrete pillars that adorn the four sides of the main structure also recall audi-
ence or assembly halls across Kandyan towns and villages which historically have
provided shelter and rest to travellers and Buddhist pilgrims alike. The complex
itself is built on reclaimed land set amidst an artificial lake, and Bawa deliber-
ately created an extensive network of stepped, ornamental terracing across the
grounds, making strong visual connections to Sri Lanka’s two millennia of tank
 Building sacred modernity 59
(reservoir) building and the agrarian paddy cultivation on which the prosperity of
pre-colonial Sinhala kingdoms was built (Jazeel 2013a, p. 119). Not usually prone
to narrativizations of his own work, Bawa himself once remarked that the whole
look of the complex is meant to reflect ‘the visual formalities of the old Sinhalese
buildings’ (Bawa, quoted in Robson 2002, p. 148).
For Bawa then, the parliament complex was meant to extend out into the pre-
colonial geography, and indeed temporality, of a nation-state that was retroactively
being fashioned as Sinhala and Buddhist all the way back. He also remarked how:

We have a marvelous tradition of building in this country that has got lost.
It got lost because people followed outside influences over their own good
instincts. They never built right ‘through’ the landscape. I just wanted to fit
[Parliament] into the site, so I opened it into blocks. You must ‘run’ with site;
after all, you don’t want to push nature out with the building.
(ibid., my emphasis)

Neither Buddhism nor the Sinhala ethnos are mobilized explicitly or directly here,
but his words resonate with popular nationalist refrains of the time concerning the
‘outside influences’ on an interior and native kernel that is implicitly framed as
Sinhala, and just as implicitly thereby Buddhist (even though Bawa himself was
not Sinhala-Buddhist). Buddhism then is mobilized not as a ‘religion’, or religious
influence here, but instead as an ornamental facet of the broader effort to historio-
graphically realign the nation-state in and with its own native modernity. This is
the ‘literal localism’ to which Lawrence Vale (1992, p. 194) refers (quoted above)
when he stresses that ‘Bawa’s capitol complex stands squarely between the abstract
universalism of high modernism and literal localism’. If Bawa considered his work
to be beyond the divisive politics of ethnicity (‘art for art’s sake’ that is to say),
being a modernist he deemed an integral part of his craft to be the recuperation of
an appropriate and authentic architectural, artistic and ultimately spatial language
for the expression of the nation-state’s historical identity. A rooted Sinhala ethnos
intractably linked to a historical narrative of Buddhist practice (not ‘religion’) was
part of this anti-colonial modernity. That is part of this space’s sacred modernity.
But Geoffrey Bawa’s architectural production of this kind of sacred modernity
was not just instantiated iconographically. The fluidity and transparency of his
architecture was equally if not more important in his attempts at making palpably
present these post- and anti-colonial temporalities and environmental aesthetics
of the nation-state. Historically, tropical modern architecture across the continents
has characteristically blurred the boundaries between inside and outside space
(see Goad and Pieris 2005). In large part this has been a stylistic innovation born
from the historical necessity to build well-ventilated structures through which
light, air and breeze can flow with maximal ease in challenging environmental
contexts (see Chang 2016). And in the case of Sri Lankan tropical modernism,
tropical architectural innovations in the service of thermal comfort must also be
positioned in a historical-political context where expensive imported air condi-
tioning units were increasingly scarce. In Bawa’s architecture, these seamless
60  Tariq Jazeel
transitions between inside and outside were common, and beyond their techno-
political origins they have come to epitomize the types of fluid spatial experi-
ence typical of Sri Lankan tropical modernism. He typically employed verandahs,
internal courtyards, terraces, folding doors or columns in place of walls, and open
hallways as transition spaces and techniques for softening the stark divisions of
inside-outside, natural-cultural, public-private (see Figure 4.3). And just as typi-
cally, though these architectural devices were in reality drawn from a range of
historical influences (Muslim, Hindu, Mughul architecture), they often came to
be narrativized as historically Sinhala architectural traditions, often by Bawa’s
commentators more than himself.
Although the parliament complex is not the best example of his experiments
in opening structures out (security requirements limited his capacity to do this at
the Kotte site), it is conceived and realized with much of Bawa’s characteristic
attention to the drama and fluidity of spatial experience. As much as it was a con-
crete edifice, for Bawa the parliament building was a spatial event extending to
the outside and back again. As Nihal Perera (2013, p. 87) writes of the complex:

. . . the rooms are open to terraces and outside lakes. There are strong thresh-
olds in the Parliament House, not least due to security. Yet, the people who
enter walk through covered and artificially lit corridors to arrive at rooms in
gardens and offices opening to terraces reminiscent of paddy-fields which are
again replicated on the site below, thus creating continuity.

It is not just these smooth transitional features that create a sense of continuity in
the parliament complex, Bawa’s use of water also aimed at the production of fluid
space. His use of reflecting pools and water-retaining structures opened the build-
ing’s internal spaces out, but also served to link those structures with the wider
spatiality of the complex whilst facilitating temporal continuities with places cel-
ebrated in popular accounts of anti-colonial Sinhala historiography. As one Sri
Lankan archaeologist put it, Bawa’s considered use of water ‘reflects the ancient
traditions of Anuradhapura, Polannaruwa, and Sigiriya’ (Senake Bandaranayaka,
quoted in Perera 2013, p. 88).
All of these architectural devices aimed, as I have stressed, at producing par-
ticular kinds of spatial experience for the user of these built spaces, and elsewhere
I have written in depth on how Bawa’s architecture, as well as the architecture of
other Sri Lankan tropical modernists, has been experienced, lived in, consumed
(see Jazeel 2013a, 2013b). In her work on Brazilian artistic tropical modernism,
Nancy Leys Stepan (2001, p. 230) suggests how similar artistic managements
of tropical nature in mid-twentieth century Brazil aimed at fashioning an appro-
priately Brazilian disposition to the natural world against a history of European
tropical vision. Similarly, if Bawa’s tropical modern architecture aimed at creat-
ing the experiential illusion that there is little between nature and social space, he
did so as a way of expressing something of an ‘appropriately Sri Lankan’ disposi-
tion to the natural world. The effect of building with and into a site like this was,
for Bawa, the production of built space that affectively was felt to emerge from
the surrounding tropical environmental context, and equally, as we have seen,
Figure 4.2 The transparent and fluid spatiality of the Guest House at Lunuganga, Bentota,
Sri Lanka: architect, Geoffrey Bawa.
Source: Tariq Jazeel.

Figure 4.3 Columns and terrace leading to outside space at the back of the Main House,
Lunuganga, Bentota, Sri Lanka: architect, Geoffrey Bawa.
Source: Tariq Jazeel.
62  Tariq Jazeel
from a particular historical milieu that was being written as ethnically Sinhala and
aesthetically Buddhist. In other words, he was intent on building spatial experi-
ence rather than visually prominent structures, and he intended his work to be
experienced as ordinary components of landscapes not easily divisible into their
human and non-human components.

4
The idiom of the ordinary spatial experiences Bawa attempted to create through
his work are a crucial component of sacred modernity, and to elaborate on the
idiomatic register of Bawa’s landscape experience I move now from the archi-
tect’s parliament complex to his rambling estate, Lunuganga, on the south-west
coast of Sri Lanka. Lunuganga was an old, disused rubber estate fringed by a
lake. Bawa bought it in 1948. He chose to keep and renovate the main house on
the estate’s northern hill, and gradually over the next half century he opened up
the landscapes and vistas around it with slow and steady precision, imagination
and purpose. He experimented by building forms, shapes and structures across
the estate, but always in ways attuned to what he perceived as the genus of this
place. The garden and estate evolved in texture and dimension, and today its open
spaces, terraces and ornamental paddy fields are liberally sprinkled with statues,
pavilions and walls, all of which form part of the estate’s careful choreography.
But as David Robson (2002, p. 240) has written, ‘[t]oday the garden seems so
natural, so established, that it is hard to appreciate just how much effort has gone
into its creation’.
Elsewhere, I have written in more depth on Lunuganga (Jazeel 2007, 2013a,
2013b), and it is not my intention here to elaborate on the estate itself. However,
Bawa’s treatment of the estate stands as an important testimony to the idiomatic
configuration of the ordinary spatial experience that Geoffrey Bawa attempted
to instantiate through his built space. In other words, his authorship of the estate
speaks of the kind of sacred modernity that mobilizes Buddhist structures of feel-
ing as an historical, aesthetic and ornamental component of places that are at once
resolutely modernist and thus secular.
Compositionally, Lunuganga is characterized not only by the ways that outside
space blends with inside space within its boundaries (Figures 4.2 and 4.3). As at
the parliament complex, it also extends out and into the environment beyond the
estate itself, into the landscape and nation-state beyond, so to speak. In a glossy,
illustrated coffee-table book on the estate, Bawa is himself quoted as saying that
‘Lunuganga from the start was to be an extension of the surroundings – a garden
within a garden’ (in Bawa, Bon and Sansoni 1990, p. 11, my emphasis). It is in
this context that we should read Bawa’s work to ornamentally, and scopically,
draw into Lunuganga a view of the gleaming dome of the Katakuliya temple,
a Buddhist dagaba, positioned on a hill some distance beyond the estate itself.
Indeed, this carefully choreographed long view to the south that ‘ended with the
temple’ (ibid., p. 13), was Bawa’s favourite from the estate. Rumour has it that
Bawa even paid the monks at the temple to keep the temple’s dome white and
 Building sacred modernity 63
clean enough such that it was always visible from his vantage point on the estate.
If Lunuganga then was to be a ‘garden within a garden’, it is precisely this kind of
work that evidences Bawa’s desire that at tropical modernism’s core was a natu-
ralization of Sinhala tradition and Buddhist structures of feeling. Bawa’s single
minded work, typical of modernism, to make the temple central within his land-
scape composition, such that as he also wrote, it ‘now looks as if it had been there
since the beginning of time’ (ibid.), leaves us under no illusion that the idiom of
the larger garden – the garden of the post-independent nation-state, so to speak –
is Buddhist ornamentally and historically, if not religiously.
But as I have been suggesting, the idiom of the ordinary in this tropical modern
architecture reveals itself not just visually and ornamentally, but also affectively
or aesthetically. And here, the coffee-table book, entitled simply Lunuganga, is
once again useful. The book, published in 1990, is a hardback montage of black
and white photographs taken at Lunuganga. The montage is accompanied by a
short English language essay on the estate, as well as some of Bawa’s sketches and
plans of the estate. The book’s price tag is discerningly high, and the combination
of text and image as well as the book’s high production values suitably convey
the aesthetic qualities of Lunuganga. All in all, it is a fitting tribute to the special
meaning this haven held for Bawa and his closest friends and collaborators.
Precisely because of this, it is also a text that betrays the Buddhist structures of
feeling I have been suggesting are key to tropical modernism’s sacred modernity.
The book’s short epilogue is a first person narrative reflection on the estate written
by Bawa. In its very last line, he defers to the reaction of a visiting lorry driver
who took the opportunity to walk around the estate during a delivery. Bawa (in
Bawa, Bon and Sansoni 1990, p. 219) describes the encounter thus:

. . . when his bricks were being unloaded – [the lorry driver] said to me “fïl
kx yß iSfoaú ;ekla” (but this is a very blessed place).

The significance of this passage is twofold. First, it is in the fact that Bawa
chooses to leave the final endorsement of his garden to a working-class Sinhalese
lorry driver (we know he is Sinhalese from the Sinhala script). It suggests some-
thing of his own desire that, despite his work’s quite evident class exclusions, the
broader Sri Lankan public might embrace his modernist vision for an appropri-
ately national form of landscape architecture. In other words, the lorry driver’s
endorsement of the estate is an allegory of its acceptance by the Sri Lankan folk
in ways that speak directly to Bawa’s lifelong desire to develop a suitably national
modern architecture equipped to bring the post-colony into modernity on its own
terms.
Second, however, and not at all unconnected to this, the significance of this
passage is in the simple desire to reprint the lorry driver’s compliment in the
language in which it was uttered, Sinhala, in what is an English language pub-
lication. For Bawa, the richness of the lorry driver’s compliment inheres in
its linguistic and cultural idiom in a national context where language politics
have a troubled anti-colonial nationalist history. In 1956, the Sinhala-Buddhist
64  Tariq Jazeel
nationalist SLFP (Sri Lanka Freedom Party) government passed a Sinhala Only
Language Act. In doing so they replaced English with Sinhala (the language of
the majority Sinhalese) as the post-colony’s official language, at once marginal-
izing Tamil speaking minorities which included Tamil and Muslim communities.
This, however, is but a historical backdrop, and my intention is not to equate
Bawa’s decision to relay this compliment in Sinhala with the divisive politics of
linguistic nationalism in Sri Lanka. As I have stressed, Bawa was always keen
publically to distance himself and his work from national politics. Rather, it is
the comment’s apparent untranslatablity that interests me here, and the precise
ways that such untranslatability might be activated as what Emily Apter (2013,
pps. 1–27) refers to as a theoretical fulcrum for techniques of reading for differ-
ence. In this case, the untranslatability of the Sinhala expression offers a way of
comprehending the idiom of the very ordinary, yet radically different, structure
of feeling that Bawa means to equate with his architecture; its sacred modernity
so to speak. By retaining the Sinhala script, Bawa suggests that the literal Eng-
lish translation cannot capture the essence of the compliment. In other words,
he conveys the sense that the English language cannot capture the essence of
this place; an essence on which the lorry driver seems to have put his finger.
But this is a brief passage caught between untranslatability and translation for
the simple fact that it is translated for the English language reader. And crucial
within this context is the significance of the English language word ‘blessed’
offered in brackets as translation, because it is a word used frequently to refer
to the Lord Buddha’s enlightened metaphysical state. It is a word that describes
an affective state of oneness. In other words, what the lorry driver names is a
residual structure of feeling in the spatial present that is quintessentially Bud-
dhist, yet at the same time un-nameable in the English language as Buddhism
for all the ‘religious’ connotations this precipitates. As an affect, this is not in
any way non-representational, but it is not reducible to any affective resonance
that the English language can adequately name; the translation is precisely what
transports the language beyond its own limits (Spivak 2008, p. 189). This is Sri
Lankan tropical modernism’s sacred modernity.

5
It is my argument that this very same sacred modernity, with its characteristic
Buddhist structure of feeling, is key to the production of tropical modern architec-
tural space more generally, and equally thus at Bawa’s parliament complex. It is
pivotal to my argument that we recognize this Buddhist structure of feeling as not
‘religious’ in the Enlightenment sense of the term. As I have suggested, ‘religion’
names a self-contained historically European concept with its own objective real-
ity identical to itself the world over. Insofar as the sacred/secular binary is inher-
ent in Enlightenment conceptions of ‘religion’, then spatially ‘religion’ implies
a secular outside somewhere. On the one hand then, the parliament complex is a
materially secular institutional space, and it is its very modernism that performa-
tively produces it as a secular space; a secularism on which the proper functioning
 Building sacred modernity 65
of political modernity in Sri Lanka depends. On the other hand, however, when
we conceive of Buddhism not as a ‘religion’ per se, but instead as an historical
and metaphysical register, Bawa’s parliament complex is at one and the same
time a space replete with Buddhist structures of feeling produced ornamentally,
architecturally and affectively. In this way, sacred modernity is not a politically
benign formulation. It serves a dual purpose: first, to give the lie to the secularism
inherent to, and essential for, political modernity, and second, to spatially produce
the post-colony in modernity as historically, essentially and metaphysically Bud-
dhist and Sinhala all the way back. This is precisely what makes it impossible for
Tamil, Muslim and other non-Sinhala-Buddhist others to be anything but guests
in a national polity spatially produced as such.

Note
1 In this chapter, I use the terms ‘post-colony’ and ‘post-colonial’ to refer to the Ceylon/
Sri Lanka’s status after formal decolonization and thus the time period after colonialism.
I use the term ‘postcolonial’ on the other hand to name methodological and theoreti-
cal approaches attentive to the ideological presence of colonialism in the present and
attempts to transcend those colonial remains.

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5 ‘I renounce the World, the
Flesh, and the Devil’
Pilgrimage, transformation,
and liminality at St Patrick’s
Purgatory, Ireland
Richard Scriven

Each of us, in turn, each of us kneels and says three Our Fathers, three Hail Marys,
and one Apostles’ Creed at St Brigid’s Cross – a cross marked on the exterior
of the basilica – before standing with our backs to the cross, with arms fully
outstretched, and say three times aloud ‘I renounce the World, the Flesh, and
the Devil’. This embodied prayer captures an essence of Lough Derg pilgrimage.
We, as pilgrims, intentionally separate ourselves from the everyday world to pur-
sue a temporary life of prayer and personal contemplation. Within this space, the
pilgrim’s journey has physical practices interlinked with metaphysical layers of
spirituality and emotionality. It is the voluntary entering into a transitionary social
and spiritual state with the intention of achieving a form of renewal or rejuvena-
tion. This potential for spiritual or personal transformation marks pilgrimage out
as a distinct form of journey.
St Patrick’s Purgatory, or Lough Derg as it is more popularly known, is a
Roman Catholic pilgrimage site in northwest Ireland. Pilgrims spend three days
on a lake-island where they withdraw from the rest of the world and complete a
set of requirements to focus on the more meaningful and spiritual dimensions of
life. It is a centuries’ old practice of prayer, fasting, going barefoot, and keeping
vigil. Magan (2014) describes it as involving ‘three days of fasting and prayers,
while standing on sharpened rocks. It’s not for everyone, but there must be a
reason why people return each year’. This account conveys the distinct nature of
St Patrick’s Purgatory as a pilgrimage that offers meaningful encounters to thou-
sands of people annually. The requirements of the pilgrimage combine to facilitate
liminal experiences through which pilgrims can reflect on their beliefs, their lives,
and themselves. Within this space, pilgrims find new meanings and reach fresh
insights (Maddrell and Scriven 2016). My study occurs within such a space.
This chapter on the transformative aspects of Lough Derg is based on an
auto-ethnographic field study comprising of participation in the pilgrimage and
interviews with pilgrims both at the site and afterwards. In addition, I examined
historical and published accounts of the island. This aligns with recent research
which foregrounds direct engagements with the experiences of pilgrimage (Frey
1998; Maddrell 2013; Maddrell and della Dora 2013; Michalowski and Dubisch
2001). I blend these strands to explore how Lough Derg can further understand-
ings of the emergence of liminality and the enabling of personal and spiritual
68  Richard Scriven

Figure 5.1 Pilgrims at St Brigid’s Cross. One pilgrim stands outstretched reciting the
prayer, while others kneel in prayer before standing themselves.
Source: Richard Scriven.

renewal. In general the research participants are described as ‘pilgrims’ to reflect

the character of Lough Derg, which adopts a loose definition incorporating all
who come to the island in search of something beyond themselves (Lough Derg
2016).
Pilgrimage is a dynamic phenomenon which has witnessed a considerable
revival in recent decades (Alliance of Religions and Conservation 2012; Jansen
2012). Moreover, definitions have broadened beyond a religious focus to encom-
pass cultural, nationalistic, and personal journeys (Coleman and Eade 2004; Gale,
Maddrell and Terry 2016). In this shifting context, the examination of the charac-
teristics of pilgrimage become more relevant. It is broadly understood as involv-
ing a journey to a specific place for religious-spiritual, and/or cultural-emotional,
reasons. The outer physical journey enables a corresponding inner metaphysical
one (Hyndman-Rizk 2012; Schmidt and Jordan 2013). Within this framework
the ‘inner intellectual, emotional and spiritual journey’ is often seen as being the
most significant component (Maddrell 2011, p. 16). Ritualistic practices facilitate
reflective and transformative experiences through which pilgrims can (re)consider
their spiritual identity and place in the world (Osterrieth 1997; Turner and Turner
1978). This transformative capacity speaks to the distinct nature of pilgrimage as
 Pilgrimage, transformation, and liminality 69
a form of meaning journey. It is the effective ‘destination’, rather than a shrine or
a significant place. My focus on this aspect highlights an essence of pilgrimage,
which will help progress understandings of the activity’s contemporary spiritual
and socio-cultural role.
In this chapter, I consider how Lough Derg is instilled with a pronounced
transformative potential through a focus on embodied performances and limi-
nality. Conceptual understandings of renewal within pilgrimage are enlivened in
accounts of the island as research participants reveal sincere feelings concerning
the reaffirmation of faith or an appreciation for the important things in life. Dif-
ferent forms of holistic individual renewal unfold within the micro-geographies
of the pilgrimage. As Lough Derg is a Roman Catholic site with the accompa-
nying structures and connotations, the religious-spiritual aspect is foregrounded;
however, there are multiple layers to this process as the emotional and social are
equally present. The role of the pilgrim enables the emergence and temporary
nurturing of the religious-spiritual, which is generally understated or neglected
in everyday lives. Accompanying these shades of awareness is a more general
affective recognition for the actual priorities in life. It is a reaffirmation of both
traditional and contemporary interpretations of the site and of pilgrimage. The
transformative capacity is visceral and authentic in these settings, making a pal-
pable impact on the pilgrims.
My discussion opens with an exploration of pilgrimage as a journey of trans-
formative capacity, informed by both the tropes of the practice and interpretations
from the field of pilgrimage studies. I draw from research increasingly focused
on the ‘embodied-emotional-spiritual-social-spatial relations’ (Gale, Maddrell
and Terry 2016, p. 2), which intervenes within the journey space through per-
formance and engagement with pilgrims (Dubisch 1995; Frey 1998; Coleman
and Eade 2004; Maddrell 2013; Maddrell and della Dora 2013; Michalowski and
Dubisch 2001). In the following section, a description of Lough Derg and the
different components of the three-day tradition establish the distinct character of
this space. Embodied spatial practices forge this reflective space, in which the
pilgrims, as active agents, co-generate metaphysical journeys in conjunction with
the physical and social context. Next, the focus falls on the emergence of liminal-
ity through the structural arrangements of Lough Derg and the resultant pilgrim
experiences. A genuine separation from the normative is affectively registered
as participants occupy a contemplative state. This enables significant encounters
which are explored in the following section. Participants offer accounts of how
emotional and spiritual rejuvenation is nurtured on the island and how they return
to the world in a refreshed state. The chapter concludes by outlining the signifi-
cance of the transformative dimension of pilgrimage.

Pilgrimages: journeys of transformation

Pilgrimages are journeys. Most obviously, they are journeys to shrines, sacred
places, and ritualised locations across faiths, cultures, and traditions. Interlaced
with these outer physical journeys are inner personal journeys of emotional,
70  Richard Scriven
spirituality, and personal growth (Maddrell 2013; Rountree 2006). Pilgrimage’s
unique role exists in the merging of these aspects. It presents an appealing and
structured means of undertaking a meaningful journey. Pilgrimages continue to
be larger religious-spiritual practices, with five million Muslims making the Hajj
annually, approximately twenty million Catholic pilgrims going to Guadalupe in
Mexico, and twenty-eight million Hindu pilgrims travelling to the River Ganges.
More recently, the concept of pilgrimage is being recognised as incorporating a
range of cultural, nationalistic, and personal journeys, such as visits to war graves,
Elvis’s Graceland, and ancestral homelands (Campo 1998; Coleman and Eade
2004).
Pilgrimage can be seen ‘as a ritual of transformation of the self’ (Gemzöe 2012,
p. 42). It offers a distinct means of moving beyond normativity by ‘looking for an
experience outside the margins of material interest and the simplistic pursuit of
gain’ (Oviedo, Courcier and Farias 2014, p. 441). Osterrieth (1997, p. 27) explains
it in anthropological terms as a ritualised quest that ‘stems from an individual
decision and aims at personal transformation’. This involves a separation from
home and all associated social normativity to enter a marginal or liminal state,
through a journey or ritualised approach to a specific site. This enables spiritu-
ally or personally meaningful encounters, before the pilgrim returns as with a
new identity having been spiritually and/or emotionally revived. By consciously
breaking with everyday life, undertaking a journey, and ‘ritually’ participating in
the pilgrimage site, participants engage in a process of renewal through which
they can establish a new identity or sense of self. This replicates broader under-
standings of rites of passage in which the ritual subject undergoes separation,
transition, and, then, incorporation (Gennep 1960). In this process, the old self of
the pilgrim ‘dies’ and a new self is (re)born; a self which returns to the everyday
emotionally or spiritually transformed (O’Giolláin 2005). In religious pilgrim-
ages, it involves the movement from the secular world to sacred spaces where the
divine is more easily encountered through more immersive spiritual experiences
(Gesler 1996). Moreover, in a Christian context, the trope of transformation is
theologically central (Maddrell 2011). Traditional medieval pilgrimages focused
on penitential exercises as the means for spiritual progression, whereas modern
pilgrimages emphasise renewal through prayer, reflection, and developing a per-
sonal relationship with God.
The transformative potential of pilgrimage is understood to be facilitated by
entering a liminal state. The concept of liminality, established as one of the main
theoretical tools in the study of pilgrimage by Victor and Edith Turner (1978),
describes how pilgrims can experience a marginal state as a ritual subject between
two identities or social positions. In this anti-structural position they become
ambiguous, existing between definite social states. Pilgrimage ‘provides a care-
fully structured, highly valued route to a liminal world where the ideal is felt to
be real, where the tainted social persona may be cleansed and renewed’ (Turner
and Turner 1978, p. 30). There is a disengagement from normative rules, rou-
tines, and responsibilities which facilitates personal and spiritual transformation
(Osterrieth 1997). It involves ‘a fundamental ritual pattern of transformation by
 Pilgrimage, transformation, and liminality 71
means of a spatial, temporal, and psychological transition’ (Bell 1997, p. 248).
Although the idea of liminality has gained widespread use more recently, within
this framework, it has a distinct theoretical function. Critiques of the concept have
highlighted how pilgrimage is never entirely separated from its social and politi-
cal contexts (Coleman and Eade 2004). Indeed, there have been numerous studies
which have focused on pilgrimage as a site of contestation or a political activity
(Digance 2003; Galbraith 2000; Pazos 2012). Refinements, however, now appre-
ciate liminality as an ontological state that is shaped by the features of the pilgrim
journey (Slavin 2003). Pilgrimage studies tend to employ it in terms of a balance
between its social commentary and conceptual meaning.
Pilgrimages are appreciated as an interlacing of an outer physical journey with
an inner spiritual or emotional one. The meanings participants bring ‘imbu[e]
the actions, objects and spaces with considerable significance for individuals
and whole communities’ (Scriven 2014, p. 252). Traditionally this has taken the
form of religious-spiritual beliefs in the form of travelling to shrines and sites
of miraculous events, whereas trips motivated by secular convictions or cultural
involvement are equally appreciated in contemporary discussions. These mean-
ings are explored and revitalised in an inner journey which is facilitated by the
outer physical journey. In many cases, especially for believers, the ‘inner intel-
lectual, emotional and spiritual journey’ is seen as being more significant than the
‘demands and challenges of the outer physical journey’ (Maddrell 2011, p. 16).
The meanings that are brought to pilgrimage generate and forge the significance
of the journey. The practices and physical exertions are the embodied expression
of these beliefs. Together they combine to produce not only substantial encoun-
ters, but also transformative experiences.

Lough Derg
Lough Derg offers a space of spiritual retreat centring on practices that have been
inherited from at least the early modern period, including sets of prayers, fast-
ing, going barefoot, and keeping an all-night vigil. It reaches towards a medieval
past, while remaining firmly located in the present. While the island is continually
modernised and developed, it retains a character that appeals to thousands of pil-
grims who are drawn by the capacity of this place to facilitate journeys of personal
and spiritual reflection and transformation.
The origins and history of Lough Derg reinforce its role as an exceptional
place. It is believed that in the fifth century St Patrick spent the religious season of
Lent – the six weeks preceding Easter – on retreat in a cave on the lake island, dur-
ing which he received a vision of the afterlife. These miraculous events marked
the island out as a sacred space, or a thin place, where the boundary between the
natural world and the spiritual realm was permeable. The earliest written records
date from the twelfth century and associate the site with the Roman Catholic doc-
trine of purgatory (a transitory state during which souls are cleansed before enter-
ing heaven) (Flynn 1986). By imitating St Patrick’s asceticism, pilgrims believed
that they could spiritually purify themselves and achieve salvation by enduring
72  Richard Scriven
an earthly purgatory (Cunningham and Gillespie 2004). It gained relative promi-
nence in medieval Christendom as a site of pilgrimage.
Since 1780 Lough Derg has been administered by the Roman Catholic Diocese
of Clogher and has been developed with the addition of dormitories, services,
and St Patrick’s Basilica (Flynn 1986). The site is headed by a diocesan priest,
called the Prior, and is staffed by both lay and religious, including a pastoral team
of other priests and counsellors. Over 10,000 pilgrims undertake the three-day
pilgrimage annually. This number has fluctuated over the past century, from 8,000
in 1921 to 34,645 in 1952 (Duffy 1980).
Structurally, the different aspects of the pilgrimage align to produce a liminal
location where normativity is voluntarily suspended. Within these conditions par-
ticipants become more open to transformative encounters. The pilgrimage begins
at midnight with a seventy-two-hour fast consisting of one meal a day, of dry
bread or toast, oatcakes, and tea or coffee, without milk. Water can be consumed
freely throughout and soft drinks are allowed on the third day (when people are
travelling home). Fasting – a penitential activity which was practiced in the early
medieval Celtic Church (Wooding 2003) – is appreciated as a sacrifice of earthly
desires that enables a focus on spiritual concerns.
On the morning of the first day, pilgrims get a boat across to the island. This
physical withdrawal from the world is reinforced by turning phones/devices off,
severing a constant connectivity. On the island, shoes are removed and the bare-
footed state begins. Through the bodily register of feet meeting the surfaces of
the island, the aesthetics of a medieval pilgrimage are felt and lived, adding to the
sense of timelessness. While on the island, nine Prayer Stations are performed.
These are a pattern of prayers involving the repeated reciting of specific prayers –
Our Father, Hail Mary, and the Apostles’ Creed – while walking around and
kneeling at different features. Through these prayer states and numerous religious
ceremonies pilgrims enter a ‘liturgical life’ (della Dora 2012, p. 969). That night
the twenty-four-hour Vigil begins with participants staying up all night perform-
ing four prayer stations and keeping each other’s spirits up. This is often seen as
the very heart of the pilgrimage.
The following day is marked by personal reflection and religious ceremonies,
including mass and confessions. The Vigil ends with night prayers that evening.
The final morning begins with mass, followed by the final prayer station. Many
people pick up religious items and souvenirs, which are blessed during mass, to
give to family, friends, and neighbours. Pilgrims return to the shore filled with a
renewed spirit and begin their transition back into ordinary life. However, the fast
continues until midnight, extending the pilgrimage experience beyond the shrine
and disrupting clear sacred-profane boundaries.
Lough Derg is a combination of these features, as body and meaning, and per-
formance and place meet in the enactments. Liminalities emerge in these interac-
tions, facilitating spiritual, more-than representational, and numinous experiences.
The structures of the pilgrimage are reinforced by leaflets given to each pilgrim
and by the staff who advise. By entering into this framework, pilgrims are freed
from everyday concerns, enabling a concentration on prayer and contemplation.
 Pilgrimage, transformation, and liminality 73
Lough Derg is a removal from the world. Similar to other pilgrimage centres, it
is a place where people seek experiences that offer release from the limitations of
daily life (Osterrieth 1997). It is the embracing of a liminality that seems to disrupt
modern sensibilities in search of something beyond the everyday and observable.
Lough Derg can be located within this wider context. Although it is clearly
Roman Catholic in nature, it is a pilgrimage destination that attracts a wide variety
of people. Devoted members of the denomination walk barefoot alongside those
with only a loose affiliation to Catholicism and those who define themselves as
spiritual, rather than religious. Lough Derg’s website (2016) emphasises that it
‘welcomes those from all religious practices and backgrounds and regular Church
attendance is not a pre-requisite of completing the pilgrimage’. Moreover, the
information and promotional literature present that pilgrimage in broad terms as
a place of prayer, reflection, and searching for meaning. While being inherently
theistic it avoids the denominational character or overt doctrine of other pilgrim-
age sites.

Liminality
Lough Derg has a pronounced liminal capacity. In many ways it aligns with
the conceptual ideals outlined by Turner and Turner (1978). Not only is there
a clear break from the everyday, but we also inhabit a temporary disconnected
world which exists almost parallel to the quotidian. A further sense of otherness,
outside of the din of modern living, is generated through the physicality of the
island in a remote valley (Ivakhiv 2003). This simple watery barrier separates
us from the world. On crossing to the island, a distinct departure is enacted,
while sitting looking towards the mainland reinforces our separation on practi-
cal and affective registers. In addition, the requirement for pilgrims not to use
phones/devices is an equally significant means of withdrawing from contempo-
rary society.
The physical, symbolic, and felt conditions of the pilgrimage align to facilitate
these liminal experiences (Figure 5.2). Our voluntary involvement generates the
liminal conditions we encounter. We become pilgrims. We become of this liminal-
ity. In talking with Eleanor, who was on the second day of her pilgrimage, we dis-
cussed this sense of detachment from the world. We are seated near the lake shore
looking towards the entrance and buildings on the mainland. She explains how:

It’s just a different world . . . there could be anything happening beyond those
pillars there [*points to the main entrance] and we won’t know.

She touches on this intentional isolation that we have entered into. Although we
can see across to the mainland, which stands in for the rest of the world, we can
feel our separation. In considering this distance, it becomes a soothing chasm, a
buffer between us and the world. There is a further liberation in this realisation
as we settle into our detached role which invites time for personal reflection and
prayers.
74  Richard Scriven

Figure 5.2 Lough Derg statue of St Patrick the Pilgrim, with the island in the background,
the lake waters separating it from the rest of the world.
Source: Richard Scriven.

The virtual disconnection of leaving your phone behind or switched off

is increasingly felt as being a significant aspect of the pilgrimage. It is fre-
quently mentioned by pilgrims as being one of the most welcome components
of the pilgrimage. Contemporary existence, no matter how much it is criti-
cised or bemoaned, involves a tethering to our mobile devices. Even when
on holidays or annual leave, we have a persistent feeling of an obligation to
check emails or update social media. However, the requirement of the pil-
grimage, combined with the character of the place, provides a palpable relief.
The island is emancipatory. Another pilgrim, Ann, mentions the importance
of this aspect for her:

We’re all so busy. Everybody is on. I find at work with email, and then I have
an iPhone, so you never get off-line. . . . I think it’s good that things, you
know, that we can cut off and just get back to basics, maybe listen to the
silence for a while.

Crucially, this intentional disengagement, as Ann alludes to, is not only about sep-
arating ourselves from the world, but also using this condition to create a space for
contemplation. The default setting of turning to our mobile devices is disrupted
and we are gladly forced to sit and think, to reflect or chat.
 Pilgrimage, transformation, and liminality 75
These themes are woven into the pilgrim experience through the performances
and structures of the pilgrimage. Fasting and bare feet combine with the features
of the island named after prominent ascetic saints creating an affective liminal
landscape. The aforementioned St Brigid’s Cross on the side of the basilica brings
these aspects into sharp relief as each of us, during our prayer stations, renounces
the world in an assertion of spiritual separation from earthly concerns. John, who
had been to Lough Derg several times, emphasised the role of St Brigid’s Cross
in his pilgrimages:

You say, ‘I renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil’. Em, and I think I had
to say, I said it out loud the first time, but it’s a very, very unusual thing to
do. And, it’s almost like you are renouncing your physical body, but, em, the
entire world.

In describing the importance of this point, John illustrates how the larger spiritual
significance is materialised and verbalised in this act. The liminality which is
facilitated by the structures of the shrine becomes personalised as each individual
stands at the cross, holding out their arms, as they make their declaration three
times. It is a self-conscious action as we are all called on to not only perform
this prayer, but also to reflect on what it means. We kneel praying in preparation,
aware of our fellow pilgrims standing up to renounce, before each of us must
ourselves make this prayer aloud. It is an individual and collective testament.
A clear purpose is added to the seclusion from the world as each person takes on
an ownership of their pilgrim journey and we as a group share this commitment.
Moreover, this point is reinforced throughout the three days, as the St Brigid’s
Cross prayer and action is repeated during each of the nine stations. St Brigid’s
Cross then becomes a touchstone for the whole three days, encapsulating the pro-
cesses that enable the emergence of liminality. Here John presents an account
which aligns with the sentiments of other pilgrims, but for him it is tied to the
renouncing at that Cross. This is a defining point on his spiritual journey where he
is conscious of his separation from the everyday world and all it entails.
Through structural, symbolic, and emotional modalities, Lough Derg manifests
a distinct form of liminality. The physical characteristics of a lake-island blend
with the requirements of the three-day pilgrimage and the commitment of each
individual to produce an almost textbook example of the liminal experience. We
are separated from the world in a way unlike other settings. We genuinely leave
behind deadlines, appointments, and to-do lists. The island becomes a liberating
space as we are both allowed to and allow ourselves to leave all of it behind.
Inhabiting this space enables us to consider other parts of our lives as the deeper
stiller waters begin to surface. We move further on our journey.

Transformation and renewal

Processes of transformation and renewal emerge from active engagements with the
meaningful aspects of life that are enabled through the pilgrimage. The shedding
76  Richard Scriven
of everyday concerns is not ‘disengagement from the challenges of one’s life,
but rather a journey toward the transformative possibility that the journey itself
contains’ (Schmidt and Jordan 2013, p. 67). It is valued as a distinct opportunity
to reflect on the more important parts of ourselves and our lives. In this liminal
space, deeper, more profound sentiments, ideas, and feelings are allowed to sur-
face (Slavin 2003; Turner and Turner 1978). Lough Derg provides the time, space,
and mind-set for these purposeful reflections. These considerations are manifest
in pilgrims performing the prayer stations, praying privately, sitting quietly over-
looking the lake, chatting with fellow pilgrims, or in conversation with the staff.
Journeys of transformation and renewal are nurtured in this reflective space.
While the pilgrimage has a broader Christian spirituality appeal, it remains
a Roman Catholic site of devotion where religious pilgrims travel annually to
prayer for special intentions and to take time out to communicate with God. For
one such pilgrim, Kathleen, the prayerful and peaceful aspects stood out for her.
These three days were a special way of relating to God and developing her faith:

It’s so peaceful, you kind of get an inner calm when you come here, you
know? . . . You get time to connect to God, the prayers now and the singing,
it’s just lovely like, you know? I mean at home you go to Mass, you’re prob-
ably rushing home to make the dinner or something. . . . Whereas at least
here, you can slow down, you know? There’s time to slow down. It’s peaceful
and tranquil. . . . You have time for God and time for yourself.

Kathleen’s pilgrimage takes what is generally classified as a traditional form

relating to prayer and developing personal faith. Even though she is someone
who practices her Catholicism regularly, she is aware of how weekly mass fits
in as another component of ordinary life. Worship and prayer are regularised and
scheduled in a manner, which although necessary, can erode their purpose. At
Lough Derg, where there is a deliberately slower pace, she has time to pray and
to participate in the liturgies in a more rewarding and resonant way. Her connec-
tion with God is experienced in an impactful manner through the pilgrimage. This
serves to strengthen her faith in very real ways. It is a spiritual revival.
Comparably Martin locates his time at St Patrick’s Purgatory as being an impor-
tant feature of his spiritual life. He returns to the pilgrimage regularly as it offers
him a means of revitalising his faith:

It’s very much a nourishing point for my faith. It was such a positive experi-
ence. You know, I can find it hard to be prayerful in my life, every day or
every week, you know, or throughout the day. Whereas something like that
I find such a profound spiritual experience. It’s nice to have this. . . . I sup-
pose, refreshment or nourishing point, you know, going back to daily life
with, having had this experience.

There is a very clear sense from Martin’s words of the significance he attaches to
his pilgrimage. Not only is it a special event which offers him the time and space
 Pilgrimage, transformation, and liminality 77
for reflection, it is an intensely significant spiritual encounter. The everyday world
is not conducive to reaching a prayerful state with little time available to truly be
still and pray. A spiritual immanence is facilitated by the conditions of the Lough
Derg as Martin settles into the rhythms and sensibilities of pilgrimage. The ethe-
reality of faith, which often remains beyond his grasp in normative circumstances,
becomes a felt and lived experience on this journey.
The experiences of both Kathleen and Martin correspond to one of the broader
rationales for pilgrimages, as they let ‘believers act out religious tenets in concrete
ways’ (Gesler and Pierce 2000, 228). Moreover, it is appreciated how faith and
spirituality can be reaffirmed in such visceral and intense moments (Beckstead
2010). These journeys then take on an important role as a form of religious trans-
formation that reinvigorates their faith and themselves personally.
The morning of the third day is frequently mentioned as a highpoint of the
pilgrimage. An earned satisfaction pervades, one drawn from enduring the dif-
ficulties of the rites. The aggregation of the journey results in a celebratory atmos-
phere, as individually and collectively the pilgrims begin to return to the world
renewed (Osterrieth 1997). We have completed our prayer stations, put back on
our shoes, and are getting ready to leave the island. As we depart, there is an
intense sense of completion and renewal. Having endured the challenges of the
pilgrimage, we now return to the world spiritually and emotionally refreshed.
Gráinne, who had completed the pilgrimage several times, explains her experi-
ences of that last morning:

And, we all just remember that epic feeling we have on day three, and we
kind of forget how awful it’s been on like day two or the vigil night, and it’s
only when you come back again that you realise how that feels, but somehow
it’s like when you revised for your exams all you remember are the results,
you don’t remember that revision period.

This ‘epic feeling’ is the completion of the pilgrimage. She appreciates how the
hardships of the three days generate the sense of revitalisation on departing the
island. The distinct challenges of Lough Derg led to this crescendo. It is only
because of the trials involved that the achievement is so purposeful. Moreover,
Gráinne’s regular participation in the pilgrimage illustrates the value she places
on these experiences and its reviving nature.
The impact of Lough Derg can last well beyond the immediacy of three days
as people carry the insights and feelings with them into their ordinary lives. For
religious believers it reinforces their faith, while for those with a more spiritual or
agnostic outlook it can be equally personally reviving. Grace, who I talked with
after her pilgrimage, described having a meaningful experience at Lough Derg
which stuck with her:

I don’t particularly have a wonderful belief in the Catholic Church or in faith,

or that kind of thing; but I kind of thought: ‘I’ll go and see’. . . . I felt wonder-
ful! Still feel wonderful after it. You feel a lot lighter. Mmm, I don’t know
78  Richard Scriven
what it is, why it works the way it does; but, it does seem to make you feel a
bit lighter afterwards. . . . It clears away all the material stuff, all the rubbish
of your daily life and you’re just back to basics, aren’t you? You just can think
about what’s happening at the minute. All the other stuff doesn’t [matter].

Sensibilities of liminality and transformation come through in Grace’s account

of her pilgrimage. Her journey was not based in a religious faith but nonetheless
drew from the exceptional nature of Lough Derg as a transitional and reflective
space.
A core characteristic of pilgrimage is the desire to search for a ‘mystical or
magico-religious experience’ through which pilgrims ‘experience something out
of the ordinary that marks a transition from the mundane secular world of their
everyday existence to a special and sacred state’ (Collins-Kreiner 2010, p. 442).
This feature is distinctly evident on Lough Derg as pilgrims withdraw from the
world and dwell in a spiritual context which facilitates meaningful experiences.
These spiritual and personal reflections help people take stock of aspects of their
lives, re-consider issues, and strengthen their faith. In different ways the research
participants articulated a sense of renewal which they carried with them back to
the world.

Conclusion
In this chapter, I have articulated the transformative dimension of the Lough Derg
as a form of personal and spiritual rejuvenation. Pilgrims pursue metaphysical
journeys through the embodied practices of the island, as medieval aesthetics, a
retreat from the world, and personal motivations intermix. They are afforded the
space and disposition to reflect on themselves, their lives, and their spiritualties.
These opportunities are valued as being a rarity amongst the demands of everyday
living that allow the pilgrims to be still and truly contemplate. Within this process,
corporeal and affective resonances present an avenue towards genuinely mean-
ingful encounters. These considerations allow for a re-appreciation for the role of
the transformative within pilgrimage journeys.
I emphasise how a contemporary pilgrimage is manifest as an active process
of change. By engaging in a temporary performance through a ritualised jour-
ney, participants can induce personal change in the form of spiritual or emotional
progression. There is a distinct agency involved with each person intentionally
entering into the space and enacting the embodied practices. This draws atten-
tion to the continuing cultural relevance of the pilgrim as a social role which
is being adopted for religious-spiritual reasons, alongside more secular motiva-
tions. I build on recent trajectories in pilgrimage studies which are intervening
in the spaces and experiences of the journey by considering how the transforma-
tive dimension is manifested through embodied spatial practices on an individual
scale. This unravels how the concept of the pilgrimage journey is encountered
in the realities of a Western Christian site, revealing how many of the tropes are
present but are experienced very personally.
 Pilgrimage, transformation, and liminality 79
In foregrounding the transformative dimension of pilgrimage, I have examined
how purpose and practice interweave to facilitate personal rejuvenation. While
transformation is considered to be a significant component of pilgrimage and
one of the features that distinguishes it from other religious/spiritual and cultural
activities, it needs to be appreciated on the scales in which it occurs. Embellished
religious accounts and popular concepts can tend to emphasise the expressive or
spectacular components of pilgrimage; however, a more nuanced consideration
understands the experiences to often be quiet, personal, and subtle. The encoun-
ters presented by the research participants in this chapter are of this order. It is a
subdued, yet resonant, form of renewal that is manifest in spiritual and emotional
registers. These feelings are slowly arrived at through the tranquility and rhythms
of located ritual practices. This highlights the significance of investigating both
the process and modalities of transformation within pilgrimage.
These features prompt further questions about the nature of liminality and
how we conceive of it in relation to pilgrimage. While the original concept of the
liminal as a social state has been disrupted and developed, its role in processual,
practiced, and embodied terms needs to be more fully explored and articulated.
There are rich ontological and practical aspects of the concept within pilgrimages;
in particular, how it facilitates pilgrims experiencing transformative encounters.
This also highlights the need for research to occur in the midst of pilgrimages
as these liminal spaces are being forged by the participants on their journeys of
belief, searching, and contemplation. While such interventions need to be prac-
ticed in a conscientious and thoughtful manner, they can yield rich insights into
these momentary and ephemeral worlds.
The prayer of ‘I renounce the World, the Flesh, and the Devil’ is repeated con-
tinually at St Brigid’s Cross throughout the pilgrimage. Pilgrims of varying reli-
gious beliefs and spiritual dispositions each make this prayer on their Lough Derg
journeys. It encapsulates a commitment to the spirit of this pilgrimage, as each
person rejects the normative, at least temporarily, and embraces the transition-
ary status of the pilgrim. It is in such acts and intentions that the liminalities and
potential transformations of Lough Derg are nurtured and enabled.

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6 Ministers on the move
Vocation and migration in the
British Methodist Church
Lia D. Shimada

Introduction
In the popular imagination, images of ‘the Christian minister’ tend toward the
static: a black-robed, white-collared figure (usually male) presiding behind a pul-
pit or, perhaps, at the edge of a grave. Pulpit and grave: These, it would appear,
are the iconic spaces for ministry. Television shows like the BBC’s The Vicar of
Dibley and Rev may place their ministers in a wider context – village chapel for
the former; inner-city parish for the latter – but the storylines nonetheless unfurl in
these specific locations, their fictional geographies bounded by the practicalities
of 60-minute storytelling.
Yet there is another way to think about a Christian minister: as a walking,
breathing geography experiment; as an exercise in religion-as-practice.
In 2010, mere months after finishing my doctorate, I accepted a three-year post
to implement the national diversity strategy for the British Methodist Church.
On spec, this was a marvelous job for a newly minted cultural geographer – and
not just because ‘mapping’ appeared as a designated task in my workplan. I also
came to this job as a professional mediator, well-versed in the art of dealing with
conflict. Little did I know that both sets of skills would be pressed into service,
in equal measure, time and again. From knowing next to nothing about British
Methodism, I swiftly learned a new language, a new organisational culture, and a
new category of person called ‘clergy’. In the process, I dealt day in and day out
with ordained ministers: some lovely, some infuriating, all of them unavoidably
human with a vocation to the divine. It didn’t take long to realise that my generic
perceptions of ministerial location (pulpit, parish, chapel, graveside, etc.) were
merely wayfaring marks in the larger scope of British Methodist ministry.
Quite simply, I learned that ministers are constantly on the move. Mobility
is ingrained in Methodist DNA, with modern-day clergy treading in the restless
wake of their long-ago founder, John Wesley. From one appointment to the next,
over the course of his or her ministry, a British Methodist minister1 may live and
serve in drastically different geographical contexts, from the Channel Islands in
the south to Shetland in the north, from Wales and the Isle of Man to the coastal
fringes of East Anglia. Migration, however, is anything but a story of Britain’s
interior. Increasingly, the currents of globalisation bring ministers from distant
 Ministers on the move 83
parts of the planet back ‘home’ to serve the British ‘Mother Church’. Migration,
for Methodists, expresses history in the present tense. The ministers who migrate
to Britain – from Australia to Zimbabwe and everywhere in between – bring with
them the versions of Methodism carried to their shores by well-meaning mission-
aries of centuries past.
Migration, for Methodists, is above all a story of change. Not surprisingly,
diverse streams of migration give rise to countless tensions: between local and
global, between rural and urban, between theory and practice, between tradition
and innovation. Migration reveals rifts in expectations and experience and, above
all, in theology. At its best, migration is a source of spiritual renewal for congrega-
tions and for the ministers themselves. At its worst, it can be a recipe for raging
conflict.
By and large, academic geographers have left Methodism to the historians.
With its founding narrative (more below) firmly couched in the visually alluring
eighteenth century, bolstered by thousands of archived sermons and hymns, the
Methodist Church seems to have a natural home in the historical sciences. Yet
Methodism should appeal to geographers, too. The denomination is inherently
geographical, scaling between the local and the global in dynamic, ever-shifting
ways. As such, it makes a fine case study for exploring the spatial politics of spir-
ituality, as viewed through the prism of Methodist ministry.
In this chapter, I explore the relationship between ministry, movement and
the complex (and potentially contested) spiritual spaces through which ministers
move. I take as my starting point an understanding of ‘ministry’ as religion-in-
practice, with a startling variety of vocational forms for both laypeople and for
those who are ordained. For the purposes of this article, I focus on the ministry
of the latter. In the story of British Methodism, two broad types of movement
fascinate me: itinerancy and reverse mission. Both have profound implications
for geographies and theologies of ministry; both are steeped in longstanding his-
torical and theological traditions. They now unfold in contemporary times – to the
tune of changing social contexts and conflicts, with human beings at their heart.

A brief history of the British Methodist Church2

Our servant came up and said, ‘Sir, there is no travelling today. Such a quantity of
snow has fallen in the night that the roads are quite filled up.’ I told him, ‘At least
we can walk twenty miles a day, with our horses in our hands.’ So in the name of
God we set out. The northeast wind was piercing as a sword and had driven the
snow into such uneven heaps that the main road was impassable. However, we
kept on, afoot or on horseback, till we came to the White Lion at Grantham.
John Wesley’s journal entry, 18 February 1747

John and Charles Wesley were born in Epworth, Lincolnshire to a vicar father and
a formidable mother, who not only bore 19 children but lived to tell the tale. In
between home-schooling her 10 surviving children, she also managed to organise
84  Lia D. Shimada
Sunday afternoon meetings in her kitchen for as many as 200 people at a time. The
home-schooling bore fruit; John and Charles eventually made their way to Oxford
University. There, they both became more serious about Christianity, developing
a spirituality that combined inward faith with outward commitment to serving
those in need. They formed a small group, nicknamed ‘The Holy Club’, with a
handful of other like-minded students. Together, they would go into town and to
the local prison to perform their good deeds. Their fellow Oxonians mocked them
with insults that, by today’s standards, sound positively benign: ‘Bible Moths’,
‘Enthusiasts’, ‘Supererogationists’ . . . and ‘Methodists’. Thus began the remark-
able movement that would carry the Wesley name across continents, oceans and
centuries, founding a global phenomenon that would one day be known as the
Methodist Church.
Charles may have been the musical prodigy (he composed between 6000 and
9000 hymns of variable quality, depending on how you count the output),3 but
John was the real organising genius, with a keen eye for expanding into new mar-
kets for the soul. Although they followed their father into the ordained priesthood,
John and Charles soon chafed against Establishment Anglicanism. They were alive
to the discontent of the working classes, feeling keenly their sense of exclusion
from local parish churches. In 1739, at the age of 36, John reluctantly preached
his first open-air sermon. He never looked back. So-called ‘field preaching’  –
at pitheads of mines, on village greens, wherever anyone would gather to listen –
became a key feature of the Methodist religious revival. In his wake, across the
countryside and in industrialising towns, John’s fiery sermons spurred his follow-
ers to band together in new communities of faith and fellowship.
Eighteenth-century Britain was a place of excess and enthusiasm, over which
reigned the Enlightenment and enormous social inequalities. Into this mix thun-
dered John and Charles Wesley, with their heart-stirring preaching, gusty hymn-
singing, spirit-infused assemblies and boundless energy. Like any oral movement,
the Methodist revival struck an emotional chord that resonated with the times,
rippling outward with each encounter. Unlike those straight-laced Calvinists, with
their conviction in God’s absolute sovereignty and their gloomy doctrine of pre-
destination, the Wesley brothers believed fervently that no one – absolutely no
one – was beyond salvation. To John, Charles and their ever-expanding commu-
nity of followers, religion was meaningless if it did not combine faith with good
works: caring for widows, orphans and the poor; prison reform; education. A tire-
less campaigner to the end, John’s last known letter urged the abolition of slavery.
The Wesleys’ message fell on grateful ears and hearts. This was a movement in
which women and the working classes found voice and status they would have
otherwise been denied. Increasing numbers of preachers were trained – women
as well as men – to spread the Wesleyan message. By the time John died, 72,000
people belonged to Methodist societies in Britain alone. The real number of
adherents, on both sides of the Atlantic, was far higher.
As an ordained Anglican priest, John never set out to create a new denomination;
his mission as he saw it was to revive the Church of England from its fusty, tired
elitism. However, by the dawn of the next century, ‘the people called Methodists’
 Ministers on the move 85
subscribed to a version of faith distinctly different from their parent body. In
1795, the Methodist Church separated formally from the Church of England:
no longer Anglican, but a Christian denomination in its own right.
John Wesley’s restless mobility remains imprinted upon modern-day Method-
ism; contemporary ecclesiastical structures clearly reflect their founding history.
Local Methodist churches are congregations based on the original Methodist
‘societies’ that met initially within the Church of England. The circuit is the stand-
ard administrative and missional unit – normally a group of churches served by
a team of ministers. Here is where new initiatives and changes in the pattern of
church life unfold, where closures of chapels are debated, where new expressions
of church emerge, and to which a minister is appointed. The district comprises a
collection of circuits, much as an Anglican diocese gathers its parishes under its
wings. Unlike an Anglican map of Britain, however, Methodist boundaries are
not concrete but notional – a faint trace of history in the contemporary landscape.
A circuit, after all, can also be imagined as the distance a wandering preacher
might feasibly cover on horse. From the outset, Methodism moved through inter-
linking spaces of spirituality, and continues to do so today. Church, Circuit, Dis-
trict: These are the building blocks of Methodist geography, transposed on the
older, Anglican map of Christian Britain.
Arching over all is the Connexion. The old-fashioned spelling is a direct legacy
from the Wesleys’ time. Today, the British Methodist Church continues to adopt a
connexional (as opposed to a congregational) structure of spiritual governance. In
other words, the whole Church acts and decides together in this large, connected
community; no local congregation is independent. The Connexion provides the
spiritual geography for all British Methodists, regardless of the extent to which
they choose – or not – to acknowledge it. To be a member in one, local Method-
ist congregation translates as full membership of the British Methodist Church,
across the entirety of the Connexion. And for those individuals who discern a
vocation to ordained ministry, the Connexion becomes part of the warp and weft
of their identities. When Methodist ministers are ordained, they are ‘received into
Full Connexion.’ In doing so, they enter into a lifelong, covenant relationship with
the Methodist Church, through which their adventures in ministry now unfold.

Itinerant ministry
Over the course of his remarkably long life (1703–1791), John Wesley travelled
over 250,000 miles and preached over 40,000 sermons. Today, ordinary Method-
ists would hardly expect their ministers to demonstrate competency in horserid-
ing, and no one would bother to count the number of sermons delivered. However,
like their historical forefathers, ministers are expected to move where Church and
God direct them. To be ordained is to belong to an ordered group of people with
a common discipline. For ordained Methodist clergy, this ‘common discipline’
translates, in part, to undertaking a lifetime of movement – to ‘exercise a minis-
try of visitation to particular groups of disciples and particular situations in the
wider world’ (The Methodist Church in Britain, 2002: 458). Contemporary clergy
86  Lia D. Shimada
tread in the footsteps of the earliest itinerant Wesleyan preachers, sent forth to
be ‘extraordinary messengers’ to help people discern the needs of the Kingdom
(ibid: 459).
To understand how distinct is this calling, we can compare it to, say, the monas-
tic Benedictine discipline of stability. In the early Christian and medieval tradi-
tion, Benedictine monks dedicated their lives to God within the four walls of a
cell, within the closed brotherhood of a monastery. Here, through exercising the
discipline of stillness, a Benedictine monk could heed his vocation, rooted in a
single place, where one’s spirituality could deepen and thus flourish (see De Waal,
1999). In contrast, Methodism is a movement that flings itself across a far wider
geography, with ordained ministers as the vanguard.
Intriguingly, for all that itinerancy is a defining characteristic of Methodist min-
istry, it leaves only faint traces in the written record. In the process of conducting
research for this article, I consulted several books dedicated to Methodist theol-
ogy (for example, Marsh et al., 2004; Luscombe and Shreeve, 2002; Langford,
1998). With each, I flipped to the index in search of ‘itinerant’ or some variation
thereof; not once did I find an entry. Official publications from Methodist head-
quarters in London also proved to be elusive. In part, this is due to the pecu-
liar shape of the Methodist ‘Conference.’ The Conference is the governing body,
comprising representatives from across the Connexion, which meets annually to
confer, debate and ultimately to agree policy for the British Methodist Church.
Through a lineage that stretches back to John Wesley’s day, Methodist theology
has evolved over time. In large part, the articulation of Methodist theology can
be traced through lengthy written reports that are submitted to the annual Confer-
ence for discussion. Every year, Conference receives hundreds of pages of these
documents, after which they are added to Methodism’s hefty archive. In this way,
the collected reports to Conference form a sort of canon for British Methodist
ecclesiological and theological thought and practice.
For a member of the general public, however, the most readily accessible refer-
ence to itinerancy is a document for people who are considering a vocation to the
ordained ministry. Embedded on page 33 of 40 is this warning:

The covenant relationship with those in ministry means that the Church will
place you in a circuit and whilst the Church makes every effort to support
ministers and their families, no-one should think that the relocation to a new
circuit and home is an easy formality without challenge.
(The Methodist Church in Britain, 2015: 33)

Every November, there is a national gathering for the leaders, known as ‘Chairs’,
of each of the 31 districts within the British Methodist Church. Each Chair comes
armed with the names of ministers seeking a new appointment, and the names
of circuits seeking a new minister. Each minister and circuit will have written a
lengthy profile, highlighting their interests, passions and hopes. Over five days,
in a delicate and complex process, the Chairs confer and pray together, matching
 Ministers on the move 87
ministers and circuits across the Connexion. As they do so, the spatial breadth of
British Methodism becomes concentrated in one, specific location. According to
Stephen,4 a former Chair with long experience of the stationing process: ‘In that
room, there is knowledge of every single chapel and minister in (British) Meth-
odism.’ Within this room, during these intensive days of wrestling with people,
places and paperwork, the Chairs will seek to discern, together, God’s will for the
spiritual geography of Methodist Britain.
Once matched, the minister (and family, if relevant) will then arrange to visit the
circuit; each will hope that the other lives up to the hyperbole of the profile. If the visit
is deemed successful by both sides, the minister will then be ‘stationed’ to the
circuit. Over the next few months, the minister, plus his or her family, will prepare
to leave their current home and then move – sometimes hundreds of miles – to a
new community. These decisions are not taken lightly, as evidenced by the prayer,
time and consideration devoted over many months, by many individuals. Taken
at face value, however, the Methodist stationing process appears to be a strange
hybrid of internet-, speed-, and blind-dating, conducted in the giddying hope of
an arranged marriage.
Today, a standard appointment lasts five years, with the option of extending if
both the minister and the circuit agree. (Depending on your point of view, this is
either a drastic improvement or a shocking step backwards from John Wesley’s day,
when a standard appointment lasted merely one year.) In theory, however, a minister
could be moved at any time. Rarely will a minister stay longer than seven to ten
years in any one appointment. Not infrequently, the stationing process goes awry;
sooner or later, minister and circuit – or both – may realise that this is anything but a
match made in Heaven. In some cases, the minister and circuit will stumble on, for
better or for worse. In other cases, the match will end with the minister curtailing his
or her appointment. Sometimes curtailment is a healthy, healing process, but usually
it is painful and fraught for all involved. Itinerancy can be reviving and exciting,
yes, but it is also deeply – and for some, dangerously – precarious.
So, what does this look like in practice? Let us consider the life of Alexander,
now a retired minister with many years of active service behind him.
Born and bred in the moors of Northern England, as a young man Alexander
travelled south, to the flatlands of Cambridge University, where he trained as a
Methodist minister. Newly married and newly ordained, he embarked on a min-
istry marked by myriad bends in the road. In the beginning, Alexander and his
wife, Beth, moved to Manchester, where they lived on a council estate in one of
the most deprived wards in England. This was inner-city ministry based firmly in
and of the community. Alexander relished the ecumenical nature of this appoint-
ment, working alongside like-minded colleagues from the Church of England
and other denominations. Eventually, and now with young children in tow, they
relocated to a rural market town for Alexander’s next appointment. This was the
base from which he served a half-dozen tiny chapels, strung along the folds of the
dales – the smallest of which boasted six members on paper, of which only three
attended regularly. Here, Alexander and Beth’s children grew and thrived, while
88  Lia D. Shimada
Beth drove daily to the regional city where she flourished in her own career. This
was, in many ways, an idyllic appointment, but shadows lurked on the horizon
from the beginning. Alexander would learn that as an itinerant minister, he threat-
ened the status quo of small chapels in communities which rarely welcomed new
blood into their midst. These were congregations that, in Alexander’s words, ‘did
not want to be moved’ from their traditional, rooted ways of doing and being.
The growing tensions boiled to the surface when the lay members of his circuit
voted – by the narrowest of margins – not to extend Alexander’s appointment. He
and his family – including two teenagers, the youngest in a vulnerable position as
she entered her exam year – now had a matter of months to move out of the manse
and wrap their minds around a new place to call home.
Toward the end of his vocational career in the British Methodist Church, Alex-
ander took one final appointment, this time in the heart of London. For a few
years, he reveled in the many opportunities the capital offered to exercise his pas-
sion for social justice. Before long, however, a combination of exhaustion, toxic
congregational conflict and ill health led him to take early retirement. In a fitting
tribute to Methodism’s energetic history, a minister’s time in service is known as
‘years of travel’; when a minister approaches retirement, he or she asks for ‘per-
mission to sit down.’ Seven years after he ‘sat down’, I asked Alexander if he had
any reflections he wanted to share about itinerant ministry. His reply: ‘I’m glad it
no longer has anything to do with me.’

Theologies of itinerancy
In the absence of a glossy, readily accessible ‘official’ theology from the powers-
that-be at Methodist headquarters, I asked a handful of ministers to articulate their
own understanding of the itinerant nature of ministry. Alexander, whom we met
above, took a pragmatic stance:

I think we invent things, and if we are that way inclined, we think of a theol-
ogy to justify it.

To others, however, itinerancy is a crucial strand of their spiritual life and work.
Wilson is a 40-something-year-old minister currently based in London, where he
is serving his third circuit appointment. Without hesitation, he summarised his
theology as ‘Pilgrimage’:

So, it’s Abraham, you know. In [the biblical letter to the] Hebrews, they talk
about a pilgrim passing through . . . a stranger and alien in the land. So we
(Methodist ministers) come along, we pitch our tent for a while, alongside
people, and then we move on.

In this invocation, Wilson reaches not just for John Wesley but much further back
in time, into the biblical foundations of Abrahamic faith itself. Itinerant ministry,
as articulated here, is a spiritual geography shaped around a call to nomadic ways
 Ministers on the move 89
of being and of relating: ‘we pitch our tent for a while, alongside people.’ Wilson’s
theology can be read as strongly geographical, in the way it speaks to the spatial,
directional energy that is harnessed in developing one’s spiritual faith: pilgrim-
age through a point in space or time; pilgrimage toward closer union with God;
pilgrimage as journey itself.
For Terri (30-something-year-old minister, now serving her second appoint-
ment in a market town within London’s commuter belt), itinerant ministry is an
expression of social justice. Like Alexander, Terri trained to be a minister in Cam-
bridge. Her first appointment took her to a Northern seaside city characterised
by a slumping economy, high levels of deprivation and a sizeable population of
refugees and migrants seeking asylum in Britain.

There is something about equality. I like itinerancy because everyone is

served regardless of their ability to pay or the attractiveness of the area. With
[Methodist] stationing, you don’t get a choice. Everybody is served. The
whole country is covered.

She compared the Methodist system favourably to its Anglican counterpart. Dur-
ing her time in this appointment, Terri worked ecumenically with vicars in the
Church of England, who struggled to attract colleagues to serve the parish due
its widespread perception as an unattractive city. Terri expressed concern that the
Methodist Church could follow suit:

Now, the reality is that’s changing, given that we (the British Methodist
Church) are getting so short of ministers now . . . which means there is an ele-
ment of choice. There is a buyer’s market, so to speak, for ministers. Which is
very sad, actually, because we are losing the theology of itinerancy.

Terri’s use of the word ‘choice’ is significant, as it signals to her the end of the cur-
rent framework in which – in theory, at least – the Methodist Connexion and the
minister discern, together, the will of God in the mission of the Church.
At its best, Methodism’s vision of ‘corporate discernment’ pairs ministers and
circuits for the greater good, each bringing out the best in the other, and in doing
so galvanising congregations toward growth and constructive change. Like Terri,
Alexander compared the Methodist practice of itinerancy favourably to the Angli-
can approach to parish appointments, which he described as a ‘freehold’ leading
to ‘a sort of staleness.’ Terri acknowledged openly that she would not have cho-
sen, of her own accord, to live and work in the economically depressed, physically
unattractive city to which she was stationed. Yet once there, buoyed by the belief
that she was following her vocation and that she had been sent for a reason, Terri
flourished in her role. In the process, she developed an impressive set of skills and
knowledge base for working with refugees:

I didn’t have any qualifications, but I developed the skills necessary because
they were needed. I did my best.
90  Lia D. Shimada
Without the new experiences offered through itinerancy, Terri suspects that she
would have ‘pigeonholed’ herself in one area. Without the discipline of itinerancy,
and the world-opening opportunities that emerged, Terri would have flung herself
into youth work and carried on doing it throughout her ministry. Itinerancy took
Terri far from her comfort zone – geographic and spiritual – and opened new
vocational horizons she may not have heeded otherwise.
If the introduction of a new minister holds the potential to rejuvenate a con-
gregation, so too does the unsettling period of transition that marks the end of
a minister’s appointment in a circuit. For Wilson, leavetaking is a process that,
whether individual or communal in scale, calls on the minister to enact a sym-
bolic, representative role:

I think that an important part of what we do is leaving. It’s a bit like a pasto-
ral visit. They’ve been visited by ‘the Church’, but then we leave, and they
breathe a sigh of relief when we go. Not because it’s been a bad experience,
but because we take stuff when we go. And I think that’s the same for leaving
a circuit as well.

In Wilson’s description are echoes of the sacrament of confession, with the minis-
ter removing ‘stuff’ that may have hampered the spiritual life of the individual, or
(more broadly) the congregation. Along similar lines, Terri finds itinerancy ‘very
useful, in that you can actually tackle conflict [in a congregation], knowing you’re
going.’ Read this way, itinerancy is nothing less than a catalyst for transformation.

The future of itinerant ministry?

In John Wesley’s day, ‘the travelling preacher’ was a perfect creation for its context
and its time. However, the world has changed enormously, in ways which John,
Charles and their early followers would never have imagined. As the contempo-
rary Church grapples with ageing congregations, chapel closures and declining
financial resources in an increasingly secular society, the question must be asked:
What will – and should – happen to itinerant ministry?
In parallel with the declining numbers of Methodist members, the Methodist
Church is also experiencing a decline in the number of vocations – of people com-
ing forward to offer for the ministry. As the pool of active ministers dwindles and
ages, itinerancy as currently practiced may require a drastic overhaul. Moreover,
advances in technology have opened new channels through which the Methodist
Church can speak of and to the world. These days, anyone with access to a laptop
and an internet connection can go online and stream a sermon. How does itinerant
ministry respond – or not – to these new frontiers?
Contemporary British society no longer reflects the social landscape in which
itinerant ministry once took root and thrived. Reflecting from the far side of active
ministry, Alexander (whose trajectory we traced in a previous section) recognises
that the world in which he grew up is far removed from the world he now inhabits.
 Ministers on the move 91
In the world I was born into, it really wasn’t that difficult for a minister to up
and move. Increasingly, ministers have spouses – male and female spouses –
with careers, and that makes it difficult.

Wilson put it more bluntly:

It’s a system that grew up in an age when the ministers were men and the
wives were housewives.

Alexander and his wife, Beth, managed to combine Alexander’s vocation to the
Methodist ministry – with its requisite commitment to itinerancy – with Beth’s own
career trajectory. When I interviewed Alexander for this article, he expressed, at
first, a remarkably sanguine approach to the human dimension of itinerancy: ‘Most
people in the modern world do a certain amount of moving. Some people are more
inclined than others to move about in their lives.’ Nonetheless, there was no deny-
ing the toll taken on his family, and the disruptions and dislocations they endured.
Other ministers whom I interviewed for this article (some of whom chose not to be
quoted directly) were more vocal about the negative – even cataclysmic – effects of
their itinerant vocation on their personal lives and relationships. Terri spent more than
a decade living on the opposite side of the country to her partner and parents, while
she served her first appointment in the northern, seaside town to which she was sta-
tioned. She spoke to me, at length, of the financial, time and above all emotional costs
of itinerant ministry. The repercussions continue today: ‘I’ve missed out on every
member of my family’s wedding, baptism, etc. I’m just not invited anymore.’
Time will reveal whether the British Methodist Church can sustain its insistence
on itinerant ministers. The apparent absence of a theology of itinerancy which is
widely understood, shared and embraced across the Connexion amongst ordained
clergy and laypeople alike, may make itinerant ministry an increasingly difficult
practice to maintain. Already, anecdotal evidence suggests that the prospect of
itinerancy may deter potential candidates from offering for the ministry – at least
in its present form. Yet running alongside the Church’s narrative of decline is a
fascinating new story of migration. The historical tides of itinerancy and mission
are now reversing, bringing new Methodists ‘home’ to Britain.

Reverse mission
I look upon all the world as my parish; thus far I mean, that, in whatever part of it
I am, I judge it meet, right, and my bounden duty to declare unto all that are willing
to hear, the glad tidings of salvation.
John Wesley’s journal entry, 11 June 1739

Even during his lifetime, John Wesley refused to let the limitations of horse travel
halt the spread of his message. Early in their ministry, John and Charles crossed
92  Lia D. Shimada
the Atlantic in an attempt to convert the Native Americans of Georgia. Closer to
home, as the Methodist Revival gained pace, they made several trips across the
Irish Sea. As Birtwhistle (1983: 1) observes: ‘The very nature of the Method-
ist Revival made it impossible that its energies could be confined to one small
country.’ In its heyday, Methodism made inroads on six continents, flourishing in
several places far removed – geographically and culturally – from Britain. Facili-
tated by the currents of British imperialism, Methodist missionaries – like ‘clever
parasites’ (Hempton, 2005: 19) – carried Wesleyan theologies across the globe.
In the twentieth century, as empires collapsed and imperialism became associ-
ated less with progress and more with oppression, so the Christian missionary
movement that had developed (at least pragmatically) off the back of imperialism
required radical rethinking. Indeed, as missionaries themselves became involved
in nationalist movements in the countries in which they served, so their send-
ing Churches were forced to grapple with a new generation of missional think-
ing (see Hempton, 2005; Koss, 1975). As the British Empire evolved into the
vast Commonwealth, the Methodist Church gradually loosened its oversight and
governance on the international stage. Once upon a time, and not so long ago,
‘overseas districts’ answered to the British Church. Over several decades, these
districts became autonomous Methodist Churches (or ‘Conferences’) in their own
right. The last of these once-subsidiary districts evolved into full independence as
‘The Methodist Church, The Gambia’ in 2008. In place of its former, imperially-
marked missionary approach, today the British Methodist Church sees itself (at
least in theory) as one partner of many in the global Methodist network.
In Britain, the Methodist Church may be a denomination in decline, yet Meth-
odism continues to thrive in many parts of Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Global
currents bring migrating Methodists – the fruits of long-ago missionary labour –
to Britain, where in many places they are reviving the ailing ‘Mother Church.’
This trend, which is by no means limited to Methodism, has given rise to the
phenomenon of ‘reverse mission.’ Ojo (2007: 380) offers this definition:

The sending of missionaries to Europe and North America by churches and

Christians from the non-Western world, particularly Africa, Asia and Latin
America, which were at the receiving end of Catholic and Protestant missions
as mission fields from the sixteenth century to the late twentieth century.

These ‘reverse missionaries’ migrate for a variety of reasons – not least out of a
desire to evangelise the ‘dark continent of Europe’ (Catto, 2012) and its post-secular
populations (see also Catto, 2013). By identifying and naming this trend, sociolo-
gists of religion have performed a valuable service. The next question, though,
may be one for the geographically-inclined: What does ‘reverse mission’ look
like on the ground, in three dimensions? How do these global itinerants express
themselves on the local stage? What are the broader implications of ‘reverse mis-
sion’ for Methodist itinerancy in Britain?
During the years I spent working as a geographer/mediator-cum-church bureau-
crat, I frequently found myself on the frontline of sharp questions. Tensions were
 Ministers on the move 93
emerging in the gap between the British Church’s aspirations toward multicultural
inclusion and the realities of the present. Nowhere was this more apparent than
with appointments involving international ministers, who hail from across the
Methodist diaspora to serve the people of Britain.
A common example: In a quiet, rural village – in a tiny chapel in which John
Wesley himself may have preached – an ordained minister from Sierra Leone (or
Singapore, or Antigua) may struggle to serve a community long accustomed to a
certain type of white British minister. For ears only used to hearing sermons deliv-
ered by ministers trained in Bristol, Birmingham or Cambridge, what challenges
does an unfamiliar accent (say, Korean) and a different set of cultural references
present from the pulpit? For the ministers themselves, the pitfalls are legion, with
the annual Harvest Sunday service a depressingly predictable stumbling block.
Local congregations can harbour fierce expectations for this service – often for-
getting that the agricultural calendar and culture so familiar to them in Derbyshire
may seem positively alien to a Brasilian.
What has long been considered ‘the norm’ is now in flux, as new voices, new
ways of worship and, crucially, new theologies reshape British Methodist min-
istry. Over two centuries, British Methodism navigated its identity as a mainline
Christian denomination that could encompass a reasonably wide but nonethe-
less recognisable theological spectrum. Today, the denomination is witnessing a
theological sea change, as ministers from the diaspora bring diverse strands of
Methodism back to Britain. For those early missionaries, who went forth with a
broadly unified Methodist message, the contemporary, post-colonial world would
be unrecognisable – not least in the variety of Methodist theologies and practices
now present in British ministry.
As this article goes to print, I will be deep in a study of ordained ministers
from the Methodist Church of Southern Africa who are currently serving appoint-
ments in Britain. Through a case study of ‘Ubuntu’, this project will explore the
broader dynamics of migration, ministry and theologies of leadership, identity
and place. The concept of Ubuntu originated from the southern region of Africa;
its high-profile populisers include none other than the Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
In broad terms, Ubuntu can be summarised as: ‘I am because we are.’ This cohort
of Southern African ministers (hailing from six countries: South Africa, Namibia,
Botswana, Mozambique, Lesotho and Swaziland) are stationed to circuits across
the length and breadth of Britain. They are male and female, black and white,
able-bodied and not, with vastly different life experiences between them. What
these ministers have in common is a familiar reference point in Ubuntu. How are
their theologies of Ubuntu shaping their practice of ministry in Britain? How is
their understanding of Ubuntu shifting as they settle into British culture and com-
munity? For the people and the congregations they serve, how does the presence
of a minister ‘from afar’ reshape their own Christian spirituality?
From South African ministers preaching from the pulpit, to Fijian soldiers serv-
ing on British army bases, to second- and third-generation Ghanaians worshipping
in London or Leicester, the congregations of the British Methodist Church have
never been more multicultural. These patterns of migration, and the encounters
94  Lia D. Shimada
they produce, are changing the cultural practices of Methodism in Britain. In
doing so, they are re-shaping the denomination – theologically, culturally, geo-
graphically – in dramatic ways.

Conclusion
For the Wesley brothers, the Methodist movement may have begun as a noun –
just one corner within the familiar Anglican Church in which they were raised
and to which John and Charles were ordained. From its inception, however, the
Methodist movement was also a verb, full of restless energy to spread its good
news to all who would listen. Over the course of three centuries (and counting),
Methodism moved across the face of Britain and beyond, carrying its distinctive
theologies and spiritual practices across the globe. This was the work of itinerant
ministry.
At its heart, ‘itinerant’ can be defined as ‘one who travels from place to place’
(Collins Dictionary). Through itinerant ministry, the scales of geography con-
dense, collide and expand, as the memories and the experiences of diverse places
accumulate and thicken. In sparking a movement, John Wesley and his followers
created fresh spiritual terrain, connecting ‘the people called Methodists’ to one
another and to God in new scales of belonging, engagement, accountability and
worship. Weaving through all was – and is – the vocation to itinerancy. At his
or her ordination service, a minister is ‘received into Full Connexion’ and thus
becomes a public representative of the Methodist Church – a living embodiment
of connexional spirituality, carried into the local congregations and circuits he or
she is then sent forth to serve. Ministers may be trained in particular locations, but
each individual is shaped long before and afterwards by unique cultural forces and
quirks of geography. Distances become condensed, while simultaneously hori-
zons widen: a congregation is altered by its minister, while the minister is broad-
ened by each place to which he or she is stationed. And then, it’s time to move
again, carrying the accretion of all these places and spiritual experiences into the
next appointment. In Methodist ministry, it can be very difficult to decipher where
‘geography’ ends and ‘spirituality’ begins.
The time is indeed ripe for multi-faceted interrogations of ‘the geographies
of spirituality’ and ‘the spaces of spirituality.’ What, though, might be unearthed
if the phrasing were flipped? How might ‘a spirituality of geography’ open new
ways of thinking about geography – about spaces, places, scales and their atten-
dant politics? As fascinating as it may be to apply a geographical lens to practices
of spirituality (of which vocation and ministry are prime examples), what more
may be gained by considering questions of geography through the lens of religion
and spirituality? As Methodist itinerancy illustrates – and particularly in the form
of ‘reverse missionaries’ – the politics and practices of one’s spiritual vocation
are profoundly shaped by the geographical context in which a person is formed.
Itinerant ministry is forever shaping, and being shaped by, the spiritual spaces,
places and scales through which a minister moves. Places are palimpsests: This is
a well-known trope of geography. So too are the ministers of Methodism, as they
 Ministers on the move 95
carry 300 years of spiritual heritage into, and through, the twenty-first century.
Through the human figure of the Methodist minister, spirituality and geography
remain constantly on the move.

Notes
1 The British Methodist Church has two orders of ministry: Presbyters (whose vocation
can be loosely summarised as ‘Word and Sacrament’) and Deacons (‘Service’). For the
purposes of this article, I refer to members of both orders as ‘ministers.’
2 Books on Methodist history are plentiful and widely available. Classics include Baker
(1970), Davies (1976), Davies et al. (1983) and Southey (1890). See also Turner (2005)
and The Methodist Church in Britain website (www.methodist.org.uk/who-we-are/
history).
3 Outside the Christian tradition, where he is celebrated for penning such classics as Christ
the Lord is Risen Today and Love Divine, Charles Wesley is probably best known for the
lyrics to the Christmas carol Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.
4 All names, and some locations, have been changed.

References
Baker, F. (1970) John Wesley and the Church of England. London: Epworth Press.
Birtwhistle, N. A. (1983) Methodist missions. In R. Davies, A. R. George and G. Rupp
(Eds.), A History of the Methodist Church in Britain, Volume 3. London: Epworth Press,
pp. 1–116.
Catto, R. (2012) Reverse mission: From the Global South to mainline churches. In D.
Goodhew (Ed.), Church Growth in Britain: 1980 to the Present. Farnham, Surrey: Ash-
gate, pp. 91–103.
Catto, R. (2013) Accurate diagnosis: Exploring convergence and divergence in non-
Western missionary and sociological master narratives of Christian decline in Western
Europe. Transformation, 30(1), 31–45.
Collins Dictionary. Retrieved from www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/
itinerant.
Davies, R. E. (1976) Methodism. London: Epworth Press.
Davies, R., George, A. R., and Rupp, G. (Eds.). (1983) A History of the Methodist Church
in Britain. London: Epworth Press.
De Waal, E. (1999) Seeking God: The Way of St Benedict. Norwich: Canterbury Press.
Hempton, D. (2005) Methodism: Empire of the Spirit. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Koss, S. (1975) Wesleyan and empire. The Historical Journal, 18(1), 105–118.
Langford, T. A. (1998) Methodist Theology. Peterborough: Epworth Press.
Luscombe, P., and Shreeve, E. (Eds.). (2002) What Is a Minister? Peterborough: Epworth
Press.
Marsh, C., Beck, B., Shier-Jones, A., and Wareing, H. (Eds.). (2004). Unmasking Method-
ist Theology. London: Continuum.
The Methodist Church in Britain. (2002) Releasing ministers for ministry. Retrieved from
www.methodist.org.uk/downloads/conf-releasing/ministers-for-ministry-2002.pdf
The Methodist Church in Britain. (2015) Called to ordained ministry? Retrieved from
www.methodist.org.uk/media/1765496/called-to-ordained-ministry-0715.pdf.
The Methodist Church in Britain. Retrieved from www.methodist.org.uk/who-we-are/
history.
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Oden, T. C. (2008). Doctrinal Standards in the Wesleyan Tradition. Nashville: Abingdon
Press.
Ojo, M. (2007) Reverse mission. In J. J. Bonk (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Mission and Mis-
sionaries. New York: Routledge, pp. 380–382.
Southey, R. (1890) The Life of Wesley and the Rise and Progress of Methodism. London:
George Bell and Sons.
Turner, J. M. (2005) Wesleyan Methodism. London: Epworth Press.
Wesley, J. (1951) Journal entry for 18 February 1747. In P. Livingstone Parker (Ed.), Jour-
nal. Chicago: Moody Press.
Section 2

The spiritual production

of space
Steve Pile

The phrase ‘the production of space’ is closely associated with the work of Henri
Lefebvre (1974). The phrase contains a hidden ‘social’: that is, Lefebvre’s inten-
tion is to critique the social production of space. For him, the social order produces
space. That is, social processes such as globalisation, commodification, neoliber-
alism, financialisation all produce spaces in ways that support the exercise of the
power relations through which they operate. Thus, space is a social product of the
power relations inherent in the social processes that produce space. This, Lefebvre
wryly observes, might seem a tad circular (1974, page 36). H ­ owever, Lefebvre
argues that the production of space is never complete, never that there are no
­fractures in the relationship between space and the social order. As importantly,
once it has been produced, space then becomes productive of social relations.
Thus, socially produced space can act back on the social order, creating unex-
pected and surprising outcomes.
Indeed, Lefebvre recognised the significance of religious and spiritual ideas in
the production of space (e.g. 1974, page 40–41). We can see this both in his analy-
sis of the Judeao-Christian thought that underlies the western production of urban
space, but also through his discussion of the myths, symbols and language that
produce the lived experience of the body (as a space). Both the body and the city,
in Lefebvre’s view, are produced spaces that are constitutive of everyday life. As
such, they warrant critical analysis, for they are a product of power relations, and
therefore are political. Thus, we can say that Lefebvre supports the idea that space
is produced spiritually and that the production of spiritual space would actively
constitute and reconstitute the social order (though few have taken up this idea).
Yet, following Lefebvre, we must remember that spiritual space can also act back
on the social and the spatial in unexpected and surprising ways. In this section,
the chapters explore those unexpected and surprising ways in the context of the
spiritual production of social and political spaces.

Highways and byways

As Claire Dwyer observes, there has been a shift in geography away from dedicated
religious sites towards wider studies of the relationship between expressions of reli-
gion and everyday life. This has created an increasingly wider frame of reference
98  Steve Pile
for the study of religion and space. However, the increasing concern with everyday
life has begun to alter and expand both the ways everyday spaces are understood,
and also how religious practices, beliefs and ideas might intersect with the social
production of space. And, drawing out questions of spirituality (in and beyond reli-
gion) only adds to this. In her chapter, Dwyer explores a very mundane space: High-
way 99. In part, her focus is historical, exploring the siting of religious buildings
along the road. The road affords the opportunity to build churches, but what hap-
pens once those religious buildings are viewed along a highway? The proximity of
religious buildings has several effects: not only does it produce a spiritual landscape
curiously laminated to the prosaic experience of the commute and of the car, it also
renders that landscape diverse and, moreover, open to many Gods. This is paradoxi-
cal: on the one hand, it might suggest that no particular experience of expression of
the divine is dominant, yet on the other hand it democratizes the divine, making its
experiences and expressions more legitimate. In this way, the spiritual production
of suburban space maps on to the more familiar question of the cosmopolitanism
and heterogeneity of the city. Yet, under spiritual production, the space of the high-
way becomes as metaphysical as it is physical: not simply a mundane connection
between Place A and Place B, but a road to prayers and miracles, to goddesses and
God, and significantly to extraordinary experiences.
The unexpected diversity of religion and spirituality in particular places was
captured well by Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead’s foundational study of Ken-
dal’s spiritual landscape (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005). This unexpected diversity
found expression both in the range of spiritualities they discovered, and also in the
surprising places where that diversity could be spotted. Karin Tusting and Linda
Woodhead return to Kendal, asking what has been learned and what has changed
since the original fieldwork back in 2001–2002. On the one hand, the core thesis of
the original study has held. They identified two trends: one towards the decline of
‘official religion’ and the other towards the proliferation of alternative spiritualities.
If anything, they argue, they underestimated these trends. However, they identify
the rise of ‘no religion’ as particularly significant. Indeed, there is evidence that the
UK is now a majority ‘no religion’ country (according to the annual social survey
in 2017). The category of ‘no religion’ has become increasingly normalised, yet
its content – that is, what people mean by saying they are ‘no religion’ – is highly
diverse. Indeed, it is a reflection of the proliferation of different ways that people
choose to be spiritual. Surprisingly, then, Kendal may look increasingly unChris-
tian, but this does not mean it is less spiritual. Importantly, the spaces of spirituality
are proliferating and democratising, rather than being localised in the church.
This accords with Jennifer Lea’s research on yoga, which reveals how main-
stream yoga and yogic practices have now become. At the outset of their chapter,
Jennifer Lea, Chris Philo and Louise Cadman observe that the spaces of spiritual-
ity have proliferated in British cities, not just in the creation of centres for dif-
ferent religions and different kinds of spiritual practices, but also in the weaving
of spiritual practices into ordinary spaces, such as the workplace and the home.
Even so, they argue, witnessing this proliferation can overlook the small stuff
of spirituality in the production and experience of everyday life. To get at the
 The spiritual production of space 99
small stuff of spirituality, they explore the idea of stillness. In their hands, the
seeming boundary between spiritual life and modern life is rendered open and
unsustainable. Their study reveals how people utilise spiritually derived concep-
tual frameworks and practical techniques to manage the stresses and strains of
everyday life. Significantly, they can do so without even realising this is what
they are doing. Alongside the increasingly visible proliferation of spiritual ideas
that Tusting and Woodhead note, then, are the quieter and almost invisible uses of
spirituality in everyday life.
By witnessing the proliferation of religion and spirituality through the land-
scape and through everyday life, three things begin to happen. First, the seeming
secularity of modernity begins to unravel. Second, religion itself begins to turn
upside down, becoming less associated with its singular expression in a faith than
with its multiplicity and its connection to the worlds that lie beyond it (physically
and metaphysically). Third, the question of the political begins to become more
present as the spiritual construction of everyday life becomes more in evidence.

A world turned upside down

By creating a space where the dominant social order could be temporarily sus-
pended, by installing their own Kings and Queens and their own (im)moral order,
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1985) argue that the mediaeval Carnival turned
the world upside down. For this reason, they were banned or continued only in
highly proscribed and regulated forms. Even so, the impulse to suspend the social
and moral order so as to see the world from underneath, however temporarily,
remains. Religion, of course, can be seen as a constitutive or significant part of the
social order that needs to be transgressed or overturned. Yet, religion itself can be
used to negotiate (and survive), if not overturn exactly, the dominant social order
(which, as we know, can be immoral and irreligious).
Turning the analysis of religion on its head, Elizabeth Olson, Peter Hopkins and
Giselle Vincett explore the role of sacrilege in the production of youthful spiritu-
alities. Curiously, sacrilege reveals the different forms through which religious
thinking can enter young people’s lives. It shows that spirituality can be as easily
constructed out of an engagement with witchcraft, the occult, Satanism and vam-
pirism as out of the more authorised versions of Christianity. Significantly, Olson,
Hopkins and Vincett use the paradoxical phrase ‘connection across difference’
to describe one instance of the use of spirituality in everyday social encounters.
Thus, sacrilege and blasphemy should not necessarily be seen in opposition to
religious life, but as a way of negotiating it and of producing and inhabiting a
spiritual life. Indeed, shifting between alternative positions is a way for people to
define exactly where they want to be, spiritually. This shifting of positions is not
simply about navigating a map of fixed spiritual positions, but about creating new
spiritual maps; new spiritual maps that better account for, and help diagnose or
negotiate, people’s place in the world. What Olson, Hopkins and Vincett empha-
sise is the paradox that resistance to religion – through sacrilege and blasphemy –
actually becomes part and parcel of spirituality.
100  Steve Pile
Meanwhile, religion can act as a way to negotiate and resist the dominant social
order. Olivia Sheringham and Annabelle Wilkins show how migrants from Brazil
and Vietnam draw upon transnational religious connections to create a home for
themselves in London. Significantly, religion affords migrants the possibility of
creating a sense of belonging in an otherwise strange place. It does not do so
exclusively through its official or institutional forms, but also through informal
and everyday practices. This is doubly paradoxical: a religion on the margins of
the social order, experienced through its liminal everyday forms, provides a sense
of belonging in an alien social order. It can achieve this precisely because it oper-
ates in in-between spaces between the migrant experience and the place they find
themselves in. As importantly, the lived experience of religion and spirituality is
capable of connecting people back to a sense of place and home far away. In this
way, religion not so much turns the world on its head as enables it to be shaped
and moulded across distance, across borders, from underneath the social order. In
this sense, spirituality produces space in ways that can make it stretch and fold,
create home and belonging, as well as enable the difficulties of everyday migrant
life to be recognised, acknowledged and negotiated.
Everyday life, indeed, can be not just challenging, it can be harmful; it can be
deadly. Sat in the West, it can be easy to assume that the world is secularising and
that there is no place (literally) for religion and spirituality. Yet, Kim Beecheno’s
work starts with the religious conversion of women in low-income, high-crime
areas of Latin America. Her study of São Paula shows how women use religious
conversion to negotiate and challenge violence, and especially domestic violence.
This reveals a paradox: often religious conversion requires women to submit to a
highly patriarchal and conservative form of religion, yet this submission enables
women to side with those patriarchal and conservative power relations and turn
them against forms of violence, in the home and on the street. As Beecheno shows,
religious conversion does not guarantee that violence against women is stopped;
indeed, it can just as easily get worse. However, what this shows is how religion
can be swerved or inverted to produce effects opposite to those we might expect.
Paradoxically, in the moment of submission, religion can be empowering.
Moving away from religion in its institutional and official forms shows that
the spiritual production of space can act as a mode of critique of the social order
and of the production of everyday life; it can also be a resource for negotiating
everyday life, both its harms and enchantments; and, it is also generative of new
spaces, new forms of spirituality and new ways of inhabiting the world. In this, it
is political and transformative, as we show in the final section.

References
Heelas, P. and Woodhead, L. with Seel, B., Szerszynski, B. and Tusting, K., 2005, The Spir-
itual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Lefebvre, H., 1974 [1991], The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Stallybrass, J. and White, A., 1985, The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life. London:
Methuen.
7 Suburban miracles
Encountering the divine off
Highway 99
Claire Dwyer

Introduction
Along a three kilometre stretch of Number 5 Road, the road which marks the
eastern edge of the suburb of Richmond in Vancouver running parallel to the
interstate Highway 99, is a remarkable cluster of more than thirty diverse religious
buildings, including temples, churches, mosques and schools known locally as
Highway to Heaven (see Figure 7.1).1 This agglomeration of religious buildings
is the product of a local planning designation which provided space for religious
buildings on land reserved for agricultural production in a creative attempt to off-
set municipal responsibilities for land management and control suburban sprawl.
The scale and diversity of religious construction was unanticipated, however, cre-
ating an ‘accidental landscape of religious diversity’ (Dwyer et al. 2016: 5) in
this suburban edge-city of Vancouver. Highway to Heaven is celebrated locally
through a secular lens of multiculturalism, framing its diverse faith communi-
ties in a language of cultural rather than religious diversity. This is a framing not
necessarily rejected by the faithful themselves who may strategically use markers
of cultural diversity to access favourable planning outcomes, preferring that reli-
gious practice remains largely invisible in the public political domain. Yet field-
work with the diverse faith communities of Number 5 Road2 suggests another
reading of Highway to Heaven as a distinctive edge-city geography of spiritual-
ity shaped by religious belief and practice and animated through a ‘performative
presencing’ (Dewsbury and Cloke 2009: 696) of the sacred. These performative
practices are evident not only in the materialisation of religious buildings and
their animation as sacred, but also in accounts of the felt presence of the divine on
Number 5 Road. This chapter explores Number 5 Road, as a distinctive landscape
of spirituality manifest in the seemingly mundane, ordinary and functional spaces
of edge-city North American suburbia.
Geographies of religion have shifted from focusing on dedicated religious sites
to the ‘unofficially sacred’ (Kong 2001; Woods 2013) and to wider explorations of
the everyday geographies of spirituality (Bartolini et al. 2017; MacKian 2012). Yet
conventional worship space remains important, not least because of the symbolic
power of such buildings, particularly those of minority ethnic faiths and migrants
which are often contested through the normative values of planning legislation.
Figure 7.1 Map of Number 5 Road. Reproduced with kind permission of Miles Irving,
UCL Department of Geography.
 Suburban miracles 103
Nonetheless most studies, including some of my own, discuss ‘religious land-
scapes’ (Peach and Gale 2003) focusing on the institutional and architectural
dimensions of new religious buildings rather than engaging more directly with
the narratives and sensibilities of believers who use these buildings. In thinking
about Number 5 Road as a spiritual landscape, I have drawn from Dewsbury and
Cloke’s characterisation of spiritual landscapes as ‘co-constituting sets of rela-
tions of bodily existence, felt practice and faith in things that are immanent, but
not yet manifest’ (2009: 696). For Dewsbury and Cloke (2009: ibid.) spiritual
landscapes are ‘not just about religion, but open out spaces that can be inhabited
or dwelt, in different spiritual registers’. Dewsbury and Cloke (2009: ibid.) sug-
gest that a ‘performative presencing of some sense of spirit’ characterises the
spiritual. This term resonates with Julian Holloway’s understanding of embodied
spiritual practice and the performative realisation of ‘space-time as infused with
the divine that the faithful enact and continually re-presence’ (Holloway 2011:
399; Holloway 2003). These understandings of embodied spiritual practice are
echoed in recent explorations of the ‘ephemeral and affective geographies that
produce and are produced by embodied practices of prayer and worship’ (Wil-
liams 2016) and ‘embodied religiosity’ (Olson et al. 2013). In this chapter I use
the idea of ‘performative presencing’ in an exploration of both how the new wor-
ship spaces along Number 5 Road become sacred places and how the road itself
becomes a spiritual landscape.
In the first part of the chapter I  focus on how the different faith communi-
ties are engaged in creating meaningful sacred space in the suburban edge-city.
The diverse religious architectures of Number 5 Road are explored not simply as
material manifestations of religious identities but also as animated sacred spaces.
Responding to Lily Kong’s focus on ‘how place is sacrilized’ (Kong 2001: 213,
emphasis added) requires a recognition that ‘sacred space needs to be understood
not as a static thing, not as a disembodied set of practices of discourse, but as an
assemblage, always made or remade’ (Della Dora 2016: 23). Starting by outlin-
ing different approaches to the engineering of affective sacred space by differ-
ent faith communities, I move to focusing on the role of practice in rendering
these spaces spiritually active. The second part of the chapter explores the wider
geographies of Number 5 Road, suggesting ways in which spatialities and tempo-
ralities are unsettled by the faithful in the making of a distinctive ‘spiritual’ land-
scape through the performative presencing of the divine in the ordinary everyday
spaces of the edge-city. Finally, I reflect on the implications of taking seriously the
extraordinary and the miraculous in the midst of the mundane and the ordinary.
The chapter begins with a brief contextualising account of the history of the pres-
ence of diverse faith communities on Number 5 Road.

Highway to Heaven: the creation of a multicultural

religious landscape
Part of metro Vancouver, the city of Richmond is located to the South of downtown
Vancouver and adjacent to the Fraser River and international airport. Established
as an agricultural municipality in the 1860s, although also the site of a salmon
104  Claire Dwyer
canning industry which recruited Japanese and Chinese labour migrants, the city
has grown rapidly since the 1990s and has an estimated population of 213,891.3
Richmond is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in Canada, with 70.4% of
the population defined as a ‘visible minority’, the majority identifying as ‘Chi-
nese’ (47%) while 8% identify as ‘South Asian’.4 The substantial population of
those with Chinese ethnicity reflects transnational migration circuits from Hong
Kong, China and Taiwan particularly since 1997 (Ley 2010), and the emergence
of Asian-themed shopping malls and restaurants in Richmond has prompted its
description as an ‘ethnoburb’ (Li 2009; Pottie-Sherman and Hiebert 2015). Many
of the more recent religious buildings along Number 5 Road were established by
Chinese immigrants, including three Buddhist temples and four Chinese-language
Christian Churches. However, religious institutions along Number 5 Road include
a Sikh Gurdwara, two Hindu temples and two mosques as well as Jewish, Muslim
and Christian schools.
The earliest buildings on Number 5 Road are churches established in the 1970s.
The oldest non-Christian institution was the British Columbia Muslim Associa-
tion (BCMA) Mosque which bought land in 1976 although their mosque did not
receive planning permission until 1982. In the 1980s facilities were established
by Sikh and Hindu communities prior to the completion of purpose built temples
in the early 1990s.5 In 1990 Richmond Council created a new land use category
which designated part of the eastern side of Number 5 Road as an area zoned for
‘Assembly Use’, a category that specifically included religious institutions and
religious schools. This new planning designation required any religious commu-
nities building on the road to maintain a proportion of their land in agricultural
use to satisfy the requirements of British Columbia’s Agricultural Land Reserve
policy. The planning policy effectively created Number 5 Road’s distinctive reli-
gious landscape with faith communities choosing to relocate there because of the
favourable planning environment, even if the agricultural stipulations were less
attractive (see Dwyer et al. 2016).
Since the 1990s faith communities which have re-located to Number 5 Road
include:

• a mosque, Az-Zahraa Islamic Centre and school which opened in 2002

• the Fujian Evangelical Church, a church started by Canadians of Filipino-
Chinese descent
• several churches founded by Hong Kong Chinese migrants, including the
Richmond Evangelical Free Church (Figure 7.2), Peace Evangelical Church
and the Richmond Chinese Mennonite Brethren Church
• The Lingyen Mountain Buddhist temple (Figure 7.3), a Pure Land Taiwanese
origin Buddhist temple in traditional style opened in 1999
• Dharma Drum Buddhist temple opened in 2006 (Figure 7.4)
• the Thrangu Tibetan monastery, another traditional style building opened in
2010
• Smaller communities include the South Indian Subramaniya Swamy temple
and the Plymouth Brethren Meeting Hall.
 Suburban miracles 105

Figure 7.2  Richmond, Evangelical Free Church, Number 5 Road.

Source: Claire Dwyer.

Figure 7.3  Lingyen Mountain Temple.

Source: Claire Dwyer.
106  Claire Dwyer

Figure 7.4  Dharma Drum Mountain Temple.

Source: Claire Dwyer.

The result is a diversification of the edge-city where an agricultural landscape of

blueberry farms is now punctuated with the gleaming spires and minarets of a gur-
dwara, a mosque and the ornate roofs of Chinese temples (Figure 7.5). Although
largely celebrated as evidence of an emblematic Canadian multiculturalism, there
is local opposition to the increasing scale of some new buildings (see Dwyer et al.
2016). Number 5 Road features in local official tourist literature as an interesting
site of ‘cultural’ diversity, and ‘cultural tours’ of the neighbourhood are arranged
several times a year by the local museum. Some limited attempts have been made
to develop inter-faith initiatives recognising the particular opportunities provided
by proximity (see Dwyer et al. 2013a; Agrawal 2015). It is this proximity of dif-
ferent faith communities and institutions which I want to engage more explicitly
in this chapter by raising the possibility that Number 5 Road might also be nar-
rated as a distinctive spiritual landscape.

Building the sacred: animating suburban architectures

Visitors to Number 5 Road are most likely to encounter its religious landscape
from a car window as they drive along a four-lane highway. Drawing on our typol-
ogy for framing suburban religious geographies (Dwyer et al. 2013b), Number 5
 Suburban miracles 107

Figure 7.5 Number 5 Road showing India Cultural Centre (Gurdwara) [on right] and Az-
Zaharra Mosque [on left].
Source: Claire Dwyer.

Road is a distinctive ‘edge-city faith’ landscape of drive-in churches and temples

with large car parks for its faith-commuters. If work on suburban megachurches
(Wilford 2012) has emphasised the ways in which such new religious formations
have reworked the mobility and transience which characterises the edge-city, for
transnational faith communities the suburban fringe offers expansive sites for
new purpose-built worship spaces which may act as regional centres (Shah et al.
2012). For the faith communities on Number 5 Road the primary reason for their
location is because of the ‘assembly district’ zoning. The advantages of this edge-
city location, such as space for more expansive facilities and parking and proxim-
ity to the highway, are off-set by the challenges of a location outside the main city
which is hard to reach by public transport and affords little immediate connection
with the local neighbourhood.
Number 5 Road’s unusual planning designation, which has mitigated some
of the planning difficulties facing communities elsewhere, has produced a reli-
gious landscape made up entirely of relatively new purpose-built facilities, all
built by fundraising within faith communities. Against the characterisation of
this as a touristic site, even a ‘Disney-land’6 of religious diversity, we sought to
explore how faith communities engaged with this edge-city landscape to produce
108  Claire Dwyer
a meaningful, perhaps a ‘sacred’ space for religious practice. Research with the
diverse faith communities along Number 5 Road suggested three broad architec-
tural approaches: a functional approach to a purpose-built facility, the reproduc-
tion of a traditional form of religious architecture in this new suburban context
and a new form of architectural innovation which might engage explicitly with the
local context. The production of a meaningful religious place may be architectural
in the self-conscious engineering of affective sacred spaces (Gilbert et al. 2016)
but also reveals the salience of religious practices in rendering a new space of
worship spiritually active.
The churches along Number 5 Road blend in effortlessly to an edge-city subur-
ban vernacular architecture of office parks or large houses. They are brick or con-
crete built with very little ornamentation, usually by local architects and builders
who also build residential and commercial buildings, and identified by commercial-
like signs from the highway. For their communities, this is intentional. As the pastor
at the Richmond Evangelical Free Church explains: ‘[Our church is] pretty plain,
but the primary thought behind it was to have a place that was functional . . . to
create a space that could be used for multiple purposes’. Similarly the pastor at
Peace Evangelical Church describes his church as ‘it’s very functional. We are not
the kind of church that pursue our look. Because the true definition of the church
is the people’. These functional buildings are sometimes described in contrast to
the more elaborate buildings of their neighbours (the Thrangu Tibetan Monastery
is immediately adjacent to the Richmond Evangelical Free Church) and a reflec-
tion of careful use of resources: ‘we need to be financially responsible’. For these
evangelical faith communities the narration of their building as a functional space
reflects their theology – that it is the faith community, the people, which consti-
tutes their Christian witness.7 As the pastor at the Richmond Mennonite Brethren
Church reiterates: ‘Jesus is in the building, Jesus is not the building’. Location on
Number 5 Road is a pragmatic choice, facilitating space for large churches with
purpose-built auditoriums for Sunday gatherings of up to 500 people and large
parking spaces since everyone arrives by car (see Figure 7.2).
If these churches seem to mirror the functional landscape of the edge-city,
these buildings are none the less different from their secular counterparts in their
divine intention. The pastor of Peace Evangelical Church describes a large dona-
tion from a practitioner in Hong Kong which allowed completion of the church
as ‘miraculous’, emphasising that the church was spiritually ordained. Similarly,
other pastors described their foundation as being led by the Holy Spirit. Our inter-
views also revealed some theological reflections on the ways in which buildings
might have some role in shaping worship practice. The pastor of the Richmond
Evangelical Free Church reflected: ‘there is something to be said about worship
in a place that is awe-filled. There’s certainly a dialogue of the younger evan-
gelicals now about the importance of art and trying to recover that’. Nonetheless
for the Christian communities on Number 5 Road their juxtaposition alongside
more ornate places of worship from other faith traditions produces a reiteration
of a theological approach to understanding places of worship as functional spaces
for groups to gather. Participation in services was to understand the powerful
 Suburban miracles 109
affective dimensions of collective worship using music, bible study and spontane-
ous unscripted prayer to create a temporal presencing of the divine within largely
plain and functional spaces. The spirit moved within these ordinary spaces.
Perhaps more surprisingly, the three older diasporic faith communities on
Number 5 Road, the BCMA mosque, the Vedic Cultural Centre and the Indian
Cultural Centre/Gurdwara Guru Nanak Niwas also framed their buildings through
a discourse which emphasised functionality over distinctive religious architec-
tures. The chair of the BCMA explains that when their mosque was built in 1982,
‘money was so scare they were just trying to get an ordinary building’. Subse-
quently the association network has built more modern and experimental mosques
in Vancouver’s outer suburbs which respond to local vernacular architectures or
environmental issues. However an emphasis remains, like the evangelical Chris-
tians, upon a building as simply a space for Muslims to gather.
The Vedic Cultural Centre is a two-storey pink concrete building which houses
a sanctuary for Hindu deities on the second floor and rooms below for meetings,
eating and yoga as well as accommodation for resident priests. With the exception
of some Hindu signage on the front of the building there is little to distinguish
the building as a site of Hindu worship. One of the founders of the Centre, which
opened in 1998, describes an explicit intention to create a building which ‘did not
look like a temple’. Instead, she explains, ‘We wanted to call it multicultural so
that everybody feels comfortable coming here. We wanted it to look like a cultural
centre’, emphasising the guidance of their spiritual leader Swami Chakradhari.
The religious geographies of this space are evident, however, once inside, with the
first floor of the temple designated a ‘sacred space’ where being in the presence of
the deities requires removing shoes and only those properly initiated within prac-
tice can be involved in worship or food preparation. The Vedic Cultural Centre
was founded by Fijian Indian migrants although it now attracts a diverse range of
worshippers of Indian heritage. The success of the temple in attracting devotees
is understood by its founders as evidence of its efficacy as a sacred site of Hindu
worship so that ‘the temple is like a god itself’. The Vedic Cultural Centre thus
emerges as a powerfully active site of religious worship where cumulative prac-
tice and devotion have animated and strengthened the sacredness of the space.
The naming and external architectural style of the Vedic Cultural Centre reflects
the founders’ desire to engage wider publics, but this is not a ‘secular’ framing of
religious identity and practice, and the temple within the building is understood
by its worshippers as sacred space through the efficacy of the deities within.
At the Gurdwara Guru Nanak Niwas, also named the Indian Cultural Centre
of Canada, a somewhat similar positioning was evident although for different
reasons. Opened as a new purpose-built gurdwara in 1993, the Number 5 Road
gurdwara is narrated by its founders as a direct successor to two earlier Sikh tem-
ples in Vancouver; the first Sikh temple in Vancouver, a wooden structure which
opened on Second Avenue, central Vancouver in 1909 and the Ross Street gurd-
wara which was designed by celebrated Canadian architect Arthur Erikson and
opened in the 1970s. Tracing their ancestry to the pioneer generation of Sikh
migrants who came to work in the lumber industry in British Columbia in the
110  Claire Dwyer
1880s, many of those who founded the Number 5 Road gurdwara had also been
involved in establishing the Ross Street gurdwara. However conflict over reli-
gious practices between these second and third generation Indo-Canadians and
more recent Indian migrants centred on the wearing of turbans and beards and
the use of tables and chairs in the langhar (eating) halls (see Nayar 2010) had
prompted a split within that gurdwara and the quest for a new site. Establish-
ing the Number 5 Road gurdwara as a private organization named the ‘Indian
Cultural Centre’ safeguarded its members against attempts to change its religious
norms and practices by new migrants who were described as not understanding
‘Canadian values, [they] did not understand multiculturalism’. The building itself
was designed pragmatically to hold large numbers for gatherings like weddings
or holy days, and there were insufficient resources at this third temple for more
innovative architecture.
The relatively plain concrete structure, distinguished only by a large exterior
painting of the Guru Nanak and a gold dome, was also described as a sensible
architectural response to the Canadian environment. Their chairmen compared
their own modern, air-conditioned building with another gurdwara in Richmond
(Guru Nanaksar Gurskih Gurwara on Westminister Highway) built in a traditional
Punjabi style with an elaborate painted façade, and now deteriorating due to its
unsuitability for the climate. The gurdwara on Number 5 Road is thus a religious
building which communicates a particular understanding of a distinctively Cana-
dian Sikh identity for its members. Inside the building, like most gurdwaras, it is
the presence of Sikh priests who come on short term visas from India as religious
workers (as they do at the Vedic Cultural Centre) which ensures an authentic reli-
gious experience to a large and diverse membership for whom the gurdwara is a
communal as well as a religious space. Thus the ‘functional’ approach to building
religious buildings on Number 5 Road might be understood somewhat differently
for some non-Christian faith communities. The ‘edge-city’ opportunities allowing
large assembly room space and parking remain important, but plain or utilitarian
building styles mark an explicit choice to blend in with a suburban, Canadian
vernacular articulated through a language of multiculturalism. Nonetheless, it is
through practice (as discussed in greater detail below) that such spaces become
spiritually animated.
In contrast to the assimilationist aesthetic which characterizes the Vedic Cul-
tural Centre and the gurdwara, two of the Buddhist temples on Number 5 Road
are characterised by their reproduction of a traditional form of religious archi-
tecture – the Lingyen Mountain Temple, a pure land Buddhist Temple (opened
in 1999) and the Thrangu Tibetan Monastery which opened in 2010. Lingyen
was built as a sister temple to the Ling Yen Shan monastery in Taiwan founded
by Master Miao Lien in 1984 and is home to a resident community of mainly
Taiwanese monks and nuns. Built in traditional Chinese-style (see Figure 7.3), the
temple was built by Canadian architects to ensure it met local building and envi-
ronmental regulations. For the temple’s predominantly Chinese worshippers, who
are from Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China, the temple represents both
a familiar space within which religious practices are maintained and a spiritual
 Suburban miracles 111
anchor for more recent migrants – daily visitors offer prayers and light incense
sticks as they share their petitions. Resident monks, most Taiwanese, offer regular
retreats and instruction. Lingyen’s efficacy as a religious space, explained by the
success of the petitions of the faithful, has produced controversy as the num-
bers of visitors have increased and the temple’s successive attempts to build a
much larger traditional style temple have been rejected (see Dwyer et al. 2016;
Dwyer 2017b).
Thrangu Tibetan Monastery is the newest building on Number 5 Road and the
largest. The building is described by its Canadian architects and builders as a ‘full
emulation’ of a temple in Tibet, a reproduction which was only possible through
the creative use of steel, glass reinforced concrete and fibre-glass to recreate the
appearance of ‘authenticity’ (Dwyer 2017a). The ambitious building was funded
by wealthy Hong Kong Chinese donors and was built under the instruction of the
resident monastic community. This instruction ensured that the spiritual capaci-
ties of the building were foundational in its construction with different stages of
construction marked by key rituals which involved both blessing the foundations
but also embedding sacred offerings into the building. Days prior to the opening
ceremony the monks related that a ‘miracle’ had occurred in the temple – that
several of the small ‘medicine buddhas’ (a devotional object of healing) housed in
cases along the sides of the main shrine hall had been inexplicably moved.8 The
miraculous movement served to effectively sanctify the new building as a site of
worship and pilgrimage, to authenticate a new Tibetan Monastery described by its
founders as the first ‘traditional-style Tibetan Monastery in North America’.9 At
both Lingyen Mountain Temple and Thrangu Tibetan Monastery the authority of
such spaces as religious is conferred through their traditional architectural style
which carefully emulates a foundational temple elsewhere. Interestingly, in the
case of the Thrangu Monastery the founders were able to gain a relaxation in local
planning regulations concerning the scale of new buildings in the Assembly Dis-
trict precisely by invoking the religious authenticity of their building style. These
‘traditional- style’ buildings are those which have also attracted most external
attention on Number 5 Road given their ‘exotic’ appearance – both favourably as
new sites of cultural tourism and more controversially in relation to local residents
who have opposed the scale of suburban change (see Dwyer et al. 2016).
Despite their narration as ‘authentic’ reproductions, it could be argued that both
Lingyen and Thrangu are somewhat hybrid spaces since the replication of a tra-
ditional style requires a creative engagement by their builders in response to the
challenges of the local environmental and planning context (see Dwyer, 2017b;
Shah et al. 2012). However, this is not part of the narrative by which these reli-
gious spaces are understood by their followers. In contrast, a final two examples
of the architectural making of religious space on Number 5 Road are more sug-
gestive of a narrative of architectural innovation. The Az-Zahraa Mosque which
opened in 2002 is an imposing structure built in a recognisable Islamic style with
minarets and a green painted dome. The Shia Muslim community which built the
building are an ethno-religious community of East-African Asian migrants who
trace their ancestry as a Khoja community to Gujurat.
112  Claire Dwyer
Describing the architectural style of the building, a member explained: ‘as
a Shi’a community, we looked towards some of the Saudi Arabian, and more
commonly, Iraqi and Persian styles of architecture and took a little bit from each
of them. So our two minarets mirror the appearance of minarets in a mosque
in Najaf, Iraq, the Imam Ali Shrine. The dome mirrors the Prophet’s mosque in
Medina – the Green Dome. The dome is actually solid copper, but we painted
it green’. The mosque hall also includes fourteen windows, inspired by Persian
stained glass, with Arabic inscriptions representing the Prophet, his daughters and
progeny. The building is similar in intent then to the traditional-style Buddhist
temples in evoking foundational religious buildings elsewhere but is more self-
conscious in how this hybrid style is narrated. The community was also innova-
tive in building a mezzanine floor to the main prayer hall which enabled women
to hear sermons without compromising norms of gender segregation for worship
practice. ‘Essentially they’re in the same room’, suggested one respondent. There
is, however, no particular attempt to engage with the specific local context and
the resulting building is comparable to some of the other large ‘boxy’ religious
institutions on the road.10 For this Muslim community the building mirrors their
transnational, diasporic identity evident in transnational worship practices includ-
ing sermons conveyed via video link and the use of technology to link them to
communities elsewhere.
Perhaps the only building on Number 5 Road whose architectural style is inno-
vative and more explicitly engaged with its local context is the Dharma Drum
Monastery. This modern, purpose-built Buddhist monastery was built in 2006,
for a largely Taiwanese speaking community inspired by the traditions of Master
Sheng Yen. The building was built by a Vancouver construction firm, Kindred,
whose specialisms included exclusive private residences in Vancouver, innovative
designs like the ‘floating boathouse’ for the University of British Columbia and
renovation of the Dr Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver’s down-
town Chinatown.11 The monastery is a low building, described as ‘California-
style’ by the Kindred building director. A spokesperson for Dharma Drum con-
trasts her own monastery with other Buddhist Monasteries on Number 5 Road:
‘it’s actually a bit different in terms of its construction. It’s very simple. As
opposed to the other temples they’re more fancy, more decorative’. Describing
the building, which is made of wood with intersecting verandas, she explains: ‘In
terms of the Dharma Drum Mountain, what we wanted to show was simplicity,
more natural. The wood, it’s all natural colours, having the windows so the natural
light can come in. And that was important in terms of environmental issues’.
For the community at Dharma Drum, which has resident monks offering retreats
for practitioners to learn ritual drumming and meditation, the architectural style of
the centre is described as ‘just a very simple, modern and clean. It’s just what we
practice here is basically, just making life simpler. So it’s something very simple
and hopefully with a design like this we hope to bring more calm and peace to
us and maybe for people that come in and just experience that tranquility’. The
Dharma Drum Monastery is an interesting hybrid space whose approach to reli-
gious and spiritual practice is articulated through an architectural style which is
attenuated to a local vernacular and narrated through an environmental theology.
 Suburban miracles 113
Analysing the architectural styles of religious buildings along Number 5 Road,
suggests differences of aesthetics which may be described as ‘functional’, ‘tradi-
tional’ or more ‘innovative’ or ‘hybrid’, which were sometimes linked to particular
discourses of belief or theology. The distinctive geographies of Number 5 Road
in terms of its ‘edge-city’ location were engaged by the faith communities primar-
ily in terms of the extent to which they facilitated larger facilities with plenty of
space for car parking. The notion of a ‘frontier space’12 for new building echoes
more secular discourses of speculative suburban-fringe development (Peck 2011)
with large religious facilities consistent with existing suburban sprawl architec-
ture. However, as I have suggested above, even the most functional of these reli-
gious spaces is rendered ‘sacred’, whether through ritual practice or the temporary
presencing of the divine in collective worship. In the next section I explore further
both how practices were understood by the faithful and how such ‘performative
presencing’ creates the spiritual landscape of Number 5 Road.

Performing the suburban sacred: prayers,

miracles and presence
Researching the histories and experiences of the diverse faith communities on
Number 5 Road was often to experience a shift in register from the physical to the
metaphysical as respondents shared their experiences and understandings of these
religious spaces. Through these moments, I came to interpret Number 5 Road dif-
ferently – as a landscape made spiritually meaningful through the performances
of believers. This performativity is sometimes formal, part of regular authorised
religious rituals, but also sometimes more spontaneous or unruly. Such moments,
related through a series of vignettes from my fieldwork, offer an insight into infor-
mal and everyday experiences of faith communities on Number 5 Road.
As I suggested above the ordinary exterior of the Vedic Cultural Centre masks the
dynamic spiritual activity of the Hindu temple within. Visiting the temple, an elderly
devotee explains to me that the venue is animated both by the presence of the deities
but also by the ritual pujas that took place the previous day. She explains:

The energy stays, we have the energy from the Sunday and you can feel that
energy, it stays here all week, it settles like the dust from construction work.

On several visits to the Subramaniya Swany Temple, a temple following South

Indian traditions of Hinduism, devotees tell me about the miracles which have
happened in the temple when the temple goddess has walked leaving footprints
in the powder around the shrine or the guru has expelled a sacred stone. A young
professional woman I talk to during an evening puja recounts her own experience:

I know it’s hard to comprehend when you’re educated and everything, but
once I was here, and the kitchen door just opened, and you felt a presence.

Such accounts by believers gave some insight into the ‘affective atmospheres
of the sacred or the divine’ (Holloway 2013: 205) through which beliefs were
114  Claire Dwyer
strengthened and sacred sites were animated. When the deities (imported from
India) were first installed in the Subramaniya temple, a forty-day cycle of rituals
was required so that, as one participant explains to me, their ‘faculties’ might be
enabled (see also Dempsey 2006). Once the gods are properly installed in the
temple, a small wooden built temporary building dwarfed by its more imposing
neighbours, their power and efficacy is evident for the faithful, as the miracles
attest.
While buildings are animated, sometimes this spiritual presence can also be
extended to the surrounding neighbourhood. Visiting the Lingyen Mountain tem-
ple, I witnessed an unusual performance which prompted reflection. Visitors to
the temple typically enter the threshold of the temple space by making an offering
and burning an incense stick. Instead a visitor took the proffered incense sticks
and after he bowed first towards the Buddha shrine, then turned and bowed with
his burning incense outward towards the Number 5 Highway. Witnessing his
action I was intrigued, questioning whether this action was an inclusive gesture
or suggested a more proselytising intent towards the suburban neighbourhood.
Whichever was true, for my Chinese Christian companion this was an undeniably
powerful gesture which risked ‘opening up metaphysical or spiritual pathways
which may not be benign’, a recognition of the agency of these incense vapours
as they travelled out into the highway.
In its different forms – spontaneous, read directly from a sacred text, chanted,
sung, organised, collective or individual – prayer was central to religious life
on Number 5 and was an important means through which the divine was made
present. For worshippers at Richmond Evangelical Free Church, collective and
spontaneous prayer produced the collective strength to send off a mission group
gathered at a church service before setting off to Mexico in 2010. The efficacy of
prayer can also extend beyond the church, and believers at the Richmond Bethel
Church are encouraged to pray with and for neighbours and co-workers while a
‘dinner ministery’ at the church will provide a space of sharing Christian beliefs
with visitors. All of the evangelical churches on the road were keen to develop
networks of local prayer groups beyond the Sunday service as a means to support
their ministeries.
An unguarded comment from some young people at one of the Chinese
churches provided an intriguing example of prayer and performance – they admit-
ted they had organised a secret ‘prayer walk’ along Number 5 Road as a means
to symbolically reclaim the street for Christianity in the wake of the building of
the new Thrangu Monastery. While their actions invoke a long tradition of prayer
walking (Megoran 2010; Maddrell 2013; Middleton and Yarwood 2015), this was
an unauthorised activity which they had concealed from the elders at their church
since it would almost certainly have been forbidden. On another occasion visit-
ing the Lingyen Mountain temple an older Chinese lady who acted as an usher at
the shrine was keen to share the many CDs which were sold at the temple which
had recordings of Buddhist chanting from the temple. She explained that she kept
them in her car and would play the chant when driving to the temple as a means
to both prepare herself for her visit and also to create a sacred space of a journey
 Suburban miracles 115
towards the temple. She raised the spectacle of many different drivers in cars
which were mobile prayer spaces opening up an interconnected set of spiritual
networks, trajectories and pathways converging on and emanating from Number
5 Road.
These diverse snippets from discussions with believers along Number 5 Road
produce a more dynamic understanding of Highway to Heaven as a spiritual land-
scape animated through the religious rituals, beliefs and practices of its diverse
faith communities. The spiritual processes and powers engaged by believers
challenge the normative temporalities and spatialities of Number 5 Road both in
extending the boundaries of the space of the spiritual and by animating the wider
landscapes of the edge-city. Relating them engages the ‘lived religion’ of those
who worship on Number 5 Road. Writing about belief in miracles, Robert Orsi
(1997: 12) explains that ‘religion comes into being in an ongoing and dynamic
relationship with the realities of everyday life’. For some believers along Num-
ber 5 Road, the everyday suburban landscape is simultaneously imbued with the
miraculous, the supernatural and the sacred. It was thus that emerging from the
Plymouth Brethren Hall after staying late after a service and finding the carpark
empty, my companions were to joke that such moments provoke the fear that ‘the
Rapture’13has taken place without their inclusion!

Conclusion: enchanting suburban geographies

My first encounter with Number 5 Road was an online blog written by a local tour-
ist from Vancouver who expressed her joy and enchantment in a chance encounter
with the unexpected religious diversity in her familiar urban environment. Her
experiences were echoed in the narrative of a devotee at Lingyen Mountain Tem-
ple, a white Canadian businessman with no prior foundation in Buddhist prac-
tice, who explained: ‘I was literally just driving by and thought: what a beautiful
place’. Much of the public discourse about Number 5 Road which suggests that
this is landscape of extraordinary and ‘spectacular multiculturalism’ (Dwyer et al.
2016: 17) also engages metaphors of enchantment. The philosopher Jane Bennett
(2001: 5) defines: ‘to be enchanted is to participate in a momentarily immobilis-
ing encounter, it is to be transfixed, spellbound . . . to be struck and shaken by the
extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday’. Evoking Bennett’s
notion of ‘enchantment’, Julian Holloway argues that ‘instead of focusing our
accounts upon sacred space and times separate from the geographies and tem-
poralities of our everyday . . . we should seek out the extraordinary as practised
and sustained in the ordinary’ (2003: 1961). While Number 5 Road is unusual in
its religious diversity, this chapter has tried to illustrate the juxtaposition of the
mundane and the miraculous in this functional edge-city landscape to illustrate
a spiritual landscape where the ‘extraordinary can be made out of the ordinary’
(Gilbert 2012: 140).
The unusual proximity of different faith communities along Number 5 Road
inevitably provoked reflection for its diverse inhabitants. The overarching nar-
rative is of both peaceful co-existence (exemplified in the sharing of parking
116  Claire Dwyer
facilities) and of somewhat passive co-location. Exacerbated by an edge-city loca-
tion heavily dependent upon automobility, our respondents told us: ‘we’re in our
own little worlds’; ‘we just drive in and drive out’. For some the proximity of
other faiths is an opportunity to acknowledge shared or syncretic belief systems.
The Buddhists, Sikhs and the Hindus were most likely to visit each other’s place
of worship while most of the non-Christian worship spaces participate in school
visits or tours. There is a certain pride in ownership of the colloquial name for
Highway to Heaven, as one of the Sikh elders suggests: ‘God lives here in No. 5
Road’.
However, this presencing of the divine by so many different groups in close
proximity can also provoke uncertainty. The impetuous prayer walk by young
evangelical Christians would have been a source of embarrassment had it been
made public, for it exposes the contradictions of Number 5 for some communities.
Some respondents agreed that to find themselves beside so many other different
faith traditions prompted reflection and even challenge. The pastor the Richmond
Bethel Church explained:

I enjoy being on the street. I love the fact [that] the gospel, from my per-
spective, can be spoken, practiced, lived in an avenue where there’s variety.
There’s a smorgasbord of faith. I don’t think that dilutes the gospel.

Another pastor found the juxtaposition more challenging and confusing in a tell-
ing comment which provided an insight into how he understood the dynamism of
this unusual spiritual landscape:

I sometimes think about the spiritual implications . . . there’s so much air-

waves in a sense if you think of prayers. . . . One can’t help but wonder does
that really affect our effectiveness? Just being surrounded by all the others?

This depiction of the overcrowded spiritual airways of Number 5 Road, filled with
prayers and intercessions, drum beats and chanting, incense vapours and smoke,
provides an intriguing metaphor for a distinctive spiritual landscape shaped by
‘the agency of gods’ (Chakrabarty 1997: 35). Number 5 Road is certainly an
unusual and distinctive religious landscape shaped by planning, real estate and
the aspirations of diverse transnational faith communities. In this chapter I have
sought to trace the ways in which this is also a distinctive spiritual landscape of
the edge-city animated by everyday lived experiences of the Spirit and encounters
with the divine. Echoing the possibilities of finding the ‘extraordinary in the ordi-
nary’ (Gilbert 2012; Holloway 2003), the mundane landscape of the ‘edge-city’
emerges as an extraordinary landscape of spirituality.

Notes
1 The starting point for this chapter was my keynote lecture to Geographies of Reli-
gion and Belief Systems Specialty Group, Annual Conference of the Association of
 Suburban miracles 117
American Geographers, Seattle (April 2011). ‘Encountering the Divine in W7 and off
Highway 99: stories of the suburban sacred.’ A later version of the paper was given
at the session ‘Investigating the Anthropo-Unseen: Mapping the Paranormal, the
Extraordinary and the Unknown’ at the Annual Conference of the RGS-IBG, Exeter,
August 2015. I’m grateful to the audiences on both occasions as well as Justin Tse,
Julian Holloway, David Gilbert, Betsy Olson and Steve Pile for helpful discussions of
some of the arguments explored in this chapter.
2 Research was conducted between 2010 and 2012 and funded by Metropolis Canada
(Grant Reference 12R47822). Work was undertaken in collaboration with Professor
David Ley and Dr Justin Tse. The paper draws on archival and documentary sources,
interviews and participant observation at all the religious buildings along Number 5
Road. See Dwyer et al. 2013a for more details of the methodology and research design.
3 Estimated population from 2011 Household Survey, which is a substantial increase
on the Census total (2006) of 175,000. The 2016 census data will be released in
2017. (Richmond City Hall: www.richmond.ca/discover/about/profile.htm Accessed
20/10/16).
4 www.richmond.ca/__shared/assets/2006_Ethnicity20987.pdf Accessed 20/10/16.
‘Visible minority’ is the category used by Statistics Canada to refer to those ‘who are
non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour and who do not report being Aboriginal’.
5 For a detailed history of the settlement of faith communities on Number 5 Road see
Dwyer et al. 2013a.
6 ‘Say No to Buddha Disneyland’ Letter from Carol Day to the Editor, Richmond News,
29 September 2010.
7 A further elaboration of this theological position in relation to architecture is provided
by the Plymouth Brethren Community, who have a small meeting hall on Number 5
Road which has no external signage beyond a bible text and is named only as ‘The
meeting hall’.
8 Notes from fieldwork at opening of the Thrangu Monastery, 25 July 2010. Richmond
News, 28 July 2010.
9 While its religious authentication may be confirmed by this process, the Thrangu Mon-
astery may also be understood as a space which is more contested in geopolitical terms,
serving as a space of religious and communal identity for both a Chinese-Canadian
community of practitioners and an émigré Tibetan community who share very different
backgrounds and political outlooks (see Dwyer 2017a).
10 There is an interesting contrast with another mosque built by a sister community in
Harrow in north-London, where the same narratives of foundation in Persia are traced
more self-consciously through India and Africa to London in the hybrid architectural
style of the building (see Dwyer 2015).
11 Kindred also built the Thrangu Tibetan Monastery, partly as an outcome of their suc-
cess at Dharma Drum monastery.
12 Entirely absent in any of our interviews was any discussion of the possibility of the
land developed for new religious buildings having any prior sacred meaning. This was
interesting given the contested status of ‘Garden City Lands’, a neighbouring plot of
land owned by the City Council whose re-development had been challenged by First
Nations Groups.
13 The Rapture refers to the belief (drawn from a reading of St Paul in the New Testament,
1 Thessalonians 4: 15–17) in an event when all born-again Christians will be gathered
together to meet Christ on his return.

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8 Kendal Revisited
The study of spirituality then and
now
Karin Tusting and Linda Woodhead

In the year 2000, as the new millennium began and before the twin towers of New
York had fallen, a team of five researchers began a study of religion and spiritual-
ity in the market town of Kendal, Cumbria, in the north of England – population
at the time 27,000. Two of that team, Karin and Linda, are responsible for this
chapter.
We chose Kendal not because it was unusual, but because it was a rather typi-
cal market town in England outside of the South East. Sitting on the edge of the
Lake District it is usually bypassed by tourists, but is remote enough to be self-
contained and large enough to have its own amenities – schools, a college, and
a hospital. In demographic terms like age and class it did not have any particu-
larly unusual features compared with other English towns. In ethnic and religious
terms, it was not very diverse and was very ‘white British’ with a Christian herit-
age and 25 functioning churches and chapels.
The Kendal Project took two years, and three years after that it resulted in a
book, The Spiritual Revolution (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005). The book’s subti-
tle – Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality – summed up the main findings:
that organised religion as represented by the Christian churches and chapels of
Kendal was declining and that new forms of holistic spirituality were growing.
It was the sheer quantity and vitality of the latter which was the project’s most
surprising and important finding: there were 126 separate ‘mind, body, spirit’-
oriented groups and one-to-one offerings, even when we excluded those which
said they did not have any spiritual purpose. They ranged from Yoga to Reiki to
spiritual dancing to various forms of meditation.
The book predicted that if current trends continued, churchgoing in Britain
would decline from over 7% to around 3% of the population by 2030. It said
that active, regular participation in the ‘holistic milieu’ would increase from the
roughly 1.5% of the population found in Kendal to about 3% of the British popu-
lation in the same period. And so it predicted that by 2050 the ‘holistic milieu’
would start to overtake the ‘congregational domain’.
Looking back from over a decade later (2017), these predictions have largely
held good, and the significance of spirituality has been much more widely
acknowledged. Churchgoing in Britain has declined as predicted. By 2015 it was
down to 5% of the population, with no sign of bottoming out. Spirituality has
 Kendal Revisited 121
achieved a much higher profile in Britain than when the study took place (today
it is hard to credit what strong criticism the Spiritual Revolution’s findings about
spirituality attracted – as documented by Woodhead, 2010). But the numerical
predictions which The Spiritual Revolution made about the growth of spirituality
are hard to test, because the evidence is lacking. The reasons for this take us to the
heart of this chapter.
By going back to Kendal, both literally and by revisiting our research data, much
of which remains unpublished, we discover some interesting things about how
spirituality has changed in the intervening years – with important implications for
the ways we should now study it. What we study and how we study it are never
completely separate. The approach we used to research spirituality in Kendal was
shaped by the way that ‘alternative’ spirituality was positioned at the time. Fifteen
years later the situation has changed so much that the approach of the first Kendal
Project would no longer be as appropriate. Reflecting on Kendal today, we find a
situation in which the churches have become more marginal, and ‘no religion’ and
spirituality more mainstream. We suggest that these changes are so significant that
our original research design would need more than tinkering – it would need to be
turned inside out. Just what that would involve is the subject of this chapter.

The street survey

One of the parts of the research project which was never written up was what we
called ‘the Street Survey’. In order to dip our toes into Kendal beliefs and religion
outside of its organised forms we decided to do door-to-door interviewing in the
most socio-economically varied street we could find. Karin, who undertook the
research, takes up the story.
To one side of the town centre of Kendal is a small residential area. At one end
is a lane of two-up two-down houses, and along from them slightly larger but still
traditional terraced homes, set around a small green. Further up the hill the houses
start to get bigger, until you turn into a private road of grand, imposing mansions,
many of which have been split into two or more dwellings, and some into flats.
At the end of the private road is a very large building which has been converted
into luxury flats. Finally, the road drops down again into a modern development
of detached and semi-detached homes.
For four months, from December 2001 to March 2002, I knocked on the door of
each one of these 116 widely varied houses, to invite people to participate in short
interviews about their attitudes to religion, their beliefs and their religious prac-
tices. Responses to this request varied widely, from those who politely refused
the interview – some citing time pressures, others on the basis that ‘we don’t talk
about that sort of thing’ – to those who responded monosyllabically to the inter-
view questions, through to those who invited me into the house and talked for an
hour or more. The interviewees’ beliefs, practices and affiliations with religious
institutions varied enormously. Some of these interviews have stayed with me
in the fifteen years since the street survey, a late part of the Kendal project, was
carried out.
122  Karin Tusting and Linda Woodhead
There was the practising Catholic who began the interview saying he attended
Mass as a ‘sacrifice of time’, and prayed infrequently – then, almost out of the
blue, shared a story of the powerful, personal mystical experience in an Italian
monastery which had brought him back into the Church. There was the commit-
ted New Ager living in a small flat crammed with angel symbols, instructions
for ‘Emotional cleansing programmes’ and books on topics like ‘Natural Highs’
who believed in a highly-organised life after death, a God made up of ‘the com-
bined power of every consciousness in the universe’, Indigo children (a group
of children from the 1970s onwards believed to be born with enhanced spiritual
abilities), and, especially, channelling – but who, despite the absolute certainty
of these beliefs, had never had what he would call a spiritual experience. There
was the woman who nominally belonged to the Church of England but believed
in reincarnation, karmic justice, and Spiritualist beliefs about life after death –
and who had the vicar bless her home with incense to quieten the live-in ghost.
I met an environmentalist who refused to have any belief in God at all, but rather
believed in ‘the power of Mother Nature’, finding his community in environmen-
tal groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth; a Pagan homeopath with
a Wiccan altar in her upstairs windowsill, to be used for prayer and meditation
when she needed to, without a belief in any kind of God; and a woman who, while
expressing a definite lack of belief associated with what she called ‘an essentially
Darwinian understanding of life’, had nevertheless had what she called ‘inexpli-
cable’ out-of-body experiences and dreams of past lives which left her ‘still haver-
ing’ on questions of spirituality and faith.
In total, 56 individuals were interviewed, from two-fifths of the households
(with a majority of the households not answering after three visits, and the rest
refusing to participate in the survey). Respondents were drawn from all the differ-
ent types of housing in the street.
The majority (55%) of the 56 people interviewed did not identify as Christian.
Of these, just under a quarter expressed a definite spiritual or religious position
which was important to them (like the Pagan Wiccan described above). Another
half expressed a definite set of beliefs about what lies beyond the material world,
but these beliefs did not play a large part in their lives and did not bring them
into association with others to share those beliefs. The remaining quarter of the
non-Christians said they did not believe in anything supernatural, but talked about
there being ‘something more to life’, either locating this in a kind of humanism –
‘I believe in people’ – or in aesthetic experience. Only two people said they were
definite atheists avowing a lack of any belief in anything beyond the material.
The remainder of the respondents (45%) identified as Christian and/or as
belonging to one of the Christian churches. Of these, a majority (three-fifths) said
they were churchgoers, but some may have meant they occasionally attended,
because our meticulous church headcount – an important part of the original
study – found that less than 8% of the town was in church on an average Sunday
(Heelas and Woodhead, 2005). The next biggest group of Christians, just over a
quarter, expressed an identification with Christianity and/or a church and belief in
God but said they were not churchgoers. And the rest – about a tenth – were what
 Kendal Revisited 123
we might call ‘Christian atheists’ who said that they belonged to a church or were
Christian but did not believe in God.
With the benefit of hindsight we can see how important these findings were.
They touched on what by the time of writing this chapter had become the most
important new discovery about the religio-cultural landscape of Britain and some
other countries: the rise of ‘no religion’. ‘No religion’ is a category created almost
by mistake – the category added to survey questions on religion (like the Census’s
‘what is your religion’) for those who don’t want to tick any of the existing boxes
(‘Christian’, ‘Muslim’ and so on).
As Woodhead (2016) shows in detail, the ‘nones’ have only a few things in
common besides their disaffiliation from a religious identity, strong commitment
to liberal values and free choice in relation to personal moral issues, and rela-
tive youthfulness. In terms of their beliefs and practices they are varied, a large
minority being atheist and the majority being believers in God or agnostics who
are not sure. To most people’s surprise, it is a category which has grown relent-
lessly to the point where, by 2017 it had just overtaken ‘Christian’ to become
the single largest category of ‘religious’ affiliation in Great Britain, especially
for people under 40 (the Census still finds ‘Christian’ to be larger, but there are
reasons for thinking that on this question of religious affiliation the Census is less
reliable than other surveys, including the British Social Attitudes Survey – see
again Woodhead, 2016 for more discussion). The significance of ‘no religion’
becoming the majority is not just a matter of numbers: it means that ‘Christian’
has ceased or is ceasing to be the norm not just in terms of self-identification but
for many institutions, rituals and activities, including weddings and funerals (by
2015 a third of people said they would like a non-religious funeral, a third a tra-
ditional religious funeral, and a third a mixture of the two). The normalisation of
‘no religion’, a category which is neither straightforwardly religious or secular,
disturbs and displaces the old ‘religious-secular’ binary which was used to do so
much work in the social sciences, and with it the theory of secularisation which
still dominated the field when we undertook the Kendal Project.
As well as being early indication of the importance of ‘no religion’, the Street
Survey also signalled the importance of ‘non-institutional’ or ‘lightly-institutional’
religion. The main study had focused primarily on institutions, organisations,
communities and individuals clearly located within the fields of religion and
spirituality and using their own demarcated spaces. We took a rather traditional,
church-inflected, account of religion as our rule of thumb, looking for something
organised, with a leader(s), boundaries, practices, teachings and a clear identity
as ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’. However, the Street Survey shows that even at that
time those institutions and the people actively engaging in them represented only
a relatively small proportion of the population of Kendal, about 10%. Today
that might be even smaller if we stayed with the same approach. What the Street
Survey did was to show that the many people who are not actively involved in
associational religion of a church-like type are nevertheless not necessarily athe-
ists, nor indifferent to questions of meaning, cosmology, and transcendence, nor
unreflective about them. We had fascinating glimpses of the thoughtful, reflexive,
124  Karin Tusting and Linda Woodhead
independent, and diverse ways in which many people generated meaning in their
lives, even when not actively involved in any kind of organised religion or faith
community.
Thus, were we to do a Kendal Project today, we would probably put such peo-
ple and ‘no religion’ at the centre of the study. There were two main reasons why
we left them out of our publications at the time. The first was that the street and its
small sample were not representative, even of the town, and so it would be wrong
to put it on the same footing as the other findings. The second was that, along with
a lot of other data, it was not central to the main purpose of the book, which was
to compare the fortunes of the ‘congregational domain’ with the ‘holistic milieu’
and explain why the latter was doing so much better. The only way we could
make that comparison scientific was by comparing like with like. That is why we
focused our attention in the spiritual milieu on ‘church-like’ organised, bounded,
associational forms of spirituality, rather than on the wider manifestations of spir-
ituality in the town.
This decision was the right one for the context in which we were working,
mainly within the Sociology of Religion and in a climate which was still ‘default
Christian’ (Luckmann, 1967; Woodhead, 2010). We succeeded in demonstrating
that, even when looked at through a Christian lens, spirituality was a force to be
reckoned with, and we were able to make sociologists who retained that church-
inflected understanding of religion take our findings seriously, even when they
argued against them. However, the downside of this decision was that we omit-
ted something which would become increasingly important. The Street Survey
revealed the green shoots which would grow so strongly that within just fifteen
years they would push aside the existing paving slabs of institutional religion and
leave a majority of people feeling they must dissociate themselves from the very
category of ‘religion’, even though many of them retain belief in God or Spirit and
some take part in spiritual practices (Woodhead, 2016). That small Street Survey
turned out to be far more representative of what was happening in the wider popu-
lation, not just of Kendal but of Britain, than we could have known at the time.

Going back to Kendal

As well as revisiting our data we can revisit the town in real life. We have been
able to do this fairly regularly because we both continue to live and work nearby.
This is the kind of informal research in which conversations and observations can
lead to new insights and inform a new research design.

The holistic milieu

The original Kendal Project found 126 distinct holistic groups and one-to-one
activities, and it had taken a full-time researcher well over a year to find them all.
Although we couldn’t possibly replicate this effort in a few short visits, the exist-
ence of the internet (only in embryo in 2000) and knowing who to talk to and what
to look for allowed us to register some prominent developments.
 Kendal Revisited 125
We could see that one of the original hubs of such spirituality – places where a
range of activities and several practitioners are housed together – was still active
(the Fellside Centre), though we were told that it was increasingly hard to main-
tain the large and costly premises. Another, Rainbow Cottage, had closed many
years ago, its owner having moved away, but there were at least two new hubs
in its place, Staveley Natural Health Centre just outside Kendal and the Holistic
Healing Centre. The latter offered massage, myofascial release, remedial massage,
aromatherapy, reflexology, no hands massage, The Dorn Method, Gentle Touch
therapy, Reiki, flower therapies, Indian Head Massage, Mindfulness, Emotional
Freedom Technique, and shamanic healing.1 Similarly, a shop offering spiritual
healing of various kinds and selling a wide range of spiritual merchandise – from
cheap crystals to expensive singing bowls – had closed, but another one offer-
ing some similar goods but with more of an emphasis on psychic readings had
opened.
We gained further information from a long-term holistic practitioner, now in
her mid-60s, who used to run the healing shop which had closed. Her personal
career trajectory was instructive. When Linda last interviewed her fifteen years
ago, she had been offering Reiki healing in the upstairs room of the shop she had
opened. She closed the shop just a couple of years later because she realised she
did not have the commercial skills or inclination to make it a success, even though
customer demand was high. After that she had continued to practise, but in a very
flexible way. She had practised out of a number of different rental premises in
the intervening year, had had periods out of work to pursue other goals, and had
continued to train and practise a variety of techniques.
Her original training had been as a nurse in the NHS (one of the refugees from
church or Health Service or both we found to be so central in the holistic domain
in our first study). While she was still a nurse she had tried out a strict Christian
chapel but found it far too restrictive for women, and had moved onto a Spiritual-
ist Church where she started to train as a healer. But it wasn’t until she encoun-
tered Reiki that she really felt she had found her vocation. That didn’t stop her
experimenting with other techniques. Re-interviewing her we found that since
the first Kendal Project she had been trained in Neuro-Linguistic Programming,
which she now practised along with Reiki and other healing techniques, offering
combinations tailored to individual client need. She explained to us how she had
learned from all of these trainings and experiences to become a better healer. It
was she – and ‘the universe’, including ‘inspirational’ people she met – who had
shaped her career, rather than a career shaping her.
Piecing this all together we gain the clear impression that the holistic milieu
has matured and become more mainstream in three senses. First, it has become
less counter-cultural and ‘alternative’ and more culturally mainstream, widely
accepted, and ‘normal’; we argue below that it seems to have changed places with
the churches in this regard.
Second, there appears to be more variety but also more integration.2 Spirituality
has shown itself to be extremely adaptable. When we were in Kendal at the start
of the millennium we found that it was fairly common for clients to experiment
126  Karin Tusting and Linda Woodhead
with various therapies, often moving from one provider to another in doing so,
or using several simultaneously. Some became expert consumers, able to rate
and mix and match their treatments in reflective ways. Today it is clearer that
this is also happening at the supply-side, not only because some practitioners
work out of a single hub from which different activities can be accessed, but
because some – like our key informant – build up a range of different skills and
knowledges themselves, and are able to tailor their different offerings to the
unique needs of each client. Individual journeys through the landscape of holis-
tic activities are shaped by the needs, aptitudes, and biographies of both client
and practitioner.
Third, spirituality has broken out of a bounded ‘holistic milieu’ understood
as a sub-section of society shared with the churches and dedicated solely to reli-
gion. Already in 2000–2002 we noticed it was creeping into other sectors and
institutions including the local College, Cancer Care Centre, and shops on the
High Street. In subsequent visits we have noted how seamlessly it has inserted
itself into the professionalised health and wellbeing scene of consumer capital-
ism: the holistic hubs, for example, present themselves as services offering clients
the sort of satisfaction they could expect from other regulated health and wellbe-
ing providers and therapists.3 In 2016 we found a further powerful example of
de-differentiation thanks to an invitation from a local primary school headteacher.

The schools
The school we visited is a Church of England state-funded primary school with
200 pupils. Such schools are common in England where over a third of primary
schools are ‘CofE’ – a legacy of the time when the church was the major educa-
tional provider (Clarke and Woodhead, 2015, p. 17). The headteacher had made
contact because he was interested in the Kendal Project and was beginning a study
of spirituality in local schools. He was kind enough to talk to us, show us around
his school, and share his findings.
It was immediately clear that spirituality was deeply embedded in the school,
its ethos, and activities. The headteacher defined it in terms of ‘Three Cs’: con-
sciousness, connection, and change. It was flexible enough to absorb many ele-
ments, including the CofE identity and a set of virtues and values drawn up by
Archbishop Rowan Williams and prominently displayed on noticeboards in the
school. To these Christian values the school had, more recently, added the ‘fun-
damental British values’ which schools now have a duty to uphold. We were told
that the addition had been helpful and harmonious: the Christian values are chiefly
about personal attitudes and virtues, whilst the ‘FBVs’ add a stronger social and
political dimension. The values aren’t ‘imposed’ on children, but made integral
to the formal and informal curricula and allowed to shape the life of the school.
In relation to ‘Democracy’ for example, we were shown a visual display made
in lessons when children met and talked with their MP Tim Farron and local coun-
cillors and learned about the Prime Minister and opposition leaders of the day,
David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn.
 Kendal Revisited 127
A short survey on parental attitudes to spirituality in the school had discovered a
very positive response. When asked ‘How important do you think it is to promote
children’s spiritual development in school?’ almost half said ‘very important’,
nearly 40% ‘quite important’, and only a small number said that it was not impor-
tant or they had no opinion. When asked which religion if any had an influence in
their household, a sizeable majority said Church of England, with much smaller
numbers (declining to single individuals) mentioning – in descending order – No
Religion, Catholicism, Buddhism, Spirituality, Mormonism, and Paganism.
The research also involved asking eleven headteachers in Kendal about spir-
ituality in their schools.4 A couple were hesitant, feeling that their distance from
religion also meant that they were unqualified to be experts on spirituality; they
were more comfortable speaking about ‘values’, ‘virtues’, and school ‘ethos’.
Most of the heads, however, spoke fluently about ‘spirituality’, generally meaning
something different from ‘religion’ and more inclusive, having an overlap with
‘values’, ‘virtues’, and school ‘ethos’ but not identical with them.
One head emphasised the importance of times and spaces for children to get
away from noise and busyness during the school day. Another saw spirituality in a
rather different way, emphasising that it helped children to know and understand
their own culture and to be made conscious of history and tradition. Two schools
placed a strong emphasis on the importance of the environment and connection
with the natural world as well as human others. One thought that spirituality helped
children to recognise the non-material aspects of the human experience, not least
by way of the arts, as well as cultivating their critical awareness. In another, spir-
ituality embraced fostering a critical approach by way of Socratic questioning
and Philosophy for Children. And a school where a large proportion of pupils had
difficult personal issues to deal with interpreted spirituality as the ‘life force that
pushes you through’ and devoted time to helping pupils to make sense of what has
happened to them and who they are. Only in a faith school which draws from a
Christian faith community were religion and spirituality regarded as inseparable
and virtually identical, with a strong emphasis on transmitting the faith, teaching
scripture, and deepening children’s relation to God and the wider global faith
community.
In part these positive attitudes to spirituality can be explained by the legal require-
ment in England not only to hold daily acts of collective worship (assemblies)
but also to attend to pupils’ ‘spiritual, moral, social and cultural development’ –
with ‘SMSC’ being inspected by OFSTED. But that duty has applied since 1944,
and in the past had more to do with Christian instruction. What is striking in
the interviews with heads isn’t so much the fact that they are taking spirituality
seriously, but that they use it in senses which draw more on the language and
concepts of the holistic milieu than of the congregational domain, even when they
are in Christian schools. Despite sharing much in common in their understanding
of spirituality, each school has given spirituality a distinctive stamp of its own,
tailoring it to particular needs, commitments, and ethos. Again we see clear signs
of the maturation, adaptability, and normalisation of spirituality and the ease with
which it can adapt to different settings.
128  Karin Tusting and Linda Woodhead
The congregational domain
As well as finding that spirituality had become more mainstream, we found that
Christianity had become more counter-cultural – a reversal of the situation in
which Christianity had been central and spirituality marginal that had pertained
for at least a century before (Woodhead, 2011). That situation was still evident
when we undertook the first study: in 2000 the churches were the dominant play-
ers. They attracted more regular participants, had a much higher social and civic
status, figured more prominently in the culture of the town and the media, and
were generally more visible. Spirituality was a controversial ‘alternative’. By
2016 that was no longer so true. It was not so much that the number of churches
had declined – in fact only two had closed and one had opened – nor that attend-
ance had continued its steady decline at a rate of around 1% per annum (we
assume it has, in line with the rest of the country because when we counted typi-
cal Sunday attenders in 2002 Kendal was exactly ‘on trend’): it was more that the
profile, activities, and self-presentation of the churches had altered, as had the way
they were culturally represented.5
Overall we found that the congregational domain as a whole had taken on a
more evangelical-Protestant hue, with that particular churchmanship having
extended its influence. In 2000, for example, the three Anglican churches each
represented a different churchmanship: evangelical, Anglo-Catholic, and broad
church. By 2016 the latter two, especially the parish church, had become more
evangelical. The evangelical vicar of the parish church had made some dramatic
changes, including sacking the choir in order to ‘reclaim the sanctuary’ as one
evangelical church member told us, and initiating a mid-morning evangelical-style
informal service with the singing of choruses displayed on TV screens placed in
a side aisle of the magnificent medieval building. A more traditional main Sunday
morning service remained in place, and the vicar told us that he continued to carry
out some of the traditional civic duties of the parish priest – but the evangelical
shift was evident. Its significance lies in the fact that evangelicals have a ‘sectar-
ian’ rather than ‘societal’ ecclesiology which draws a much sharper line between
church and society than traditional Anglicanism, and which values distinctiveness
rather than integration (Brown and Woodhead, 2016). While the holistic milieu has
de-differentiated and blended into various sectors of public life, the congregational
domain appears to have differentiated and become more distinct from society.
This conclusion might seem to be challenged by something else we observed:
the continuing role of the churches in social outreach and charitable action. How-
ever, despite the fact that some churches were actively involved in voluntary
activities like food banks and helping people recover from flooding in Kendal in
December 2016, we gained the clear impression in Kendal that the congregational
domain had become less central to mainstream civic and local life than when we
first studied the town. A prominent figure in the Kendal voluntary scene whom
we interviewed reported that the churches had become ‘less visible, prominent
and confident in the last fifteen years’, though they continued to be an impor-
tant part of the voluntary sector. He also reported that ‘I find fewer organisations
are registering as primarily faith organisations’ and ‘the faith organisation that
 Kendal Revisited 129
may lie behind the scenes can be somewhat hidden to the public that sees their
works. . . . Much of the works being undertaken by them aren’t thought of by the
recipients as being carried out by faith organisations’.6 The reason, he speculated,
was that people could be ambivalent about using faith-based services, and that
church involvement would not always be welcomed, something which a full-time
employee of an ecumenical homeless shelter in the town confirmed to us. (Her
explanation was that ‘in the past the churches have not always been kind’.)
So declaring yourself Christian – even CofE – is no longer the normal, unprob-
lematic marker of cultural identity, ethnic-majority-belonging, normalcy, and
even good morals that it once was. In Kendal, as in the rest of the country, the
churches have become more marginal to everyday life, ritual practice, and culture,
whilst spirituality and ‘no religion’ have become more central.
This inversion, and its limits in media representation of religion, was given
an interesting illustration by a newspaper story which occupied the front page
of the local paper, the Westmorland Gazette, in February 2017, under the ban-
ner headline: ‘Same Sex Duo Wed in Church First’.7 The Gazette reported that
‘Kass Conroy and Keysia Mattocks tied the knot in Kendal Unitarian Chapel,
surrounded by family and friends, in a ceremony which is also thought to be the
first of its kind in South Lakeland’. In 2000–2002 we had studied the Unitarian
chapel now carrying out the wedding and had found it and the Quakers to be the
only churches which had a significant overlap with holistic spirituality. Revisiting
in 2016 we found it had continued to travel this path: it had appointed an Interfaith
Minister rather than a Christian leader, and had commissioned a prominent new
mural outside its entrance – the ‘Spirit of Life’ – displaying in full technicolour a
multifaith, ecological, holistic, planetary spiritual orientation.
At one level this was not a ‘story’ at all, same-sex marriage having become
commonplace in the UK since 2014. What made it news in Kendal was that it took
place within the congregational domain, which has set its face against accepting
wider social change in attitudes towards homosexuality. Had the wedding been
undertaken by a holistic practitioner outside of a chapel context it would not have
made the front page. Still, a traditional Christian framing lives on in the way that
the story uses the wedding as a peg on which to hang a national story about a
new report by Church of England bishops reaffirming their refusal to marry or
even bless LGBTI partnerships. Solemn statements by local bishops are artfully
juxtaposed with vox pop from Kendal: ‘ “we sometimes still do experience dis-
crimination, but we always will,” Kass said. “I don’t talk to my grandparents any
more because they are Roman Catholic. But you can’t change who you are.” ’ The
reader is left with the impression that it is the Unitarians who are normal and in
touch with mainstream values and common decency – but the Christian framing
remains. The old Christian ‘establishment’ may have become more questionable
and open to challenge, but it continues to shape the newspaper’s gaze.

Methods and theory then and now

Revisiting Kendal allows us to see what has changed and to consider how one
would approach such a project today. The changes we have described suggest the
130  Karin Tusting and Linda Woodhead
answer: we would start from the outside and work inwards; rather than beginning
in the official space of religion and working outwards to streets and other spaces,
we would start with more and varied spaces of Kendal life and society and work
inwards towards the explicitly religious.
The closest we came to this in the original project was with the Street Survey,
which, as we have shown, proved surprisingly productive. It revealed that the
main categories we were working with – religion/congregational domain, spir-
ituality/holistic milieu – were even at that time only applicable to some respond-
ents, and that even within these categorisations there were a very wide range of
positions.
The churchgoers ranged from those who expressed a clear set of orthodox
beliefs to those who expressed a fairly non-specific sense of God as ‘something
more’ and saw church attendance as one way to explore this, and included those
who prioritised belonging to the church community, or behaving in a particular
moral or socially-acceptable way, over believing. This identification with Chris-
tianity or with one of the churches and chapels was not necessarily related to
religious belief or spiritual practice.
The non-churchgoers were even more diverse in their accounts. Belief systems
and practices were often put together from a wide range of cultural resources, and
there is clearly no expectation that people hold similar beliefs to their neighbours.
Combinations included a personal identification with the Church of England
without a belief in God, a self-identification as a non-believer combined with
an expressed belief in fate or destiny, and a fairly un-defined and definitely non-
Christian belief in ‘some kind of guiding Spirit’ coupled with occasional church
attendance. The only belief that was widely, though not universally, expressed
was a belief in the positive value of tolerance of difference.
So where as recently as 30 or 40 years ago religion was still chiefly associated
with one cultural domain and demarcated social space – the churches – and was
accepted or rejected on that basis, we see here a much more flexible situation.
Historians have reminded us that even when the church held maximum sway indi-
viduals often had diverse and heterodox beliefs and practices; what has changed is
the sheer range of cultural resources on offer (especially because of the internet)
and the diminishing cost of expressing them in public as Christianity has lost its
social and cultural sway and centrality.
In a Kendal study of today an equivalent of the Street Survey would clearly have
a very important role to play. By triangulating it with nationally-representative
survey data on beliefs, values, and practices, it could be one useful starting point
for a study which would seek to understand not just the beliefs and practices of
churchgoers and ‘alternatives’ in a particular place, but those of the town as a
whole. It would be better, however, to sample from across the town to represent
different demographics (using a sample frame based on Census data) rather than
focusing in on one small geographical segment. We would also need to be more
careful to avoid the danger of undersampling those with no interest in the spir-
itual. In a climate in which ‘no religion’ is the norm, a restudy would have to focus
in a much more open way on culture, values, beliefs, and practices which have to
do with explicitly religious or spiritual meaning, identity, and significance.
 Kendal Revisited 131
As well as developing and using a more sophisticated Street Survey, a second
Kendal Project would need to enter into many different spaces to see whether and
how meaning and purpose is enacted, expressed, articulated, produced, or repro-
duced. We could once again rely on informal and short-term ethnography as the
initial method, bringing in other methods like chats, interviews, surveys, or focus
groups as and when needed, in relation to a flexible research design. We have
illustrated how and why the domains of education, health and wellbeing, the local
media, and voluntary services would have much to tell us. A wider study could
step into many other spaces, such as the crematorium, graveyards, and a wood-
land burial site; places of work and leisure; or shops. It could talk to accountants,
lawyers, social workers, and others who come into contact with large numbers of
people dealing with difficult decisions – potential key informants.
As in the original Kendal Project we would use a carefully-combined mix of
open and closed methods. The latter, mainly surveys, would be used to test how
extensive certain beliefs and attitudes are and how they correlate with other fac-
tors (often useful at both the start and end of a piece of research – the first to get
an initial map of the territory, the second to test out hypotheses arising). The more
qualitative methods would be used to explore people’s own approaches rather
than forcing them to choose between pre-selected alternatives – enabling us to
discover somewhat unexpected categories, such as those who identified as Chris-
tians without a belief in God. We know from the first Project that this allowed us
to pay attention to the sorts of language people used to express their beliefs, the
wide variety of cultural repertoires and meaning systems drawn on even within
one small geographical area, and the varied frames of meaning within which peo-
ple make sense of questions such as ‘would you say you believe in anything?’.
Following Geertz (1973, p. 5), this hermeneutical approach is situated within the
tradition of cultural research which is not ‘an experimental science in search of
law but an interpretive one in search of meaning’. It does not assume coherence,
and rather than looking for assumed correlations it can detect new ones – it does
not assume, for instance, that ‘lack of belief in an afterlife’ is necessarily indexed
with ‘never having experienced contact with someone who has died’.
New technologies would make some aspects of this research much easier.
While the initial Street Survey did not audio-record people’s responses, a new
study could easily incorporate this using a digital voice recorder on a phone – now
so everyday as to be unobtrusive (whereas in 2000–2002 our recording equip-
ment drew more attention to itself). Corpus linguistic analysis techniques could be
used to identify keywords and clusters, with qualitative analysis of concordance
lines developing a fuller picture of the different discourses people drew on in the
interviews (Baker, 2006). Similar techniques and web-scraping could be used to
identify the different discourses of spirituality being drawn on in the town, both
by analysing religious texts such as sermons and church newsletters, and by ana-
lysing the more secular everyday texts such as local media or websites.
With the development and codification of research ethics in the last decade,
however, some aspects of a new Kendal Project would have to be rethought. In
relation to a new Street Survey, for example, a lone female researcher knocking
on unknown people’s doors and requesting consent on the spot would be likely to
132  Karin Tusting and Linda Woodhead
raise queries from university ethics committees – which, like smart phones, didn’t
really exist back in 2000!
Along with these changes, a restudy of Kendal would also be working with a
very different repertoire of concepts and theories to the one which still held sway
at the start of the century (Woodhead, 2009). The first project was firmly rooted
in secularisation theory, even as it undermined it. It took the churches as its blue-
print of ‘real religion’, even as it found that holistic spirituality was taking various
forms, and placing more emphasis on body, emotions, practices, and rituals than
on beliefs and belonging. Today, with a growing emphasis on lived and every-
day religion; material objects and practices; spaces, places, and locations; and of
course on ‘no religion’, the field has moved on. A new study would spot different
things not just because things have changed on the ground, but because its tools,
assumptions, and theoretical framing would focus attention in new ways.

Conclusion
The original Kendal Project put spirituality on the map, making it harder for
scholars of religion who had ignored or dismissed it to continue to do so. It made
a splash because it had a clear headline of obvious significance – ‘spirituality tak-
ing over from the churches’ – backed up with strong quantitative evidence. It even
got a feature on BBC Newsnight, with a full camera crew arriving in the town –
the first of several. The project became part of ‘A’ Level Sociology textbooks and
launched many related student projects in towns across the country as well as
studies by academics in other countries.
It worked because it took a widespread assumption – that church-based Chris-
tianity was mainstream religion in Britain and its decline meant secularisation –
and challenged it on its own terms. By treating the ‘spaces of spirituality’ as
analogous to the ‘spaces of church-religion’ and using very similar methods for
interviewing and counting ‘believers’, it was able to present an alternative picture –
religion wasn’t just declining, it was changing, and secularisation wasn’t the
whole story. It offered a clear explanation for why this was happening, drawing on
Charles Taylor’s idea of a massive subjective turn in the culture of modern liberal
democracies.8
This chapter and restudy shows just how much the picture has changed since
the year 2000. Church Christianity no longer dominates social reality and imagi-
nation in the same way and no longer shapes the contours of ‘alternative’ spiritu-
ality. In many spheres it is now spirituality which is mainstream and Christianity
which is ‘alternative’ and even counter-cultural. Religion has burst its boundaries
both conceptually and empirically. The ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ have been
complicated and questioned and can no longer be used as straightforward alter-
natives with which to carve up the whole of culture. The growth of spirituality
has certainly been an important element in this change, but the relentless rise of
‘no religion’ (not identical with ‘secular’ or ‘spiritual’) to displace ‘Christian’ as
the majority self-identification is the broader change, and has been the subject of
Woodhead’s (2016) recent research.
 Kendal Revisited 133
The result is a much larger territory for the scholar of religion and spirituality
to explore. Our forays into Kendal in the last few years illustrate how fruitful it is
to step outside the traditional associational spaces of religion and spirituality to
ask, with an open mind and open questions, how people are gathering, ritualising,
making sense of life, death and suffering, sacralising, and drawing on the myriad
resources now available to them in contemporary Britain.
What we report on in this chapter is a fascinating transitional situation in
which the old religious centre has become increasingly marginal and the periph-
eries central. In many spheres spirituality is now more normal, mainstream, and
‘unmarked’ than Christianity. Where the latter used to shade into ‘no religion’ –
‘I’m not religious, I’m CofE’ – now spirituality does the same, and it is the
churches, including the CofE, which have sharpened their boundaries and sense
of distinctiveness.
This de-centering of church-like religion means we have to turn our methods
inside out as well. Rather than starting with associational groups with shared
beliefs and moving out to street and school, it makes more sense to start with street
and school and move inwards towards dedicated forms of religion and spirituality.
‘No religion’ is a useful provocation, but is ultimately a placeholder which points
beyond itself and cries out to be replaced once we have found more appropri-
ate categories. For researchers who have been trained in the study of religion,
values, and culture but who are open to reworking their methods and rethinking
their approach, there is golden opportunity to make a major new contribution to
cultural understanding.

Notes
1 www.holistic-healthclinic.co.uk/ Accessed 10–12–16
  Staveley Natural Health Centre www.cumbriasupportdirectory.org.uk/kb5/cumbria/
asch/service.page?record=FW8pcFbGcw8 Accessed 10–12–16
2 One informant thought the best indication of this in the UK as a whole was the ‘IPTI List
of Approved Treatments and Therapies’ which has grown steadily; by 2016 it listed 164
different activities which it will insure, providing the practitioner can provide a separate
diploma or certificate for each one. They range from Art Therapy to Face Reading, Baby
Massage to Prana Healing, and four different kinds of healing for animals. http://www.
iptiuk.com/treatments-covered-by-the-ipti-insurance-policy/ Accessed 12–12–2017
3 Quality marks and professional accreditations on spirituality are more evident than they
used to be – the Kendal Holistic Health Centre, for example, is registered with the Com-
plementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC), the Federation of Holistic Thera-
pists (FHT), and the Bach Foundation International Register. www.holistic-healthclinic.
co.uk/About-us.html Accessed 18–2–17
4 The schools were all part of Kendal Collaborative Partnership, a company formed five
years ago to enable the schools to work more closely together.
5 We revisited a handful of the churches and attended some morning and evening ser-
vices at the Roman Catholic church, the main Anglican parish church, and Parr Street
independent church (evangelical). We also spoke with some clergy, churchworkers, and
others in the voluntary sector.
6 As examples he cited food banks, the work of Manna House with the homeless, and sup-
port for the formation of a local credit union.
7 The Westmorland Gazette, Thurs 27 February, pp. 1–2.
134  Karin Tusting and Linda Woodhead
8 As Taylor puts it in The Ethics of Authenticity, ‘I am called upon to live my life . . . not
in imitation of anyone else’s. But this gives a new importance to being true to myself. If
I am not, I miss the point of my life, I miss what being human is for me’ (1991, p. 29).

References
Baker, P., 2006. Using corpora in discourse analysis. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Brown, A. and Woodhead, L., 2016. That was the Church that was: how the Church of
England lost the English people. London: Bloomsbury.
Clarke, C. and Woodhead, L., 2015. A new settlement: religion and belief in schools.
[online] Available at: <http://faithdebates.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/A-New-
Settlement-for-Religion-and-Belief-in-schools.pdf>
Geertz, C., 1973. Thick description: towards an interpretive theory of culture. In The inter-
pretation of cultures: selected essays. New York: Basic Books. pp. 3–30.
Heelas, P. and Woodhead, L. with Seel, B., Szerszynski, B. and Tusting, K., 2005, The
spiritual revolution: why religion is giving way to spirituality. Oxford, UK, Malden,
MA: Blackwell.
Luckmann, T., 1967. The invisible religion. London: Collier-Macmillan.
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gion. Nordic Journal of Religion and Society, 22(2), pp. 103–121.
Woodhead, L., 2010. Real religion, fuzzy spirituality. In D. Houtman and S. Aupers, eds.
Religions of modernity: relocating the sacred to the self and the digital. Leiden: Brill.
pp. 30–48.
Woodhead, L., 2011. Christianity and spirituality: untangling a complex relationship. In G.
Giordan and W. Swatos, eds. Religion, spirituality and everyday life. Chicago: Springer.
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Woodhead, L., 2016. ‘No religion’ in Britain: the rise of a new cultural majority. Journal of
the British Academy, 4, pp. 245–261.
9 The small stuff of barely
spiritual practices
Jennifer Lea, Chris Philo and
Louisa Cadman

Introduction
The spiritual sector is growing in economic, social and cultural significance in
the UK. Particularly significant are those practices grouped under the term ‘New
Age’ or ‘spiritualities of life’, such as yoga, massage, reiki and meditation (Sointu
2006). At the same time as the sector is growing, the practices that constitute it
are changing (Carette and King 2004) and new geographies of spiritualities are
emerging. This chapter draws on a wider research project that attempted to trace
the formation of some elements of these new geographies on the ground, taking
Brighton and Hove (a south coast UK city, home to many spiritual practitioners)
as a case study for the emergence of an ‘everyday urban spiritual’ landscape. The
broader project asked how far, and in what ways, the spiritual comes to matter
both in explicitly spiritual spaces (e.g. Buddhist centres, Natural Heath centres),
and also across the kinds of mundane spaces of everyday life that are often seen
as resolutely non-spiritual, notably workplaces and homes. The chapter draws on
extracts from diaries completed by research participants which offer an under-
standing of spiritual practices (here chiefly yoga) as constituted by the broader
contexts within which they are pursued. In enabling us to develop an understand-
ing of how such spiritual practices relate to other aspects of people’s lives, the
chapter contributes to wider debates emerging in response to the growth and pro-
liferation of the spiritual sector, as well as to the small body of geographical work
on spiritualities (e.g. Bartolini et al. 2013, 2017; Conneely 2003; Holloway 1998,
2000, 2003, 2011; MacKian 2011, 2012).
Our project moves beyond the concern shown by geographers of religion (e.g.
Park 1994; Sopher 1967; Stump 2008) for the most obvious, self-proclaimed sites
expressing – enabling, bearing witness to – faith in godheads of one stripe or
another, what Lily Kong (2001: 228) calls the ‘officially sacred’ spaces of (organ-
ised) religious observance. Instead, we reach out to all manner of practices and
attendant spaces, places, environments and landscapes, many of which strike an
ambiguous pose with reference to both conventional notions of ‘belief’ and geo-
graphical interest in ‘sacred space’. If the field was originally animated by the
‘big relations’ of person, world and divinity, as mediated through small numbers
of core spaces anchoring what Peter Berger (1967; also Wilford 2010) terms the
136  Jennifer Lea et al.
‘sacred canopy’ of religious guiding principles, then we are excited more by ‘the
“small stuff” of spirituality’ (Bartolini et al. 2017: no pagination). Hence, in line
with newer emphases in the geographies of religion and spirituality (Gökarik-
sel 2009; Henderson 1993; Holloway and Valins 2002; Philo et al. 2011), our
attention instead turns to multiple micro-instances of ‘other ways’ for being-in-
the-world, however localised or momentary, where a spiritual charge arises in
isolated patches and along dangling threads (scantly referencing any overarching
‘canopy’). More specifically, we explore the intimate ‘small relations’ between
snatched spaces of yoga practice and how they ‘rub up’ against everyday worka-
day and personal lives, thereby opening up the quite mundane, often unexciting,
undramatic and, echoing Sara MacKian (2012: Chap.2), ‘spirituality lite’ geogra-
phies of spirituality lived by our case study participants.1

Thinking the spiritual

Perhaps due to the proliferation of the spiritual sector, many of the existing aca-
demic accounts have tended toward defining or quantifying the sector to lend it
some coherence (e.g. Chandler 2008; Glendinning and Bruce 2006). One lens
frequently applied to the spiritual is consumption, with authors suggesting that
New Age spirituality is a form of bricolage in which a variety of (previously
separate) traditions, practices and objects are combined together and repackaged
as commodities to be bought/consumed. This has led other writers, such as Jer-
emy Carette and Richard King, to critique the sector in strong terms because it
has become a kind of ‘pick and mix’, allegedly undermining the integrity of the
practices and producing narcissistic and self-serving identities (2004: 21–22).
Much of the research reaching such conclusions has deployed a rather abstracted
form of discourse analysis, and therefore has not engaged in detailed empirical
investigation of the actual happening of spiritual practices in particular contexts.
Work on ‘spiritualities of life’ (Heelas 2008; Heelas and Woodhead 2005), emerg-
ing from a disciplinary framing in Religious Studies, has been more attuned to
such grounded practices as arising in the spiritual milieu of Kendal, UK. This
work has broadly concerned the processes of identity formation and the connec-
tion with a ‘life force’: an experiential quality of being in the ‘here and now’ that
the practices were seen to afford (Heelas 2006: 224), one seen to make a substan-
tial difference to the participants’ subjective lives (Heelas 2008: 33). This idea of
‘life-itself’ has led Paul Heelas and others to situate the practices within a broader
‘subjective turn of modern culture’ which authors such as Charles Taylor (1992)
argue has been present in Western societies since the 1960s, a ‘subjective turn’
involving a turn away from ‘external’ roles and obligations, such as those travers-
ing the ‘sacred canopy’, towards a ‘life lived in reference to one’s own subjective
experiences’ (Heelas and Woodhead 2005: 2; also Heelas 2006, 2008).
This is life lived in deep connection with the self, through the cultivation of
attentiveness to ‘states of consciousness, states of mind, memories, emotions, pas-
sions, sensations, bodily experiences, dreams, feelings, inner conscience, and sen-
timents’ (Heelas and Woodhead 2005: 3). An exploration of such inner subjective
 Barely spiritual practices 137
experience as afforded by spiritual practices has been taken up by some geogra-
phers, as they have begun to examine practices that can be understood as ‘spir-
itualities of life’, including yoga (Lea 2009) and meditation (Conradson 2008,
2010). Conradson’s work, most notably, follows up some of the questions asked
by the spiritualities of life literature, and delves into the qualities of the subjective
experiences that might be opened up through encounters with specific spaces,
places and environments. These inner states are conceptualised through the idea
of ‘stillness’, which Conradson (2008, 2010) particularly addresses in his empiri-
cal research on so-called ‘retreat’ settings. Rather than stillness being defined by
corporeal inactivity, stillness here refers to a kind of inner experience which is
characterised: firstly, by a present focus (awareness of what is happening here
and now, rather than thinking about what might be happening in other times or
spaces); secondly, by an internal state of calm wherein the mind becomes less
active and less engaged in ruminative thought; and thirdly, by the kind of clarity
of thought that might emerge through stilling the mental habits of distraction and
dissection.
Conradson considers the emergence of stillness in retreat settings by two routes:
firstly, focussing on the ‘experiential economies’ of stillness using a ‘therapeutic
landscapes’ perspective to understand the kinds of spaces in which stillness might
potentially emerge (2008); and secondly, looking at the ‘orchestration of feelings’
of stillness via ‘mind-body shift technologies’ such as meditation (2010). These
moves allow Conradson variously to analyse how stillness as a mind-body state is
valued and how it occurs across different spaces, with a particular focus on why
retreats offer settings in which experiences of stillness might emerge. Notably, he
pinpoints factors such as the distance between the retreat and everyday working
and caring responsibilities, the fact that the meditation practices are supported by
the retreat’s regime and routine as expressly designed to allow stillness, and also
the situated social context of being surrounded by others also seeking experiences
of stillness.
The distance between the retreat and everyday life is understood to allow the
possibility of thinking and feeling ‘differently’, and for many the retreat setting
was experienced as ‘counterposed to the stress of demanding and busy lives’
(Conradson 2010: 72). Looking at these practices in separation from ‘everyday
life’ draws similarities with scholarship on religion and pilgrimage (e.g. Mad-
drell and Della Dora 2013), but contrasts with the majority of other geographi-
cal enquiries into spiritual practices, which have precisely sought to approach
them when set in the bustling scenes of everyday life. Julian Holloway’s work
on the spiritual milieu of Glastonbury (2003), MacKian’s work on spirits and
enchantment (2011, 2012) and our own work on the spiritual everyday (Lea et al.
2015a, 2015b; Philo et al. 2015) all assert that spiritualities must be addressed as
contextual and embedded in such scenes, while still maintaining a relationship,
more-or-less muted, with the ‘otherworldly’ aspects of such practices. This kind
of research thus starts to show how ‘sacred space’ has to be seen as not solely
inhering in obviously religious buildings and sites, but as leaking into all sorts of
spaces (some of which are indeed very ordinary and everyday).
138  Jennifer Lea et al.
This chapter, drawing on accounts offered of how individuals manage to inte-
grate ‘spiritual practices’ into their everyday lives, attempts to address spirituali-
ties as contextual and embedded through a focus on the inner life of participants
(as outlined in work on spiritualities of life, as well as in Conradson’s work on
stillness). The chapter considers the inner states of individuals who attend yoga
classes as part of their weekly routine, taking seriously the implications of striv-
ing to ‘fit in’ these classes alongside work and/or caring responsibilities. These
inner states are those that might be ‘orchestrated’ through organised practices in
which the individuals are taking part (in this case, yoga classes), but they also
entrain those states that come about in other parts of the participants’ lives (e.g.
anxiety, stress and worry). The space-time data from the diaries that our partici-
pants completed allow us to trace the emergence, change and endurance of vari-
ous bodily states (including stillness) across transitions between the everyday
spaces of home, work and leisure, the workaday sites of busy urban lives, and the
yoga classes that they elect to attend. What begins to emerge is an understanding:
firstly, of how experiences of stillness, and perhaps then a more all-embracing
spirituality, might be enjoyed – and, to an extent, actively made – in much closer
proximity to the everyday than proposed by Conradson; and secondly, of the rela-
tionships that emerge between spiritual and what we might (perhaps too simplisti-
cally) understand as ‘non-spiritual’ arenas of a life.

Space-time diary-keeping
The data here derives from a project which explored spiritual practices (yoga
and meditation) in Brighton and Hove, which has a reputation for a high density
of spiritual practices and associated ‘alternative’ lifestyles. Central to the project
was an interest in the everyday nature of spiritual practices: how participants used
them in their working and home lives, as well as in the more ‘formal’ spiritual
spaces that they might frequent, such as natural health centres and classes. While
the broader project used other methods – in-depth interviews with participants,
teachers and centre owners; participant observation in yoga classes and on medi-
tation courses – this chapter is based on the space-time diaries that we asked
participants to complete. Based loosely on the ‘diary: diary-interview’ method
(Latham 2003), we asked participants who practised yoga and/or meditation to
create a written record of their practices in the context of their wider lives; and in
so doing to become observers of their own practices, thoughts, feelings and sensa-
tions while engaged in (and also while not engaged in) spiritual practices.
A detailed consideration of our diary methodology is given in Louisa Cad-
man et al. (2017), but in summary we asked diarists to record their activities
on five days when they practised yoga or meditation. We asked them to give
details of their practice, where and when they practised, but also of what else they
did, where and when, to gain a picture of how people fit their engagement with
spiritual practices into (often hectic) daily schedules. We were also interested in
whether these practices had longer-term effects throughout their days (or maybe
longer) and across a range of other sites and activities, thereby asking about what
 Barely spiritual practices 139
MacKian (2012: 3) describes as ‘a tendency [of spiritualities] to spill out into the
broader fabric of everyday life’. While the practices in question often happen
in separate space-times – participants take time out of their day to visit a class
in a yoga studio, gym, village hall or a natural health centre; they often change
their clothes and may use equipment such as yoga mats to transform the space –
this does not mean that these space-times are experienced in isolation from other
aspects of the participants’ lives. By situating these practices in the space-times
of the broader day, we were able to develop an understanding that departed from
typical assumptions about the separation of the ‘sacred’ from the ‘profane’ aspects
of people’s lives.
More specifically, we gave participants a time-space diary template with each
day divided into timeslots at two-hour intervals, and with columns for the record-
ing of key activities and locations, including but not restricted to spiritual prac-
tices, and a column for participants to reflect on these practices and their ‘fit’
into the day. (Figure 9.1 includes the precise instructions provided at the head of
each column.) We explicitly invited participants to elaborate here on the feelings,
sensations and experiences of the spiritual practices involved, as well as on any
broader elements of the participants’ lives that they felt were being touched by
these situated practices. We also requested some background information, includ-
ing basic demographic details, and also asked them to complete a section where
they could reflect on their relationship to their practices, working lives, health,
where they lived and so on. We offered some examples of how the diaries might
be completed, but we also indicated that the diary template was only loosely for-
matted and that participants were entirely welcome to use it as seemed best for
them.
Diarists were recruited through various means: we put flyers and posters up in
the ‘associational domains’ (Heelas et al. 2005) where yoga and meditation took
place or were advertised (e.g. natural health centres, cafés, health food shops,
community noticeboards); we asked yoga and meditation teachers (who were also
interviewed for the project) to pass on flyers to their students; and we used our
own participation in yoga and meditation classes to recruit, either by the teacher
giving us time to make a call-out at the end of the class or via informal socialising
after classes. This third route was the most successful. Of the 23 diaries com-
pleted, ten used an electronic template, eleven a paper template and two their own
formats; most completed five entries within a timescale of six weeks.
This chapter focuses on the diaries of two participants – diarist 9 and diarist 11
(these numbers being our identifiers for them) – permitting in-depth focus hom-
ing in at the grain of individual experiences. These particular diarists were chosen
because they attended weekly yoga classes alongside their working and home
lives, and because their diaries show a clear attention to their thoughts, feelings
and the interwoven nature of their practice with their work commitments. Both are
female and live with their partners (without children). Diarist 9 is in the age range
35–45, and works as a psychologist within a mental health team; she attends a
weekly yoga class and also has a regular evening home practice of yoga and medi-
tation (four or five times a week). She also uses, in her own words, ‘meditation/
140  Jennifer Lea et al.
breathing and mindfulness techniques either in a structured or interwoven into
daily routine and activity (particularly if I feel stressed or anxious)’ (diary intro-
duction). Diarist 11 is between 56–65 and works as a tutor in higher and further
education; she attends classes once a week and, in contrast to diarist 9, does not do
any practice outside of the sessions. In what follows, we roughly arrange our treat-
ment of the two diarists’ contributions according to the temporalities and spatiali-
ties of attending a yoga class: firstly, thinking about going to the class; secondly,
thinking about the class itself; and thirdly, thinking about what happens after the
class. We should underline the importance of reading carefully through the ‘raw
text’, unedited by us, in the diary entries shown (in Figures 9.1–9.7) below: this
text, arguably more than our own interpretation, is what really gets at the ‘small
stuff’ of everyday spiritual practices which is the beating heart of this chapter.

Beginning the class

The diaries showed the spatio-temporal proximity of the classes to the working
and home lives of participants, demonstrating how they assembled the classes
alongside their other commitments. This proximity meant that, most often, the
participants brought themselves to the class in whatever state they were; bringing
bodily sensations, feelings and thoughts from work or home. Participants as a
whole were more or less able to ‘let go’ of these thoughts and feelings, certainly as
a class progressed, but there were different ways in which they linked back to the
world ‘outside’ of their class. For example, each of diarist 11’s entries note some
kind of difficulty experienced during her day, including: feeling ‘rather miserable’
that her son would not be visiting her for another six weeks (entry one);2 feeling
‘rather redundant and demotivated’ that not many people had attended a charity
drop-in session that she helps to organise (entry four); and experiencing difficul-
ties relating to work (entry four). Despite these contextual starting-points, in each
of the entries she describes starting the class and being able to access feelings
of stillness almost immediately. This access was even the case when there were
potentially disruptive circumstances, such as having a different teacher from nor-
mal (entry two) and being away from class for weeks because of holidays (entry
one).
In contrast, diarist 9 tends to experience a more difficult transition to the class,
being less able to detach from her thoughts and feelings from ‘outside’, and there-
fore bringing such extraneous influences into the class. The following extract
from her diary (Figure 9.1) reveals her very busy day before attending a class, one
in which almost every moment is accounted for, from the moment she leaves for
work to the time she gets changed for class in the evening. She is constantly at
work, doing household chores or eating – or even doing more than one of these at
once (lunch is eaten during a work meeting). While she might anticipate the posi-
tive effects of attending the yoga class, which provides the motivation to get up
and get changed and go to the class, it is not surprising that she feels reluctant and
rushed. This is indeed not an isolated occurrence, and entry five describes a similar
Time Main activity/activities Where were you? Reflections on yoga
during this time block (where possible, and/or meditation
(please note the times please give (for example:
you practised yoga or the postcode did you enjoy the
meditation [e.g. meditation or area [e.g. practice?
12.30-13.30]) Kemptown], or how did it affect
street name. Also you physically and
include where emotionally?
you practised how did the practice fit
yoga and/or into your day?
meditation) what impact did the
practice have on your
day)

5-7 am Sleep. Home.

7-9 am Get up at 7.30am; shower
and dress; eat cereal
breakfast at 8.30am,
whilst flicking through
house magazine; leave
house at 8.40am; travel
in car along Shoreham
Road to work and arrive
at 8.55am.
9-11 am Attend morning meeting Work.
with [colleague] at 9am.
She is late (annoying) and
end up meeting at 9.20am
instead. Sit outdoors in
cafe with coffees, because
lovely weather. Makes
up for lateness. Go to
Library in Education
Centre, on site to look at
Psychology and Therapy
resources. 10.30am Client
paperwork and G.P.
letters.
11 am – 1 pm Individual supervision at
11am. 12 noon client
work/assessment with
new client (as CBT
specialist psychologist).
Then rushing to get to
Supervision meeting
at 1pm.

Figure 9.1  Diarist 9, extract of entry from day one.

Time Main activity/activities Where were you? Reflections on yoga
during this time block (where possible, and/or meditation
(please note the times please give (for example:
you practised yoga or the postcode did you enjoy the
meditation [e.g. meditation or area [e.g. practice?
12.30-13.30]) Kemptown], or how did it affect
street name. Also you physically and
include where emotionally?
you practised how did the practice fit
yoga and/or into your day?
meditation) what impact did the
practice have on your
day)

1-3 pm Running 10 mins late.

Arrive for 2-hour
Supervision Group at
1.10pm and eat lunch
during process which
I hate doing (ready
prepared salad which
I have bought in - nice -
some consolation)
3-5 pm 3pm Client work. 4pm
Trying to catch up on
day’s clinical notes and
data entry.
5-7 pm 5pm. Leave 15 mins late Home.
for home.3 Not too bad.
Home by 5.15pm. Prepare
dinner. Eat dinner early
at 5.30pm, a light supper,
as going out to Yoga
later. 6.15pm. Attend to
personal emails, make
some phonecalls and use
the internet.
7-9 pm 7.30pm. Change for Yoga. Yoga class Reluctant to go to
7.50pm, travel to Yoga yoga, feel rushed
Class, walking. 8pm. (rushing). Frustrated
Attend Yoga Class. during yoga by
my attempts to
constantly monitor
thoughts and affect
and how body
responding to yoga
postures and breath.
Thought processes
taking me out of the
mindfulness of the
moment.

Figure 9.1 Continued
 Barely spiritual practices 143
pattern, wherein the residual traces of this diarist’s day shape the beginning of her
class in a negative fashion (Figure 9.2).
There are a number of things worth noting here. First is that the persistent and
problematic bodily rhythms and sensations are seen to arise from the weather,
physiology and the diarist’s stress levels, offering a clear example of how the
practice within the class is enmeshed in wider relations with the ‘natural’ environ-
ment as well as in the social roles, relationships and tasks that encompass lives
outside of the classes. A (perhaps) lifetime of monitoring and working on her
breath because of an asthmatic pathology, compounded by the weather and high
stress levels, gives rise to the negative orientation of diarist 9, who is well used to,
and indeed highly sensitised to, differences in her breathing. This negativity might
be compounded because the (restricted) breath and (tight) chest are central to
practising the kind of modern postural yoga being studied at her class. The breath

Time Main activity/activities Where were you? Reflections on yoga and/

during this time block or meditation
7-9 pm 6pm Snack supper Home and yoga studio. Stress levels have
as attending Yoga been high today
and hate having full and generally really
stomach as interferes struggling with
with process. breath (not helped by
Spend next 1 and weather). Unsure if
45 mins cutting emotional or asthmatic.
and pasting Yoga I rarely use my inhaler
diary entries from because I don't believe
computer notepad that it is a good habit
and completing but prefer to work with
and finishing diary. my breath to deepen,
7.50pm drive to Yoga, but notice chest feels
as in a rush. 8pm. tight and restricted
Yoga for one and half all day to day (breath
hours. feeling rushed,
like me).

My heart is pounding,
with rapid shallow
breathing and pounding
head - difficult to
rest as mind racing
and then reluctance
to begin postures -
want to stay on back.
Postures are easier in
heat, but motivation
lessened.

Figure 9.2  Diarist 9, extract of entry from day five.

144  Jennifer Lea et al.
is often the first point of reference in a yoga class: both for the student who lies
or sits on the mat before the class, checking in with their breath and body, and for
the teacher who often directs the students to attend to their breath in the opening
moments of the class. The breath is a foundational aspect of yoga, and hence it
is unsurprising that diarist 9 is dispirited about their restrictive shallow breathing
in the light of this practice, finding it hard to shift, via a focus on the breath, to
the kind of present focus and inner state of calm described by Conradson (2008,
2010).
The second thing to note is the relationship between the mind and body dis-
cussed by this diarist. Even though she has arrived at the class, she is not able
simply and straightforwardly to engage with the practice, because of the feelings
of stress and the physical sensations of a pounding head and heart. While the heat
might make the body more supple and yielding, the diarist reports having to meet
with, and overcome, resistance in order to participate in the class. While she wants
to do the practice, it is hard to exert the will over the body in order to start the pos-
tures and to elevate the body from the floor. Stillness does not straightforwardly
emerge here, then, precisely because of the agitated mind-body relationship that
has been established during the rest of the day.
From this look at these couple of diary extracts, we can see how traces of the
surrounding world push into the classes that the participants attend in a number
of ways. Transitions between the different spaces of work/home, or the broader
city, and the class – both of which have different norms around what forms of
embodied existence are appropriate – can be hard to enact successfully due to the
persistence of bodily and mental states from outside of the class. In this context,
these practices rub up against the rest of the participants’ lives in a close fashion.
For the diarists, their spiritual practices are not enacted in some kind of vacuum,
and the relationship to the self is constituted and mediated via the embodied traces
of work or home life, ones manifested through niggly corporealities, habits of
thought or a combination of both.

During the class

It is important to note, however, that once in a class participants generally man-
aged to effect a kind of change in ‘subjectively experienced state of conscious-
ness characterised by calmer mental rhythms and a shift in attention from other
places and times (the “there” and “then”) towards the present moment (the
“here” and “now”)’ (Conradson 2010: 72), at least to some degree. This section
of the chapter looks at the kinds of experiences that the participants reported
emerging from their practices as they were conducted: the space-time situated
changes in mood, sensations and feeling. Some reported a straightforward shift
in sensation. Considering entry four from diarist 11’s diary, it can be seen that
her afternoon consisted of worrying about work. Her mind was ‘taken off’ it by
chatting with her hairdresser, and then the yoga class allowed her to gain some
new perspective on the problems that she was experiencing, as can be seen in
Figure 9.3.
Time Main activity/activities during Where were Reflections on yoga and/or
this time block you? meditation

1-3 pm Drove home and checked emails.

Rather alarming message from
college re a change of class at
the last minute. Felt stressed
and put upon. Trawled through
several emails with instructions,
lists, forms, docs relating to
new term. Wished I wasn’t
working for the college.
Rang line manager to discuss
issues but she couldn’t talk till
tomorrow. Printed out pages
and pages of notes from college
website. Miserable about
amount of paperwork.
3-5 pm Drove in for haircut. Unusually Hairdresser’s
didn’t turn on radio to think flat.
through what to do about
problems at the college. Forgot
worries whilst chatting with
hairdresser.
5-7 pm Dropped off at home briefly to Yoga class More emphasis on
check more emails and got back breathing exercises
into car to drive to yoga class though from the start ‘to
for 5.30. bring our minds into our
bodies’ – this is just what
I needed tonight. I was
conscious of needing
relief from the work
issues and to get some
sense of perspective
on the importance of
these new developments
that had come to light
today. Relaxation was,
as always, lovely. This
week the addition of
small eye ‘cushions’
filled with lavender that
the tutor placed over our
eyes was particularly
welcome. Shutting out
the light and giving off a
lovely perfume.

Figure 9.3  Diarist 11, extract of entry from day four.

146  Jennifer Lea et al.
The teacher explicitly attempted to orchestrate a change in feeling and atten-
tion by asking the participants in the class to shift from their minds into their
bodies. The breath was foregrounded right at the beginning of the class to ‘kick-
start’ a feeling of stillness in the participants. This feeling came together for this
diarist with a desire to get some respite from thinking about work issues, and
to gain perspective on the problems upon which they were dwelling; almost a
textbook description of the kinds of ‘lucid’ or calmer thoughts that are seen to
be part of becoming still. As Conradson reflects, ‘the mind becomes less busy
and attention is drawn towards the scale of the body. Cycles of mental rumina-
tion may soften or begin to dissipate, enabling calmer and more lucid states of
consciousness to emerge’ (2010: 72). In this case, diarist 11 successfully manages
to achieve this change in feeling, shifting her attention away from work and to
the present moment. She understands the class as being ‘just what [she] needed’,
partly because the shift to the body allows some lucidity to emerge around work
issues. Physical objects and pleasant smells (scented eye cushions), ‘[s]hutting
out the light and giving off a lovely perfume’, were also gathered into the situa-
tion, ‘circumstantial’ accumulations (McCormack 2016) that assisted in releasing
a positive affect for this diarist.
Diarist 9 describes a somewhat more problematic route towards stillness in
the following diary entry (Figure 9.4), which continues from an extract shown
previously (Figure 9.2). Here, the diarist fleshes out the transition made in the
felt sense of the self during the class. The participant brings the traces of a busy
day into the class, meaning that, at first, she finds it hard to experience the ‘shift
in consciousness’ that Conradson (2010: 72) suggests constitutes stillness. The
‘then’ and ‘there’, as Conradson puts it, stubbornly enter into the class, rendering
it difficult to connect with the ‘here’ and ‘now’. The habits of thought endure from
her everyday life elsewhere and elsewhen, draining into the class and exerting a
lasting hold over the diarist even when she has entered the class and started her
yoga practice. Yet, within the space of the class, she still experiences quite pro-
found transformations in her ‘subjective experience’ (Conradson 2010: 72) which
can readily be equated with the kinds of transformations that Conradson describes
as stillness. It is maybe telling that geographical metaphors abound here: the dia-
rist’s eventual transformation moves her into ‘an even deeper place of mindful-
ness’, the yoga postures and breathing ‘creat[ing] an internal space . . . for the
chi energy to habit’ which has been ‘shower[ed]’ and ‘cleansed’ – the everyday
of elsewhere and elsewhen has now been substituted for an interior bubble of
space-time ‘stilled and slowed’, as Ben Anderson (2004) has claimed in a differ-
ent context (to do with the ‘boredom’ of home music-listening).
While some of the mind-body states that comprise barriers in the way of accom-
plishing stillness endured for longer and were more persistent than others, all of
the entries suggest that there was some kind of shift in feeling towards stillness
during the class. The diary methodology puts these shifts of feeling into a proces-
sual frame, allowing us to see what changes occur in the yoga classes, almost
despite the things that the participants might bring in with them. If the spiritual
 Barely spiritual practices 147

Time Main activity/ Where Reflections on yoga and/or meditation

activities during were you?
this time block
7-9 pm 8pm. Yoga for yoga I again notice (like previous yoga
one and half studio class) that noticing and monitoring
hours. too carefully my breath and physical
sensations is distracting me from . . .
engaging . . . with my breath -
not allowing me to engage more
holistically, in that I am constantly
questioning how am I feeling, what
am I experiencing etc.-Reminds
of when I first began yoga and the
process of conscious incompetence
to conscious competence. Eventually
I notice and let go and this seems to
move me into an even deeper place
of mindfulness with the yoga. It feels
as though the postures and breathing
create an internal space, like a shower
cleansing internally and allowing
expansion and a space for the chi
energy to inhabit. Feels really good.

Figure 9.4  Diarist 9, extract of entry from day five.

practice here is changing feelings, shifting bodies and offering new, more lucid,
perspectives on the kinds of everyday problems that the diarists report, then this
finding goes some way towards answering the question of why people carve out
time, space and energy in their already overfull days to go to their yoga classes;
and why they exert the will over the self to lift the body off the mat and to begin
to move the body as instructed by the yoga teacher.

Leaving the class

The chapter will now look at how feelings and sensations from the class may
endure, or otherwise, after the class has ended. Again, participants reported a
range of experiences, from positive effects which endured over a range of time-
scales, to less straightforwardly positive effects. Diarist 11 uses her journey home
from yoga to describe various states of energy, ranging from feeling ‘much more
energetic than earlier in the day and walked fast, noticing the strength in my legs
as I strode up the hill’ (entry one, 7–9pm); driving home ‘feeling loose and nicely
weary’ (entry three, 5–7pm); to walking home and ‘feeling rather heavy and tired.
Would have liked a lift today’ (entry two, 7–9pm). Diarist 9 focussed her descrip-
tion on her senses rather than her ‘energy’ (and see Philo et al. 2015 for more dis-
cussion of energy in relation to these practices), as disclosed below (Figure 9.5).
148  Jennifer Lea et al.

Time Main activity/activities Where Reflections on yoga and/or

during this time block were you? meditation

9-11 pm Yoga Class finishes at Feeling calm, happy, grounded.

9.30pm, leave by 9.40pm Glad came and thinking
and walk home. about it has helped to deepen
my practice in being more
thoughtful and attentive to
breath and positions and
effect on body, instead of
doing automatically when
familiar with poses. Feel
happy, grounded and body
feels more supple/freer.
11pm -1am Home at 9.50pm. Feel Home. Hyperarousal and sensitivity
grumpy. Hypersensitive of senses in concert with
to mess in kitchen that sense of calm, really normal
Husband has created in my response for me after yoga
short absence. irritated. so easily irritated/annoyed
ironically. During the walk
home always more sensitive
to light and noise. I feel
more incongruent with my
environment. I have a desire
to surround myself with
peace and calm.
1-5 am Bed at 11am and turn lights Feel slightly stimulated so takes
off at 11.30pm. Sleep a while to fall asleep, but fall
really well, into deep and replenishing
sleep (wake up next day and
feel refreshed and calm).

Figure 9.5  Diarist 9, extract of entry from day five.

While she had achieved a state of calmness and happiness during her practice,
when she stepped outside of the yoga class she reports this sensibility changing
into a feeling of being ‘out of step’ with the outside world – of being ‘incongruent
with [her] environment’ – set apart in a state of hyperarousal and hypersensitivity.
She expresses a desire to surround herself with peace and calm, but on arriving
home was confronted by a messy kitchen. The state of hypersensitivity expe-
rienced after yoga then became manifest as irritation, followed by stimulation,
which hindered the onset of sleep for her. This re-telling shows how the state of
stillness can be changed as bodies travel through different settings, suggesting
too that stillness can occasionally morph into agitation or turbulence, stillness’s
opposite. Once this diarist had slept, though, she still woke up feeling refreshed
and calm, perhaps regaining some of her feelings of stillness after their slightly
bumpy transition back into ‘normal’ life. This outcome points towards a lengthier
and more enduring set of feelings that may arise from the yoga practice.
 Barely spiritual practices 149

Time Main activity/activities Where Reflections on yoga and/or

during this time block were you? meditation

5-7 pm Dropped off at home briefly Natural . . . It did help – I came away
to check more emails and Health feeling more distanced from
got back into car to drive Centre all the chaos and pressures
to yoga class for 5.30. of the last couple of weeks
spent at the college. Writing
this 1.5 hrs later I still feel
quite detached and able to
keep it in proportion.
7-9 pm Received call from friend
who needs help tomorrow
morning when I was
looking forward to some
space in which to tackle
the college problem and
speak to my manager on
the phone. Found myself
explaining that I wouldn’t
be available at that
time – untypically putting
my needs before hers.
I wonder whether the yoga
session had any bearing
on my decision to not
offer to drop everything
and help her out.
9-11 pm On reflection I realised there
would be plenty of time
in the morning to help out
my friend. Rang her back.
Went to bed 11.30 fell asleep
quite quickly.
11 pm - 5 am
1-5 am Woke up while still dark
thinking about work. Fell
asleep again and woke
again about 7 still thinking
about work. . . .

Figure 9.6  Diarist 11, extract of entry from day four.

We can usefully trace out feelings and how they change over time and space
through diarist 11’s entries. In the diary extract shown in Figure 9.6 this diarist
suggests that after a class she was able to maintain changed feelings about the
things that had been problematic beforehand, now feeling more distanced from
work. In addition to these changes in her relationship to her problems, she also
notes a changed relationship to herself and her friend, noting that it was ‘untypi-
cal’ for her to put her own needs in front of others. She wonders whether it is the
Time Main activity/activities Where were you? Reflections on yoga and/or
during this time block meditation

7-9 am Get up early at 7.00am; Home and Work Wake up early refreshed after
shower and dress; (as above). previous evening Yoga
eat cereal breakfast practice. Also good mood
at 8.00am, whilst because Friday. Notice how
looking at hotmail much more expansive my
account; leave house breath feels even now and
at 8.20am; travel in car this escalates my sense of
along Shoreham Road relaxation.
to work and arrive at Notice more than usual the
8.30am. profound lasting effect that
the yoga has today, although
feeling really stressed and
anxious about new job on
one level, breathing ok, less
difficult.
9-11 am Individual Clientwork Work (as above). I'm more attentive to my breath
and accompanying and body today (because
paperwork. of the diary) and notice
when I am feeling stressed/
tense and consciously
breath abdominally to calm
me which works really
effectively.
11am- Individual Clientwork Same as above.
1pm and accompanying
paperwork.
1-3 pm 2.30-3pm. Take a late Meadow at back Despite breathing, beginning
lunch break. of work in to feel stressed because have
Sunshine. been unable to have a break
with lots of new clients and
paperwork to complete. I feel
that I shouldn't take a break
and I know if I eat in the
office that I'll rush, so I go
outside instead to eat and after
I lie in the sunshine in ‘lieing
pose’ breathing for 20 mins
I feel completely rejuvenated
and destressed. Breathing
expansively and abdominally
again. It is as [if] I have
breathed in the sunshine and
it is relaxing me and melting
away my tensions from inside.
I notice that it is easier to
activate this sensation after
yesterday’s yoga class (I must
remember the benefits of
longer practice)

Figure 9.7  Diarist 9, extract of entry from day two.

 Barely spiritual practices 151
yoga session that has brought about this change in orientation to her friend? The
next timeslot shows her changing her mind, but in a measured, reflective and
spacious manner, and not as a result of feeling guilty or as if she had put their
friendship under pressure. All the same, she still wakes up early the next morning
thinking about work, showing the complex shifts between states of stillness and
everyday feelings that happen.
Longer-lasting effects are detailed by diarist 9, who identifies feelings and
sensations that lasted overnight. Entry two (Figure 9.7) comes the day after the
entries detailed prior (Figure 9.5) where the diarist had felt grumpy with the messy
kitchen. She wakes up feeling refreshed, experiencing her breath as more expan-
sive and less constrained. While she feels the lasting stress about her job, she can
still maintain good feelings from the yoga, and she reiterates the importance of
her breathing being good. Later in the day, however, she offers a less clear-cut
positivity and shows that other events had interfered in the maintaining of these
positive feelings. Here, therefore, we can see the stress taking over after a rushed
morning at work where there has been no opportunity to stop, but significantly
she recognises her ability to intervene in the process by going outside to eat and
to do a yoga pose which returns her to being able to breathe less restrictively and
to relax. She identifies that this ability is linked to the class attended the previ-
ous day, perhaps because the sensations and feelings were closer temporally and
experientially, and she was therefore able to access the feelings again more easily
and, moreover, to remember the benefits of doing so. There is something to note
here also about the wider context – that the diarist has access to a sunny space
to lie down in without fear of being disturbed – central to a low-key but helpful
micro-geography of yogic practice.

Conclusion
The chapter has paid close attention to the shifts in feelings and sensations that
arise as bodies move between everyday worlds and snatched space-times of yogic/
meditative practice. Our diary methodology has enabled us to begin to develop
an understanding of the relationship between these different spaces: to address
how the one influences, inflects, enhances or sometimes compromises the other.
In this case, we have approached these contexts through an intimate acquaintance
with the kinds of feelings and sensations that were registered by the bodies of our
participants, and which variously lingered and/or dissipated once the yoga class
began. The species of close attention paid here to the mind-body and its feelings
and sensations, as constituted in and by the diary entries, lends us clear indications
about the modes of corporealities that ‘we’ bring with us to yoga classes, what we
work with when we work upon the mind-body in this way, and the imbrications
or foldings of minds and bodies that might be created through spiritual practices
such as yoga.
This close attention to experiences, feelings and sensations also gives some
pointers towards what it is about these snatched time-spaces that matters – the
qualities of experience that emerge (stilling, slowing, calming, thinking) even
152  Jennifer Lea et al.
when participants have come into a class full of worry or anxiety. At the same
time, though, the data indicates that a more diverse range of outcomes might
emerge – stillness does not always straightforwardly emerge, and it does not
always give rise to some kind of congruence between the participant’s mind-
body and its environing world. Nonetheless, the spiritual practices in play are
often used to ‘press back’ against the demands of everyday life, as figured
through work and care. Here we present small accounts of everyday worries,
anxieties and bothers stalled, if momentarily (and possibly even just countered
in a more positive ‘spirit’). These are sustained for shorter or longer periods,
across smaller and larger spaces. On re-entering the more everyday contexts of
home or work, however, these worries and anxieties themselves ‘press back’
against the experience of stillness that might have come about thanks to the
yoga practice.
If the kinds of things described here are, in some way, ‘new geographies of spir-
itualities’ then we accept that they are not really geographies of enchantment, rev-
elation or other ‘big stories’, but rather geographies of the everyday, the ordinary
and the mundane: the ‘small stories’ (Lorimer 2003) of ‘small stuff’ spiritualities
that are, in many respects, barely even spiritualities at all. These are geographies
full of church halls, community centres, leisure centres, health centres, alterna-
tive cafés and bookshops, as well as fine-detailed micro-geographies of where
bodies can find room to do yoga at home, at work, in the park, on the beach, on
public transport – which are themselves set in the everyday fabric of settlements
big and small. Nonetheless, these geographies really matter: the diary extracts
underline the fact that, when we act upon the self in order to ‘orchestrate’ some
kind of feeling (through a practice such as yoga), our action (and indeed agency)
is always variously shaped (constrained/enabled) by the contexts in which we are
situated. These everyday geographies offer vital information in our understanding
of the ‘place’ of yoga, and indeed of other associated spiritual or barely spiritual
practices, carved from the maelstrom of people’s lives and the chaos of broader
settings.

Notes
1 Actually, whereas MacKian (2012: 2) ‘focussed on those spiritual experiences and prac-
tices which have a distant air of enchantment about them’, many of the spaces intriguing
us have few trappings of such enchantment: a few did, but many are utterly prosaic and
ostensibly just flotsam of the secular world.
2 Entry one refers to the first day for which the participant made an ‘entry’ in their diary.
3 These timings don’t add up. The text is taken directly from the diary entries. This reflects
the difficulty in accounting for practice within the linear temporal framework that the
diary provides.

Acknowledgements
We are very grateful to the AHRC-ESRC Religion and Society Research Programme,
which provided funding for this project (award number AH/H009108/1).
 Barely spiritual practices 153
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10 Rethinking youth spirituality
through sacrilege and
encounter
Elizabeth Olson, Peter Hopkins
and Giselle Vincett

Introduction
Contemporary interest in Western young people’s spirituality experienced a
notable uptake in interest in the early 21st century (Cusack 2011), and within
geography, the role of religion in young people’s and children’s lives has formed
an important axis for the rejuvenation of the study of religion (Kong 2010;
Olson and Reddy 2016). Yet within this work, examinations of youth spiritual-
ity have been relatively modest when compared to studies of religious identity
and agency within schools, youth groups, and communities (see Hemming and
Madge 2012). This contrasts with a growing geographic interest in a range of
spiritual practices and approaches toward studying spirituality amongst adults,
such as through therapeutic communities and emotion (Finlayson 2012; Wil-
liams 2016), spiritualism (Bartolini et al. 2013; Holloway 2006), pilgrimage and
landscape (Maddrell 2009; della Dora 2016), ethics (Cloke 2002), and activism
(Pulido 1998). In the fields of sociology and psychology, previous framings of
youth spirituality as shrouded in mystery and secrets, to be carefully extracted by
meeting children in their own worlds (e.g. Hart 2003), have given way to surveys
detailing individual youth perspectives on concepts of God, afterlife, the occult,
and transcendence.
The purpose of this chapter is to experiment with a different approach for
researching youth spirituality in geography, one which might respond to Bar-
tolini et al.’s (2017) observation that our current theories and questions remain
insufficient for understanding emerging spirituality beyond our modernist con-
ceptions. Our experiment thus entails attuning ourselves to everyday encoun-
ters that reveal youth engagements with spirituality that have previously been
excluded or sidelined in youth spirituality research. Specifically, we focus on
performances of sacrilege through blasphemy, its discursive practice, in order to
think differently about relationships between practices and beliefs in contempo-
rary spirituality. We draw our data from a research project designed to explore
youth religiosity in areas of urban economic deprivation, focusing on the work
we conducted in Glasgow, Scotland. Sacrilege was a common practice amongst
our young participants, but as we explain below, has not been taken up broadly
in studies of youth spirituality.
156  Elizabeth Olson et al.
Accounting for the spirituality of youth
Youth religiosity has been researched through diverse disciplinary perspectives
and methodologies, but as Hemming and Madge (2012) suggest, existing frame-
works can often be inappropriate for understanding how young people engage
with belief and religion. The same might be said for research on youth spiritu-
ality, which has acknowledged the need for better methodologies to categorize
and describe changes in spiritual practices and perspectives amongst young peo-
ple (Singleton et al. 2004). In this section, we briefly outline research trends in
two fields  – developmental psychology and sociology  – which have made the
most robust contributions to research on youth spirituality. These trends and their
resulting frameworks have influenced our own research questions and method-
ologies, but they also illustrate the barriers to researching spirituality in a way
that avoids reproducing existing modernist categories. We suggest that alterna-
tives might be found through methodological experiments that train our focus on
encounters and discursive practices.
Until the start of the 21st century, youth spirituality tended to preoccupy the
attention of religious and moral educators working in the context of a secularizing
Europe. However, with a growing recognition of new forms of spiritualism in
the West coupled with claims of social ‘re-enchantment’, and broader population
trends embracing claims of ‘spiritual, but not religious’ (Fuller 2001) or ‘believ-
ing without belonging’ (Davie 1994), other researchers began to pay attention
to the function and practice of spirituality in the lives of young people. Within
developmental psychology, youth spirituality emerged as a potentially important
variable in explaining adolescent ‘moral’ behavior such as voluntary sexual activ-
ity (Holder et al. 2000) or drug consumption (Belgrave et al. 1997). Lerner et al.
(2008), for instance, found that professed spirituality had positive impacts on self-
esteem, community membership, and pro-health behaviors. However, many of
these early attempts at capturing spirituality were critiqued for their tendency to
define spirituality from the perspective of a world religion, rather than as some-
thing that might be distinct from religion or monotheistic religious doctrines (e.g.
King et al. 2014; Zinnbauer et al. 1997). Subsequent research has attempted to
address these biases by capturing ‘the internal, personal, and emotional expres-
sion of the sacred’ (Cotton et al. 2006, p. 273). Surveys such as the Measurement
of Diverse Adolescent Spirituality (MDAS), evaluated and tested by King et al.
(2016) in the context of youth in Tijuana, Mexico, and the Youth Spirituality Scale
(Sifers et al. 2012), thus emphasize higher powers and ultimate realities, relation-
ships, and wellbeing.
These studies are relevant to our interest in this chapter not for their conclu-
sions or content, but because they illustrate how researchers have grappled with
the methodological challenges of classifying and analyzing youth spirituality.
Overall, critiques of methodologies point to two main challenges: the challenge of
adequately defining youth spirituality in ways that avoid cultural and age-oriented
biases, and the lexical challenges associated with the study of spirituality (Savage
et al. 2006). The first challenge is most frequently concerned with the conflation
 Rethinking youth spirituality 157
of spirituality with religion, and with the prominence of definitions of spiritual-
ity which reflect a bias toward religious dogma. As Ezzy and Halafof (2015) sug-
gest, a focus on spirituality is more common in work that engages with traditional
world religions than with spiritualism or those of the occult, which can tend toward
describing practices rather than beliefs about the sacred. Studies from across Europe
and the US describe young people embracing a traditional religious identification
while also engaging spiritualist or new age practices (Vincett et al. 2015). Nonethe-
less, the common presence of questions about belief in a ‘Higher Being’ or an after-
life in social science studies of youth spirituality may fail to capture the spirituality
of young people who are not traditionally religious or who might be secular. Studies
of raves and witchcraft (Ezzy and Halafoff 2015), and of satanism and vampirism
(Cusack 2011) illustrate this point, and suggest that more open questions might be
necessary to capture occult spirituality. In the case of indigenous spirituality, Chris-
tianity sits in very different relation to other culturally-embedded ontologies for
indigenous youth than it might for non-colonized youth (Collard and Palmer 2015).
Questions about sacredness can be normatively biased, assuming that the absence
of the sacred is associated with an absence of spirituality.
The second challenge is more sharply concerned with the reliability of elic-
ited information about spirituality. Singleton et al. (2004, p. 250) propose using a
stipulative definition of spirituality as ‘a conscious way of life based on a trans-
cendent reference’ in order to avoid lexical associations with religious institutions
or other philosophical touch-points. They identify ten dimensions of spirituality
including themes such as salience and authority, as well as more agential possibili-
ties through categories such as eclecticism and expression. Critical youth scholars
have followed suit by opening up the entanglements of religious symbols as central
to spirituality (Ezzy and Halafoff 2015). Others have reflected new and emerging
arrangements through the language of religiosity (e.g. Olson and Reddy 2016) or
lived religion (e.g. McGuire 2008), both of which point toward the assemblage
of practices, beliefs, representations, and institutions that produce spirituality as
a discursive practice as well as a feeling or a belief. Nonetheless, the overwhelm-
ing approach toward studying youth spirituality treats it as a matter of personal
choice or agency (Flory and Miller 2000), or as Lynch (2010, p. 37) cautions, as
‘an unquestioned view of the importance of metaphysical belief for individuals’.
Our own research has pointed to the importance of opening up the scope of
analysis beyond traditional religions or religious spaces and seeking to describe
the boundaries and the fuzzy edges of faith and belief. We find common ground
in Bartolini et al.’s (2017, p. 14) call for work that engages ‘forms of spiritual-
ity, spiritual practices and spiritual experiences that do not look like a religion
or a religious practice or a religious experience’. We have also clarified that
research claiming declining religion amongst young people is often simply dis-
missing young people’s religious categories because they don’t fit neatly into
existing frameworks (Olson et al. 2013; Vincett et al. 2012). Nonetheless, hav-
ing attempted to do this kind of work for over ten years with diverse groups of
young people, we admittedly have found it a difficult task; looking beyond exist-
ing framings of spirituality and the sacred could make the concepts too broad and
158  Elizabeth Olson et al.
thus meaningless descriptions of anything or nothing at all.1 We are also aware
that broadening the category could have a disingenuous and distorting effect if it
forces spirituality upon diverse practices that might resist the label. For example,
de la Cadena’s (2015) work with Quechua ‘speaking men’ provides alternatives to
the language of spirituality for practices that might be interpreted from a Western
theoretical/theological position as religious practice. Deeming certain practices
spiritual or religious potentially reproduces the categorical and analytic schemes
that are historically rooted in Eurocentric hegemony (Asad 2009). Finally, though
our research on youth religiosity has always been open to spiritual practices
including ghosts, spiritualism, and afterlife, we have dismissed other evidence
about spirituality when it is not equivalent to personal/individual belief. Lynch
warns that this approach,

. . . can obscure the possibility that issues of existential meaning may only
be important for young people in specific moments, that young people may
only learn to become ‘believing subjects’ through particular social contexts,
and that assent to metaphysical or existential beliefs may play a relatively
unimportant role in the day-to-day conduct of many young people’s lives.
(2010, p. 38)

In the remainder of this chapter, we look to the day-to-day discursive and per-
formative practices that fall well outside of the categories and engagements nor-
mally associated with youth spirituality. Specifically, we consider performances
which, though clearly about spirituality, may or may not be about belief. To do
this, we focus on practices that might be described as sacrilege – actions and prac-
tices which take sacred things for secular use (St John 2006, p. 180) – in modern
studies of religion and the sacred. Our data is drawn from Marginalized Spirituali-
ties,2 a project examining the spiritual and religious experiences of young people
in areas of urban economic deprivation. Our overall research design was inspired
by Kim Knott’s work on religion and space, for we hoped her locational approach
could ‘reconnect “religion” with those other categories – “society”, “politics” and
“economics” – from which it has been separated for the purpose of classification
and study’ (Knott 2009, p. 159). However, in order to move away from the clas-
sifications discussed above, we also incorporated in-depth ethnographic and par-
ticipatory work, including filmmaking with teams of young people and spending
time at a youth club in a Glasgow neighborhood. While the locational approach
allowed us to avoid bias toward religious or spiritually-articulate participants,
we found that everyday encounters were important for exposing ‘unmarked non-
religious cultures’ (Lee 2015, p. 20) that might better describe the emergence of
youth spirituality.

Sacrilege
We are riding on a very slow train which jolts us as it takes in all the uneven sur-
faces of the tracks, killing time on our journey to the town center. There are four
 Rethinking youth spirituality 159
of us – one researcher, and three girls between the ages of 14 and 16. The girls
know each other well. As young carers, they frequently make use of the services
provided by the care support services in their ward, and this includes trips for the
exceptional (boating trips) and the necessary (registering for ID cards for things
such as public transportation access). We decide to go into town to collect footage
for a movie we are making about spirituality, and to maybe interview some people
in shops on camera if they agree. The trip is a relatively rare social outing for the
girls, a chance to hang out where other kids hang out and get moved on periodi-
cally by police or shop owners, just like other kids. We had been working hard
out of the cramped space of the neighborhood youth club for several months, and
we all thought of this as a treat. Our research budget meant that we could safely
deliver everyone home by taxi. Being in the center of town and having dinner in
a restaurant also meant that the girls could relax and wander, something that was
difficult to do in their own neighborhoods which were known for gang activity,
distrust between different ethnic groups, aggressive policing, and a drug trade that
would ebb and flow into public space in unpredictable ways.
Because we are filming, taking pictures, and recording audio, we are dressed
in multi-colored hoodies with the names of our film crew and an image of a film
clapper on the back. Our research team hoped to avoid suspicion by being con-
spicuous in our intent; an Italian art student had been assaulted and arrested for
filming in public space recently, and though the right to film in public had been
reasserted, there were too many questions being raised after 7/7.3 The final film
that we produced, ‘Being’, drew together a series of short, edited interviews with
adults speaking about the difference between religion and spirituality. The film
team liked the topic because they claimed to have never spoken about spirituality
before involvement in our project, though they had been in compulsory Religious
Education classes since primary school. They tripped over the word itself when
we first began to talk about it as if it were being presented to a foreign tongue;
‘spirituality’ is not an easy word to manipulate with the Glaswegian dialect if
unpracticed.
The researcher holds the camera during the train ride, in case the girls want
to include some of the footage in the final film (they don’t). When they begin
to speak about ‘organized’ and ‘unorganized’ religion, one of the members of
the team asks the researcher to turn the camera on and record what they are say-
ing. The conversation battles against the cacophony of the train, of screeches and
bangs, and in doing so, draws out a dynamic that might have otherwise been
passed over in only a few seconds:

B (researcher): (Camera pointed at L) So what do you think about organized

versus unorganized religion?
L: (Looking very bored, staring out the window) I don’t have a
clue what they are, really.
C: (To L, sitting beside her) A church, a Mass, a people.
L: (Turns to C) Ah, right. So that wouldn’t be Dude-ist.
C: Taoist? No.
160  Elizabeth Olson et al.
L: Dude-ism (with emphasis, hand cupped to her mouth)
C: Dude-ism?
A: (from off camera) Taoism?
L: Taoism? Taoist?
C: Dude-ism!
L: Dude-ism. (L and A reiterate the word several times. B laughs.)
B: Define Dude-ism for us.
L: (with an ironic smile, head tipped back, playful) It’s Dude-ism. Where you’re
a dude. You’re a Dude-ist, and then Dude-ism religion. Pretty cool religion.
I’m a part of it.
C: Oh. (deadpan and looking straight into the camera). Tell me about it.
L: You just be a dude.
C: So you just exist? (very skeptical look, again directly at the camera.)
L: (looking at L and the camera interchangeably) yeah, and you relax and be
cool to others and be kind and friendly and be cool and that makes you popu-
lar and no harm comes to you.

Interpreted from the literature of youth spirituality, L’s description of ‘Dude-ism’

echoes many of the findings encountered with middle-class youth in the U.K.
and the U.S. Sometimes referred to as ‘moralistic therapeutic deism’, this youth
perspective is interpreted as replacing traditional Christian teachings of a power-
ful God who punishes evil with a benevolent God that watches over people and
aims for ‘personal happiness and interpersonal niceness’ (Smith and Denton 2005,
p. 171). Dean (2010, p. 28) refers to this trend amongst young Christians in the
U.S. as the ‘cult of nice’, and defines it as perhaps the most important category of
contemporary youth spiritual understanding. This positioning of youth spiritual-
ity is interpreted against an adult and institutionalized religious theology that is
set in contrast with Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, which Smith (2011) consid-
ers a degraded organized theology that collapses into confused transitions into
adulthood.
Indeed, L’s commentary could be fixed as a nearly textbook example of the
cult of nice – relaxing and being cool. However, to interpret it as evidence of the
cult of nice would require ignoring the intermittent mocking and sincere manner
that signals L as engaging in something much more akin to sacrilege. Dude-ism
has a doctrine, following, and website based on the movie character from which
it comes.4 It is satirical, but also content-heavy. It belongs in the category of other
modern satirical traditions evoked by post-boomer generations including the
Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but rather than being overtly secularist in
its intent, it also condones a form and structure of spiritualism that is playful but
also ambiguous. Isn’t Dude-ism relevant in that it could produce a kinder world
than we have now? Couldn’t it be taken seriously as a spiritual practice, just like
the film it is drawn from? But even L delivers her sacrilege with a recognition
that she is committing it; the purpose of the performance is to make a point about
herself as a subject that can be in formation, and also about religion and her ability
to satirize it. Hers is not a claim to the sacrilege of the Protestant Reformation, but
 Rethinking youth spirituality 161
more of a reform without replacement. L is not a Dude-ist – or maybe she is. What
is important for us as researchers is her eagerness not only to confront traditional
forms of religious subjectivity, but also the normality of committing sacrilege, one
which her friends find amusing but also interesting and confusing.
This discursive practice of sacrilege could be dismissed as banter on a train, but
it illustrates a much wider trend that religious scholars have to work increasingly
hard to ignore or dismiss. The emergence of distinctively modern secular human-
ist movements which have also taken to acts of sometimes wide-scale sacrilege
in order to create space for ‘being godless’ (Blanes and Oustinova-Stejepanovic
2015). In Australia and the United Kingdom, the movement to write in ‘Jedi
Knight’ as a religious category in the national census confounded state govern-
ments and researchers. Initially praised by atheist activists, they later responded
with a more serious call to record ‘no religion’ as it became clear that Jediism
would go on to claim religious status.
Academic accounts of religious change often relegate the episode to footnotes
that simultaneously acknowledge and dismiss its presence and significance – it
requires explanation, but only in as much as it artificially manipulates our descrip-
tions of religion. Interpretations include speculations that respondents ‘may be
being humorous’, or trying to make the point of ‘just how inadequate the catego-
ries provided on the census are’ for categorizing religiosity and spirituality (Ezzy
and Halafoff 2015, p.  850). Since 2001, the date of the first significant census
write-in movement, Temple of the Jedi Order has become a tax-exempt non-profit
in the United States5 with an articulated doctrine and method for developing as a
Jedi spiritual leader. An application in 2016 by The Temple to be recognized as
a religion by the UK Charity Commission failed because of the Commission’s
assertion that charity law defines religion as ‘belief in one or more gods or spir-
itual or non-secular principles or things . . .’ (The Temple of the Jedi Order – Full
Decision 2016, p. 3) Referring to the Hodkin case, the Commission based its
decision on the assertion that Jediism, though ‘open to spiritual awareness’, could
nonetheless ‘be advanced and followed as a secular belief system’ (ibid p. 4).
If the census protest and L’s playful performance as discursive and material
practices are considered as part of the spiritual landscape of Western societies,
rather than abnormalities, we might begin to describe youth spirituality differ-
ently. Both L’s Dude-ism and Jediism suggest a blending of spiritual types, but
a transcendence that emerges from this act of assembly and play across the reli-
gious and the secular, or if ascribing to the argument advanced by the British
state, an act of sacrilege. They are expressed through discursive practices carried
out in informal and formal everyday spaces, sometimes on a train, other times
through governmental institutions that challenge the boundaries of definitions
and categories of religion and spirituality. Though the encounter described above
can’t be conflated with an elaborated belief or practice, it should not be entirely
discounted from our descriptions of youth spiritual practice and belief. As a dis-
cursive practice, it suggests that sacrilege should be thought of as a part of, rather
than apart from, the production of youth spirituality; it requires explanation rather
than dismissal.
162  Elizabeth Olson et al.
Encounter
The performance of sacrilege on the train serves as a check upon our assump-
tions of how young people navigate religious categories and their significance.
In describing Australian secularism, Coleman and White (2006, p. 3) explain
that although the space for the sacred is ubiquitously assumed to demand soci-
etal respect, ‘blasphemy and sacrilege are both affronts to this value: they are
acts of disrespect, irreverence, or destruction’. The implication is that sacrilege
is antithetical to a secular society because of its divisiveness and role in perpetu-
ating social prejudice. It can be carried out deliberately and on a wider social
order, such as the desecration of Muslim sacred objects and Muslim bodies in
the clandestine prisons maintained by the United States since September 11th,
2001. However, this kind of sacrilege is different from that expressed on the train
encounter, which we would describe as more creative than destructive, carried out
haltingly and singularly, without clear conviction except a dedication to commit-
ting the sacrilege. Here we describe two more expressions that might be described
as sacrilege, one which illustrates a more concerted effort to articulate spirituality
through practice, and a second which turns to an individual account of encounter.
On a day when we were scheduled to brainstorm a fictional short film about
spirituality, C arrived at the youth club visibly energized, and excitedly presented
a flier she had been handed with the word ‘Spirituality’ printed boldly on the front.
The flier advertised a workshop and event described as ‘new age spirituality’, with
opportunities for attendees to experience meditation, shamanism, yoga, and reiki.
None of the young women were familiar with any of these practices or knew what
they were, and we looked some of them up on the computer and talked through
them, toying with the idea of paying to go to the event. As we sat around a large
piece of newsprint in the youth club meeting room to try and think of a storyline
that would explore their ideas about spirituality, the girls moved quickly away
from the new-age practices advertised in the flier, and instead gravitated toward
what a spiritual person would do. Spiritual people would be good people, ‘bet-
ter’, generous, and caring. One of the screenplays that resulted from these exer-
cises – their favorite, and the one we would have filmed had it not been for our
inability to procure the central prop – focused on a brief interaction between an
older man making his way down the pavement on a motorized mobility scooter,
and a teenage girl walking in the opposite direction. Rather than passing the girl,
who they decided would project visible characteristics of distress (head down,
walking slowly, looking dejected), the old man would stop and speak with the girl
and ask her how she was feeling, and if she was OK. In just a few moments their
exchange would be over, but the girl would look different – thoughtful, reflective,
reconnected, and looking at the world around her. Hopeful.
The film team’s version of spirituality is better described as care and connection
across difference, less ‘interpersonal niceness’ than encounter, or what Wilson
(2016) identifies as ‘the unpredictable ways in which similarity and difference
are negotiated in the moment’ (p. 5, emphasis in original). Wilson points to the
uncanny sense of interruption that is the outcome of encounter across difference,
 Rethinking youth spirituality 163
or ‘meetings where difference is somehow noteworthy’ (p. 14). Encounters of
spirituality thus imply a very different process than the individualistic and pos-
sessive framings discussed in the youth spirituality literature; whereas the latter
assumes that spirituality is embodied and thus measurable as an attribute of more
or less spiritual, encounter implies that difference, time, and place are central to
spiritual experiences. The time and place of our filmmaker’s lives was ‘broken
Britain’, a phrase offered by Sir Iain Duncan Smith and others in the Conservative
Party as a broad-brushed description of the decline of working class neighbor-
hoods. Youth, who were viewed as products of irresponsible and morally-bereft
parents, were the outcome of the social pathology of poverty. Then Prime Minis-
ter David Cameron painted neighborhoods like the one where our film crew lived
as ‘the seed bed of crime’, emerging from the tragic and unruly consequence of
failed families.6 To find the sacred in a pensioner who will notice and speak with
a teenager tells us as much about their context as it does their spiritual beliefs.
Explaining and understanding youth spirituality thus might require more
explicit groundings in encounter than belief, even when seeking to understand
individual perspectives and experiences. To illustrate this final point, we turn to
a 17-year-old young woman, ‘Z’, who was interviewed for our project. As a fre-
quent fixture in the youth club she was often listening in, though not participating,
in our other activities. She was born in Pakistan and moved with her family to
Glasgow when she was just a year old. She is fond of her neighborhood because
she knows most of the people who live around her, though she worries about how
many young people do drugs, drink, and get into trouble. She describes herself as
always the most interested in speaking about religion amongst her peers, always
wanting to help others understand God as she did but recognizing that most peo-
ple her age weren’t interested, including her boyfriend. She states confidently, ‘I
believe in God with all my heart, I’ve been brought up as Muslim but. . . (pause)
my heart doesn’t really belong there, if you get me’. Z is therefore difficult to cat-
egorize in our existing interpretations of spirituality beyond the individualism that
is often affixed to post-boomer generations. Still, she defines herself as ‘more on
the Christian side than I am on the Islam side. I think all religions are basically the
same. It’s just the small differences that set them apart’. Her certainty about God
is buttressed by her ability to successfully cope with her long-term depression.
‘It’s mostly because I trust God that I see life in a different way now’.
Meeting across difference, and holding difference in tension, is central to Z’s
sense of the spiritual and the sacred, and it is also what drives her to piece together
practices that would be considered sacrilege, blasphemy, or ‘fuzzy theology’ from
the perspective of either Christianity or Islam. Spirituality for Z is located both
in and through difference, and she insists that ‘[. . .] so many places that are
spiritual, but in their own way. I would just love, you know, to go around the
world and just see what everybody is like’. The discovery of the sacred through
encounter of spiritual places is a grounding characteristic of her spirituality, and
she explains that this is a long-standing practice for her. ‘It sounds really strange,
but sometimes I used to just like skip off school and like I would just sit outside
the church just to find, you know, comfort . . . just to feel like I’m closer to God in
164  Elizabeth Olson et al.
a sort of way’. Though Z confesses lacking words to describe the power of church
buildings, she thinks that it must have to do with ‘so many people that have been
there baring their souls out to God’. Her practices might be described according to
existing theories of youth religiosity as taking on a ‘candy-jar’ or ‘spiritual seeker’
role. However, these explanations would mischaracterize her certainty about her
belief, and perhaps also her reasons for her sacrilegious practices, which are not
intended as desecration or destruction. Instead, her sacrilege allows for the folding
together of difference, revealing not an individualistic form of spirituality but a
complementary place of peace, saturated with souls.

Conclusion
To conclude, we would like to highlight three ways that attention to everyday
encounter, captured outside the practices, discourse, and spaces normally associ-
ated with religion and spirituality, might lend new insights into youth spirituality.
Firstly, this approach provided relief from existing categorical biases and from
the assumption that spirituality is an analytic category best studied by asking
about individual beliefs and then describing trends. Instead, our analysis sug-
gests that there are other processes we should be paying attention to and discuss-
ing. Focusing on practices of sacrilege reveals some problems with our own
assumptions as scholars when we categorize things that fall outside of our exist-
ing definitions as inaccuracies, or as not quite serious. Secondly, and relatedly,
our focus on everyday encounters revealed a range of possibilities for studying
youth spirituality: as engagement and play with popular culture, as attempts to
articulate spirituality within context and that which is missing, and also as the
more common scholarly reflections on novel combinations of practice-led (rather
than theologically driven) belief. Furthermore, encounters don’t have to be last-
ing to be meaningful to our study of youth spirituality; L doesn’t have to become
a Dude-ist, and Z doesn’t have to articulate a personal theology to correspond
with sitting outside of churches, in order for us to pay attention to their expe-
riences. Thirdly, research that focuses on spirituality through the collection of
beliefs will provide only a limited understanding of both the construction and the
meaningfulness of youth spirituality. Here we have experimented with looking
across encounters that would traditionally be described as sacrilege or its related
practice of blasphemy in order to look at instances of encounters with spirituality
that may or may not be felt or expressed as belief. Though tentative and limited,
it illustrates the importance of both moving beyond existing discursive catego-
ries (Bartolini et al. 2017), and considering approaches and methodologies that
encourage researchers to engage youth spirituality as not just existential or meta-
physical (Lynch 2010), but also as encounters that produce and reflect important
signals in spirituality more broadly.
We would like to end by briefly reflecting on sacrilege and blasphemy as poten-
tially important qualities of contemporary spirituality. We have resolved very few
questions about its function in late modernity, and it requires more research. Our
analysis suggests that exploring who is able to commit sacrilege, what is condoned
 Rethinking youth spirituality 165
or condemned, in what context and for what ends are all worthwhile questions
that may help us understand contemporary spirituality with new insights and new
categorical emphases. Understanding that which used to be deemed sacrilege or
blasphemy, and tracking both continuity and new emergences of its discursive
performance, could be an important undertaking for describing contemporary
spirituality. We find room, and perhaps even an urgency, for moving further from
our traditional scripts and into areas that are still partly formed and tentative,
revealed through close attention to everyday encounters.

Notes
1 See, for instance, discussions surrounding Taves’ (2009) recommendation to shift reli-
gious studies toward ‘experiences deemed religious.’
2 The project was funded by the AHRC-ESRC Religion and Society Research Programme
(www.religionandsociety.org.uk/)
3
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNEgLLGLL18 and www.theguardian.com/law/2011/
aug/31/do-we-have-right-to-film-police
4 http://dudeism.com
5 www.templeofthejediorder.org/
6 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5166498.stm

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11 Transnational religion and
everyday lives
Spaces of spirituality among
Brazilian and Vietnamese
migrants in London
Olivia Sheringham and
Annabelle Wilkins

Introduction
In a study of irregular migration from Mexico and Central America to the United
States, Hagan (2008: 7) argues that ‘religion permeates the entirety of the migrant
experience’. Migrants draw upon their faith for guidance before embarking upon
migration, as well as turning to religious objects, practices and institutions for
material, emotional and spiritual support during frequently dangerous journeys
(Hagan 2008). Once they have reached their destination, migrants engage with
local religious sites and practices that enable them to feel a sense of belonging
in an unfamiliar, often hostile environment (Hagan 2008, see also Sheringham
2013). Religion is also trans-temporal, connecting migrants’ memories and tradi-
tions with ideas of the future, including potential returns to the homeland (Vásquez
2016). However, while there has been increasingly widespread recognition of the
significance of religion within migrant experience, few studies have examined the
connections between home, migration and spirituality in the city (Wilkins 2016;
Blunt and Sheringham 2015). This chapter explores everyday urban and trans-
national spiritualities, with a particular focus on religious and spiritual practices,
objects and spaces among Brazilian and Vietnamese migrants in London.
Drawing upon qualitative research with people who have migrated to London
over a range of time periods from 1979 to the present day, the chapter explores
the everyday urban spaces in which religion and spirituality are practised, as well
as the relationships between material and spiritual worlds.1 This chapter also
extends research on transnational religion in its attention to relationships between
the domestic and the urban as sites of religious and spiritual experience, both
of which are mediated by transnational connections. Throughout our discus-
sion, we develop the idea of the migrant home in the city as a site of connection
between domestic, urban, transnational and spiritual realms. We also consider the
ways in which spiritual objects and practices are present in workplaces and those
that travel with migrants on their journeys around the city. The chapter draws
upon these objects and practices to theorise how everyday spiritualities unset-
tle the boundaries between the home, the city and worlds beyond. We empha-
sise the importance of locality and migrant home-making alongside transnational
 Transnational religion and everyday lives 169
networks, showing how religious practices can contribute to the shrinking of
space between home and (imagined or remembered) homeland. We argue that
migrants’ everyday spiritual practices not only contribute to understandings of
transnational religion, but also articulate broader debates within geographies of
home and migration, including what home is and where it might be located.
Through its examination of religious and spiritual practices in the lives of Bra-
zilian and Vietnamese migrants in London, this chapter develops a holistic per-
spective on the significance of transnational religion in relation to home, work
and the city. Previous research has revealed how individual migrants draw upon
religious and spiritual practices in multiple ways, including as resources for
navigating and coping with the challenges of everyday life (Vásquez and Knott
2014), as strategies for ensuring success in work (Hüwelmeier and Krause 2010;
Wilkins 2016), or in maintaining relationships across transnational space (Sher-
ingham 2013). Religious practices are also significant in terms of building a sense
of home, identity and belonging (Tolia-Kelly 2004). In emphasising material,
affective and intangible aspects of religion, our approach highlights the ways in
which religious practices operate at multiple scales, from the individual body to
the dwelling, the workplace, the city and across transnational space. It takes into
account the ways in which religion is reconfigured by and through mobility, as
migrants find new and innovative ways to adapt their practices to new contexts.
This is not without significant challenges, as everyday spiritual practices are influ-
enced and constrained by material, economic and personal dimensions of life in
the ‘super-diverse’ city.
Our analysis is informed by a ‘lived religion’ approach, in which the empha-
sis is shifted from institutional or formalised religion towards a focus on how
religion is actually practised in the everyday lives of individuals and communi-
ties (Ammerman 2007; McGuire 2008; Orsi 2003). Ideas of lived religion have
been incorporated into migration studies, as research has explored the roles of
spiritual practices, sacred objects and spaces in enabling senses of belonging,
home and identity among migrant communities (Sheringham 2013; Vásquez
and Marquardt 2003; Vásquez and Knott 2014). Alongside broader understand-
ings of lived religion, this chapter draws upon ideas that are embedded within
particular cultural contexts, such as concepts of the Vietnamese home as a site
of connection between material and spiritual worlds (McAllister 2012; Jellema
2007a). In addition to exploring the multi-scalarity of religion and spirituality
among Vietnamese and Brazilian migrants in London, we propose that spir-
itual practices are important elements of home and belonging in the context
of migration and urban super-diversity. Furthermore, we argue that a focus
on everyday spiritual practices not only enables new understandings of home
and migration, but also contributes to knowledge on the complex relationships
between these domains. The city is emphasised as a crucial site for transi-
tions and transformations in religious and spiritual practices in the everyday
lives of individual migrants and communities. Before examining the particular
spiritual practices, sites and objects that are significant for participants, the
following section situates the chapter within broader geographies of religion
and migration.
170  Olivia Sheringham and Annabelle Wilkins
Religion and transnationalism: from institutional religion to
everyday spiritualities
Relationships between religion and migration have been explored by increasing
numbers of scholars across a range of disciplines (Sheringham 2010; Vásquez
and Dewind 2014; Wong 2014). The globalisation of migration focused attention
on the ways in which religious and spiritual practices travel and change through
mobility (Levitt 2007), the formation of transnational religious networks (Ebaugh
and Chafetz 2002), and the heightened visibility of diasporic religious identities
in urban space (Garnett and Harris 2013; Hüwelmeier and Krause 2010; Vásquez
2016). Religious institutions have been theorised as liminal spaces in which
migrants can experience a sense of belonging in what can be an exclusionary
environment (Vásquez and Marquardt 2003). However, others have argued that
focusing solely on institutions and adopting a ‘functionalist’ or ‘materialist’ per-
spective on religion have led scholars to overlook personal and embodied aspects
of religion and spirituality within the migrant experience (Dwyer 2016; see also
Mazumdar and Mazumdar 2009). Similarly, Sheringham (2010: 1689) calls for
geographers to examine ‘how religious beliefs and practices travel across borders
not just through institutions and formal networks, but also as an integral part of
the identities and experiences of many migrants.’ This perspective regards migra-
tion and religion as inseparable from broader practices and processes of mobility,
dwelling and everyday life, not only for particular migrants or religious communi-
ties but also for those who stay put (ibid).
An emphasis on the intertwining of religion and everyday life draws upon ideas
of ‘lived’ or ‘everyday’ religion (Ammerman 2007; McGuire 2008; Orsi 2003),
whereby attention is focused on embodied practices, sacred objects and spaces in
homes and places of work, as well as public rituals or performances of faith that
take place during religious celebrations (Dwyer 2016, MacKian 2012; Vásquez
and Knott 2014). Both the home and the city have been explored as important
realms of religious and spiritual experience and practice. Fewer scholars, how-
ever, have focused on how migrants’ religious practices can create connections
between these domains as well as with spaces beyond (see however Wilkins 2016;
Tolia-Kelly 2004). Moreover, as we argue below, migrants’ religious and spiritual
practices in urban and domestic spaces can foster temporal connections, including
relationships with deceased ancestors and aspirations for the future.
A substantial body of research draws upon domestic material culture to explore
emotional dimensions of home, migration, memory and identity (Hurdley 2006;
Miller 2001; Walsh 2006). Studies have also examined the role of domestic objects
and images in creating and remembering homes across diasporic space (Burrell
2014b; Parrott 2014; Walsh 2006). Recent scholarship argues that domestic pos-
sessions are not simply ‘identity markers’ or reminders of a homeland, but involve
layers of emotion and sensation that are interwoven with cultural and personal
values (Parrott 2014). Other studies have examined the ways in which the material
culture of diasporic homes is imbued with religious and spiritual meaning (Tolia-
Kelly 2004; Mazumdar and Mazumdar 2009). Drawing on research with South
 Transnational religion and everyday lives 171
Asian women in London, Tolia-Kelly (2004) discusses domestic religious spaces
including mandirs (home altars or shrines), exploring their material and sensory
significance in relation to feelings of home, belonging and identity in the con-
text of migration. Tolia-Kelly’s theorisation of shrines as objects of ‘re-memory’
points to the ways in which these sacred spaces change over time, as objects and
images symbolising personal and collective histories are continually added (ibid:
319). Discussing the significance of photographs of the Dalai Lama among mem-
bers of the Tibetan diaspora, Harris (2001) notes that these images do not only
evoke religious feelings, but are drawn upon to generate a sense of solidarity and
resistance against Chinese politics. Parrott (2014: 51) notes that objects that were
intended to bring a sense of comfort may evoke feelings of loss or isolation in a
new location.
Within the growing research field of geographies of religion (Dwyer 2016),
there has been an increasing interest in the materialisation of religion in urban
landscapes, sometimes involving contestations over public space and identity
(Naylor and Ryan 2002; Smith and Eade 2008). Recent work has also highlighted
the intersections between religious identities, space and power, often, as Dwyer
(2016: 2) suggests, producing ‘richer accounts of the intersectionalities of social
formations, power and resistance.’ A number of studies have examined the roles
of faith-based organisations (FBOs) in the ‘post-secular city’ in addressing social
and welfare-related issues (Beaumont 2008; Jamoul and Wills 2008). Religious
and spiritual practices can therefore be understood as resources for building a
sense of belonging and community in what can be exclusionary contexts. How-
ever, a focus on the particular buildings and functions of religion risks overlook-
ing the embodied aspects of spirituality and the diverse spaces in which they take
place. In this chapter, we respond to scholarship that recognises how spiritualities
are ‘infused into ordinary spaces’, including homes, workplaces and public spaces
in the city (Bartolini et al. 2017), while also examining spiritual and otherworldly
experiences as important topics of study in their own right (Holloway and Valins
2002; MacKian 2012).
A spatial perspective on religion, as Knott (2005) argues, encompasses not only
physical and cultural spaces, but also the wider expressions and practices of religi-
osity and spirituality across and within multiple domains. This chapter responds
to calls for scholars to adopt an embodied and spatial approach to transnational
religion. However, this chapter also contributes to geographies of spirituality by
broadening spatial perspectives on religion to encompass the spirit world along-
side domestic, urban and transnational dimensions of space. We also demonstrate
the ways in which spiritual practices connect multiple temporalities of home and
relationships between living relatives, spirits and ancestors. We explore the signif-
icance of spiritual objects found in the home, as well as objects that migrants carry
with them on their journeys around the city. These objects are examined in rela-
tion to the multiple ways of ‘doing religion’ in the city. Migrants’ everyday spir-
itualities encompass face-to-face and virtual dimensions, including online apps
that facilitate worship, alongside objects and rituals that are important resources
in work and home-making practices. These practices and objects generate new
172  Olivia Sheringham and Annabelle Wilkins
connections between migrants’ homes and mobilities in the city, as well as form-
ing translocal connections between London and their countries of departure. We
argue that attending to everyday religious practices and spaces offers new ways of
theorising home beyond the material, urban and domestic, incorporating spiritual
and temporal worlds.
It is important to clarify how we are using the terms religion and spirituality,
which whilst overlapping, also refer to distinct concepts and realms of experience.
Several of our interviewees did not describe themselves as religious, but empha-
sised important spiritual aspects of their everyday lives. Conversely, several par-
ticipants referred to the social aspects of their affiliation to a formal religious
denomination as an important site of belonging in the city, without highlighting
the spiritual dimension. Here we understand spirituality as often encompassing,
but also moving beyond, formal and institutionalised religion. Drawing on MacK-
ian’s (2012) work on ‘everyday spiritualities’, we point to the importance of taking
seriously the ‘agency and salience of the spiritual’ (Dwyer 2016: 758–759). Our
approach to home is informed by established frameworks conceptualising home as
a ‘spatial imaginary’: not only a physical location, but also a site of emotions, mem-
ories and imagination that is intertwined with power relations (Blunt and Dowling
2006; Blunt 2005; Brickell 2012). Finally, we build on recent work that examines
the intersections of home, city and migration, where the city is understood as an
important site of home for migrants and diasporic groups (Blunt and Bonnerjee
2013), and the home is revealed as a site of connection between the urban and the
domestic (Burrell 2014a; Blunt and Sheringham 2015). Drawing together the lit-
erature on home, city and migration with perspectives on lived religion enables a
comprehensive understanding of the importance of everyday spiritualities within
migrant home-making, as well as the broader role of the city as a site in which
religious practices are maintained, adapted and transformed. Before discussing
the spiritual dimensions of home, migration and the city in relation to our empiri-
cal material, the following section briefly establishes the background of Brazilian
and Vietnamese migration to London.

Brazilian and Vietnamese migrants in London

Brazilian and Vietnamese migrants are two relatively recent migrant groups
in London, whose migratory trajectories follow different patterns to those of
migrants with particular colonial links to the UK. While the groups have very
different backgrounds and circumstances of migration, they share a number of
important features with regard to their internal diversity and visibility in the city.
While earlier waves of Brazilian migrants to London included those who came in
the 1960s to escape the military dictatorship in Brazil, it is widely acknowledged
that the most significant inflow of Brazilian migrants to the UK, and to London
in particular, occurred in the early 2000s. Unofficial estimates put the number
in London alone at somewhere between 150,000–300,000 (Evans et al. 2015),
while estimates from the Brazilian Ministry of External Affairs put the figure in
the UK at around 120,000 (MRE 2014). Existing studies of Brazilians in London
 Transnational religion and everyday lives 173
highlight the internal heterogeneity of Brazilians with regards to region of origin,
race, sexuality, class background and migration status as well as the fairly wide
dispersal of Brazilians across the city (McIlwaine 2011; Evans et al. 2015; Sher-
ingham 2013). Despite such internal diversity, a high proportion of the recent
flow of Brazilians to London are ‘economic migrants’, the majority employed
in low skilled, low paid service sector jobs (Evans et al. 2011). London’s size-
able Brazilian presence is reflected in the large numbers of shops, restaurants,
beauty salons and publications that exist, established predominantly by Brazil-
ians, to serve Brazilians. More significant, perhaps, are the growing number of
churches – of varying denominations – that seem to represent crucial spaces of
support for Brazilian migrants as well as seeking to attract followers from other
denominations (Sheringham 2013). The empirical discussion in this chapter is
based on a wider study – conducted in 2011–2012 in Brazil and London, with
follow-up interviews in London conducted in 2016 – of the role of religion in the
everyday lives and migration experiences of Brazilian migrants in London and
those who return home (see also Sheringham 2013). The research involved a total
of 78 interviews with men and women from a range of backgrounds who were
either currently living in London or had returned to Brazil after a period of time
living in the city.
During the 20 years following the takeover of South Vietnam in 1975, over two
million refugees left Vietnam. This mass exodus was triggered by the reunifica-
tion of North and South Vietnam in 1975, when Communist Vietnamese forces
took control of Saigon and thousands of people fled the city, many of them in
small fishing boats (Chan 2011). Other refugees left as a result of conflict between
China and Vietnam after 1979. Many refugees who were rescued at sea endured
long stays in refugee camps in Hong Kong (Hale 1993). The first Vietnamese refu-
gees were accepted by the UK from Hong Kong in 1979, when Hong Kong was
under British rule (Sims 2007). Around 22,000 refugees were resettled in Britain
between 1979 and 1988. Alongside those who came as refugees, the Vietnamese
population includes people who have migrated for work or education in more
recent years. The 2011 census estimated around 30,000 people living in England
and Wales who were born in Vietnam, of whom around half live in London. How-
ever, these official totals are markedly lower than the 55,000 Vietnamese in the
UK estimated by community organisations (Sims 2007: i). While Vietnamese
communities have formed across East and South East London, Hackney is com-
monly regarded as an important location for the city’s Vietnamese population,
evidence of which can be seen in the presence of Vietnamese restaurants, shops
and nail salons. The Vietnamese diaspora is diverse in terms of ethnicity, political
affiliation and religious practice, and includes followers of Buddhism, Catholi-
cism and ancestor veneration. The research on which this chapter is based draws
upon qualitative research involving 22 men and women from a range of back-
grounds, all of whom were born in Vietnam and now live and/or work in London.
Alongside repeated semi-structured interviews, the study used ethnography and
visual methods to examine material, emotional and imaginative dimensions of
home, work and the city.
174  Olivia Sheringham and Annabelle Wilkins
As relatively ‘new’ migrant groups without colonial links to the UK and char-
acterised by internal heterogeneity with regard to class, migration status and
religion, both Brazilian and Vietnamese migrants could be seen as contribut-
ing to the increasing intensification of diversity in London that has been termed
‘super-diversity’ (Vertovec 2007). Both groups have made their mark on the urban
landscape through the emergence of shops, restaurants, nail salons and other busi-
nesses, as well as public cultural events such as Brazilian Day or the Vietnam
Discovery festival. Yet these visible traces of ethnicity to some extent mask the
more complex and contested ways in which migrants inhabit and experience the
city (Knowles 2013). In the following sections, we examine migrants’ everyday
religious and devotional practices – which span domestic, urban and spiritual
worlds – to contribute to a more nuanced and layered understanding of home,
transnational religion and super-diversity.

Religion in the home

The home was a significant space of religious and spiritual practice among Brazil-
ian and Vietnamese migrants in our case studies. The presence of home shrines or
altars, for example, facilitated contact with deities, ancestors and spiritual beings,
as well as contributing to a diasporic identity. Domestic altars can be observed in
the homes of many Vietnamese people in London, and include those that venerate
the Buddha, others that are directed towards Taoist deities and altars to famil-
ial ancestors. Alongside the major religious faiths of Buddhism and Christianity,
ancestor worship is widely practised in Vietnam, including among people who
would not define themselves as religious (McAllister 2012). Ancestor worship
is part of a belief system in which spirits of the deceased are considered to exist
alongside the living, and is related to the on-going repayment of ‘moral debt’ to
parents for the sacrifices they have made in raising their children (Jellema 2007a).
Practices of worship include the offering of food, water and other material goods,
and have been understood as a means of connecting the living in this world with
the dead in the other world (Di Gregorio and Salemink 2007). Several participants
described ancestor veneration as a private and intimate practice, and many rituals
are undertaken in the home.
Son left Vietnam as a refugee in 1979 and had lived in Hackney for over
20 years at the time of the research. His altar was given a prominent position in the
main living room and included statues of the Buddha and pictures of his deceased
parents. Son described how the ancestors are considered to return home to receive
offerings from their relatives. He noted that the altar must be kept brightly lit so
that the spirits can find their way home:

The spirit wanders, the spirit comes to the house, they have to know where to
go . . . when you make the offering they come back and sit in the picture . . .
then they start to enjoy what you offer them . . . you offer the incense stick,
you tell them who you are and you ask them for whatever you want – for a
better career, to find a partner, whatever you want them to bless you to have.
 Transnational religion and everyday lives 175
Several participants noted the importance of keeping the altar clean and regularly
replenishing the offerings as a mark of respect to the ancestors. As he described
his altar, Son admonished himself for not keeping it clean and for using dried
flowers instead of fresh ones, frequently pointing out differences between the
placement of his altar and how it would be positioned in a Vietnamese home.
Despite these challenges, Son described the altar as the focal point of his home
and a valuable connection to his ancestors and to the Buddha. However, several
other participants were unable to house an altar because of a lack of space in their
rented accommodation. Many younger interviewees shared flats and sometimes
rooms in East London and changed their accommodation frequently, making it
difficult to maintain an altar. Indeed, migration impacts upon participants’ reli-
gious practices in multiple ways, including through the effects of constraints on
space, differences in housing design, access to places of worship and living costs.
However, Ngọc, a Vietnamese student who lived in a shared house near Mile End,
had adapted the material culture and rituals surrounding ancestor worship to her
East London home. Her shrine resembled a traditional altar, but was focused upon
a depiction of the Buddha and did not venerate any of Ngọc’s ancestors. It did not
include any pictures or shelves that were fixed to the wall, making it more practi-
cal for living in rented housing. Ngọc explained that she consulted her mother for
advice on the practicalities and demands of worship in her new location:

She said, well, basically, when I was asking her, do we need that? As in, do
we need to have a picture of my grandfather or something? And then she said
that it’s too complicated for you, so instead you can have a picture of Buddha,
it’s a good blessing for the house.
(Ngọc)

Like Vietnam, the Brazilian religious landscape is marked by diversity. Despite

being the world’s largest Catholic country, a vast array of other religions and spir-
itual movements have emerged and proliferated in recent decades that have chal-
lenged the hegemony of the Catholic Church as well as fostering change – new
‘creolisations’ (Rocha 2006) – within it. These religious shifts are also bound up
with processes of migration and mobility, making Brazil an important node in
diasporic religious networks (Rocha and Vásquez 2013). Among Brazilians in Lon-
don, religious practices both reflect the dynamic religious field of Brazil, as well
as demonstrate distinct and innovative ways of practising religion in a new and
unfamiliar environment. Within such a context, Brazilian migrant homes became
important sites for these complex religious and spiritual practices, which often
reveal affiliation to major religious denominations as well as creativity and adapt-
ability in response to the challenges of migration. Several interviewees had domes-
tic shrines, crucifixes and other devotional objects in their homes, which, whilst not
necessarily regarded as creating links to ancestors, were emphasised as providing
spiritual support as well as enabling ties with people and places back in Brazil.
Vera, for instance, a practising Catholic, lived in a small flat in East London
with nine other people, including her son-in-law, granddaughter and other family
176  Olivia Sheringham and Annabelle Wilkins
members. As well as working as a cleaner with shifts in the early morning and late
at night, Vera worked from home as a manicurist and beautician, and as a child-
minder. The flat was thus a hub of activity: Vera’s clients would come to have their
nails painted or legs waxed, while others would drop off their children for her to
look after. At the same time, the other inhabitants of the flat would come and go,
often to eat or sleep before heading out to their next workplace. Yet within this
unadorned space in which the often mundane, practical realities of everyday life
were carried out, there was a small shrine to the Nossa Senhora de Aparecida, the
Patron Saint of Brazil, and to Jesus, positioned on a shelf in the kitchen. As well
as offering everyday protection and being a symbol of God’s presence, this small
shrine took on great significance when Vera’s husband was run over by a car and
suffered severe injuries.
Looking at the shrine, Vera explained how it was thanks to God that he had not
been killed, and how as a family their faith had helped them get through this diffi-
cult time. Ivone, aged 25, who had lived in London since she was 14, had recently
purchased a flat with her husband on the outskirts of the city. She explained how
important it was to bless their home ‘just asking God to protect, bless and keep
this house’ as well as ‘when something is important to us.’ Eventually they had it
officially blessed by a Priest with a prayer called ‘Minor Exorcisms’ which, she
explained, ‘frees that house from any bad and makes the house God’s property.’
Yet unlike her home in Brazil where she and her family had had a room in the
house dedicated for prayer, where they had ‘photos, some small sculptures, rosa-
ries, candles and the Bible’, Ivone and her husband didn’t have such a room or
even an altar as they did not have space in their London flat. She talked about their
plans to rearrange furniture and redecorate so as to incorporate space for more
‘religious signs like photos or sculptures’. Enrique, aged 30, didn’t see himself as
belonging to a particular religious affiliation but talked about his ‘personal faith’
which, he said, didn’t require him to go to a specific church or temple, but could
be practised in the space of his home. Enrique explained how he would often sit
in silence, light a candle and feel a sense of comfort, as well as a connection to
absent people and places.
These examples demonstrate not only the links between religious objects, mem-
ories and lives pre-migration (Tolia-Kelly 2004), but also highlight the adaptabil-
ity and mobility of religion and spirituality and how they can be shaped to respond
to shifting needs and demands in new environments. Domestic shrines are also
examples of the transnational movement and circulation of spiritual objects. Items
used in worship, such as Buddha figures and incense holders, could be purchased
from Vietnamese shops in London which import the objects from Vietnam. Other
people obtained religious objects on visits to Vietnam or had them brought to Lon-
don by visiting relatives. Buddhist objects, incense holders and other items were
also obtained from temples around the city. Son noted, however, that a Buddha
obtained from the temple must be blessed by a monk before it enters the home.
Relationships between the Vietnamese home and the wider world become
particularly apparent during Tết, the Lunar New Year festival, which is seen as
a time to renew social bonds and to prepare for the coming year. Many of the
 Transnational religion and everyday lives 177
rituals involved take place within the domestic space, and include the cleansing
of the home as families prepare to welcome living and dead relatives (McAllister
2012; Jellema 2007a). These activities also link the home to other sites in the city,
including markets, shops and pagodas. McAllister (2012) draws upon the Fou-
cauldian concept of heterotopia to theorise the Vietnamese home as a place that
connects to other sites through the activities of its inhabitants:

The home connects to the heavens, to an ancestral graveyard, to the ances-

tors in the underworld or in heaven, to pagodas or churches, and to other
sites associated with the supernatural, in various ways – spatially, temporally,
materially and spiritually.
(McAllister 2012: 120)

Practices involved in ancestor veneration are closely tied to particular notions

of home. Ancestor worship summons ancestors and the living to return to their
‘native homeland’ (quê hương), the ancestral home that is associated with birth
and childhood. This highlights the complex relationships between home and
mobility, presence and absence. While Vietnamese people overseas are urged to
return to the homeland to venerate the ancestors, Jellema (2007b) argues that these
returns are accepted as temporary and occasional, describing a flexible ‘coming
and going’ relationship with the nation. Migrants’ practices of worship also link
the Vietnamese migrant home with the wider world. Minh described how she
includes her current location and Vietnam in her prayers, connecting her London
home with broader ideas of home and identity on a transnational scale.
In some cases, the home becomes a significant site of migrant religious practice
for practical reasons. Places of worship may be located far from people’s homes or
workplaces, and their worship may be affected by the demands of work and fam-
ily life or the absence of religious services. Brazilian and Vietnamese participants
demonstrated how they adapt their practices to the new environment, leading to a
reconfiguration in practices of worship over space and time. Several individuals
described how the act of worship provided a sense of comfort and guidance, help-
ing them to establish a sense of home in their new environment. However, this
relationship also placed practical and emotional demands upon worshippers, par-
ticularly among those in temporary or transient housing conditions. In addition to
the religious significance of objects located within the home, several participants
referred to spiritual objects that they would carry with them in their everyday
lives. In the next section, we examine the portability of these objects and how they
enable new connections between domestic, urban and spiritual worlds.

Connecting home, city and worlds beyond:

portable and virtual spiritualities
Participants’ narratives emphasised the ways in which spiritual practices extend
beyond the home and how the meanings of objects can be altered in contexts
of mobility. Ty, a Vietnamese student in London, described the emotional and
178  Olivia Sheringham and Annabelle Wilkins
spiritual significance of a Buddhist amulet given to him by his mother for protec-
tion on his journey from Vietnam. Alongside its protective capacities, Ty cher-
ished the amulet because it was a tangible reminder of his home and family. Ty
kept the amulet in his wallet and carried it with him around the city, enabling a
sense of spiritual presence as he navigated urban space. Fernando, an undocu-
mented migrant from Brazil, also showed an amulet that he carried with him in
order to feel ‘a bit protected’ in what could be an unwelcoming environment.
Lucia, who attended a Brazilian Catholic church in London, carried an image of
the Portuguese ‘Our Lady of Fatima’ in her purse, which her sister had bought
her from Portugal, along with one of Jesus. She explained how she would look at
them and touch them when she was feeling ‘alone, or homesick’, describing how
these images reminded her of her faith as well as her sister who now lives back
in Brazil.
Similarly, Ivone carried in her purse an image of Jesus and a prayer, which she
drew comfort from during her journeys around the city. Yet what seemed more
significant for Ivone were the various religious apps that she had downloaded onto
her phone, such as the Bible, the liturgy and the Eucharist, and various prayers.
She explained how they allowed her to study religion, as well as to pray, when she
was travelling on the underground or at home. Minh, a Vietnamese woman study-
ing in London, used a mobile app based on the lunar calendar that would help her
determine the optimal day or time for particular life events, such as travelling or
planning a wedding. These examples demonstrate the portability and adaptability
of migrant everyday spiritual practices and the ways in which religious objects
take on particular significance while navigating the challenges of urban life. Fur-
thermore, the portability of many religious objects and practices enables worship-
pers who migrate to feel a sense of belonging as part of transnational religious
networks (Hüwelmeier and Krause 2010).
Religion’s adaptability is increasingly incorporating new technologies, forging
virtual as well as physical connections. Several scholars have explored migrants’
use of the Internet to access religion through the use of online chat rooms, prayer
groups or the live broadcasting of religious services (Levitt 2007; Oosterbaan
2011; Sheringham 2013). Indeed, for many participants who were unable to
attend services because of their working hours, the Internet was a crucial resource
for allowing participation in a religious community – either in London or transna-
tionally – and the practice or experience of religion in the home. Another example
of the intersections of the virtual and the religious came in the form of a Brazilian
soap opera – or telenovela – called ‘The Ten Commandments’ that many Brazilian
families watched.2 As one participant explained: ‘The TV channel had done many
other religious series in the past, different stories from the different characters in
the Bible. But for some reason this one was special. Maybe because it was about
Moses and his journey to become the leader and take people to the Promised
Land.’ Yet it wasn’t just the religious content that was important for Brazilians
living in London. Rather, for Ivone, it was the one time in the week when she and
her family came together without fail and all sat down together at home, huddled
around the TV to watch this important programme. In this sense the spiritual, the
 Transnational religion and everyday lives 179
virtual, the domestic and the familial are all intertwined, the home becoming a
space of connection with people who are present and absent, as well as a sense of
connection with a wider religious community.
For many Brazilian and Vietnamese migrants, spiritual practices are not only
associated with the home, family and domesticity, but are also connected to the
domains of work, business and urban public life. Thus, for example, altars to the
God of Fortune (who is associated with prosperity and success) are widely found
in Vietnamese restaurants, shops and nail salons in London, illustrating further
connections between spirituality, home and the city. Several Brazilians also talked
about the connections between their spirituality and their economic successes in
London and, subsequently back home. As one return migrant exclaimed as she
showed her newly built house in Brazil: ‘this was possible thanks to London and
to God’ (Anete).
The city figures throughout our research as both enabling and constraining
migrants’ spiritual practices. While some religious objects and activities are mobile
and adaptable, those that require a large public space or visible presence in the
city can be more difficult to sustain transnationally. Son, for example, explained
that many Vietnamese Buddhists would prefer to have a temple located in Hack-
ney, but the community faced barriers including the cost of land and obtaining
planning permission. While some participants visited temples elsewhere in Lon-
don and beyond, the need for transport to and from the temple posed a barrier to
regular public worship. Son also described how the Linh Son Buddhist temple
in South London had been the target of complaints by some local residents, who
objected to parking problems and the sounds of early morning ceremonies. In
contrast to the Vietnamese Catholic community, who have a large congregation in
a church in East London, Buddhist worshippers must travel further afield. Several
Brazilian and Vietnamese participants said that the timings of religious services
were incompatible with their working hours. In this context, worship in the home
and on the move can be understood as practical as well as spiritually-based prac-
tices that are influenced by the challenges of everyday life in the city.

Conclusion
This chapter has demonstrated the significance of everyday spiritual practices
and spaces within and beyond the migrant home, offering new understandings
of religion and spirituality in contexts of urban migration and mobility. We have
explored the multiple ways that migrants draw upon religious and spiritual objects
as resources for navigating the challenges of everyday life in the city, in main-
taining relationships across transnational space and time and in building a sense
of home and belonging. These objects operate at multiple scales, from the indi-
vidual body to the dwelling, the workplace and the city, as well as circulating
within transnational networks. Yet the chapter also uncovers the challenges of
maintaining spiritual practices in contexts of migration and urban super-diversity.
Religious practices are reconfigured in movement and are frequently adapted to
the new location. People, of course, also face barriers to mobility and settlement
180  Olivia Sheringham and Annabelle Wilkins
that will impact upon their spiritual practices. Participants in this research develop
pragmatic and creative solutions to the challenges of practicing their religion or
spiritual beliefs in the city, yet these practices cannot be separated from the struc-
tural inequalities and power relations involved in housing, work, immigration sta-
tus and (im)mobility.
This chapter contributes to geographies of spirituality in broadening spatial
perspectives on everyday religion to include the spiritual world alongside homes,
workplaces and public spaces in the city as sites of spiritual practice and signifi-
cance. Exploring the place of spirit within contexts of modernity, Bartolini et al.
(2017) argue that ‘we need to rethink the lines drawn between the secular and the
religious’ towards ‘those sites and spaces where the fuzzy and fluid boundaries
between superstition, religion and modernity are evident . . . where new forms
of modern spirituality are being created.’ In addition to examining how migrants
adapt their spiritual practices to the urban environment, this chapter demonstrates
how everyday spiritualities unsettle the boundaries between the home, the city
and worlds beyond. We emphasise the importance of locality and migrant home-
making alongside transnational networks, showing how migrants’ religious prac-
tices can contribute to the shrinking of space between home and (imagined or
remembered) homeland.
Migrants’ everyday spiritual practices not only contribute to understandings of
transnational religion, but also speak to broader debates in geographies of home
and migration. The home itself becomes a site of spatial and temporal connection
with people and places in Brazil and Vietnam, for example, as well as deities and
the spirit world. Spiritual practices are important ways in which migrants generate
a sense of home in the city, yet these practices are constrained by the spatial and
economic conditions of urban life. Understanding religion in contexts of mobility
requires us to explore how practices are lived across borders, as well as the power
relations that come into contact with ideas, practices and people as they move.

Notes
1 This chapter draws upon empirical data taken from two research projects, both of
which incorporated in-depth interviews and ethnographic research. Olivia Shering-
ham’s study explored transnational religious practices among Brazilians in London
and on their return to Brazil, and was based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in
London and Brazil (Sheringham 2013). Annabelle Wilkins’ research examined home
and work among Vietnamese migrants in East London, drawing upon interviews, pho-
tography and ethnographic research with Vietnamese people who migrated to London
in diverse circumstances, including individuals who arrived as refugees following the
Vietnam War, as well as participants who migrated for work or education in recent
years (Wilkins 2016).
2 ‘Os Dez Mandamentos’ is a Brazilian telenovela that was produced and broadcast by
the TV channel Rede Record in 2015.

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12 Life cycles of spirituality,
religious conversion and
violence in São Paulo
Kim Beecheno

Introduction
In this chapter, I explore the role of violence in the religious conversion of women
to Pentecostalism1 in Brazil. Drawing on ethnographic data and interviews with
female converts from a low-income, high-crime area of São Paulo, as well as liter-
ature analysing religious conversion in the Americas (Brenneman, 2012; Brusco,
1995; Freston, 2008; Lehman, 1996; Mariz and Machado, 1997; Martin, 1993;
Rostas and Droogers, 1993; Smilde, 2007; Stoll, 1990 among others), this chapter
finds that some women use religious conversion and continued spiritual practice
as a strategy for dealing with everyday violence and especially domestic violence.
This study employs Gooren’s (2007) concept of conversion careers, a life-
cycle approach to the examination of religious conversion, which highlights how
women use various levels of religious adherence over time to deal with the vio-
lence of everyday life (Scheper-Hughes, 1993) and domestic violence. Although
Pentecostalism is generally considered a patriarchal and conservative form of
evangelical Protestantism, this study demonstrates that some women feel empow-
ered by their conversion and religious adherence, which allows them to create
spaces of safety in which they negotiate and ultimately escape the violence they
are experiencing. This also underscores a spatialized understanding of conver-
sion, the effects of which are played out in different ‘spaces’, notably in the street
and in the home.
Data for this chapter was collected in the low-income, periphery city of Mauá,
São Paulo metropolitan region, much of which is favela (slums). It suffers from
high rates of urban violence, including 10.4 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants,
considered epidemic levels by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
(UNODC) (Waiselfisz, 2012a). In addition, statistics reveal high levels of robbery,
car theft, unemployment and drug abuse, particularly in the form of crack cocaine
(Waiselfisz, 2012a). While São Paulo is the 26th most dangerous state for women
with 3.1 femicides per 100,000 inhabitants, statistics show that these numbers are
unequally distributed, with metropolitan areas including Mauá reaching femicide
rates above 10 per 100,000 (Waiselfisz, 2012b). Although statistics are hard to
gain, rates of domestic violence are believed to be very high and Brazil is the 5th
deadliest country in the world for women (Waiselfisz, 2015). There is a plethora
 Life cycles of spirituality 185
of Pentecostal churches which have grown significantly in the last two decades,
demonstrating the ease of access potential converts have to Pentecostalism and
highlighting the tendency of these churches to grow in impoverished areas (Fres-
ton, 2008; Garmany, 2013).
I lived near Mauá for two years and returned to conduct the study over two
months in April and May 2012. I had intimate knowledge of the area and the
difficulties faced by its residents which allowed an entry point as well as access
to contacts. I conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews2 with female con-
verts to Pentecostal churches from Mauá (n=15). In addition, I spoke to many
people in the area such as residents, church members and leaders (n=46), and
attended numerous church services while living with a family in the area. Several
interviewees (n=8) worked as assistants in a local health centre earning Brazil’s
minimum salary of R$600 per month (around US$300) and the other women were
from favela Pedreirinha in Mauá (n=7) with no fixed income.
The chapter is divided as follows: first, a brief look at current literature on
conversion to Pentecostalism to set the scene and highlight the importance of
this study. Next, I will turn to a section describing the reasons for women’s con-
version, in which domestic violence was found to be the overarching reason for
conversion. This is followed by analysis of the subsequent effects of women’s
conversion from a life-cycle perspective and the way in which religious conver-
sion and spiritual practice were used in relation to violence, before turning to the
conclusion.

Religious conversion in Latin America

Despite important contributions examining the high rates of religious conver-
sion to evangelical Protestantism in Latin America, few studies have linked it
to violence. Researchers have suggested that conversion was linked to processes
of US acculturation and cultural imperialism (Lehman, 1996; Martin, 1993) or
even a natural effect of the ‘religious economy’ whereby adherents are likened
to consumers in a religious market (Chesnut, 2007). Studies have often focused
on conversion as a strategy for dealing with poverty (Stoll, 1990); a short-term,
problem-solving strategy giving converts a sense of empowerment (Rostas and
Droogers, 1993) or a form of cultural agency that allows converts to gain control
over personal, economic and social aspects of their lives (Smilde, 2007). These
important and varied theories demonstrate the complexities around religion and
spirituality, highlighting that reasons for conversion are not isolated to specific
‘sacred’ spaces or moments (Garmany, 2013).
Conversion has sometimes been considered within the context of the high rates
of urban violence that plague the region, leading Brenneman (2012) to describe
religious conversion as an exit strategy for men from drug gangs. Goldstein
(2003) took a different stance, calling it a gendered form of oppositional cul-
ture for women against gang membership and participation in urban violence.
Several authors pointed out that the conservative dress converts wear sends out
a visual message that they are not part of the violence around them (Abi-Eçab,
186  Kim Beecheno
2011; Goldstein, 2003). Garmany (2013) suggested that in low-income areas
evangelical pedestrians help to break down spatial barriers induced by fear of
public spaces at night. These theories also demonstrate the spatial effects of con-
version, which in these cases are played out in public spaces, in the city and in
the street. This is pertinent in the context of Brazil, where conversion levels have
increased concurrently with mounting levels of urban and interpersonal violence:
evangelical Protestants increased from 6.6 per cent of the population in 1980, to
20.2 per cent of the population in 2010. Over the same period, there were more
than a million homicides in Brazil, which is an average of around 36,000 deaths
a year (Waiselfisz, 2012a).
However, statistics demonstrate that while Brazilian men are by far the greatest
victims of homicide, women are the overwhelming victims of domestic violence.3
A national phone line set up for victims of domestic violence receives around
175 calls a day, and data suggests that a woman is beaten every two minutes and
one woman is killed every 1.5 hours in Brazil (Agencia Patricia Galvão, 2016).
Domestic violence is committed mainly against women or children by an intimate
partner or family member and occurs predominantly, although not exclusively, in
the home. In Brazil, domestic violence includes physical and sexual violence as
well as verbal and psychological violence such as swearing, threatening or humil-
iating someone (ibid). Therefore, for millions of Brazilian women, the spatial
distinctions of home/safety, street/danger, are not applicable. Conversion theories
analysing urban violence may therefore be less pertinent for women than studies
exploring the role of domestic violence. This underscores the importance of this
study, which found domestic violence to be the overarching reason for conver-
sion, although other forms of violence were also found to exist.
Not often considered in conversion theories are the intertwining effects of eve-
ryday violence (Scheper-Hughes, 1993). This includes structural violence, e.g.
Brazil’s historical, political and economic oppression, creating significant socio-
economic inequality, as well as institutional violence, e.g. created by agents acting
on behalf of the State, such as the police and those who oppose its authority, such
as armed gangs (Scheper-Hughes, 1993). Everyday violence is also the normali-
sation of interpersonal aggression in communities and individually lived experi-
ences. This includes drug abuse, delinquency, domestic and sexual abuse. These
forms of violence lead to the creation of an ethos of violence (Scheper-Hughes,
1993) and a culture of fear (Kruijt, 2001).
One of the few authors to link conversion and domestic violence, Burdick
(1996) suggested that Pentecostalism and Umbanda or Candomblé, Afro-Brazilian
Spiritist religions, would be more appealing than Catholicism to women seek-
ing help for domestic conflict. This is because they are ‘cults of affliction’ (153)
whose clienteles are drawn through the experience of suffering. These cults of
affliction created spaces of social privacy, where blame for conflict could be
safely articulated and projected onto spiritual ‘others’ (Burdick, 1996). It has also
been suggested that male conversion elevates domesticity by limiting traditional
aspects of ‘macho’ male behaviour, such as drinking, smoking, gambling and
extramarital relations (Mariz and Machado, 1997; Drogus, 1997; Brusco, 1995).
 Life cycles of spirituality 187
This led Brusco (1995) to call evangelical conversion a ‘strategic women’s move-
ment, like Western feminism, because it serves to reform gender roles in a way
that enhances female status’ (1995: 6).
These theories demonstrate clear benefits for conversion although they fail to
highlight how women negotiate everyday violence through religious conversion
and spiritual practice. In addition, the concept of ‘conversion’ suggests a one-time
event. I believe that a temporal analysis of women’s conversion and continued
religious practice is important for understanding why and how it could be used as
a strategy for dealing with violence, particularly within the private space of the
home and within intimate relationships. Using a temporal lens helps to explain
how women engage in the church in different ways and why they leave if they do
not find an answer.
Therefore, I employ Gooren’s (2007) concept of conversion careers to analyse
women’s conversion and continued use of religion and spirituality in relation to
violence, using a life-cycle framework. Gooren (2007) identified five levels of
higher or lower religious participation during a person’s life, the first of which is
pre-affiliation, when a potential member makes their first contact to see if they
would like to affiliate themselves on a more formal basis. All the women inter-
viewed in this study went through this step as they sought a solution to their
problems. The second step is affiliation, where the person refers to being a formal
member of a religious group, but the membership does not form a central aspect
of one’s life or identity. The next step is conversion, which all the women inter-
viewed achieved, referring to a radical change of worldview, and attribution of
religious identity not only from members of the church, but also non-members
outside the group. The fourth level identified is that of confession, a theological
term for core member identity, denoting a high level of participation within the
church and a missionary attitude towards non-members, a position that many of
the women achieved within their respective churches. Finally, disaffiliation refers
to those who have rejected membership of the church or inactive members who
still self-identify as believers (Gooren, 2007), examples of both of which were
found in this study. This theory is helpful for analysing religious adherence par-
ticularly in relation to violence, as Brazil’s high levels of religious syncretism
mean that conversion from one religion to another and often subsequent disaffili-
ation is relatively common (ibid). The following section will address women’s
initial reasons for conversion before turning to the consequences of their conver-
sion from a life-cycle perspective.

What were the women’s reasons for converting

to Pentecostalism?
A variety of push and pull factors explain the reasons the women in this study had
for converting to Pentecostalism. However, this study found domestic violence to
be the overarching reason for women’s conversion. All the women turned to the
church during a moment of crisis in their lives, directly or indirectly affected by
alcoholism and drug abuse, domestic violence, depression, illness or bereavement.
188  Kim Beecheno
Several elements attracted them to convert: a sense of community, friendship,
advice from the pastor, a safe space in which to verbalise problems, miracle cures,
divine intervention and predictive visions from other members.
Conversion to Pentecostalism was offered as the solution to all their problems,
and they were told it would give them a personal relationship with God once they
had accepted Jesus as their saviour, allowing the Holy Spirit to act in their lives.
Pentecostal churches are therefore postulating their services as a one-stop-shop
for the kind of poverty-related issues common to periphery urban areas and fave-
las, suggesting a lack of institutional or state-run services, which churches have
been quick to fill. None of the women interviewed converted at a time when they
were happy or when their lives were going well, hence conversion to Pentecostal-
ism can be seen as a survival strategy (Rostas and Droogers, 1993; Smilde, 2007;
Stoll, 1990).
The violence of everyday life is often exacerbated by poverty. In Mauá and
Favela Pedreirinha in particular, the violence of everyday life is played out
through the indignity of living in makeshift housing inadequate for human living,
a lack of basic services from the State and vulnerability to urban violence. One
of the interviewees, Jacinta, 48 years old, suffered from these forms of everyday
violence and had converted to Pentecostalism two years previously. Her husband
was in jail, she had 6 children, the youngest one had Down’s syndrome, and she
had recently discovered that her 15-year-old daughter was pregnant and that her
13-year-old daughter was addicted to crack. Jacinta felt that no one but the Pen-
tecostal church had offered any form of support, signifying that the church offers
services that the State should be providing.
Eight out of the 15 women cited their father or husband’s alcoholism and
domestic violence as the major contributing factors to their conversion. This sug-
gests that the women were all looking for solace from a problem in their lives.
Several of the women reported being on the verge of leaving their husbands due
to the alcoholism and related problems, and were therefore looking for a practi-
cal answer to a serious problem in their lives. In addition, 5 out of the 15 women
cited their own, their husband’s or family member’s drug addiction as a major
contributor to their conversion. Drug addiction led to conversion for several of the
women, whether it was the women’s own drug addiction, or a close family mem-
ber’s. Therefore, domestic abuse in the form of physical violence from a spouse
or family member often due to his alcoholism or drug addiction proved to be the
dominant form of violence affecting the women.
Stories of urban violence were noticeably lacking. However, during an inter-
view with Laura, she mentioned that her brother-in-law had been shot in front of
her house. When questioned about whether she found the area dangerous to live
in, Laura replied:

I don’t think it’s very violent around here. We’ve been burgled but it wasn’t
by people from around here. The same with my brother-in-law, he was just
unlucky, that bullet wasn’t meant for him, it was meant for someone else.
 Life cycles of spirituality 189
Her narrative suggests that there is a high tolerance to urban violence which has
become normalised due to its pervasiveness in their everyday lives. According
to Valentine (1989) this ‘othering’ of violence – locating it in ‘other’ people and
‘other’ places – is a coping strategy which allows women to operate in a climate of
fear and maintain some level of control over their lives by attempting to minimise
risk, because they cannot be afraid of all men all of the time (1989: 171).

What are the life-cycle consequences of the women’s

involvement in a Pentecostal church and how do they vary?
Violence, intimate power relations and indeed, religious or spiritual practice them-
selves do not necessarily remain at the same level or intensity over time. Gooren’s
(2007) theory of conversion careers and a life-cycle approach to women’s conver-
sion stories is useful in analysing the temporal outcomes of women’s use of reli-
gion and spirituality throughout their lives, particularly in relation to the violence
they experienced. The following section analyses women’s life-cycle conversion
stories with levels of spirituality described by Gooren (2007) above.

Maintaining the confession level of religious conversion

Some women consciously married a Pentecostal and brought their children up
within the church in order to protect themselves and their family from urban and
domestic violence. Sara and Flora, currently aged 39 and 28, were the women
who had converted youngest in this study, aged 6 and 17 respectively. They had
both converted due to their father’s alcoholism, which had negative impacts on
the family. Now married with children, they both remained very active within the
Assembly of God church, attending at least two or three times a week with their
families. Both reported a conscious awareness of wanting to marry a man with
the same religious beliefs they had, and a strong determination to bring up their
children within the church.

There is danger everywhere in Brazil, but here it’s getting worse. There are
so many drugs. Here we raise our children inside the home and don’t let them
play outside, because we’re scared they’ll fall into it [drug taking]. In the
job we do [health assistants] we know about a lot of abuse, especially child
abuse. The Evangelical church gives you a structure and that’s how we want
to raise our children, so they can learn to make the right choices and be as
safe as possible.
(Sara)

This narrative demonstrates that in some cases, Pentecostal women within the
church are keen to marry men who are Pentecostal themselves, in order to main-
tain the tight, family structure the church emphasises so heavily. It also reveals an
awareness of violence in the form of child abuse in Mauá. These women show that
190  Kim Beecheno
core member identity is seen as a way of protecting themselves from both urban
and domestic violence. This also demonstrates that conversion is spatialized, as
the women felt more protected through conversion, both in the private space of
the home and in the street.
Outside of the church, several women developed a new role for themselves
through evangelising and proselytising in their neighbourhood (Drogus, 1997;
Mariz and Machado, 1997). For all the women interviewed, conversion to Pen-
tecostalism gave them a renewed sense of self-esteem from which they drew
strength and happiness. Camila, now 47, converted aged 20 after her daughter’s
tragic death and developed a new role for herself evangelising in the local area.
She claimed that other people sought her out for advice, which was an obvious
source of pride. Similarly, Julia, 47, who converted aged 40, took on a leading role
evangelising in prisons and orphanages which she found very fulfilling.
Ana’s husband passed away but she felt moved to rent out a space in front of her
home and open a small branch of her preferred church, Renewed Presbyterian. The
small, but growing group of members hired a pastor and evangelised in the local
area to bring in more members. These examples suggest that conversion allowed the
women a voice in the public sphere they hadn’t had before (Birman, 2007), therefore
pointing to social empowerment (Stoll, 1990, Smilde, 2007), and challenging tradi-
tional gender roles with the women finding roles for themselves outside the home.
Roberta, 53, who converted at the age of 40 because three successive husbands
had left her, found that marriage counselling from the pastor helped her and her
husband so the whole family converted. She saw it as her responsibility to pray
for her neighbours and evangelise in the local area.

You have to be careful around here at night, there are a lot of drugs and peo-
ple are dangerous. The problem is crack, there’s a lot of it here, I pray for my
neighbours and their children who aren’t Evangelical, spread The Word, and
thank God that my son isn’t doing drugs.

Roberta felt it was her duty to evangelise since it had given her a role in life, as it
had to a greater or lesser extent in many of the women’s lives. However, her testi-
mony also highlights awareness of local urban violence and suggests that she and
her family felt more protected from that violence due to their conversion. Marital
counselling had solved her immediate problem of domestic strife, but the sense of
safety derived from the whole family’s conversion partly explains the continued
attraction for remaining within the church. These examples show women who
have remained at the highest confession level of religious affiliation, demonstrat-
ing that this intense level of religious participation, taking place in the church, in
the home and in the street, is necessary for them to maintain the sense of safety
from everyday violence that they have gained.

Empowerment
Many women felt empowered through their conversion and that translated into
empowerment within their relationships, leading to elements of change in socially
 Life cycles of spirituality 191
constructed gender roles. Eight out of the 15 women who converted to Pente-
costalism reported improvements in their marriages and in all but two of these
situations, the husbands also converted. Varlene, who converted with her husband
due to his alcoholism and abuse, demonstrated the ability to speak in tongue. An
obvious source of pride and admiration within the family, this could be seen as
a form of empowerment through religion, elevating her importance and respect
within the family and in church. At the same time, her husband’s focus returned to
the family, stopping the highly negative characteristics of machismo he had previ-
ously displayed through drinking and womanising. This is what Brusco (1995)
called the domestication of men, which occurred concurrently with Varlene’s
own growth in self-esteem through her role in the church. Varlene’s conversion
changed the balance of power within the home and she no longer suffered from
domestic violence. In this case, conversion and its effects were played out in the
church and in the home.
It is important to note that the Pentecostal church does not set out to empower
women or change socially constructed gender roles, but its family focus and
asceticism create the realignment of a family’s goals (Brusco, 1995). As these
goals are family-orientated, they can be considered more feminine goals, mak-
ing Pentecostalism a feminine, although not feminist, religion (ibid). In a similar
way, Maria-Claudia’s conversion and the important leadership role she developed
within the Assembly of God church gave her strength after her alcoholic and abu-
sive husband left her. She opened a little shop to sustain the family and was sup-
ported emotionally by the church and visions from members that he would return.
Eventually, her husband did indeed return and seeing the whole family had con-
verted, he did too. According to Maria-Claudia, conversion therefore reunited the
family, whose economic situation improved due to her entrepreneurialism and the
fact that the husband was no longer drinking away the family’s income. The cou-
ple were both highly active within the church and Maria-Claudia was particularly
respected for her gift of visions and premonitions.
Forgiveness of sins is a strong theme in Pentecostalism, as is the sacredness
of marriage. Together with the social status many women feel they gain once
married, Maria-Claudia was keen for her husband to return, despite the domestic
violence she had suffered. In this case, however, the return and conversion of a
wayward husband, her role as the main breadwinner and the maintenance of her
conversion at the highest confession level, allowed for a change in power rela-
tions within the relationship which protected her from further violence, especially
within the home.
Similarly, Yolanda’s conversion 15 years ago, aged 20, led to her husband’s
conversion and the creation of new roles for the couple as leading religious fig-
ures in the community. He became a pastor of 5 Assembly of God churches in
Mauá. By encouraging her husband’s conversion, Yolanda’s conversion allowed
her to escape the everyday violence she had been experiencing, in this case high
levels of domestic violence while her husband had been an alcoholic. Although
the socially constructed roles of patriarchal/pastor husband and submissive/helper
wife were still present, Yolanda was empowered by her husband’s domestication
through his rejection of his previous life of drink and drugs. There was a growth
192  Kim Beecheno
in equality between the sexes within the relationship. If the empowerment was
not the kind expected by Western feminist standards, within the context of eco-
nomically poor and socially disenfranchised women, this level of empowerment
represents a significant, positive change.

Conversion and problem solving

Conversion to Pentecostalism can also be used as a problem-solving technique
(Rostas and Droogers, 1993). When Laura’s womanising husband began drinking
and staying out late with his friends, instead of arguing with him, she prayed as
she had learned to do at church and said that God told her she needed to find a job,
having previously been a housewife.

I used to be so jealous, my God, to an extreme! It was ruining our marriage,

I was even jealous of his mother and sisters! The church cured me of my
jealousy, and when I got the job, that made him start to think more about
me. . . . I’m still an attractive woman you know, and suddenly I had all these
male colleagues and I was in the street, not just at home. . . . It made him a bit
insecure and he began to desire me again!

Her new job’s working hours meant that her husband had to be at home in the eve-
nings to look after the children, but the extra money relieved his burden as the sole
breadwinner and Laura’s confidence grew because she was more occupied and
earning money independently. The result was that her husband stopped his late-
night drinking and staying out with friends, and the family’s focus was realigned
to achieving common goals. The variation in this situation was that her husband
did not convert, but the balance of power within the family became more equal,
improving family life. Laura displayed signs of conversion which were all played
out in church, in the home and in public spaces, but did not display the missionary
zeal signs of confession the other women had attained.
This suggests that the level of confession may be more common in women
whose husbands have also converted, where family life revolves solely around
church life. It also suggests that conversion to Pentecostalism at ‘conversion’
level solved Laura’s problem, so she had no need to go up to confession level.
This is unlike the women in the previous examples who gained and maintained
their growth in female power by reaching confession level.

Conversion and separation

In some cases, the women’s sense of empowerment through conversion led to
separation. Marcela had lived most of her life in favela Pedreirinha. She had
been evangelised in her 30s through the radio – media has been proven to be
an important vehicle in attracting converts (Oosterbaan, 2006). Marcela admitted
that before converting, she would give most of her monthly salary to a local sha-
man, who cast spells on her husband, to make him stop drinking and beating her.
 Life cycles of spirituality 193
Marcela initially turned to Afro-Brazilian spirit religions, and then Pentecostal-
ism, as a potential solution to domestic violence. Pentecostal churches strongly
denounce the ‘black magic’ of Afro-Spiritist religions, which they see as the Dev-
il’s work (Birman, 2007). In addition, the church emphasises female submission
to husbands and the importance of prayer in cases of marital conflict. This would
allegedly help their partner be released from the devil by whom he was possessed:

I realised that I hadn’t been a good wife and that I must be more obedient.
I went back home and my husband couldn’t understand what had happened
to me, I sat on his knee and wept for forgiveness.
(Marcela)

Told, essentially, that the domestic violence Marcela suffered was her own fault
due to her use of shamans and lack of consistent prayer for her husband, Marcela
claimed that their domestic situation improved because she learned to be less
argumentative with her husband. Marcela learned that changing her own behav-
iour in the home could improve her husband’s behaviour, although the change
entailed a greater level of submissiveness.
Over time though, the situation worsened, as Marcela’s husband refused to
convert and continued drinking, which meant that the beatings continued. How-
ever, Marcela claims that the teachings of the church made her a calmer person,
allowing her to finally see the need for separation. She firmly stated, ‘if I hadn’t
converted, I think we would have killed each other’, admitting that during the vio-
lent outbreaks, she too fought back as hard as she could. Marcela maintained the
‘conversion’ level in Gooren’s (2007) conversion careers. Maintaining conversion
level ultimately resolved the domestic violence she was suffering and helped her
through life emotionally and spiritually. Now, living alone and unable to attend
church services due to her health and fear of street crime, Marcela admitted, ‘I
invite Jesus to come and lie down next me in bed, that way I am never alone’.
Marcela’s religion was obviously a source of comfort throughout her life which
brought her solace in different ways and in different moments.

Disaffiliation
The following examples demonstrate disaffiliation with the church, which hap-
pened over time once the main motive for conversion had been resolved. These
examples also show that the high levels of discipline, moral asceticism and time
dedicated to the church, which led to the women’s conversion, also led to their
disaffiliation.
Carla, now 38, had converted at the age of 26 because of her and her husband’s
addiction to crack, and found the courage to separate from her husband, a year
or so after converting. As with Marcela, Carla’s husband’s refusal to convert and
change his negative habits after her conversion led to their separation and her
escape from violence. Carla quickly attained confession level of religious affili-
ation, evangelising in the local neighbourhood. However, she later met another
194  Kim Beecheno
man who moved into her family home. As Carla still wasn’t officially divorced
from her husband, in the eyes of the church she was living in sin with another
man. This highlights the fact that even though empowerment is sometimes gained
from the teachings of the Pentecostal church, it does not aim to change traditional
social roles and holds very conservative views on marriage.
Carla was still allowed to attend services, but she was banned from performing
any leadership duties due to her family situation. The church therefore demoted
Carla from confession to affiliation or even disaffiliation level. Carla still identified
as Pentecostal but did not go to church very often as a result. This demonstrates
religious intolerance for a family that no longer fitted the married husband and wife
mould, despite Carla overcoming her addiction and finding a more suitable man.
This situation is unlikely to be unique to this case study in Mauá, and could therefore
indicate one of the reasons for the Pentecostal church’s equally high drop-out rates.
Teresa, now 29, chose to leave the church of her own accord. She had converted
aged 22, in order to remove herself from an abusive relationship and an addiction
to cocaine. Over the years, Teresa worked as a leader in the church and as a mis-
sionary in favelas around São Paulo, trying to convert other addicts. But a year
ago she suddenly left the church:

It was due to problems at work, stress and too much pressure. I regret leaving
because of that, it’s not that I couldn’t return, I could, but it’s up to me and
I want to be selfish, I want to do my own thing, I want to make the most of
things and have fun. I wanted to live something new and threw everything
up in the air.

Teresa had also reached confession level, but this time the high levels of disci-
pline and morality as well as the personal time she sacrificed made her decide to
drop out. The fact that Teresa was young, single and had friends who were not
Pentecostal obviously influenced her desire to change from such an abstemious
lifestyle, demonstrating how social factors are important in conversion and con-
tinued religious participation.

Conclusion
The study finds that the women interviewed in Mauá were using religious conver-
sion and different levels of religious adherence and spiritual practice in order to
negotiate everyday violence and in particular, domestic violence. It extends cur-
rent theories on evangelical Protestant conversion in the Americas by highlighting
a clear link between conversion and domestic violence. This study demonstrates
that conversion can help women escape violence, and shows how women do so by
employing Gooren’s (2007) concept of conversion careers, examining violence
and conversion from a long-term, life-cycle perspective. Each woman’s conver-
sion is a highly complex and heterogeneous process, although the link between
conversion and domestic violence is unlikely to be unique, given the high levels
of interpersonal violence in Brazil and growth of Pentecostal churches throughout
the country.
 Life cycles of spirituality 195
Data from this study found that several of the women interviewed felt more
protected from urban violence having converted to Pentecostalism when that con-
version entailed the conversion of their husbands and children. They believed
that it protected them and their families from drug-taking. More importantly, the
subsequent involvement of the women in the Pentecostal church allowed them to
negotiate different forms of domestic violence in the home. Some women found
jobs outside the home or developed leadership roles within the church, while oth-
ers found great satisfaction evangelising and proselytising non-members. There
were visible signs of female empowerment leading to greater equality between
husband and wife and to changes to their socially constructed gender roles.
The conversion or non-conversion of their spouses proved important as it was
closely linked to the women’s own subsequent levels of religious adherence. Also,
the resolution or non-resolution of the problem or problems that they had been fac-
ing affected their level of continued religious adherence. Disaffiliation occurred
due to the church’s strict ascetic doctrine on marriage and non-attendance at social
events such as parties outside of the Pentecostal group, which contributed to the
loss of some of its adherents. This strict code of conduct suggests that while con-
version to Pentecostalism may ‘protect’ converts from urban and domestic vio-
lence, it also alienates converts from society.
However, it is evident that while violence is a push factor for female conver-
sion, conversion by itself does not save women. In fact, Pentecostal focus on
female submission and placing the blame for violence on spiritual entities or even
women’s failure to pray allows violent men off the hook and could place women
in even greater danger. This study highlighted how women used the teachings of
the church, as well as different levels of religious adherence, in order to find alter-
native ways of addressing the forms of everyday violence they experienced. The
religious effects of conversion were played out in various spaces, especially the
church, the street and the home. This creative negotiation of violence and the use
of faith had positive, practical outcomes in their lives and empowered the women
to negotiate and counteract domestic violence.

Notes
1 Pentecostalism is a form of evangelical Protestantism and the majority of converts to
Protestantism in Brazil are Pentecostal. Therefore, for this study, I use evangelical Prot-
estantism and Pentecostalism interchangeably.
2 Participants’ names have been changed in order to protect their identities.
3 The WHO estimates 35 per cent of all women around the world have experienced either
physical and/or sexual violence from an intimate partner and/or sexual violence from a
non-intimate partner. In addition, 38 per cent of femicides are committed by the wom-
an’s intimate partner (WHO, 2013).

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Section 3

Spiritual transformations
Sara MacKian

If we look back into the past history of mankind, we find, among many other
religious convictions, a universal belief in the existence of phantoms or ethereal
beings who dwell in the neighbourhood of men and who exercise invisible yet
powerful influence upon them.
(Jung, 2008, 128)

The very nature of spirituality requires us to acknowledge and confront that which
we cannot easily grasp or sense; the invisible yet powerful otherworldly influ-
ences which lie at the heart of religious conviction. Attempting to engage with that
empirically challenges us to find new ways of knowing and to push at the habitu-
ally imposed boundaries of our epistemological inquiries. For there are aspects
of almost all spiritual ontologies which seem intuitively impossible to the outside
observer; Jung’s invisible, unknowable, unfathomable beings and forces which lie
hidden to our regular senses.
This aspect of spirituality is therefore difficult to comprehend as rational, rea-
sonable, intellectual beings who rely on things we can touch, see, categorise or
at least measure with some degree of certainty. However, it is to this seemingly
impossible task which the authors in this final section turn. Like the White Queen
in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland who claimed sometimes to believe ‘as many
as six impossible things before breakfast’, you are being challenged now to see the
value of engaging with the world empirically from a position of believing what
you might actually feel is logically impossible, or at the very least improbable.
Throughout this volume, we have seen that the spiritual, in all its manifest
forms, appears to share some common attributes. Whether in strict affiliation to a
particular religious doctrine or in relation to a more fluid and individually carved
path, cutting across these experiences we witness some common threads: a spirit
of the political; a sense of the everydayness of something which for so long has
been conceptualised as existing somehow beyond the mundanities of the eve-
ryday; and the transformative power of engaging with the spiritual. Yet for all
their apparent mundaneness and ultimate predictability, the spaces of spirituality
are also inherently otherworldly and unpredictable. By their very nature, spaces
of spirituality also open up complex, unwieldy landscapes which are difficult to
200  Sara MacKian
apprehend and tame with the academic and intellectual tools at our disposal. The
phantoms and ethereal beings dwelling in the neighbourhood of men [sic] are not
limited to Gods and prayer sanitised by familiar religious doctrines. They con-
sist also of dead people, nature spirits, goddesses and magic, and a host of other
eldritch energies which are less familiar to our academic narratives of contem-
porary religion. Although geographers have historically been reluctant to engage
with this side of religious and spiritual practice, recently the discipline has become
ever more open to engaging with the occult, the otherworldly and the impossible
things which lurk in the unmapped territories of these outer spiritual realms. You
are invited in this final section, therefore, to step with us into a space of academic
liminality to reflect on how attending to the spiritual might also transform our
practice as researchers and commentators. Whilst we may not be asking you to
personally believe in the power of witchcraft, mediumship or mother goddess, we
are asking you to recognise the value of responding to these forces faithfully as a
part of your enquiries, and to consider seriously the possibility that picking up a
pack of Tarot cards or engaging in ritual may open new spiritual spaces and pos-
sibilities for academic exploration.

Imagining impossible spiritualities

You may or may not be reading this before breakfast, but what six impossible
things are you being asked to believe as you work through this final section? First
off, Julian Holloway (Chapter 13) begins by reminding us of the sheer diversity
of religious and spiritual traditions which might be shaping contemporary geopo-
litical spaces. Suggesting that certain spiritual geographies can manifest as occult
geopolitics, he argues the implications of this should be in our sight-line for study.
Holloway asks us to consider the role of witches in the mechanical and techno-
logical atrocities of Western warfare. Rather than focusing on the familiar and
recognised geopolitical maps of the Second World War, we are invited behind the
scenes of a counter-geopolitical reality; the occult shadow of Britain’s war effort.
One must always, argues Holloway, seek to make sense of and take seriously the
spiritual geographies which are enacted and produced in such battles. As I write,
covens are convening around the world to cast binding spells on President Donald
Trump in an attempt to limit the geopolitical damage his presidency may unleash.
Holloway’s example may be historical, therefore, but such ongoing attempts at
using witchcraft to influence global geopolitics suggest this is not something we
can easily dismiss or confine to the great dust-heap of history.
Secondly, James Thurgill (Chapter 14) turns to explore not how the occult
might have influenced the making of place, but rather how the spectral might
aid in the recovery of hidden historical spaces. Looking at the work of Frederick
Bligh Bond in 1918, he explores the role of psychic archaeology in uncovering the
memories, people and landscape of Glastonbury Abbey. Though sceptical readers
may consider the use of automatic writing and Ouija boards to ascertain informa-
tion to guide archaeological digs quite impossible, Bond’s findings through such
 Spiritual transformations 201
methods were not without subsequently uncovered material archaeological evi-
dence, in the form of lost foundations and skeletal remains. Nearly one hundred
years later, Philippa Langley – President of the Scottish Branch of the Richard
III Society – stood in a Leicester carpark and experienced the ‘strangest feeling’
(Kennedy, 2013). In that exact place beneath her feet, the remains of the last Plan-
tagenet King of England were subsequently retrieved, perhaps asking us again to
reflect on Bond’s psychic excavations and the palimpsestic nature of place. Not as
impossible, but as simply another layer we can choose to dig into for clues as we
reimagine our connections to the narratives of place and the implications for the
geographical imagination.
In Chapter 15, David Wilson reminds us that making the familiar strange and
the strange familiar is good anthropological (and geographical) practice. Exam-
ining material with fresh eyes (in this case as an apprentice medium at a Scot-
tish Spiritualist church), Wilson destabilises the popularly assumed distinction
between shamanism (as ‘othered’ and ‘elsewhere’) and British mediumship.
Instead, he suggests, there is much to be gained from considering each as cul-
turally specific examples of essentially the same thing. However, he warns that
the current research funding climate is not conducive to the sort of long-term
extended commitment such participatory fieldwork engagement requires. Clearly
the challenges to taking seriously the impossible in academic explorations are not
just about the otherworldly, ontological and methodological, but are also about the
real-world practicalities and mundane pragmatics of getting research done. This is
our third impossible thing.
Patricia ‘Iolana’s Chapter  16 brings together the influences of Jung and sec-
ond wave feminism on the development of the Western goddess movement. Once
again, we see the political and cultural influences of the time making their mark
on how people seek to align their innate spiritual drive in a meaningful relation-
ship with the sociocultural circumstances they find themselves in. By reframing
Jung’s theory of individuation, a spirituality emerged which released women from
the gender restrictions of a patriarchal worldview to provide them with a multidi-
mensional, transformative, yet uniquely personal relationship with the god(dess)
within. This takes us to the heart of the fourth impossible thing. Here, the chal-
lenge lies in accepting ‘Iolana’s proposition that such a spirituality offering adher-
ents the tools and ability to ‘heal themselves’ can also, ultimately, heal the world.
As we turn to Alison Rockbrand’s Chapter 17, the fifth impossible thing you
are asked to believe is that you are now entering a ritual; a liminal space from
which we will all emerge transformed. To study the esoteric is to participate in
it on some level, she argues, as in the space of ritual there are no ‘outsiders’ and
everybody becomes an ‘insider’. You cannot feign abstinence on grounds of intel-
lectual objectivity, as a blurring occurs between the public and the private with
everybody in the ritual space taking part in the magickal change that occurs. In
this way, she presents esoteric theatre as a means of re-enchantment in a soci-
ety lacking in ritual. Rockbrand’s invitation to join the ritual might be seen as a
rehearsal for encountering the next chapter in this collection.
202  Sara MacKian
Finally, we come to professor dusky purples, who arguably presents the most
impossible things to believe (Chapter 18). For a start, professor purples is destabi-
lising the very act you are now engaged in, for she implores: ‘We must continually
read differently, read more, and read better’ (page 293). She provocatively prods
the ritualised nature of reading as a means of knowledge advancement and reveals
to us the pitfalls of ‘reading only one way’. She invites us instead to contemplate
(and participate) in a new way of engaging with the geographies of spirituality
and their reading in the academy; to loosen the epistemological binds that tie us.
Indeed, she argues, survival can only be achieved by maintaining a foot in other
worlds . . .

Stepping into other worlds

With this final section then, we ask you to question how you know. We are chal-
lenging you, admittedly, when we encourage an embrace of the otherworldly,
the unknown and the seemingly impossible. However, there are truly incredible
things to be gained from different ways of knowing; from daring to even imagine
the impossible. It may not necessarily manifest the impossible as a reality, and it
may at times feel unsettling; nonetheless, it can release us from intellectual bat-
tles, providing ontological relief and epistemological rebirth. In order to achieve
this, as the authors in this final section show, it is time to abandon the strictures
of the carefully considered, emotionally barren ways of knowing which have
previously defined our safe empirical journeys through well-rehearsed religious
landscapes, and to embrace instead the art of the impossible, the creativity of
uncertainty, and the multiple spatialities of the spiritual. Reading through these
chapters reveals the world (and our place in it) to us in new and unfamiliar ways.
As you start to embrace the possibility of the impossible, it opens up a new way
of approaching the world and our place within it. Gaining novel knowledges
through the magical art of reading differently thereby prompts us to question
what spirit(s) guides our own investigations and experiences of the world? And
whether there is space to expand that spirit, in the spirit of advancing academic
enquiry.
I opened this introduction with a quote from Jung, and I turn once more to him
to close with the reminder that we should ‘never lose sight of the limitations of
our knowledge’ (2008: 126) but constantly strive to push beyond them. Ask your-
self, dear reader, if you are asking the right questions, and reading the right way.
Believe the impossible and you might see something worth exploring further.
Rather than dismissing ways of reading, we need to bring them together, to break
the chains which separate the ideal (pretence) of rigorous intellectual pursuit from
more intuitive, creative and exploratory ways of knowing. Attending to the spir-
itual in its more eldritch and occult manifestations is shown as a fertile ground for
generating new alternative knowledges which can contribute to our understand-
ing of our place in the world. Attending to the spiritual then can – and perhaps
should – also transform our practice as researchers. It is in that spirit which we
invite you to immerse yourself in this the final section of the book.
 Spiritual transformations 203
References
Jung, C.G. (2008) Psychology and the Occult. London: Routledge.
Kennedy, M. (2013) ‘It’s like Richard III wanted to be found’, 5 February, The Guardian.
Available at www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/feb/05/king-richard-iii-found (accessed
4.4.17)
13 The magical battle of Britain
The spatialities of occult
geopolitics
Julian Holloway

Introduction: religion and geopolitics

Where the geography of religion and political geography meet, a productive
range of writings have emerged around the theme of religious geopolitics (see
Dijkink 2006; Dittmer 2007, 2009; Dittmer and Sturm 2010; Megoran 2010). In
his agenda setting piece on this conjunction, Sturm (2013) sets out a distinction
between ‘the geopolitics of religion’ and ‘religious geopolitics’. The former refers
to actors who view the geopolitical map of the world through theological spatial
divisions and religious discourses of valued significance; here one may cite the
contrasting contemporary examples of Daesh’s self-declared caliphate or the Dali
Lama’s vision of Tibet as a regional ‘zone of peace’ facilitating a ‘scalar jump’
to world peace (McConnell 2013: 164). On the other hand, ‘religious geopolitics’
demarcates how manifestly secular geopolitical discourse often deploys and is
organised through religiously inspired ideas, languages and practices; here one
might mention the Christian Right in the USA whose policies, both foreign and
domestic, are often framed or underpinned by Evangelical readings of Scripture.
Sitting somewhere between these demarcations, one could also look to debates
over postsecularism and its (re)configuration of state and religious relations and
practices, to see further intersections between religion and (geo)politics (Cloke
2010, 2011).
This chapter develops Sturm’s (2013) notion of geopolitical religion, and hence
religious and spiritual discourses and practices which give meaning to, predict or
seek to intervene in the relations between nations and the map of political spaces.
Thus, it aims to explore how religious and spiritual actors give meaning to, prac-
tice and create visions of geopolitical space, and how they seek to enact religious
and political power both within and beyond the nation (Dittmer 2007). However,
as McConnell (2013: 162) points out, critical analyses of the geopolitical-religious
nexus have ‘been dominated by the study of two faiths: Anglophone Christianity
and, post 9/11, Islam’. In light of this, this chapter seeks to supplement the scope
of these analyses by taking as its primary focus a spiritual movement with both
a long and varied history and a diverse constitution: the Western Occult tradition
and movement.
For the purposes of the analysis presented here, the Occult tradition is a broad
philosophical practice that concerns itself with unseen or hidden forces or aspects
206  Julian Holloway
of cosmic reality which can, in various ways, be contacted, drawn upon or manip-
ulated in the service of particular goals. These concealed ‘realities’ pervade the
universe and Occultists often argue that knowledge of these forces has been lost
or obscured. Therefore, uniting occult thinking from Renaissance Hermeticism,
through to the nineteenth century occult revival and more contemporary visions of
the contemporary New Age and magick, is the assurance that there is a Universal,
underlying hidden structure to the world and cosmos, that has been forgotten or
deliberately masked. Via practice, training and knowledge the occultist thus seeks
an awareness of the secrets of nature and the cosmos and hence seeks some form
of union or realisation with them.
Interest in the occult and the supernatural more broadly has grown in human
geography in recent years (see Bartolini et al. 2013; Dixon 2007; Holloway 2000,
2003a, 2003b, 2006; MacKian 2012; Pile 2005a, 2005b, 2006, 2012; Thurgill 2015).
However, there has been little work in human geography that seeks to explore the
connection between the occult and geopolitics despite the numerous examples
wherein the occult has intersected with, arguably influenced, contested and ran as
a counter-geopolitical reality to more mainstream geopolitics. Acting as a hidden
shadow to these explicit geopolitical strategies, imaginaries and practices, the geo-
politics of the occult has drawn and practiced its own spatialities of the map of
power. Thus, occult geometries of power often reproduce, but also skew and refract,
national, militarist, statist and popular geopolitics. In particular, the occult simulta-
neously resonates with and differs from explicit meanings and narratives of national
identity, history and destiny. Furthermore, how the geopolitical map is shaped, the
processes that configure it and how it might be re-drawn, are re-imagined by occult
movements which develop spatialities driven and organised by irrational forces,
other cosmic realms and topologies of unseen power. Simultaneously sharing com-
monalities with mainstream geopolitical strategies and discourse whilst running
counter to them, occult geopolitics seek to understand or shape national and world
affairs according to their own visions, esoteric imaginaries and cosmic goals.
In this chapter, I will seek to analyse a particular example of occult geopoli-
tics – Dion Fortune’s Fraternity of Inner Light and what has become known as the
‘Magical Battle of Britain’ – which sought to direct the course of World War Two
through connecting to and manipulating an esoteric topology of unseen forces.
This occult geopolitics both drew upon and differed from more secular geopolitics
whilst being formed through a series of material, immaterial and affective spati-
alities that were patterned through a judgemental and essentialist cosmology of
difference and divine destiny.

Intersections of the occult and geopolitics

In addition to the case study that forms the majority of this chapter, examples
of the intersections of the occult and geopolitics are manifold. Arguably, the
strengths of these links range from the sturdy to the more tenuous, and as such
can be given to considerable contest, both historically and evidentially. Here
I will discuss briefly and sequentially some of the more well-known examples of
these intersections. For example, in early seventeenth century Europe, the three
 The magical battle of Britain 207
infamous books associated with Rosicrucianism (Fama Fraternitas, Confessio
Fraternitatis and The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz), filled with
alchemical, hermetic and astrological knowledge, appeared at a time of Catholic
and Protestant enmity across Europe. For some these books have been deemed as
both occult treatise and geopolitical propaganda in their call for religio-political
reformation in Europe, and as supporting the hermetically inclined Fredrick V
(1596–1632) to lead the effort to undermine Catholic European supremacy (what
Reformation Protestants deemed heresy). With the start of the Thirty Years War
and the defeat of Fredrick V at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620 by Emperor
Ferdinand II, this secret brotherhood supposedly fled east taking their occult
knowledge and geopolitical discourses with them (directing the occult gaze of
later nineteenth century groups, such as Theosophists, Eastwards). As such, the
occult-geopolitical import of these works faded, but arguably was present and
influential at their inception (Lachman 2008).
The philosopher, mathematician, astrologer, alchemist and geographer Dr John
Dee (1527–c.1608) is a widely acknowledged thinker whose magical and occult
work entwines in many ways with geopolitics. Not only did Dee astrologically
calculate the date for Elizabeth I’s coronation, he was asked by political advis-
ers to the Queen to predict Spanish naval invasions which were expected as part
of a more general Catholic conspiracy both within and beyond the borders of
the realm (Parry 2012). Moreover, Dee is widely acknowledged with inventing
the phrase ‘The British Empire’ in his writings on Elizabethan geography. Dee’s
mythological belief in the empire of the Welsh sixth century King Arthur (and
before him Brutus) allowed him to assert that Elizabeth had a historical and gene-
alogical right to the possession of certain territories, including Greenland, Iceland
and into North America (MacMillan 2001; Parry 2006). This justification for the
geopolitical expansion of the realm intersected with Dee’s reading of Johannes
Trithemius’ philosophy of angelic spirits controlling different ages of history. He
thus saw Elizabeth as having an eschatological and apocalyptic role and destiny
to ‘civilise’ and restore these lands of the Empire in order to prepare the world for
the second coming of Christ. Indeed, for the most part these geopolitical occult
prophecies garnered their detail through the practice of ritual ‘scrying’, wherein
his (ultimately treacherous) companion Edward Kelley summoned and received
messages from angelic presences (Wooley 2001).
England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was another key period
where links and intersections between occult knowledge and groups, and geo-
political events and discourses flourished. For example, the development and
popularity of Speculative Freemasonry amongst liberal Whigs, including Prime
Minister Robert Walpole (1676–1745), meant a belief in a Hanoverian monar-
chy and Protestantism mixed with esoteric lore of divine rationality and sacred
geometries. Furthermore, the popularity of the fraternal Masonic lodges in pre-
revolutionary France has been argued to have been a key aspect of the revolu-
tion itself, through the lodges facilitating a mixing of social strata and acting as
forums for radical anti-Christian thought (Boyet 2014; McIntosh 2011). Indeed, in
post-Revolutionary France occultism thrived particularly in the form of explicitly
geopolitical prophecy wherein predictions for a return of the ‘Great King’, and
208  Julian Holloway
reestablishment of a (reformulated) Ancien Régime, abounded: for example, the
Prophecy of Orval of the 1830s predicted the overthrow of Louis-Philippe and the
‘arrival of a Great King, who would establish the European peace under French
hegemony’ (Harvey 2003: 688; see also Holloway 2015).
In the same century, the Theosophical leader Helena Petrovna Blavastky
(1831–1891) not only promoted a racialised view of the Aryan ‘root’ race with
Altantean origins, but upon moving to India became a strong proponent of Home
Rule. Here she laid the foundations for the social reformer, suffragette and the-
osopher Annie Besant (1847–1933) who ‘was to be interned in India for activities
relating to her support of Indian Home Rule, and in 1917 was elected president
of the Indian National Congress’ which itself was founded by another theoso-
phist Octavian Hume (1829–1912) (Owen 2004: 31). Indeed, there is a need to
explore the links between late nineteenth and early twentieth century occultism
and geopolitics more widely. One possible avenue for such research are links
and influences between the former Society for Psychical Research president and
British Prime Minister Arthur James Balfour’s (1848–1930) spiritualist experi-
ences (known as ‘The Palm Sunday Case’), The Balfour Declaration and Zionist
messianic prophecies. Or one could pursue a critical analysis of the British Israel-
ite Movement whose religious nationalism (active from the 1870s onwards) was
worked through a reading of the Great Pyramid of Khufu as the ‘Bible in Stone’
and hence a material manifestation of the Egyptian possession of arcane and lost
spiritual knowledge and truths. Through multiple geometrical calculations of the
Pyramid’s dimensions and structure, not only was the Movement’s belief in the
British as descendants of the Biblical Lost Tribes confirmed, but also the reading
of geopolitical events of the two World Wars were interpreted in eschatological
terms (see Moshenska 2008).
The relationship between occult practice, knowledge and the geopolitics of war
is where this chapter sits. As such, one might look to the work of anthropologists
on war magic and warrior religion which ‘demonstrate that warrior religion and
war magic are ubiquitous social phenomena that have arisen across the globe in a
diverse range of cultures’ (Farrer 2014: 3). Here ritual practices are embodied and
performed in order to harness occult and magical forces to inflict harm on ene-
mies, or sometimes heal (in various ways) the victims of war. In the extreme one
might discuss war sorcery as a form of occult geopolitics whereby ritual practices
are deployed to ‘harness magical, spiritual, and social-psychological forces that
result in an opponent’s misfortune, disease, destruction and death’ (Farrer 2014:
4). Yet this more strategically offensive practice is often only part of the broader
war magic which also seeks to counter harmful forces and offer safeguards in times
and spaces of conflict. One example is that of Javanese kanuragan, a ritual process
wherein cosmological knowledge and entities named aji are used to foster invul-
nerability and power, which was practiced amongst fighters in the Indonesian War
of Independence (1945–1949) against the Dutch colonial powers (de Grave 2014).
Of course in discussing the occult in relation to war and geopolitics it is impos-
sible not to mention the links between Nazism and the occult tradition. A source of
considerable debate, contest and popular myth (propagated by many non-academic
 The magical battle of Britain 209
books, TV shows and, of course, films), this intersection is one of some legitimacy
and definite complexity. Colouring rather than directly causing Nazism, some of
the occult intersections with the Third Reich include: the influence of Guido von
List’s völkisch and esoteric ideology of Ariosophy, and the supposedly ancient
Aryan Teutonic Gnostic religion of Wotanism; the anti-Semitic and proto-Nazi
Thule Society and its links with the DAP of whom Hitler joined; the self-proclaimed
mystical teacher Karl Maria Wiligut who was made head of the SS Pre-and Early
History department; Hess and Himmler, who ‘trafficked themselves in a range of
esoteric beliefs, from astrology and pendulum dowsing to natural healing’ (Kur-
lander 2015: 504); and the supposedly magical space for the SS ‘brotherhood’
at Wewelsburg which Himmler allegedly believed would be a stronghold for a
millennial conflict between a Germanic Europe and Asia, and where the room of
the ‘Obergruppenführersaal’ was purportedly designed for twelve officers of the
SS, akin to the Knights of the Round Table, to ‘commune’ with the ‘Aryan Race
Soul’. Add to this list the ‘acceptable border sciences including World Ice Theory,
cosmobiology . . . “scientific” astrology, and biodynamic agriculture’ and the mix
of racism, occultism and geopolitical thought under National Socialism is a heady,
disputed and often conflated one (Kurlander 2015: 521; see also Black and Kur-
lander 2015; Goodrick-Clarke 2003; Trietel 2004).
Therefore, the geopolitical hostilities of World War Two had an occult shadow
that accompanied and coloured some of its discourses and events. To this end the
so-called Nazi Occult is well known. What is less well known are the occult activ-
ities leading up to and during the war that occurred in Allied nations, particularly
Britain. Indeed, subject to much speculation and a degree of conjecture, the Great
Beast himself, Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) was said to have links to British
Intelligence in the 1930s, and in the 1920s he and his followers were expelled by
Mussolini’s authorities from Sicily and the ‘Abbey of Thelema’ allegedly due to
the Italians believing him to be a British spy. One of Crowley’s friends, whom he
dubbed the magical ‘Adept of Adepts’, was the bohemian and notoriously eccen-
tric Evan Morgan, 2nd Viscount Tredegar (1893–1949), who was both a member
of the occult group The Black Circle in London and was appointed in 1939 head
of MI8, the Radio Security Service. Admiral John Godfrey, who himself seem-
ingly recruited astrologers in the war effort, was boss to Ian Fleming at British
Naval Intelligence and it was the latter who exploited (through producing fake
astrological charts) Rudolf Hess’ pre-war British high society links and occult
interests to persuade him to fly to Scotland (to seek a meeting with the Duke of
Hamilton – a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn) to seek peace
with Britain. This, in part, was due to Hess’ own astrologically influenced con-
cerns over Hitler’s second front with the Soviet Union (see Howard n.d; Spence
2008). Finally, the ‘Father of Wicca’ Gerald Gardner (1884–1964), by his own
account, performed ‘Operation Cone of Power’ in 1940 wherein ‘a Great Circle
was cast at night in the New Forest and a cone of magical energy raised and
directed against Hitler’ (Hutton 1999: 208). It is to a similar attempt to thwart and
undermine Nazi war efforts through magickal means that this chapter turns now,
namely Dion Fortune and her Fraternity of Inner Light.
210  Julian Holloway
Dion Fortune and the ‘Magical Battle of Britain’
Described by Hutton (1999: 188) as a ‘complex thinker, whose career defies any
simple formulations’, Dion Fortune (1890–1946) was one esoteric thinker and
practitioner whose rituals and actions during World War Two allow us to explore
the spatial intersections of the occult and geopolitics more closely. Born Violet
Mary Firth in Llandudno on December 6th 1890, she was brought up in a house-
hold who followed the teaching of Christian Science. With the outbreak of World
War One, Fortune joined the Land Army along with many other women and was
given a laboratory job (where she discovered the possibility of making cheese
from soya bean milk). After the war she had set herself up as psychotherapist in
what was then still a nascent area of inquiry. Fortune then moved from her study
of psychology to occultism; for her the two were not mutually exclusive as they
both involved ‘hidden forces’. As Benham (1993: 253) explains:

Although both defer to hidden forces that inform the appearances of life, the
phenomena of psychology emerge from the inner depths of the individual
psyche; the phenomena of the occult are understood as invisible forms and
powers outside and beyond the psyche – although they may primarily engage
it at the unconscious level. For Violet the two were quite compatible.

Post World War One, Fortune joined the Theosophy movement. Leaving in 1927
she became President of the Christian Mystic Lodge and a member of the London
‘Alpha et Omega’ temple of the (by then much divided) Hermetic Order of the
Golden Dawn wherein she changed her name to Dion Fortune (taken from her
family’s motto ‘Deo non Fortuna’, approximately ‘By God, not Fate’). By 1929
she had left the Golden Dawn and the Lodge and had formed her own Community
of the Inner Light, later to become The Fraternity of Inner Light and today The
Society of Inner Light.
Broadly one can divide Fortune’s esoteric and occult biography into three peri-
ods: unorthodox and mystical Christianity (1914–30); more pagan and Goddess
inspired thinking (1930s); and a return to esoteric Christianity after 1939 until her
death in 1946 (see Hutton 1999; also Chapman 1993; Fielding and Collins 1998;
Johnston Graf 2007; Richardson 2007). The events that concern us here occurred
in this last period. However, it is important to consider her earlier thinking and
writing in order that her actions and ideas during World War Two are suitably
contextualised. In short, Dion Fortune’s thinking was defined by a geopolitical
discourse of race and nationhood wherein the two were often conflated – a mode
of thought not uncommon at the time. Indeed, she believed that each race/nation
had a ‘Group Soul’ based on racial differences (or subconscious) which gave rise
to and could be influenced by the ‘Group Mind’ (or consciousness) of the nation:

The innumerable individuals who make up a nation share a common sub-

consciousness [sic] below the personal subconsciousness of each one; this is
called the racial or collective subconsciousness, and it plays a very important
 The magical battle of Britain 211
part in both individual and collective life. It is this level of the subconscious-
ness that is appealed to by national heroes; it is this level that is manipulated
by spellbinding demagogues. It is here that the trend and limitations of the
national character are determined, and from here that its inspiration is drawn.
(Fortune 2012: 72)

Fortune’s was very much a cosmological and esoteric form of nationalism and
racism. She saw these Group Souls and races as ultimately descended from the
oneness of the ‘Divine Mind’. From there ‘cosmic rays’ descend to organise the
‘group soul’ of a race which, ‘being rooted in the Earth, acquires a Place aspect
with the passage of time’, equating to both the ‘Group Soul’ and ‘Group Mind’
of the nation (Fortune 2012: 155). For Britain, Fortune portrays the three races
of ‘the Kelts, the Norse, and what can only be described as the Conglomerate,
being that which is composed of all the different elements that have ever struck
roots in British soil’ and hence a ‘unified Group Mind has grown up on the basis
of a diversified Group Soul’ (Fortune 2012: 155). Furthermore, for each Group
Soul of nation/race there existed an ascended cosmic Master: ‘racial types are
guided in their destiny by Racial Angels and initiated by racial Masters’ (Fortune
2012: 154, 158). However, and telling in the quoted passage above is the use
of the word ‘limitations’, implying a hierarchical vision of the advancement of
certain nations/races above and beyond others. As Hutton (1999: 182) reveals, in
Fortune’s writings, and particularly her novels, a racial hierarchy was presented
through descriptions ‘of the “wily Teuton” and the “savage races” of the Balkans’
and a ‘general fear of contamination by other nations, races or classes which runs
through her books at this time’. Indeed, she stated ‘the instinct for racial purity is
a sound one’ (Fortune 2012: 154).
In this context of a cosmological geopolitics of race and nation the ‘Magical
Battle of Britain’ occurred (as it has become known). As such, between Octo-
ber 1939 and July 1942, Fortune and her Fraternity of Inner Light sent out 134
weekly letters that amounted to an occult and spiritual geopolitical strategy to
magically defend Great Britain and counter the ‘brute force’ of Nazism, initiated
in the belief that ‘the knowledge of the Secret Wisdom is going to play an impor-
tant part in what has to be done for the winning of the war and the building of the
stable peace’ (Fortune 2012: 40). This belief was driven by Fortune’s understand-
ing that the Nazis themselves were waging war on the astral or spiritual plane:
Hitler, who surrounded himself by a ‘relatively small and apparently obscure
group of those who realise that there are subtle forces that can be enlisted to serve
their ends’, was according to Fortune ‘a natural occultist and highly developed
medium’ (Fortune 2012: 81). Yet, the cosmological belief that necessitated this
occult geopolitical strategy was wedded to a more material and mundane neces-
sity: with travel restrictions in place during the war, and paper rationing meaning
the printing of the Fraternity’s magazine ceased in 1940, letters were a means by
which the spiritual work of the group could be continued despite the geographi-
cal dispersal of its members. As such, the letters were sent out every Wednesday,
to be read and consumed by the Sunday in order that the occult diaspora of the
212  Julian Holloway
Fraternity could join in the ‘united meditation’ scheduled for that day at 12:15,
whose ‘nucleus of trained minds’ would be based at the Fraternity’s headquarters
at Queensborough Terrace in London (Fortune 2012: 15).
Immediately we see that this occult geopolitics was played out across two inter-
woven and mutually dependent spatialities: one spiritual and imagined; the other
material and this-worldly. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, what we might call
a network spirituality is both mundane and cosmologically patterned (Holloway
2000). Here the material (the letters) and immaterial (the magical warfare) are
necessary to the performance and perceived success and development of the spir-
itual geopolitics through which they take shape: the diasporic occult geopolitics
of the Fraternity thus took form and coalesced through this material-immaterial
spiritual network. Moreover, the materiality of the body and embodiment – its
positioning, training and deportment – was central to the realisation of the Fra-
ternity’s spiritual geography and its occult geopolitics. As such, a preliminary
document was sent out to members containing a series of instructions, composed
of seven stages, on how to perform the ‘work’ of the esoteric warfare and hence
generate this spiritually networked geopolitics. These included a series of direc-
tives on how to hold the body and its geographical positioning:

[. . .] take your seat if possible in a quiet, dimly lit room, secure from distur-
bance; face towards London; sit in such an attitude that your feet are together
and your hands clasped, thus making a closed circuit of yourself. Your hands
should rest on the weekly letter lying on your lap, for these letters will be con-
secrated before they are sent out in order that they may form a link. Breathe
as slowly as you can without strain, making a slight pause at the beginning
and ending of each breath.
(Fortune 2012: 16)

The occult geopolitical strategy sought here thus began with a body composed
and configured in immediate space. Yet the immediate was married to, supported
and generated a scaling of the spiritual geography to an extended space, in both
physical and cosmological senses. Moreover, this was a composed and trained
body that would inform and configure an occult geopolitical sensibility of judge-
ment and salience towards space and geopolitical events (Holloway 2012). In
other words, this was a somatic composition which would seek to realise a psy-
chic defence from the evil forces of (occult) German Nazism and its ultimate
defeat, both in the seen and unseen world. This spiritual geography was one com-
posed of an assemblage of geopolitical scales and spaces of practiced embodied
cosmological evaluation, which were simultaneously immediate, distant, national
and international, material and immaterial, ordinary and extraordinary, and pat-
terned as good versus evil.
In order to understand this patterned occult geopolitical strategy and scaling
more closely, we need to attend to the immaterial and spiritual geographies pro-
duced by the Fraternity’s warfare. Therefore, in order to explore the geopolitics of
occult and indeed wider spiritual movements, one must always seek to make sense
 The magical battle of Britain 213
and take seriously the spiritual geographies enacted and produced. These spir-
itual mappings often centre upon key places of divine and spiritual intervention,
cosmological significance or mysterious events. Mostly due to her unorthodox
Christian beliefs, Fortune’s spiritual geography coalesced around the early medi-
eval monasteries of Iona, Lindisfarne and Glastonbury (Hutton 1999: 184). This
was further realised and strengthened during the Fraternity’s occult warfare: early
on in the geopolitical work conducted by the group, visions and symbols emerged
through meditation which centred on Glastonbury.

Starting from the symbol of the Rose upon the Cross, we immediately found
it surrounded by golden light of great brilliance. [. . .] It was then perceived
that the golden light and the Cross were formulated inside a cavern. [. . .]
This cavern is known to the initiates as the cavern beneath Mount Abiegnus,
the Hill of Vision, of which the earthly symbol is Glastonbury Tor. [. . .] [I]n
future those who join with us in the meditation exercises should visualise the
Rose Cross as standing in the cave under the Hill of Vision, for this is now
our meeting place.
(Fortune 2012: 23–24)

Glastonbury, its earthly and material environs, is confirmed and made apparent
here as a place of spiritual energy and insight. Through the embodied action of
meditation, a space of spiritual centrality is performed and perceived. Patterning
the network, this action simultaneously unites the dispersed Fraternity, as they
supernaturally travel to and reside in the ‘Hill of Vision’, whilst enacting a mode
of communal spiritual subjectification composed in and through this immate-
rial geography, and providing a place of identification for a scattered spiritual
community. Moreover, the patterning, scaling and differentiation of this spiritual
geography and the subjectivities produced, become central to the performance of
the group’s occult geopolitical action: for it is under the Hill of Vision where the
group will meet and be contacted on the ‘Inner Planes’ by those Masters who will
‘bring to the race mind a realisation of the support afforded to it by cosmic law’
(Fortune 2012: 23). In other words, this (im)material space became the key geo-
political arena in which different geographies – astral, material, disaporic, con-
flicted – were performed and intersected. Hence, here the Fraternity were given
the esoteric knowledge, sourced from otherworldly spatialities, of how to wage
occult war and protect the nation.
At this juncture we see the Fraternity’s spiritual geography finding some coinci-
dence and overlap with more widely held nationalist geographies. Fortune and the
Fraternity sought to ‘evoke primordial energies from the primitive levels of the
national group soul and harness them to archetypal ideas in the group mind of the
race’ (Fortune 2012: 84), and given that it was Glastonbury where their occult geo-
political strategies would be learnt and performed, it was the ‘Watchers of Avalon’
which would pursue war on the astral-spatial plane: ‘Let us wake from their long
sleep the primordial images of our race, King Arthur and his knights, with the
wisdom of Merlin to guide them. These shall keep the soul of England against the
214  Julian Holloway
invisible influences being brought to bear upon it for its undoing’ (Fortune 2012:
85). Whilst these ‘ideals’ figure strongly in other British nationalist and populist
geopolitical imaginaries, both in the past and in the present, it must be noted that
they are deployed here in a manner which runs somewhat counter to their role as
symbolic emblems of national identity. For here, the Fraternity evoked Arthur and
Merlin as doing actual work on the soul and spirit of the nation, and hence were
very much a real part of the conflict and war. Far from being just symbols to rally
round and identify with, Fortune believed warfare was taking place in this other-
worldly space and hence these figures were acting to shore up Britain’s defences
as the war ensued:

In order to guard against any such subtle influencing, let us meditate upon
angelic Presences, red-robed and armed, patrolling the length and breadth
of our land. Visualise a map of Great Britain, and picture these great Pres-
ences moving as a vast shadowy form along the coasts, and backwards and
forwards from north to south and east to west, keeping watch and ward so that
nothing alien can be observed.
(Fortune 2012: 34)

In making sense of spiritual geographies, here manifest as occult geopolitics, we

must therefore take seriously the reality of the formations, ideas and cosmologies
generated by these groups in their discourses and practices.
One way in which we might pursue a more sympathetic understanding of these
geographies, yet one which, importantly, allows for a critique of such groups
to emerge, is through an attention to the forces that bind and pattern them, and
allow them to work. More precisely, one might examine how occult geopolitics
is formed and enacted through series of transfers that amount to an esoteric spa-
tiality of diasporic affect. Therefore, the transfers that formed and produced this
occult geopolitical network are very much akin to Pile’s (2011) study of telepathy
as a form of affect over distance. Pile (2011: 4) informs that telepathy, as multi-
faceted supernormal phenomena, ‘refers to the ability to sense (to be affected)
and also to perception beyond immediate cognition, such as intuitions, premoni-
tions, or inklings’. As such, the Fraternity’s occult warfare was composed and
achieved through a series of transfers occurring at distance that welded imagined
spaces, embodied acts and judgemental differentiations, such that a community of
affected sensation emerged and solidified. Here ‘the experience of shared affects
between people at distance’ was produced through an occult cosmology of racial-
national differences and geopolitical esoteric conflict (Pile 2011: 7). These circu-
lations allowed for an occult geopolitics to occur across distance and through im/
material spaces and borders, melding the embodied and the imagined, the sensed
and the spiritual. Essential to this network of geopolitical defence and combat
was a series of binding occult transferrals. Here affect at a distance is envisaged
as occult energies performed through supernormal flows across space. These
transfers are understood through cosmologies of spiritual energy, thought-forms,
visions and sensations circulating amongst the network. As this spiritual affect
circulated, as the occult transference affected at a distance and as these energies
 The magical battle of Britain 215
bound the network, the geopolitical forces of the ‘Watchers of Avalon’ and their
attendant geographies were generated.
This form of spiritual geopolitics thus amounts to an occult topology of affect
spatially manifest across different and dispersed geographies: a geopolitical spa-
tiality and strategy was built and cemented with a ‘glue’ of occult affect transfer-
ence binding the network:

From our Inner Plane contacts we draw strength and inspiration [. . .] It is not
enough to make contact and receive inspiration. The inspiration will soon dry
up unless it flows through us, ever renewing itself in flowing. For those who
have the deeper knowledge, participation in the national war effort is a sac-
ramental act whereby the power that has been drawn down is put in circuit.
Break the circuit, and the power ceases to flow.
(Fortune 2012: 53)

During the war years, this affective topology, composed of energetic circuits of
‘sacramental’ and ‘inner plane’ inspiration, produced and strengthened judgemen-
tal dispositions with regard to the events happening, how to affect these events
and processes and, more significantly, why they were happening. Yet Fortune’s
letters rarely state, and at best only hint at, possible direct material impacts on
the events of the war. For the most part, where a link is made it takes the form of
prophecy: for example, on June 23rd 1940 she notes how the ‘change of feeling’
in the USA towards the war was seen in their meditation three weeks previous
and ‘how it will be recalled that the entry of Italy into the war was announced a
fortnight before it occurred’ (Fortune 2012: 54). However, Fortune warned her
followers from dealing directly in this-worldly geopolitics stating:

. . . our teaching concern[s] principles, not politics. [. . .] This is the way in
which, as initiates, we work. We outline nothing; we meditate upon cosmic
principles till these take intellectual form. [. . .] There is, in consequence,
a gap between the initiates who bring through the archetypal ideas and the
statesmen and economists who give them practical form. [. . .] The thought-
forms that have developed as a result of group meditation work have to cross
the gap by means of their own inherent energy.
(Fortune 2012: 103)

For Fortune and the Fraternity, their occult warfare was happening through an
other-worldly spiritual geography, wherein the nation’s group soul and, literally,
spirit was being fortified and advanced.
At the heart of this occult geopolitical strategy was belief in cosmic destiny
whereby the Fraternity ‘have to simply pull the lever, and the Machinery of the
Universe does the rest. Our work is to formulate and reformulate day by day
the mental link between the spiritual influences and the group mind of the race’
(Fortune 2012: 25). The notion that there is a ‘cosmic plan’ to the universe that
each of us is living out (whether we realise it or not) and that we need to learn our
spiritual and cosmological destiny is something common to occult, esoteric and
216  Julian Holloway
spiritual groups (Holloway 2000). Consequently the more spiritually advanced
and developed a seeker is, the more they are aware of their part in the divine plan
and eschatological affairs: ‘We believe that there is a cosmic plan being worked
out, of which the present conditions form a phase, and that we can consciously
co-operate with the working of that plan’ (Fortune 2012: 20).
Fortune, given the spiritual messages she and others in the group received, was
thus able to state as early as 1941 that ‘the question of the ultimate outcome of the
war and the form of the final peace was never considered a matter for speculation
because it was taken for granted’ (Fortune 2012; 90). This assumption was based
on the very appearance and intervention of the Masters or Elder Brethren that
waged astral combat, protected the nation and allowed the Fraternity to do their
spiritual geopolitical work during the war. Indeed, Fortune argued that the ‘oppor-
tunity to establish contacts with the Masters’ was ripe during the war: ‘for it does
not often happen that the veil is as thin as it is at the moment’ (Fortune 2012: 32).
Moreover, this appearance signalled a proto-New Age version of history which
envisioned the war as the movement from the Piscean Age ‘as the pure Aquarian
types made their appearance among us’ (Fortune 2012: 148).
With the spiritual assurance that a New Age was dawning and the nation would
be protected through the astral combat of the Masters and the work done by the
Fraternity, in her later weekly letters Fortune began to spell out her geopoliti-
cal spiritual vision for the future. This proposal took the form of a post-national
cosmopolitanism wherein the spiritual would supersede the material geopolitical
conflict experienced and suffered:

Nations must not be looked upon, nor think of themselves, as self-contained

units; they are simply sub-sections of human society thus divided up for con-
venience. [. . .] It is the men and women of the New Age in all nations who
must take control across the national barriers as soon as the fighting is over,
and they must meet as Aquarians, not as English, French or Germans.
(Fortune 2012: 100–101)

Whilst this occult geopolitical future is shaped here by a doctrine of spiritual-

global post-nationalism, Fortune’s vision of the divine plan must still be read
as one where racism and nationalism are driving forces. Therefore, generated
through affective relation and communities of esoteric sensation, this was sin-
gularly not an ethics of open becoming, but one where differences were absolute
and destinies preordained. Here a network of affective relations did not present a
future open to becoming (contra Anderson and Harrison 2010; Connolly 2011),
but a spiritual geography where the future is pre-given and closed down: as For-
tune (2012: 158) opined, ‘each race has its own destiny to pursue under its own
leaders, and change can only come from within, if change be needed’. This des-
tiny was a teleological path of spiritual enlightenment, yet one where history and
fundamental differences in national Group Souls were paramount and conditional:

When the Germans open up the primordial levels of their racial mind they
release the elemental energies of the old gods – the bloodstained, mindless
 The magical battle of Britain 217
images of the heroes of Norse myth. [. . .] A good thousand years intervenes
between the [Christian] conversion of Britain and the conversion of Ger-
many; consequently the influences of Christianity reaches to a far deeper
level of racial consciousness with us than with them, and when the surface
consciousness of the British group soul peels off we find, not the mindless
heroes of Valhalla, but the chivalry of the Table Round; Excalibur instead of
Nothung; and the Quest of the Grail instead of the looting of Rhinegold.
(Fortune 2012: 85)

As such, pre-destined spiritual enlightenment is made provisional across space

due to evolutionary and essential cosmological differences. Indeed, Fortune
(2012: 157) expands these national differences to a global scale in her discus-
sion of the Western and Eastern mystery traditions when she states: ‘[t]o the East
belongs the glory of a great past from which we may learn, but to which we may
not return’. This occult geopolitics is thus one formed through a doctrine, embodi-
ment and practice of essentialism, spiritual evolutionism and ultimately, esoteric
supremacy at a national and global scaling, despite (or because) of her claims to a
cosmopolitan New Age dawning.

Conclusion
Understanding how spiritual geographies are produced and sustained through
communities of sensation and affective topologies, and how they give rise to and
pattern geopolitical discourses of essential division and hierarchical evolution, is
one way a critical approach to such movements might be developed. Here I have
traced how a spiritual geography is formed that seeks to intercede in national
conflict and foresee and configure the future map of political spaces, both nation-
ally and internationally. I have examined how occult geopolitics is played out
and performed across two interwoven spatialities – the immaterial and the mate-
rial. Spiritual geographies are manufactured through the real and the imagined,
and are stitched together with the thread of spiritual energies and occult affective
transfers. Dion Fortune and her Fraternity of Inner light sought to wage war on an
immaterial plane against hostile forces, and in-so-doing plaited together an occult
geopolitical imaginary and practice that simultaneously drew upon and differed
from national symbolism organised around iconic material spaces. This was a
spiritual geography performed through a network glued and bound by supernor-
mal affects at a distance and embodied action that affected geopolitical judgement
in and towards other nations and identities. This judgement was manifest as a
spiritual evolutionism, with some identities and nations closer and more inher-
ently capable of divine realisation than others.
This chapter has explored in detail an historical example of where occult discourses
and practices coincide with and shadow geopolitical events. Yet to believe that the
practices and discourses of occult geopolitics are a thing of the past would be a mis-
take. For example, Pop (2014) has examined how during the Romanian Presiden-
tial election campaign of 2009, Aliodor Manolea, a staff member of the incumbent
president Traian Băsescu, used occult powers (specifically the energy of the ‘violet
218  Julian Holloway
flame’, a source of mystical power) during a live television debate to ‘negatively
influence’ the counter-candidate Mircea Geoană. Furthermore, there is a contempo-
rary coincidence between the occult, geopolitical imaginaries and conspiracy theory.
For example, David Icke, whose popularity is widespread amongst New Age
countercultures, has produced a series of publications and video podcasts detailing
his discourse of geopolitical institutions, such as the European Union. Icke believes
the world is being run by a ‘hidden kabbal’, deemed the Illuminati, whose goal is a
‘Global centralised society, based on a world government, world central bank con-
trolling all finance, and a world army imposing the will of the world government’
(Icke 2016a). The EU is a ‘Super State’ within this ‘world government’: ‘The plan
within those [super states] is to destroy all countries, to end all sovereignty, to end
all nations, and break these nations into regions. [. . .] The idea is to have a world
government dictating to these union super states and the union super states dictating
to the regions of the super state’. To this end, Icke has spent much time and effort
revealing the ‘evidence’ that proves this occluded geopolitical agenda. For example,
he notes how the ‘Twelve stars of the union is the symbol of the Babylonian god-
dess. [. . .] The European Union is not a political union, it is the union of the Illumi-
nati Goddess which they wish to enslave the whole of Europe within’ (Icke 2016b).
Given the popularity of Icke – someone who can sell out the 6000 capacity
Wembley Arena in 2012 – and the circulation of other occult inspired conspiracy
theories both today and in the past, it seems appropriate and indeed crucial that
geographers of religion and spirituality seek to analyse and critique the spatialities
of occult geopolitics, and their significance and ramifications. Indeed, in a world
where political power is increasingly practiced through statements of ‘alterna-
tive facts’, it seems imperative geographers of religion and spirituality seek to
critically investigate and unpack the consequences and implications of the inter-
section of geopolitics and religion, especially in the ‘post-truth’ world of occult
conspiracy theory wherein Icke and his ilk reside.

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14 ‘Where should we commence
to dig?’
Spectral narratives and the biography
of place in F. B. Bond’s psychic
archaeology of Glastonbury Abbey
James Thurgill

Introduction
In 1918 Frederick Bligh Bond published his report on the archaeological excava-
tions he and his team had conducted at the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey in the
West of England. Bond, a practicing architect at the time of his appointment to
excavate the site, possessed a deep interest in medieval ecclesiastic architecture
and design, publishing a number of architectural reports and essays on case stud-
ies in the West of England from 1902 onward, as well as his first major work on
the subject, Roodscreens and Roodlofts, in 1909. Bond’s existing notoriety as an
architectural historian, particularly of pre-reformation churches, had led to him
being appointed Director of Excavations at Glastonbury Abbey in 1908. Though
merely an amateur in the field of archaeology, Bond made significant progress
in uncovering sections of the abbey’s foundations hitherto believed to have been
lost for centuries. The success of Bond as an archaeologist is, however, not quite
as straightforward as it might first appear; rather the case of Glastonbury Abbey
remains one of Britain’s most perplexing unsolved mysteries.
As with Glastonbury itself, the town from which the abbey takes its name, the
ruins are shrouded in religious myth, with Bond’s contribution serving as only one
of myriad mythical and mystical narratives that are rooted in the area (Hopkinson-
Ball, 2007, 2012; Michell, 1989). Marion Bowman (2009) speaks of the complex-
ity of Glastonbury, positioning the site as a multitude of place-based encounters.
To be sure, Glastonbury is not a single space; it has a variety of natural features
and constructed sites that are imbued with different resonances, attractions and
meanings (Bowman, 2009, 167). Through such a lens, Glastonbury becomes
represented by a fluid identity; one that is both essentialized and yet capable of
shifting the conceptualization of its ‘rootedness’ in and between myriad mythical
readings, from biblical to spectral (Bowman, 1993, 2004; Holloway, 2000, 2003a,
2003b; Prince and Riches, 2000; Wylie, 2002). What sets Bond’s story apart is
perhaps the evidential nature of his findings, that his claims are (somewhat) sup-
ported by material archaeological evidence, not that this has deterred skepticism.
In his The Gate of Remembrance: The story of the psychological experiment
which resulted in the discovery of the Edgar Chapel at Glastonbury (1918), Bond
222  James Thurgill
describes how he and his co-investigator, John Alleyne, made use of automatic
writing and necromancy in order to communicate with the otherworldly charac-
ters of the monks who had lived in and built the abbey. Moreover, Bond makes
use of the experiment to test his theory of ‘Greater Memory’, a collective (perhaps
cosmic) historical memory that transcends and interpenetrates our own (1918,
vii). Bond’s is perhaps the first example of what we might term psychic archaeol-
ogy (Williams, 1991) – a form of excavation that initially relied on Spiritualist
practices in order to uncover the material past hidden beneath us.
Archaeology and Spiritualism might well seem like unlikely bedfellows, par-
ticularly when it is so often the case that the former is considered to challenge,
‘sanitize’ or undermine the complex spiritual topology of the latter. Yet both fields
are inextricably linked through the mechanism(s) that each employs in order to
galvanize an understanding of place via the chronicling of history and the human
experience. Both archaeology and Spiritualism make strategic use of narrative
insofar as they seek to explore and recount events, encounters and practices that
are rooted in memory, people(s) and landscape. Furthermore, both the archaeolo-
gist and the spiritualist privilege an embodied experience of time and space: The
archaeologist quite literally places their body within the physical space in which
they seek to excavate – the earth itself – whilst the spiritual is encountered as a
psychophysical experience, with the body being utilized as a physically located
material receptacle for interaction with the immaterial divine. From the outset,
then, archaeology is a spectrally inflected practice; it seeks to uncover traces
of the past, physical memories that are concealed by time and earth, uncovered
through intuition, a mental projection of where material history might lay, as well
as making use of both recorded history and professional expertise. As such we
might view the archaeological discipline as engendering a sort of spectral materi-
alism through which a greater understanding of the past-world is generated in the
bringing forth of objects consigned to an otherwise forgotten history.
For both archaeologist and spiritualist, then, the world evolves around them,
with relationships to place becoming of greater importance where affective inter-
actions with the unseen are made manifest. It goes without saying that there are,
of course, obvious differences between the telos of archaeology and that of spir-
ituality (if the latter can even be said to possess one) and I do not seek to make a
case for reconciling the ultimate aims of the two here. However, I wish to make
use of both practices so as to demonstrate narrative and experience as central to an
understanding of place and our connection to it, as illustrated through the example
of Bond and his psychical experiments.
Using Bond’s excavations of Glastonbury Abbey as a case study, this chapter
aims to demonstrate the integral role spectrality plays in the building and rebuild-
ing of spiritual-spatial narratives, positioning place (and its biography) at the
heart of Bond’s ghostly encounters. However, the case of Bond’s Glastonbury
excavations expresses a much wider relevance for readers than of the importance
of spectrality alone; rather, Bond’s work exemplifies a direct challenging of the
affective qualities of place – one that sees the workings of the immaterial revealed
to us as an autonomous, communicative force worthy of our consideration. Put
 ‘Where should we commence to dig?’ 223
another way, in thinking beyond the supernatural, Bond’s report provides us with
an opportunity to rethink how we relate to places and their histories, showing us
through overtly practical (and material) means the innovative ways in which we
might reconnect and engage with the world around us.

Spectral geographies: haunting, narrative and memory

Before entering into an account of Bond’s excavations at Glastonbury it is worth
considering how and in what ways spectrality itself functions as a component
of spatial experience. Spectral and spectro-geographies have, in recent years,
emerged to become a foundation for discussions of the unseen, affective qualities
of place (Thurgill, 2014; Trigg, 2012). Undoubtedly influenced by Derrida’s Spec-
tres of Marx (1994), readings of spectral geographies can be seen as responding to
the sense of loss or haunting that came with the fin-de-siècle of the 20th century
(Maddern and Adey, 2007). Increasing developments in the use of the revenant
as a mode of cultural (and spatial) enquiry has led to what Luckhurst terms the
‘spectral turn’, an analytical framework negotiated through ‘a language of ghosts
and the uncanny . . . of anachronic spectrality and hauntology’ (2002).
Geographers in particular have placed much emphasis on the roles of haunting,
spectrality and Forteana when assessing our engagement with place and space.
Though not an exhaustive list, a number of notable spectral tropes have developed
in light of contemporary geographic research: affect (Pile, 2012); death and dying
(Maddrell, 2013; Maddrell and Sidaway, 2010); phantasmagoria (Hetherington,
2001; Pile, 2005a, 2005b); supernatural agency (Dixon, 2007; Holloway, 2006,
2016); literary hauntings (Magner, 2015; Matless, 2008; Wylie, 2008); spiritual
practice (MacKian, 2011, 2012); ruination (Edensor, 2005, 2008; Trigg, 2012)
and tourism (Holloway, 2010; Inglis and Holmes, 2003). Such a wide range of
geographic interest in haunting serves to demonstrate the relevance of spectral
geographies to scholars of the spatial humanities, galvanizing the need to analyze
and interpret the workings of memory, history and absence in our experiences of
place. This occulted vision of place is dependent upon a spatial memory that we
are, for the most part, unable to tap into. Haunting has a way of readdressing the
balance between the future and the past, allowing us to move beyond the con-
fines of the present and affording us a temporal experience that oscillates between
things both present and absent. Haunting provides an antidote to the anxiety of
spatial and spiritual kenophobia that pervades our daily lives – the fear that all
which lay before us is but nothingness, the abyss. Spectrality allows for a return,
moreover, it necessitates one.
Like all forms of narration, spectro-spatial narratives are place-based stories,
accounts expressed as a ‘complex network of relations’ (Cobley, 2001). It has
been argued elsewhere that alternative spiritual practices add to the creation and
narration of a biography of place through their apparent willingness to deal with
a place’s immaterial qualities (Thurgill, 2015a, 2015b): Bond’s psychic archaeol-
ogy is surely an example of this process. How a place comes to be known to us
is largely determined through a combining of spatial experience and narrative.
224  James Thurgill
Places are necessarily rooted within a socio-historical context and encountering
them comes about through a negotiated enquiry whereby one seeks to become
informed of previous uses, inhabitants and events that have occurred there. As
such, we might well consider place to be palimpsestic, inscribed with the writing
and rewriting of its past, laden with memory.
The philosopher Edward Casey (2000) describes place as a situated repository
for memory, ‘a mise-en-scene for remembered events precisely to the extent that
it guards and keeps these events within its self-delimiting perimeters’. In this
sense one might argue that any encounter with place is an archaeology of sorts.
In attending to place we are forced to unearth the memories stored within it, deci-
phering particularities, histories and our own experience in order to construct a
biographical understanding of the space we (temporarily) occupy. In doing so,
place comes to be understood as existing within a continuously unfolding sto-
ryline, one that is always both historical and contemporary.
The haunting qualities of place, the manner in which the past permeates and
lingers within the present, is a much documented interpretation of the affective
mechanisms at play in spatial encounters (Benjamin, 1999; de Certeau, 1988; Pile,
2005a, 2005b, 2012; Till, 2005). Historical narratives, both officially recorded and
those presented in oral traditions, feed the idea that place exists within a progress-
ing narrative, that there is some sense of a (linear) plot which can be traced or
followed in order to know about where we are. This spatial story is made up both
of tales told and re-told but also from the memories of a place that are left to be
uncovered. This narrative or biography of place informs our spatial experience,
setting to work a psychical engagement with the affectual qualities of a site. The
psychic archaeology of F. B. Bond works, as we shall see, to speak to the haunting
of place, to allow its history to unfold and its story to be uncovered.

The quest at Glastonbury

In 1908 Bristol-based architect and archaeology enthusiast, Frederick Bligh
Bond, was appointed Director of Excavations at the ruined ecclesiastical site of
Glastonbury Abbey. Prior to the start of the excavations, Bond had spent much of
the previous year studying manuscripts and plans of the abbey as well as making
a number of field visits to the ruins themselves. Bond was later commissioned to
dig the site in search of ‘lost’ foundations, particularly those belonging to an apse
of the so-called Edgar Chapel. It was during these initial archaeological inves-
tigations that Bond first began to experiment with psychic enquiry, seizing the
opportunity to ‘test’ his theory of ‘Greater Memory’ (Bond, 1920, vi). Rejecting
conventional belief that memory is confined to the corporeal life (and death) of
the individual, Bond conjectured that postmortem memory could be consigned
to a greater, infinite source of memorial record and that, through certain psycho-
logical training, this cosmic repository of memory could be accessed remotely
by the living. Bond viewed this ‘Greater Memory’ as ‘transcending the ordinary
limits of time, space and personality’ (1920, 20), an ever-growing, omnipresent
resource at the disposal of man’s mental faculties. Furthermore, Bond sought to
 ‘Where should we commence to dig?’ 225
test his hypothesis through the (then future) excavations of Glastonbury Abbey,
developing a working methodology for psychic archaeology. Bond framed his
unusual archaeological approach as a ‘psychological experiment’, a term he went
on to place in the subtitle to his accounts of the Glastonbury dig.
Bond was not alone in his belief that psychical methods could be of use in the
excavation of historical sites and, together with like-minded former naval officer,
close friend and Spiritualist, Captain John Allen Bartlett, who worked under the
pseudonym of John Alleyne, Bond began experimenting with the use of auto-
matic writing and Ouija boards. The pair began preliminary investigations of the
ruins in 1907 when Bond was anticipated to become Director of Excavations at
Glastonbury Abbey on behalf of the Somerset Archaeological Society (1920, 7).
Bond describes in the preface to his account how he and Alleyne developed their
practice so as to successfully excavate the abbey site ‘in the absence of physical
remains and [a] lack of trustworthy evidence from documents’ (1920, 8).
In setting out the principles and methods of psychology applied to his archaeo-
logical research, Bond criticized the over-rationalized thinking of Western society,
claiming that the West looked only to measurable phenomena for explanations of
the world, whilst the East turned inwards, to imagination: ‘Western folks’ Bond
suggested, ‘think it unpractical to cultivate this gift (of imagination) . . . we have
no system of training it’ (1920, 18). From the outset, Bond’s thinking appears to
have been influenced by Eastern spiritual and philosophical traditions, namely
Buddhism and Hinduism as well as Kabbalistic mysticism. His intention to qualify
the uses of his theory through a blending of these spiritualities and their associated
mystic practices can be seen at least two years prior to the physical excavations
taking place. The excavations held at Glastonbury can be viewed in part, then,
as Bond’s attempt to ‘train’ the mind, or his mind at least, reconciling this differ-
ence in thinking so that the truth of the (spatial-) past might be revealed: ‘a more
contemplative element in the mind would seek to revive from the half-obliterated
traces below’ (1920, 19). Bond outlines his thinking as follows:

The germination of new and profitable ideas in the mind may in this respect
be brought about, firstly, by a suitable system of mental exercise and culture;
secondly, by a willingness to hold back all mental preferences and preconcep-
tions, and to restrain also the surface activities of the brain, so that the chan-
nel of pure ‘idea’ which resides in the subconscious mind may be maintained,
and the finer activities allowed to percolate.
(1920, 24)

The experiments were themselves predominantly practiced remotely from Bond’s

architectural practice’s offices in the Alliance Chambers, 36 Corn Street, Bristol.
Bond describes how he would hold a piece of foolscap paper in place with his
left hand whilst gently resting his right hand on top of Alleyne’s, which in turn
would be lightly clasping a pencil. Bond would start by asking a question ‘as
though addressed to some other person’ (1920, 32). Alleyne’s fingers would start
to move and the pencil would begin to make small, irregular lines. Bond notes that
226  James Thurgill
‘[t]he agreed method was to remain passive, avoid concentration of the mind on
the subject of the writing, and to talk casually of other and indifferent matters’
(1920, 32). Indeed, Bond writes in a footnote found in the Preface to the Second
Edition (of The Gate of Remembrance) how he would often read aloud from a
novel to Alleyne throughout the process so as to draw the medium’s mind away
from consciously answering the questions posed and allow for the unadulterated
recording of ‘small voices from a distant time’ (1920, viii). Neither man would
attempt to read or decipher the writing until after the communication had ended,
thus removing any additional element of intention from the automatist process.
Bond and Alleyne’s experiments with automatic writing produced a seemingly
‘queer’ and ‘curious patchwork of Low Latin, Middle English of mixed peri-
ods, and Modern English of varied style and diction’ (1920, v) with responses to
Bond’s questions growing of greater accuracy and detailed instruction ‘as though
in obedience to some preordained intention and settled plan’ (1920, v). Naturally,
Bond’s account appeared all the more genuine because of the ‘details of its struc-
ture and history, written in the archaic language of the old monks’ themselves
(Michell, 1989). However, it should be noted that the languages Bond claimed to
be in use throughout the sessions of automatism were rife with error and incon-
sistency. Knowing this to be a point of contention, Bond accounted for any flaws
or errors in the transcribed Latin by conjecturing that the communications merely
reflected the pervasive illiteracy that would have been present during the lives
of the communicators, therefore, erroneous spelling was to be expected (Bond,
1920, 31). Defensive of his technique, Bond sought to instate automatism as a
‘gift of tongues’ parallel to those present in the biblical imagination, citing Saint
Peter so as to argue for a ‘great revival’ of these powers – a revival that Bond him-
self undoubtedly hoped to initiate (1920, 22–23). Both Bond and Alleyne consid-
ered these experiments to engender a ‘fruition of memories and experiences long
dormant and inaccessible to us’ (1920, 25).
Though both men had, in one way or another, been involved in the Spiritualist
practices that led them to pursue this line of investigation, Bond notes the automa-
tism used to investigate Glastonbury Abbey as a marked departure from Spiritual-
ism per se: ‘neither F.B.B. nor J.A. favoured the ordinary spiritualistic hypothesis
which would see in these phenomena the action of discarnate intelligences from
the outside upon the physical or nervous organisation of the sitters’ (1920, 19).
Such a view is important here in that it moves away from the idea that Bond and
Alleyne were under the influence of spirits, as such, and toward the notion of an
engaged interaction with a greater source of shared memory, similar to that which
was later alluded to by Jung in his writings on psychology and the occult as the
‘collective unconscious’ (2008). If what Bond describes is to be believed, then
both he and Alleyne were novices in spirit communication. Indeed, Bond makes
the claim that although Alleyne had previously experienced a talent for divination
twice before, it had been without intention or a willing of the gift and so should
not be considered connected to the Glastonbury Abbey experiments.
Bond conducted his initial archaeological surveys of the site during the months
of May through August 1907, his seasonal approach being somewhat enforced by
 ‘Where should we commence to dig?’ 227
insufficient funding and a dwindling team of labourers (Kenawell, 1965). Initial
experiments with psychical phenomena produced intriguing results for Bond. The
first experiment with automatism took place in Bond’s offices on 7th Novem-
ber 1907; Bond posed the question ‘Can you tell us anything about Glastonbury?’
to which he received the answer: ‘All knowledge is eternal and available to men-
tal sympathy’ (1918, 32). After a short pause in communication a second message
was transcribed: ‘I was not in sympathy with monks – I cannot find a monk yet’.
As the experiment continued information on the history of the abbey started to be
received as well as what appeared to be a hand drawn plan of the abbey, includ-
ing a sketch of the hitherto lost Edgar Chapel. Glastonbury Abbey was dissolved
in 1539 AD during Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries act, at which
point, according to Bond’s research, the Edgar Chapel disappeared from histori-
cal record (1918, 4). Much like the presence of the chapel itself, Bond noted how
communicative narratives would terminate without warning, only to be resumed
with the flow of information re-established in the following séance (1918, 30).
In order to qualify the ‘scientific’ nature of Bond’s experiments, he enlisted
Everard Feilding, Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research, as an inde-
pendent adjudicator so as to provide an outside testimony to the truth of the
account he would later give on the excavations and the psychical communications
that led to his success (1918, 6). Bond included an extract of a letter from Feild-
ing written in March 1917 within the body of the excavation script. In the letter,
Feilding encourages Bond to publish his findings and reiterates his belief that
no knowledge of the Edgar Chapel’s location existed prior to Bond and Alleyne
beginning automatism.
By the sixth sitting Bond had been instructed on where to begin his excavations:

Sitting VI, 26th November 1907

Question: ‘Where should we commence to dig?’Answer: ‘The east end. Seek

for the pillars and the wall(s) at an angle. The foundations are deep’.
(1920, 41)

Further sittings continued to provide information on the whereabouts of the

Edgar Chapel’s remains, as well as detailed descriptions of the personalities that
communicated through Alleyne. Amongst the most frequent and detailed com-
munications derived were those emanating from three particular spirits: Guliel-
mus (William the Monk), Johannes (truant monk and nature-lover) and Abbot
Beere (received as Bere in the communications) (1918, 45). These three spirit
characters, Bond claims, provided substantial accounts and descriptions of daily
life at the abbey; of feuds and battles; of leisure pursuits and the integral role of
nature; historical accounts of the construction of the chapel; of traders, visitors
and founders of the abbey (including its connection to Joseph of Arimathaea);
as well as of rites and rituals conducted within the abbey walls. These spectral
figures formed part of a collection of spirits who termed themselves simply ‘The
Watchers’ and gave Bond the exact locations of those parts of the abbey he was
228  James Thurgill
seeking to excavate, in turn demonstrating a bond (to Bond) between Bond’s work
and the historical guardianship of the Abbey (1918, 93). Sitting XXVII conducted
on 17th March 1908 at Bond’s Bristol offices gave the amateur archaeologist the
final sign he was waiting for: ‘The time is ripe for the stones to be studied’, and in
May of the same year Bond finally acquired a licence to excavate the ruins, acting
as a representative of the Somerset Archaeological Society (1918, 45).
Bond and Alleyne continued their own psychical experiments in private and on
16th June 1908 the final detailed description of the Edgar Chapel was recorded,
providing Bond with measurements of its foundations along with hand drawn plans
of the abbey buildings (1918, 28–29). When Bond finally began to excavate the
remains of the abbey, following the instructions afforded him via the automatism,
he successfully uncovered the foundations of a large rectangular chapel east of
the abbey’s retro-quire. Bond recalls in his text that many of the measurements
received in the sittings appeared conflicting and as such he was required to repeat
and probe in his questioning in order to make sense of the dimensions. The infor-
mation recorded in Bond and Alleyne’s transcription of the sittings provides sixteen
references to the Edgar Chapel and East End of Quire (1918, 70), in addition to
supplementary information on King Arthur (‘The tombe of Arthur in shining black
stone was in fronte ye altare’ (Bond, 1918, 65) and skeletal remains found outside
the church walls (named in automatic writing as Eawulf, Earl of Somerton: Bond,
1918, 106) which were found to have been buried along with a second human skull.
By the time the third edition of his account was published in 1920, Bond had
been provided with yet further archaeological data through his psychical work-
ings and had moved on to excavating the remains of a second formerly ‘lost’
structure, the Loretto Chapel. On the discovery of the Loretta Chapel Bond wrote:

[T]his discovery sets the seal upon the veridical nature of the writings, and
emphasizes the importance of the method employed by the author for the
recovery of latent knowledge.
(1920, 2)

This second major discovery was, for Bond, the point at which the theory of
‘Greater Memory’ was ratified by reality, a demonstration to his critics that other-
wise (seemingly) impossible material finds were made possible through ‘kindred
knowledge from the great reservoir of the memory of nature’ (1920, 112).
Bond’s psychical and physical excavations were doubtless a continuation of his
existing interest in both Spiritualism as well as geomantic and Eastern traditions.
In addition to the publication of his script as a monograph, Bond published further
reports as articles in Psychic Research Quarterly1 and the Journal of the Ameri-
can Society for Psychical Research, as well as a collection of nine pamphlets
entitled The Glastonbury Scripts.2 His meditations on The Chapel of Our Lady
(A.D. 1184) reportedly built on the site of the Church of Joseph of Arimathaea
(confirmed in Bond’s spirit communications) demonstrate an architecture that fol-
lows the spiritual instruction of the Gematria in the Greek scriptures, a practice
that utilizes geometry and numerology for the purposes of engendering sacrality.3
 ‘Where should we commence to dig?’ 229
Furthermore, as a trained architect Bond was a talented illustrator and used this
skill to produce conjectural reconstructions of the abbey and its associated struc-
tures; this he did so as to augment the descriptive accounts arrived at through
spirit communication and automatism. In doing so Bond provided yet another
demonstration of his unique insight into the place and biography of the abbey.
For more than a decade Alleyne and Bond conducted séances and varying
forms of divination in order to commune with the spirit-memories of the monks
who had frequented the abbey all those centuries ago. Over fifty communications
were made between 7th November 1907 and 30th November 1911, with a num-
ber of additional spirit writings being gathered from 1912 and later. The script
generated by the pair was in fact so vast that Bond published an additional text
from the experiments in 1919.4 This second text Bond titled The Hill of Vision,
and which saw a gathering together of the messages received from initial sittings
that did not directly correspond to Glastonbury Abbey or its locale. The most sig-
nificant claim of this secondary publication was that the messages received from
Bond and Alleyne’s sittings had prophesied the First World War. Together with
The Gate of Remembrance, Bond had succeeded in bringing the entirety of his
psychological experiments to the public’s attention.
The experiments went on in private, many sessions taking place remotely whilst
at Bond’s Bristol based architectural office, behind the backs of the conservative
church authorities who Bond had suspected would be less than enthused by the
prospect of his psychical methods. Bond was right to be concerned. Following
the publication of his findings in 1918, word of Bond’s occult practices spread.
Bishop Armitage Robinson eventually dismissed Bond from his role in 1922 on
grounds of using necromancy at a consecrated site. Following his rejection by the
Church, skepticism from the archeological community and a damaged reputa-
tion, Bond left the UK to continue his psychical research in America. Treatment
of Bond’s claims was (and remains) in many ways far less fair then it ought to
have been. Accusations of fraud undermined the very concrete findings (seen in
the form of archaeological evidence) that Bond presented his readers with. Fur-
thermore, from the very beginning of his account, Bond set the tone as one of
both enquiry and experimentation; he defined his work as suggestive, imploring
the reader to treat the text ‘with an open mind’ (Bond, 1920, 112) and concluded
by stating that the account was a demonstration of his working method and the
results presented were ‘not to be accepted with credulity, but are subjects for criti-
cal analysis’ (1920, 155). To follow Bond’s conjecturing on the nature of memory
is to surrender to the spectral, and in doing so, he suggests ‘we should stand at the
threshold of the Gate of Remembrance’ (1920, 144).

Coda
Notwithstanding the obvious criticism that such an account would face, Bond’s
description of his psychic archaeology, and the successes he had in discovering
both the Edgar and Loretta chapels at Glastonbury Abbey, remains one of the most
fascinating examples of Forteana to date. The series of questions and responses
230  James Thurgill
that were recorded by Bond highlight the specificity of the information that was
‘coming through’ during the automatic writing sessions and support Bond’s the-
ory that his apparent success at locating remains at the site was partially down to
inexplicable occurrences.
The methodologies employed by Bond are the first documented instances of
psychic archaeology; a fringe discipline that remains practiced today. Bond’s
techniques for uncovering the material past through spiritually inflected archaeo-
logical practices provided the foundations for later spiritual enquiries into land-
scape such as those seen in the works of Broadhurst and Miller (1990); Devereux
(1991, 1994, 2010); Foster-Forbes (Foster-Forbes and Campbell, 1973); Leth-
bridge (1957, 1963); Underwood (1968) and Watkins (1922, 1925). My interest
in this case is not so much to validate claims of the existence of the paranor-
mal, nor to prove or disprove the information gathered by Bond and his team to
have emanated from spectral sources. Rather, the subject of interest here is one of
re-imagining our connections to the narrative, history and sacrality of place and
moreover, what this might mean for the development of a biography of place, an
unending spatial-story in which we play an active role in shaping, challenging and
re-writing place. Of wider interest still is Bond’s unique way of challenging the
tension between matter and immateriality. The ghosts given voice through Bond’s
experiments call for us to pay attention to place, to listen to its stories. In analyz-
ing the affective nature of place(s), we often overlook any sense of purpose to
being moved or disturbed by our surroundings, but Bond teaches us otherwise. By
returning spirits to place, Bond and Alleyne’s experiments work to demonstrate
that affect teaches us about place, that through being affected by a site’s physical
and psychical offerings we can gain a greater understanding of our role in its his-
tory. It is not so much spectrality, then, that determines the significance of Bond’s
work, rather, it is the innovative way in which he works with materiality to ‘show’
us the value of the immaterial.
Furthermore, it is worth considering what implications a case such as Bond’s
might have for the geographic imagination. How might the spectres of the abbey
change the way we view the relations between people, place and affect? It appears
that whether real or figurative, Glastonbury Abbey retains its own unique set of
spirits. Bond made a connection to these through a multiplicity of materialities;
the abbey site, masonry, soil, grass, shovel, paper, the very lead of John Alleyne’s
pencil that permeated the foolscap and recorded the communications. Through
each of these objects, Bond was able to ascertain the location of the hidden
chapel(s). He did so through an engagement with the immaterial via uncontest-
ably material means: the site spoke to Bond, spectrally narrating its own story
through unquestionably corporeal processes. The tension between these two, the
material and the immaterial, is what forces open a space for the engendering of the
spectral, and moreover is the site at which we engage with a biography of place.
The mobilization of a mysticism that shrouds the abbey, as well as the wider set-
ting of the Somerset town of Glastonbury (Cope, 1998; Michell, 1989), makes for
a deeply affective environment that is situated within a landscape saturated by its
past and associated narrative(s) of myth. Such a landscape is where new meanings
 ‘Where should we commence to dig?’ 231
and re-imaginings can take place. We might refer to such spatialities as being the
place where the (im)material comes to exist; where the immaterial inflects and
works upon materiality. The absence of the definite here gives way to a place of
exploration; the chapel remains were simultaneously lost and present, both there
(existing) and not there (unseen). Bond exploited the tension between this absent-
presence further through the replication of the process; he engaged with unseen
subjects, using material things to bring their voices to life.
It strikes me that the interaction between the historical figures of the abbey (the
architect and the monks) has further developed the hauntological existence of the
site. If, as Tim Edensor (2005) posits, ruins act as spaces for rethinking history of
their own accord, then they possess the affectual qualities that lead one to contem-
plate and imagine previous acts of habitus that would have occurred within them.
In this sense structural remains haunt us by continually allowing the past to per-
meate the present. In bringing the ‘spirits’ of the Glastonbury ruins to life, Bond
created a duel haunting whereby ghosts appeared both as absences made present
(the ruins) and as unseen agents (the spirits). The spectralization of such a site is
amplified further through the retelling of Bond’s discoveries here: the abbey, its
ghostly narrative and indeed Bond himself will continue to occupy the space; the
(after)lives of all three caught up in a continuous cycle of haunting.

Notes
1 Bond, F. B. (1920–1) ‘The discoveries at Glastonbury’, Psychic Research Quarterly, 1,
pp. 302–312. Online at www.iapsop.com/archive/materials/psychic_research_quarterly/
psychic_research_quarterly_v1_1920-1921.pdf. Last accessed 7 July 2016.
2 Coates, R. (2015) Frederick Bligh Bond (1864–1945): a bibliography of his writings
and a list of his buildings. Working Paper, University of the West of England (Research
Repository), Bristol. Online at http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/25679.
3 Bond, F. B. and Simcox Lea, T. (1917) A preliminary investigation of the cabala con-
tained in the Coptic Gnostic books and of a similar gematria in the Greek text of the
New Testament, shewing the presence of a system of teaching by means of the doctrinal
significance of numbers, by which the holy names are clearly seen to represent aeonial
relationships which can be conceived in a geometric sense and are capable of a typical
expression of that order. Oxford, UK: B. H. Blackwell.
4 Bond, F. B. (1919) The Hill of Vision, a forecast of the Great War and of social revolution
with the coming of the new race, gathered from automatic writings obtained between
1909 and 1912, and also, in 1918, through the hand of John Alleyne under the supervi-
sion of the author. Boston, MA: Marshall Jones Co.

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15 Categorizing Spiritualism as a
shamanism
Lessons in mapping
David Gordon Wilson

Introduction
This contribution explains the background to ‘Redefining Shamanisms’ (Wil-
son 2013), to the doctoral thesis upon which it was based, and to the underly-
ing research, with the intention of summarizing some of the insights gained. The
methodologies I adopted drew in part upon geography at its most traditional, and
were a potent reminder that comparative and other established methodologies,
which may seem to be exhausted, or perhaps just overly familiar, can continue to
offer new insights.
I will explain my interest in the modern Anglo-American tradition of Spiritu-
alism, by which I mean the religio-philosophical movement that makes use of
human mediums to communicate with the spirits or souls of the deceased (per-
ceived as people who are alive but no longer incarnate), and which has found its
particular home in Anglo-American culture of the mid-nineteenth century to date
(Nelson 1969). I also detail my approach to studying contemporary Spiritualist
practices, and to categorizing Spiritualism as a distinct religious tradition. I show
how my interest in shamanic traditions alerted me to the useful comparisons they
offer in the endeavour to categorize Spiritualism. In this I follow in the footsteps
of those who maintain that categorization is a core activity in human understand-
ing, something that was first brought home to me by a particularly able Professor
of Roman law during my undergraduate legal studies (Birks 1997).
It is in light of these concerns, and particularly the question of how to categorize
Spiritualism, that I came to see my efforts as an exercise in mapping. I mean this
in two distinct senses, which I term geographical and mathematical. A basic geo-
graphical approach might be to take a map of the world and proceed to plot areas
where this or that religious tradition is dominant, or has been identified. At any
given time there will be overlaps, porous boundaries, co-existence, local blend-
ings, or simply gaps in scholarly knowledge. In plotting those parts of the world
where scholars have identified shamanic traditions, it became apparent that there
was an obvious lacuna, namely Europe (especially northern Europe), and, from
the early to mid-nineteenth century, North America; to that list might be added
recent Australia and New Zealand. This indicated that where Protestant Christian-
ity is the normative tradition, shamanic practices tend not to be identified; to the
 Categorizing Spiritualism as a shamanism 235
extent that shamanism is identified, it tends to be perceived in non-Protestant,
often indigenous, marginal sub-cultures.
It struck me that Protestant Europe and modern North America represent an
obvious missing piece of the puzzle when assembling a map of shamanic tra-
ditions around the world, while also being the classic locus when mapping the
presence of Spiritualism as a distinct tradition. Might these be pieces of the same
jigsaw puzzle?
This question led me to the more mathematical sense in which we use the term
mapping. In mathematics, if a shape or area can be transposed from its existing
position onto a shape or area in a different location, and match, one can be said to
map onto the other. This is a particular example of enquiry into the extent to which
each of the elements of a set can be associated with those of another set, into the
extent to which they can be said to be the same. For the purposes of the current
exercise, the question becomes, ‘Can the essential or characteristic elements of
Spiritualism be identified and, if so, can they be associated with the essential or
characteristic elements of shamanic traditions?’ Neither of these tasks is easy.
This is a question that takes us back to the old practice of comparing things
as a way of comprehending them, but the process of answering it, while revali-
dating comparative approaches, highlighted the importance of attending to our
choices as to which characteristics to compare and contrast. At its broadest, this
is the question of which traditions to compare; interestingly, this question is
answered in part by ignoring some of the characteristics often assumed to be
of the essence of religion, and it is certain characteristics of Spiritualism and
shamanisms that alerted me to the need to do this. It is also important to point
out that some previous scholarly attempts to locate Spiritualism suggested the
shaman as a role with which the Spiritualist medium might bear comparison
(Nelson 1969: 246), although, to my knowledge, that suggestion had not been
explored in any detail.
A particular challenge presented by Spiritualism is that it is a singularly undog-
matic religious tradition; it has no single founder, it has competing narratives,
it has many written texts but no one set regarded as authoritative (Nelson 1969:
238–246). Ask ten Spiritualists what they believe and they will probably provide
ten different answers, possibly even the outright response that it is not a matter
of belief, although it is reasonable to expect them to centralize mediumistic spirit
communication in some way. The point to highlight is that the element of consist-
ency in the answers is not a belief but a practice; this is true regardless of one’s own
views as to whether any actual spirit communication is or can be present. Prioritiz-
ing belief misses the point of Spiritualism, as it often does with other traditions; at
the very least, it can lead us to overlook those practices that actually maintain the
tradition. This well illustrates why scholars of religion often prefer to focus upon
practices, upon reading behavioural texts rather than written ones, or upon inter-
preting physical artefacts (including texts) as giving access to the ways in which
people relate to each other so as to maintain a tradition (Jordan 2001). Which of
these approaches is useful depends upon the tradition; traditions that are not sig-
nificantly characterized by written records, or where scripture is not central  to
236  David Gordon Wilson
maintenance of the tradition, can be difficult to access absent personal involve-
ment on the part of the researcher.
This is important as it indicates the methodology that is needed, something
that is not always obvious. Methodologies embody (often implicit) assumptions,
not only as to how to study but also as to what is worth studying. For this reason,
methodologies can be powerful political tools: used foolishly, they can obstruct
learning; used wisely, they can illuminate ideas and objects of study hitherto mar-
ginalized but which risk challenge.
In order to compare two things, one requires knowledge of both. In choos-
ing two things to compare, there should be elements of commonality that offer
a preliminary indication that the comparison might prove useful; an important
favourable indication here is if it is apparent that an appropriate methodology
is the same for both objects of study. Given an obvious need for analysis of
practices rather than beliefs, some element of ethnography is indicated, espe-
cially given the paucity of existing examples. The need for this approach was
strengthened by my awareness that shamanic studies as an academic discipline
has relied heavily upon anthropologists, and therefore upon ethnography as a
methodology. The classic example is the work of Russian ethnographer Sergei
Mikhailovich Shirokogoroff, who worked among the Evenki (Tungus) tribes or
clans of Siberia and northern China from 1913 to 1918 (Shirokogoroff 1929,
1935). It is from the Evenki, and as a result of Shirokogoroff’s work, that we
have the term šamān or shaman, which roughly translates as ‘knower’ (‘gnostic’
would be a good transliteration, were it not already employed elsewhere). Shi-
rokogoroff felt that the description shaman should not be applied to comparable
practitioners in other cultures, demonstrating a sensitivity to context that needs
to be accommodated in making instructive comparisons; both commonalities
and differences matter.
Despite influential efforts to do so, scholars of shamanism(s) have struggled to
establish a definition of shamanism such as might allow the field to be clearly dis-
tinguished; indeed, discussion has been so prolonged, and the word now applied,
academically and popularly, to so many particular examples that many, if not
most, scholars have given up the attempt and maintain that the effort is naïve.
I adhere, however, to the view that a category that does not work indicates that
some things habitually included in it should not be there or have been inade-
quately comprehended; either way, it is likely that the question underpinning the
category description has not yet been adequately formulated.
My interest in Spiritualism and (other) shamanisms is not only based upon
my recognition of those traditions as fascinating in their own right, and for what
they reveal about the societies in which they are bounded (both enabled and
constrained), but is also prompted by the analytical challenges they present to
scholars. Some of those difficulties arise simply because we bring ourselves to
whatever we study, and it can take us time to realize that sometimes we must not
only observe and analyze so as to learn but change in order to comprehend, per-
haps especially so when engaged in ethnography.
 Categorizing Spiritualism as a shamanism 237
Exploring Spiritualism and shamanism: mapping
the globe and other initial comparisons
How then to show that Spiritualism is worth studying, how to identify that which
is essential or strongly characteristic of Spiritualism so as to enable comparison,
and how to choose an appropriate comparator?
It is difficult entirely to remove my personal experience from answering these
questions. In September 2001, I began reading for an undergraduate degree in
Divinity at the University of Edinburgh; with no intention of going into minis-
try, I was free to include courses in shamanism and African religious traditions.
From personal curiosity, I also began attending services at Portobello Spiritualist
Church in Edinburgh. Initially, I was curious as to the possibility that there might
be elements of Spiritualist mediumistic practice that might parallel practices in
the early Christian churches of the first century CE. That interest gradually took a
back seat as I became a member of Portobello Spiritualist Church’s development
circle (the church’s teaching forum), and increasingly began to draw compari-
sons between my experiences and observations there with the shamanic traditions
I was learning about at Edinburgh.
From joining Portobello Spiritualist Church’s development circle in Janu-
ary 2003, to leaving it in June 2007, I underwent a fascinating series of learn-
ing experiences; these are detailed more fully in the extended ethnography that
forms Chapter 4 of ‘Redefining Shamanisms’ but, in brief, I gradually became
a demonstrating medium at Portobello Spiritualist Church and across Scot-
land, with occasional forays into England and across to Canada. This extended
involvement was recorded and reflected upon at length, initially for personal
benefit, and from September  2005, as research towards my doctoral thesis at
Edinburgh.
I began by making a simple comparison of mediumship within the Spiritual-
ist tradition with shamanism, with the intention of testing whether Spiritualism
could be categorized as a shamanism, the thesis being that it could indeed be so
categorized. Initially, I had no particular expectations as to what might come from
making that categorization, and was ill-placed even to say why it might be worth
doing.
In its origins, the identification of shamanism is closely bound up with the
traditions of the Evenki (Tungus) and other nomadic reindeer-herding peoples
of Siberia, whose tribes or clans tended to maintain shamans, whose social role
was to act as carriers of clan lore (creation myths, history, knowledge of animal
behaviour and uses, plants for healing), and to communicate with spirits (human,
animal, elemental/nature spirits) on behalf of the clan. Communication is usually
undertaken with practical outcomes in mind, such as knowledge of the wherea-
bouts of game for hunting, healing of illnesses not susceptible to the usual physi-
cal remedies, or personal or collective advice from the ancestors. A sometimes
overlooked aspect of a shaman’s role is to act as psychopomp, conductor of a soul,
whether into this world by ensuring a safe birth (midwifery) or, upon death, by
238  David Gordon Wilson
escorting the person to their due place in the spirit world, the afterlife. The healing
aspect of a shaman’s work can also include the recovery of those who become lost
souls during their embodied life; many traditions entertain the teaching that a soul
can become fractured or fragmented, or that the boundary between the living and
the dead can be inadvertently crossed at risk of loss of life, the shaman’s respon-
sibility being to correct or repair the situation. There are many potential activities
that might be called healing in a shamanic context.
My early studies of shamanism took me to examples identified in Siberia, and
among indigenous North American peoples, particularly Alaska and Greenland
(Jakobsen 1999). This was partly down to availability of secondary material, as
shamanic models have been heavily utilized in English-speaking North American
scholarship in comprehending the traditions of indigenous North American, or
‘First Nation’, peoples (Jones 2006, 2008). In large part, this was due to the work
of Mircea Eliade, who was based at Chicago and whose cross-cultural model of
shamanism was very influential, both as to particular practices identified as sha-
manic, and as to the idea that there could be a cross-cultural model (Eliade 1964).
Specifically on Spiritualism, there are some intriguing hints in early Shaker prac-
tice as to the tradition of Spiritualist mediums with native North American spirit
guides (Bennet 2005), and some early to mid-twentieth century descriptions of
native North American spiritual traditions made very heavy use of Spiritualist
terminology and perspectives (Spence 1914; Seton 1939).
Further enquiry soon reveals that scholars have identified shamanic traditions
in societies across the globe (Atkinson 1992). The claim that shamanic tradi-
tions have been identified across the world has proved slightly controversial as
regards countries where scholarship has been dominated by British scholarly tra-
ditions employing models of possession, with its traditionally negative connota-
tions. Broadly speaking, scholars have often fallen into habits of thought that
characterize shamanic practitioners as active, masculine, travelling or journey-
ing, employing techniques that have been proactively learned and which require
the practitioner to practise a degree of self-control; by contrast, similar traditions
in countries where British scholarship was enabled by British colonial authority
(especially Africa, India, and parts of south-east Asia) have often been character-
ized as involving some form of possession, generally characterized as passive,
feminine, spontaneous, and uncontrolled or otherwise lacking in expertise. These
preconceptions have often been evident in preliminary attempts to understand
Anglo-American mediumship, and have in some degree shaped that tradition by
being characteristic of the society within which is functions.
Increasingly, however, modern scholarship concludes that traditions of spirit
communication have both active and passive aspects, much like any conversa-
tion; the work of Smith (2006) in examining south-east Asian traditions has been
especially useful here, showing that it is often simply a matter of scholarly habit
and semantics as to whether a tradition is labelled shamanic or possessory (Smith
2006: 60–66). The use of the word shamanism in relation to Indian or African
traditions can seem unfamiliar, as can the use of the word séance in relation to
shamanic demonstrations, but this strangeness has little to do with the traditions
 Categorizing Spiritualism as a shamanism 239
and practices being examined, and can have its uses if seeking to examine the
material with fresh eyes. Making the familiar strange and the strange familiar is
good anthropological practice.
Looking more closely at European history, it becomes possible to identify
some practices that can be labelled shamanic elsewhere, but they have largely
been forced underground as folk religion or, more traditionally, witchcraft. This
is especially true of those areas of Europe where Protestant Christianity has been
dominant in recent centuries, Protestant Christianity having been especially keen
to exclude experiential knowledge of spirits, or spirit, something Roman Catholic
and Orthodox Christian traditions have retained particular ways of accommodat-
ing (Sluhovsky 2007).
Modern European culture, particularly Protestant culture, is the part of the
world where shamanism is most completely missing; it is also the part of the
world where the mediumistic tradition of Spiritualism is most strongly and obvi-
ously present.
It can be objected that the modern Spiritualist tradition began in upstate New
York in the 1840s, with the activities of Andrew Jackson Davis and the Fox sis-
ters, among others. This is correct, but highlights the importance of identifying
location in time and culture as well as in physical space when seeking to identify
the places, or spaces, where human beings conduct religious or spiritual activi-
ties. Shamanism is identifiable in the traditions of North American First Nations
and, following the transplantation of Protestant European culture, continues to
be identifiable in that location in the form of Spiritualism, within the migrated
culture. A similar point can be made as to the presence of Spiritualism in South
Africa, Australia, and New Zealand; also parts of India and, to a lesser extent,
Nigeria.
By mapping cultural presence over time, and by identifying Spiritualism as the
form of shamanism found in traditionally Protestant Anglo-American culture, it
is immediately obvious that we plug the one significant gap in the shamanic map-
ping of our cultural world over time.

Initial conclusions and observations: the varieties

of mediumistic and other shamanic experience
A major factor obstructing consensus on a definition of shamanism is the perceived
variety of experiences attested to by practitioners, and observed by researchers.
There is also an academic history of resistance to the idea that there is a robust
cross-cultural model that can be identified or developed. Although Eliade’s model
was influential, it was quickly apparent that it had its problems, to the extent
that it, and even the possibility of a useful cross-cultural model, became deeply
unfashionable.
Eliade maintained that, historically, the Evenki were the people among whom
shamanism was to be found in its purest form. Like many other early attempts to
determine the origin of a religion (or even of religion itself), this followed early
linguistic studies of cultural migration, in this case of the word shaman itself. In
240  David Gordon Wilson
this, Eliade drew heavily upon Shirokogoroff, whose work is excellent but now
little used.
Shirokogoroff was a careful anthropologist and ethnographer, reluctant to use
the term shaman (Evenki šamān) to describe practitioners beyond the Siberian
Tungus culture he was examining; he was perfectly open to the possibility that
similar practitioners might be found in other cultures but strongly argued against
employing the term shaman to indicate them. Despite Eliade’s own position that
the Evenki were the host people to the archetypal shaman, the weight of his argu-
ment was that a cross-cultural model is indeed possible, and for a time scholars
almost universally spoke of shamanism, rather than shamanisms. As the deficien-
cies of Eliade’s model became apparent, including his Christian preconceptions
and evidential selectivity, it was only a question of time before the scholarly pen-
dulum swung again in favour of appreciating, indeed emphasizing, the cultural
context of particular shamanic traditions; my own attempt to develop a useful
cross-cultural model has had to contend with this contemporary bias.
If we treat shamanism as an academic field of enquiry, rather than something
that is out there in the field, we can usefully designate experiences and practices
as shamanic, while appropriately acknowledging their cultural settings, and there-
fore their variety. On this basis, the category of practices traditionally recognized
as shamanic include: the ability to perceive spirits, and to discriminate between
them, both as to different kinds of spirit, as to individual spirits, and as to their
motivation or purpose. These skills are generally honed through some commu-
nally recognized and validated process of training or apprenticeship involving an
existing, recognized practitioner, and will include the ability not only to perceive
spirits but to communicate with them purposefully in order to achieve some prac-
tical, useful objective.
The spirits perceived will generally include human ancestor spirits, but may
also include animal spirits, sometimes individual animals but possibly a kind
of species spirit, and other nature or elemental spirits, including those we might
term gods, namely spirits with some responsibility for creating or maintaining the
existence of the world, or with responsibility for the care or wellbeing of a clan
or people.
Methods of communication by a practitioner can involve some form of divi-
nation, overshadowing by a spirit influence (the degree of which can amount to
full possession, where the personality of the practitioner is overshadowed almost
to the point of absence), or journeying (astral) travelling, by which is meant that
the practitioner’s soul or consciousness travels out with her or his physical form
so as to journey to the spirit world(s), where some form of conversation or other
interaction takes place. As mentioned, healing is often noted as a regular element
in a shaman’s practice; many shamans employ a wide knowledge of herbs or other
substances, and are to this extent recognizable as herbalists; many only employ
their ability to communicate with the spirits if they diagnose an illness as having
a spirit origin, such as the uncontrolled and unknowing overshadowing of the
patient by a spirit, with unwelcome results.
The communal services expected of shamans inevitably vary according to cul-
ture, as do the detailed contents of the recognized training processes, the skills or
 Categorizing Spiritualism as a shamanism 241
methods employed to communicate, and, in some societies, the kinds and identi-
ties of spirits recognized. This might seem to make it self-servingly easy to draw
parallels between recognized shamanic traditions and cultures on the one hand,
and Spiritualist mediumistic practices in Anglo-American culture on the other,
but it goes too far simply to reduce these various traditions to traditions of spirit
communication: there are more particular and precise parallels that can be drawn.
The public settings in which Spiritualist demonstrations are given are generally
modelled on the churches and chapels of nonconformist Christian denominations
(Nelson 1969: 130–152); superficially, they look very different from the dem-
onstrations of a Siberian shaman. This is misleading, in that one needs to look
beyond language and clothing, the use of prayers rather than chants, hymns rather
than songs, churches rather than tents, so as to identify the particular practices
employed.
It is a popular, and often a convenient scholarly commonplace that shamans
typically travel in spirit, whereas mediums are overshadowed or possessed; even
scholars can be susceptible to the attractions of convenient typologies. This char-
acterization owes much to Eliade’s model, which emphasized journeying or trav-
elling as typical of shamanic practice, together with an emphasis upon animal or
other nature spirits. Re-examination of Shirokogoroff is instructive here: first, it
transpires that travelling is not typical of shamanic practice but is instead better
understood as its apogee, in the sense that it was regarded by the community as
the mark of an experienced and proficient shaman; more commonly, especially
in the earlier stages of a career, the shaman was much more likely to be used or
overshadowed by the spirits; secondly, interaction with human or ancestor spirits
is the norm in Shirokogoroff’s descriptions, examples of which easily form the
bulk of the spirit interactions documented by him.
As to Spiritualist practices, astral travel has long been recognized as well within
the mainstream, with descriptions of this practice leaving little doubt that sha-
manic journeying and astral travel map very closely indeed (Sculthorp 1961).
Although Spiritualist tradition is primarily focused on providing evidence of life
after death through communication with human spirits, interaction with animal
spirits is routine, if not heavily emphasized.
In ‘Redefining Shamanisms’, I undertook the exercise of detailing the corre-
spondences between traditional Evenki practices and those to be found in Spir-
itualist tradition, mapping one to the other. Although there is little space to do
so here, and little point in repeating the exercise, the core examples given help
to illustrate why I consider a distinction between shamanism and mediumship
(including possessory traditions) to be one that unhelpfully distinguishes between
traditions that are more appropriately categorized together.

Testing the thesis against the varieties of shamanic

experience: why does the comparison hold?
It was important to establish that various correspondences of practice can be
observed between the Evenki shamanic and British Spiritualist traditions, if only
because it challenges some of the categories, and therefore some of the language,
242  David Gordon Wilson
that English-speaking Anglo-American scholars have habitually used; that said,
the more interesting and revealing question is why do these correspondences
arise? Is it possible to identify the underlying mechanisms or processes whereby
variant but comparable traditions arise in apparently unrelated cultures across
time and space? It is in answering this question that my extended participation in
the development circle at Portobello Spiritualist Church proved invaluable.
Mediumship is often spoken of as being a ‘gift’ but it is a commonplace within
the Spiritualist movement that this is only true in the sense that one might speak
of a person as having a ‘gift for music’, or for playing the piano: the old saying
that ‘discipline is the means by which talent becomes ability’ applies. The ability
to work as a medium is widely understood as being the outcome of an extended
training, undertaken over years rather than months, sometimes decades rather than
years. The usual form of that training is apprenticeship to an existing medium,
either on a one-to-one basis or through participation in a conducted group, usually
referred to as a circle (from the traditional practice of sitting in a circle).
Reflecting on the process of developing as a medium at Portobello Spiritualist
Church led me to perceive it as an apprenticeship in the management and develop-
ment of my awareness so as to engage with additional realities, by which I mean
independently existent places and persons beyond those familiar to us from inter-
action with our physical surroundings, including other physically embodied per-
sons. I perceived a particular pattern and structure to this apprenticeship, which
I summarized as follows:

The apprenticeship comprises a process of learning enhanced cognitive abili-

ties, achieved by communicating and developing relationships with spirit
guides or helpers, facilitated by an existing practitioner, who usually also
undertakes responsibility for passing on a body of accumulated traditional
knowledge. The apprenticeship typically proceeds from an initial uncon-
trolled (often possessory and/or unwelcome) psychic experience or phase to
a point where the apprentice is granted communal recognition as having the
ability to manage her or his awareness so as no longer to be personally at risk
from uncontrolled spiritual forces, and is able to use her or his spiritual skills
to communicate, at will, in ways that are recognised as being beneficial to
other members of the community.
(Wilson 2013: 17)

Although this definition was developed in order to better understand the mediu-
mistic tradition at Portobello Spiritualist Church, it became apparent, from my
examination of shamanic traditions through secondary sources, that this defini-
tion also serves as an accurate and useful definition of shamanism more widely.
Attending to mediumship as the outcome of a process of apprenticeship made
me more sensitive to those aspects of other shamanic traditions that seemed puz-
zling or disparate until interpreted within the contact of similar apprenticeship
processes found in those traditions. Upon rereading Shirokogoroff’s work, it was
a striking moment when I came across his comment that the essence or core of the
tradition was probably to be found in the apprenticeship undertaken by potential
 Categorizing Spiritualism as a shamanism 243
shamans, even as he acknowledged that this was the part of the tradition most
inaccessible to researchers.
Preliminary application of this definition, or model, to other traditions has been
encouragingly productive, not least because it lends itself to a valuable focus
on the social mechanisms whereby traditions are maintained, and bodies of lore
transmitted across the generations.

Conclusion: the importance of processes and marginality

Much of what has been said is supportive of pleas for the importance of examin-
ing the processes whereby religious traditions arise, develop, and persist. Time is
often the dimension that allows us to make sense of what exists in terms of the
other three, whether comprehending the creation of sedimentary rocks or the ways
in which human religious traditions arise. When analyzing human societies, and
particular aspects thereof, it is important to develop an appropriate narrative, not
least because this is often the means by which non-scholars create meaning and
significance, the things that underpin social institutions. Narratives are often key
to how we make our way in the world, how we navigate our encounters with oth-
ers, and can offer rich examples of categorization in action.
My own research involved undergoing a process that lasted almost a decade,
from beginning my involvement with Portobello Spiritualist Church to being
awarded the PhD it led to. This is not the kind of extended and open-ended
research that readily finds funding in today’s world but it is what was required in
order to categorize Spiritualist mediumship. Previously, it languished as some sui
generis oddity, which was a clear indication that it was still to be comprehended;
attempting to do so brought unexpected benefits in helping by bring a greater
degree of order to a wider field.
This happened because I tested a definition by attempting to include within it
something to which it had not previously been applied. Just as particular meth-
odologies contain implicit assumptions as to how things should be examined, or
even as to what should be examined, so too do the definitions we employ, simply
because definitions tend to be answers to the questions we have asked. This is why
it can be important to unpick and challenge our preferred definitions; unless we do
so, we are not in charge of the questions we are asking, and risk repetition or error.
I felt it a mistake to give up on developing a new definition of shamanism; this was
not because I think there is one correct definition of shamanism but because I think
there are always new definitions that can be developed, the application of which
can offer new insights and understandings. As a lawyer, I long since abandoned the
notion that there is a correct, enduring, or essential definition of anything; we law-
yers define our terms in all sorts of interesting and novel ways, to suit the needs of
the moment, or the contract. The only worthwhile test of a definition is its utility, in
terms of its ability to enable understanding, to facilitate clarity of expression. To find
that one’s preferred definition does not quite work is to have learned; to respond by
developing and testing a new definition is to continue to enquire. To maintain that
developing new definitions is futile is to admit to having run out of ideas, even if the
form of one’s admission is to maintain that there is nothing more to be learned.
244  David Gordon Wilson
Using definitions is to engage in a form of mapping. Definitions bound, exclude
as well as include, meaning they require us to attend to what is excluded or mar-
ginalized; on occasion this can turn out to be central to an improved understand-
ing. Testing the categorization of Spiritualism as a shamanism not only offered
new insights into Spiritualism and mediumship, and as to why they arose and per-
sist in modern western society, but also brought unanticipated new insights that
have enabled a new definition of shamanism, which has since gone on to prove
helpful to scholars whose expertise is in shamanic traditions I have little knowl-
edge of; in other words, the definition I developed has proved to have a degree of
utility. I very much hope that others will develop and apply additional definitions,
thereby furthering our collective academic learning.

References
Atkinson, J. (1992), ‘Shamanisms today’, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 21,
pp. 307–330.
Bennet, B. (2005), ‘Sacred theatres: Shakers, Spiritualist, theatricality, and the Indian in the
1830s and 1840s’, The Drama Review, Vol. 49(3), pp. 113–134.
Birks, P. (1997), The Classification of Obligations. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Eliade, M. (1989 [1951, 1964]), Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. London:
Arkana.
Jakobsen, M. (1999), Shamanism: Traditional and Contemporary Approaches to the Mas-
tery of Spirits and Healing. New York: Berghahn.
Jones, P. N. (2006), ‘Shamanism: an inquiry into the history of the scholarly use of the
term in English-speaking North America’, Anthropology of Consciousness, Vol. 17(2),
pp. 4–32.
Jones, P. N. (2008), Shamans and Shamanism: A Comprehensive Bibliography of the Terms
Use in North America. Boulder, CO: Bäuu Press.
Jordan, P. (2001), ‘The materiality of shamanism as a world view: praxis, artefacts and land-
scape’, in N. Price (ed.), The Archeology of Shamanism. London: Routledge, pp. 87–104.
Nelson, G. K. (1969), Spiritualism and Society. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Ordan, P. (2001), ‘The materiality of shamanism as a world-view: praxis, artefacts and
landscape’, in N. Price (ed.), The Archeology of Shamanism. London: Routledge,
pp. 87–104.
Sculthorp, F. (1999 [1961]), Excursions to the Spirit World. London: Greater World
Association.
Seton, E.T. (1970 [1939]), The Gospel of the Redman: An Indian Bible. London: Psychic
Press.
Shirokogoroff, S. M. (1966 [1929]), The Social Organization of the Northern Tungus.
Ooosterhout: Anthropological Publications.
Shirokogoroff, S. M. (1999 [1935]), The Psychomental Complex of the Tungus. Berlin:
Reinhold Schletzer, Verlag.
Sluhovsky, M. (2007), Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment
in Early Modern Catholicism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Smith, F. M. (2006), The Self Possessed: Deity and Spirit Possession in South Asian Litera-
ture and Civilization. New York: Columbia University Press.
Spence, L. (1914), Myths and Legends of the North-American Indians. London: George G.
Harrap & Co.
Wilson, D. G. (2013), Redefining Shamanisms: Spiritualist Mediums and Other Traditional
Shamans as Apprenticeship Outcomes. London: Bloomsbury.
16 Jung’s legacy
The Western Goddess Movement1
Rev. Patricia ‘Iolana

Introduction
Jungian and post-Jungian theory have contributed significantly to the development
of the Western Goddess Movement and the focus on spiritual and psychological
well-being that currently permeates Western Culture. My research revealed not
only the historical development of several important threads of accepted wisdom
pertinent to the birth and development of the Western Goddess Movement in the
United States and beyond but also concretised the expansion of the inherently
religious attitude of Jungian and post-Jungian thought. This essay demonstrates
the influence of the substantial contributions of seven individuals, who, along
with the second wave of feminism in the United States, significantly enhanced the
development of the Western Goddess Movement and focused on the spirituality at
the heart of Jungian analytical psychology. Chronologically, these revolutionaries
include: (1) Carl Jung’s analytical psychology (1912–1961); (2) Dr Mary Esther
Harding’s feminist revision of Jung’s theories and the birth of women’s analytical
psychology in America (1935); (3) Jung’s heir apparent and grand theorist, Erich
Neumann’s The Great Mother (1955); (4) Naomi R Goldenberg’s 1976 call for a
feminist revision of Jung; (5) Christine Downing’s ground-breaking memoir, The
Goddess (1981); (6) post-Jungian E C Whitmont’s Return of the Goddess (1982);
leading to (7) Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Crossing to Avalon (1994) which creates a
bridge from Jung’s analytical psychological theory to religious or spiritual praxis
by including rituals for her readers to follow whilst revealing the extent to which
Jung and post-Jungian spirituality have been integrated into diverse emergent
paths to Goddess.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1971)

Carl Jung, a prominent Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and founder of ana-
lytical psychology, posited a vast array of theories and models over his career –
the extent of which can be found in his massive Collected Works. Though not
all of Jung’s theories and models appear to be relevant or useful to the Western
Goddess Movement, and only Jung’s primary theories on the Collective Uncon-
scious, Archetypes, the Shadow, Union, and his Path of Individuation are cited by
246  Rev. Patricia ‘Iolana
the authors in my study.2 However the two Jungian models that seem to permeate
the Western Goddess Movement, and certainly the five memoirs that serve as my
primary source material, are Jung’s Individuation and the post-Jungian transfor-
mation of Jung’s Anima and Anima Mundi archetypes.

Individuation
Individuation, as a psychological imperative, is the crux of Jung’s analytical
psychology; he writes: ‘I use the term “individuation” to denote the process by
which a person becomes a psychological “in-dividual,” that is, a separate, indivis-
ible unity or “whole” ’ (Jung, 1968: 275). According to Jung, this psychological
wholeness is actuated through a conflict between the conscious and unconscious
minds; Jung writes:

Conscious and unconscious do not make a whole when one of them is sup-
pressed and injured by the other. If they must contend, let it at least be a fair
fight with equal rights on both sides. Both are aspects of life. Consciousness
should defend its reason and protect itself, and the chaotic life of the uncon-
scious should be given the chance of having its way too – as much of it as
we can stand. This means open conflict and open collaboration at once. That,
evidently, is the way human life should be. It is the old game of hammer and
anvil: between them the patient iron is forged into an indestructible whole, an
‘individual.’ [. . .] This, roughly, is what I mean by the individuation process.
As the name shows, it is a process or course of development arising out of the
conflict between the two fundamental psychic facts.
(Jung, 1968: 288)

Therefore Individuation is a process, based on opposing binaries, of attaining a

harmonious balance or union between two psychic components (beginning with
the union of conscious and unconscious and followed by a host of oppositional
unions) into one cohesive and psychically-stable whole Self. This totality of Self,
or psychological wholeness through union, was the aim of Jung’s psychother-
apy. Individuation is an extremely difficult long-term psychological process that
requires special (Jungian and/or post-Jungian) knowledge or trained assistance to
navigate successfully (avoiding such potential complications as substantial psy-
chological breakdown or neuroses) (see Jung, 1968: 350).
In addition to having some special knowledge of Jungian and post-Jungian the-
ory, it is also essential, according to Jung, to possess a ‘religious attitude’ (Jung,
2001: 68). For Jung, it is more important to have religious faith rather than a belief
in religious dogma. So in order to effectively navigate Jung’s psycho-religious
Individuation, one needs to be equipped with both a basic understanding of Jung’s
theories as well as possess a religious attitude – which includes some belief in
a Divine Source or Creator. Jung believes that a religious attitude and frame of
mind are integral to Individuation: ‘With us, religious thought still keeps alive the
archaic state of mind, even though our time is bereft of gods’ (Jung, 2001: 149).
 Jung’s legacy 247
It is also important to note that Individuation is understood as an inherent
unconscious psychological drive for wholeness fuelled by the autonomy of the
archetypes that will press themselves into consciousness despite any attempts
at repression (McGuire and Hull, 1977: 294). The central element for Jung is
that Individuation ‘[. . .] aims at a living co-operation [. . .]’ (Jung, 1976: 123).
The living co-operation is exemplified through the concepts of ‘being in relation
to’, union, and the web of interconnectivity demonstrated in the source material.
As the centrepiece to Jung’s analytical psychology, he asserts that Individuation
stands above all other of humanity’s achievements in value and importance; he
writes:

The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant.

In the last analysis the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone
makes history; here alone do the great transformations first take place, and
the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a giant
summation from these hidden sources in individuals. In our most private and
most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its
sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch.
(Jung, CW 10: para 315)

Therefore, according to Jung, Individuation is as important to the individual as

it is to the Western world. As Jung understood Individuation, one of the positive
psychological outcomes would be to discover one’s reason for being (her or his
affirmation of destiny). This acknowledgement of one’s true path is an important
element in Jung’s process of Individuation and a required step before one can
proceed further. However, the term Individuation is also used by Jung to describe
the transformed Self after successful union and integration of opposing psychic
forces. In Jung’s analytical model one can only attain true ‘Selfhood’ through
Individuation because, for Jung, the Self is also an archetype (Jung, 1976: 142).
Confusion ensues because for Jung the term Individuation is used not only to
indicate the process but also the psychological destination of wholeness. Having
Individuation as the title for both the process and the end-goal can be confusing to
readers unfamiliar with Jung’s theories.
To avoid confusion, I have opted to incorporate a term used by Jung (1995:
328) and widely used by post-Jungians, Path of Individuation, to differentiate the
process from the fully Individuated Self, but also to acknowledge the Eastern-
influenced religious aspects of Jung’s theories and models. Especially with Jung’s
model of Individuation, the influences of Eastern traditions such as Taoism, Hin-
duism, and Buddhism are evident. Jung perceived Individuation as the ultimate
psychological state that each human being should strive for in order to be psycho-
logically healthy and internally unified as an individual – and this elevated state
of Self is impossible without some form of personal relationship with the Divine;
according to Jung one who walks Jung’s Path seeks self-enlightenment. Nonethe-
less Jung’s focus on one’s psychological health does not detract from the striking
similarities between Jung’s Individuation and the Buddhist Eightfold Path.
248  Rev. Patricia ‘Iolana
Damien Keown writes: ‘The Eightfold Path is thus a path of self-transformation:
an intellectual, emotional, and moral restructuring in which a person is reoriented
from selfish, limited objectives towards a horizon of possibilities and opportuni-
ties for fulfilment’ (2000: 56). This description of the Buddhist Path resembles
Jung’s Path of self-transformation on many levels including that both focus on
replacing the ego as the centre of the Self and subordinating it to the fully realised
Self. Based on the similarities of the Buddhist ‘Path’ in Jung’s theory of Individu-
ation, the fact that all five authors in my study offer their rebirth memoirs as Paths
for others to follow, combined with the assertion that Jung’s analytical psychol-
ogy is arguably a religion (Dourley, 2006; Noll, 1994; Wehr, 1987), the use of
the term Path of Individuation appears highly applicable to describe what post-
Jungian theologian John Dourley deems a ‘religious event’ (2006: 43).
It is interesting to note that out of all of Jung’s theories that continue to per-
meate both contemporary post-Jungian analytical psychology and the Western
Goddess Movement, Jung’s Path of Individuation, other than being more appro-
priately named as a Path and being reshaped for women, has endured relatively
unchanged as a construct of healing and well-being. Post-Jungians have expanded
the writing on the various components and shifts of consciousness that perme-
ate Individuation as a psychological event, but Jung’s original model remains,
essentially, intact. This is, perhaps, due to the fact that this particular model of
Jung’s is not a gendered construct as are his other theories and models; however,
Jung’s construct of Individuation is limited by the gender essentialist nature of its
author. The necessary feminist rephrasing would be completed by Jung’s student,
M Esther Harding (1888–1971), who created a Jungian Path of Individuation for
women, and that model is accessible in the source material through the lens of
five different analytic and religious foundations demonstrating the fluid nature
of Jung’s model of Individuation and its continuing importance and relevance as
an accessible Path to Selfhood and Goddess in the Western Goddess Movement.

Jung’s Anima
At the heart of Jung’s Path of Individuation and the centre of his Collective
Unconscious is Jung’s Goddess, Anima. In its initial inception the Anima, as a
Jungian archetype, is essentialist and gender-locked as the contrasexual feminine
principle of man which Jung defines an ‘an archetype that is found in men [. . .]’
(Jung, 1976: 151). Jung further defines the Anima as ‘[. . .] a natural archetype
that satisfactorily sums up all the statements of the unconscious, of the primitive
mind, of the history of language and religion’ (Jung, 1968: 27). However, Jung
firmly believed that only men possessed an Anima archetype (a gender essentialist
concept that will be revised by several women who follow Jung). Jung wrote at
great length about the archetypes of the Collective Unconscious but gave ‘special
reference to the Anima concept’ (Jung, 1968: 54). Jung wrote:

With the archetype of the anima we enter the realm of the gods, or rather, the
realm that metaphysics has reserved for itself. Everything the anima touches
 Jung’s legacy 249
becomes numinous – unconditional, dangerous, taboo, magical. She is the
serpent in the paradise of the harmless man with good resolutions and still
better intentions.
(1968: 28)

While Jung aligns the Anima with the ‘realm of the gods’, he also images her as
the snake in the Garden of Eden who tempted Eve to challenge God with a subtle
critique of Christianity evident in much of Jung’s writing. What is important to
take away, however, is that Jung envisions the Anima as the purveyor of self-
knowledge. Jung writes: ‘[. . .] for the anima can appear also as an angel of light,
a psychopomp who points the way to the highest meaning [. . .]’ (1968: 29). Jung
further characterises the Anima in an Alpha/Omega pairing with his model of
the Shadow that signifies not only both of these archetypes’ importance to one’s
growth as in individual (Individuation) but also their importance as the beginning
and end of one’s Path:

If the encounter with the shadow is the ‘apprentice-piece’ of the individual’s

development [Individuation], then that with the anima is the ‘master-piece.’
The relation with the anima is again a test of courage, an ordeal by fire for the
spiritual and moral forces of man.
(Jung, 1968: 29)

In essence, what Jung is saying is that in his model of analytical psychology the
growth of an individual begins with an encounter with the Shadow and ends with
a ‘relation with the anima’ (often described by post-Jungian feminists such as
Downing, Bolen, and Perera as attaining Union with Goddess). This effectively
outlines Jung’s Path of Individuation, and as Jung himself states, the Anima is
‘numinous,’ ‘dangerous,’ ‘unconditional,’ and ‘magical’ (Jung, 1968: 28). It is
therefore not surprising that Jung has deified the Anima and refers to her as ‘[. . .]
the latent primordial image of the goddess, i.e., the archetypal soul-image’ (Jung,
1982: 10). Thus, Jung began with an archetype that was the essence of femininity
within men, imbued her with divinity and referred to her as ‘goddess.’ This is not
uncommon in Jung’s models, as he believed ‘[. . .] the idea of a deity is not an
intellectual idea, it is an archetypal idea’ (McGuire and Hull, 1977: 346). How-
ever, in his writings, it is the Anima archetype as Goddess that takes centre stage
of Jung’s theories and models.
Jung makes special note of the ‘timelessness’ of the Collective Unconscious; he
writes: ‘The anima and the animus live in a world quite different from the world
outside  – where the pulse of time beats infinitely slowly, where the birth and
deaths of individuals count for little’ (Jung, 1968: 287). What Jung means, in an
extension of Platonic thought (Jung, 1968: 4), is that the Collective Unconscious
and the archetypes who inhabit it are all not bound by the constructs of linear time.
If the Collective Unconscious can move outside of time, then it is not constrained
to our linear concepts of the past, present, and future. By extension, if the arche-
types inhabit the timeless Collective Unconscious, then they, too, are timeless. In
250  Rev. Patricia ‘Iolana
essence, this timelessness construct makes the archetypes, and most importantly,
the Anima eternal.
As timeless, eternal, and autonomous, the Anima has the power to emerge from
the Collective Unconscious into an individual’s conscious mind in any form or
dress; Jung writes: ‘The anima is conservative and clings in the most exasperat-
ing fashion to the ways of earlier humanity. She likes to appear in historic dress,
with a predilection for Greece and Egypt’ (Jung, 1968: 28). Christine Downing
and Jean Shinoda Bolen, both trained Jungians and the first two authors examined
in my study, present the Anima as Goddesses from the Ancient Greek pantheon.
Their use of the Greek Goddesses offers a validity to Jung’s theories about the
Anima’s (Goddesses’) predilection to cling to earlier visions and forms of human-
ity. Jung however, does state that the Anima’s form can vary by culture or individ-
ual and tends to change over historical periods as well; Jung writes: ‘To the men
of antiquity the anima appears as a goddess or a witch, while for medieval man the
goddess was replaced by the Queen of Heaven and Mother Church’ (Jung, 1968:
29). So, as an autonomous and eternal archetype, Jung has imbued the Anima
with tremendous psychological and spiritual power. It would be Jung who would
transform the Anima from lead archetype into the Divine Creatrix Anima Mundi.

Anima Mundi
Anima’s final transformation would be the most important to the Western God-
dess Movement. In ‘The Difference Between Eastern and Western Thinking’ Jung
calls the Anima the ‘[. . .] spark of the Anima Mundi, the World Soul’ (Jung,
1976: 481). Not a Jungian designed concept, the Anima Mundi is a vital force or
principle which is conceived of as permeating the world. With the Anima already
established as a numinous Goddess by Jung (1968: 28), the Anima (Goddess) is
now aligned with the Anima Mundi. Both Jung’s Anima and Anima Mundi would
be further revised and amplified3 by several influential and popular post-Jungians
and become pivotal archetypes in the Western Goddess Movement.
While Jung’s writings on the Anima were inspirational to his students and
patients, they were problematic for many women who followed. There is no deny-
ing that Jung’s original theories and models were sexist, gender-essentialist, and
limiting. His writings are from the ‘male’ perspective and include only masculine
pronouns which may be problematic to those who don’t identify as male. He pos-
its that women’s psyches are less developed than men’s (1968) and makes a num-
ber of detrimental statements about the analytical ability of women – especially
prevalent in ‘Aspects of the Feminine’ (published posthumously as a collection
of articles and extracts in 1982). However, this essentialist and gender-restricting
bias eventually brought about feminist revision of Jung’s theories beginning with
his student Dr M Esther Harding in 1935. Post-Jungian revision could be consid-
ered a tremendous positive outcome of his original gender-essentialist theories,
especially seeing that these feminist modifications and following amplifications
would be critical to adherents in the Western Goddess Movement. Feminist revi-
sions of Jungian thought, particularly the role of the Anima and Anima Mundi
 Jung’s legacy 251
in Individuation, were necessary to contribute further to the development of the
Western Goddess Movement.

Revising Jung: constructing Goddess4

In the post-Jungian years, there would be a number of individuals who would
revise or amplify Jung’s theories with a feminist twist. Susan Rowland’s Jung:
A Feminist Revision (2002) is integral to my understanding of the varieties of
post-Jungian revisions. Not all post-Jungian revision would be useful and inte-
grated by the Western Goddess Movement. The first major revision of Jung’s
Anima would occur in 1935 when Esther Harding published Woman’s Myster-
ies: Ancient and Modern in the United States which would greatly expand Jung’s
geographical sphere of influence. Post-Jungian Susan Rowland cites Harding as a
‘key author’ in the Amplification of Jung’s Eros and ‘Feminine Principle’ (Anima)
(Rowland, 2002: 56). Harding both embraced and revised Jung. Rowland writes:
‘Amplifying Eros as “the feminine principle” enables her to cover a far greater
and more powerful range of qualities than those envisaged by her mentor’ (Row-
land, 2002: 56).

M Esther Harding (1888–1971)

In Woman’s Mysteries: Ancient and Modern, which created the first women’s post-
Jungian analytical psychology written specifically for women by a woman, Hard-
ing continued Jung’s essentialist dualities with the Anima/Animus, but revised
Jung by writing specifically to women and extolling the power of the female psy-
che; Harding writes: ‘The neglect of the inner or subject aspect of life has led,
particularly for women, to a certain falsification of her living values’ (Harding,
1971: 9). She presents an openly feminist model for the women who have recently
been granted the right to vote and the introduction to Congress of the Equal Rights
Amendment in 1923. Harding writes: ‘Our civilisation has been patriarchal for
so long, the masculine element predominating, that our conception of what femi-
nine is, in itself, is likely to be prejudiced’ (Harding, 1971: 30). Harding calls
for women to find a way to connect with Jung’s Anima as Goddess and offers a
rich and varied cultural and anthropological history of numerous societies who
worshipped Goddess in the embodiment of the Moon. Harding not only revises
Jung’s essentialist theory by expanding the need to women, but she is also the first
to amplify Anima to cultural and historical Goddesses, providing her readers with
a host of concrete manifestations of Jung’s intangible Anima.

Harding’s work would serve as a source of inspiration for those who followed
and demonstrates the potential in Jungian amplification. Despite Harding’s radical
transformation of Jung’s theories and being a student of Jung, Erich Neumann,
who studied with both Freud and Jung, found himself ‘Jung’s anointed intellectual
heir’ (Paglia, 2006: 3). Neumann’s The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Arche-
type (1955) transformed Harding’s female psychology and mixed it with a form
252  Rev. Patricia ‘Iolana
of Goddess-centred spirituality. Neumann amplified (projected) Jung’s Anima
Mundi archetype to that of Creatrix in The Great Mother, offering the reader a
vast array of images of Jung’s Anima Mundi as Magna Mater. Christine Downing
and E C Whitmont, both theorists in the emerging Western Goddess Movement,
follow suit and continue the amplification of Jung’s Anima and his Anima Mundi
(Great Mother) (Downing, 1981; Whitmont, 1982). All five of the authors in my
study amplify Jung’s Anima (Goddess) and his Anima Mundi (Great Mother) in
their memoirs, thus continuing the post-Jungian amplification of Goddess and the
Great Mother and expanding Her role through an analytical religious attitude indi-
cating both their prominence and relevance to adherents in the Western Goddess
Movement. However, revisions of Jung were not limited to the world of analyti-
cal psychology or mythology; theologians would also engage with post-Jungian
theory on the Anima as Goddess.

Naomi R Goldenberg (1947–)

In 1976 Naomi R Goldenberg published an essay entitled ‘A Feminist Critique
of Jung.’ In this essay, Goldenberg is openly critical of Jung’s sexist language
and models and calls for feminist scholars to ‘confront the sexism of Jung’s theo-
ries’ which have been ignored by his followers (Goldenberg, 1976: 444). She
writes: ‘Beyond the overt sexism in Jung’s concept of the feminine, a feminist
critique must examine the inequity of the anima-animus model of the psyche,
which is never challenged by any of his immediate circle of followers’ (Golden-
berg, 1976: 445–46). Maggy Anthony, who studied and authored Jung’s Circle of
Women (1999), agrees with Goldenberg’s assessment but also comments that ‘It
was no accident that he chose a woman to accompany him into the depths of his
own unconscious [. . .] for him women and the unconscious were synonymous’
(Anthony, 1999: 103). A theory, however, can be inferred from Anthony’s state-
ment: the initial circle of women surrounding and collaborating with Jung (such
as Toni Wolff, Marie-Louise von Franz, M Esther Harding, and Jolanda Jacobi)
were part of his Individuation process, representing Jung’s Anima archetype, and
therefore unable to see the models and theories objectively. As ones so intricately
connected both to Jung’s own Individuation and to the development of the central
models and theories he puts forth in his analytical psychology, perhaps Jung’s
circle of women were unable to see beyond their own contributions to the process
itself as theory. It would be Harding who would revise Jung the most, but she
never directly confronts his gender essentialism or sexism. Only the following
generation was able to engage with Jung’s theories critically: perhaps the reason
for a lack of criticism from the first generation of Jungian women lies in their
participation in Jung’s development process whereas the second generation held
an objective critical distance from Jung’s theories and models.
Goldenberg wasn’t only calling for a critical examination of Jung’s sexist lan-
guage and models, she also recommends fundamental changes be made to Jung’s
original gender-biased constructs; she states: ‘I would argue that it makes far more
sense to postulate a similar psychic force for both sexes’ (Goldenberg, 1976: 447,
 Jung’s legacy 253
emphasis is mine). Goldenberg suggests that the Anima-Animus archetypes be
removed from biological gender and the fundamental restrictions these forms of
gender essentialism contain. Goldenberg’s call for a deconstruction of gender
from Jung’s theories and models would lead to important changes in post-Jungian
theory that would be instrumental to the feminist adherents in the Western God-
dess Movement. Rowland cites Goldenberg alongside Demaris S Wehr as ‘key
authors’ in Feminist Theories examining Jung from other disciplines (Rowland,
2002: 84). She states that Goldenberg, while influenced by Hillman, differs from
him in that she insists on the archetypal image ‘as a vehicle of cultural expression’
(Rowland, 2002: 84, emphasis in the original).
Goldenberg is critical at a time where change is prevalent on political, cultural,
and academic fronts. During this historic period the Equal Rights Amendment is
passed by the US Congress in 1972 (although never fully ratified by the US gov-
ernment), quickly followed by Title IX of the Education Amendments which bans
sexual discrimination in the schools; Roe v. Wade in 1973 establishes a woman’s
right to safe and legal abortion; and a host of publications by feminist thinkers
exemplify the drastic political and social upheaval occurring parallel to a new shift
in feminist religious thought, the inclusion of women to the American Academy of
Religion, and a new emerging concept of the post-Jungian Goddess. The Western
Goddess Movement evolves at the peak of the second wave of feminism in the
United States and the writings and revisions seem to follow Goldenberg in droves.
The preponderance of significant literature being published at this time demon-
strates how the writings of the second wave of feminism aided in the expansion
and amplification of Jung’s Anima (Goddess) and Anima Mundi (Great Goddess or
Magna Mater) and how those models are carried forward into contemporary times.
Further feminist transformation of Jung’s Anima would be explored by a num-
ber of scholars in the 1980s. Now openly critical of Jung’s gender essentialism,
some of these feminist revisions would build on Jung’s perception of the Anima
Mundi as the world’s salvation from the failure of patriarchy and logos-centred
thinking in a movement Rowland calls ‘Goddess Feminism’ which is a direct
descendent of Jung. In Modern Man in Search of a Soul Jung writes: ‘It is from
the depths of our own psychic life that new spiritual forms will arise; they will
be expressions of psychic forces which may help to subdue the boundless lust for
prey of Aryan man’ (Jung, 2001: 221).
Goddess Feminism, as a reformation of Jung, could not have come about with-
out making all the critiques and changes recommended by Goldenberg the decade
before:

Feminist scholars must examine the very idea of archetype in Jungian thought
if sexism is ever to be confronted at its base. Indeed, if feminists do not
change the assumptions of archetype or redefine the concept, there are only
two options: either (1) to accept the patriarchal ideas of the feminine as ulti-
mate and unchanging and work within those or (2) to indulge in a rival search
to find female archetypes, ones which can support feminist conclusions.
(Goldenberg, 1976: 447–448)
254  Rev. Patricia ‘Iolana
Post-Jungian feminist revisions of Jung not only kept Jung and his theories topi-
cal during the second wave of feminism in America, but also provided a way for
women to explore their own Selfhood, discover a form of spirituality that was
Goddess-centred, and take control of their psychological health and well-being
without the social and cultural limitations and gender restrictions of both Jung
and the patriarchal West.

Christine Downing (1931–)

Many significant writers contributed to this transformation of Jungian Anima
to post-Jungian Goddess, including Christine Downing’s rebirth memoir The
Goddess published at the same time as Sylvia Brinton Perera’s Descent to the
Goddess (1981). As a foremother to feminist theology, thealogy, and the West-
ern Goddess Movement, Christine Downing’s memoir and her engagement with
both Jung and Harding are crucial; Downing constructed her memoir based on
Jung’s Path of Individuation by examining several Jungian concepts, includ-
ing the Archetype, Shadow, Jung’s affirmation of destiny, and the post-Jungian
and feminist union of Anima/Animus or Eros/Logos. Downing is the first to
provide a path of initiation into Women’s Mysteries and follows Harding in her
validation of women’s search for meaning; she also provides the first bridge
from analytical psychology to a post-Jungian religion by outlining a primer in
thealogical polydoxy. Downing is the first to publish, and her memoir would be
significantly influential to those who follow. Rowland cites both Downing and
Perera as ‘key authors’ in post-Jungian Goddess Feminism alongside E C Whit-
mont (Return of the Goddess in 1982) and Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Goddesses in
Everywoman in 1984 (Rowland, 2002).
Whitmont’s revisions of Jung had a tremendous influence on those who fol-
low (especially Bolen), as he not only amplifies Jung’s Anima Mundi arche-
type as the Magna Mater (Great Mother) Creatrix in a spiritual rather than
analytical sphere, but also introduces Pagan pantheons and mythology inter-
linked with the Christian Grail myth. Whitmont would provide the beginning
of the contemporary Western Goddess mythology; Bolen would later build on
Whitmont’s Grail myth and make it the centre of her argument of the return
of Goddess to Western culture. Moreover, Whitmont makes a vital contribu-
tion to the revision of the highly-problematic gender essentialism of Jung’s
original theories by removing Jung’s constructs of Eros and Logos from their
gender-essentialist roles and offering Jung’s ‘ways of knowing’ as an acces-
sible path to Goddess for all genders. Through the projection (‘amplification’)
of the Anima and the Anima Mundi onto existing cultural and mythological
figures such as the Ancient Greek pantheon of gods and goddesses, Down-
ing, Whitmont, and Bolen forever transformed Jung’s Goddess from a purely
analytical archetype to a spiritually-significant Goddess quest which helped
spur the dramatic growth of the Western Goddess Movement in the past few
decades.
 Jung’s legacy 255
Jean Shinoda Bolen (1936–)
Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen follows Whitmont’s revisions to Jung’s gen-
der essentialist theories and rises to Goldenberg’s 1976 critique in 1984 with her
publication Goddesses in Everywoman. Bolen removes the anima/animus from
bodily gender and gender essentialism. She presents anima/animus as elements
of Goddesses for women, removing gender binaries as well as the inherent oppo-
sition in Jung’s original anima/animus construct. In the foreword to Goddesses
in Everywoman Gloria Steinem, a renowned and vocal feminist, writes: ‘The
author’s sensitive analysis of archetypes takes them out of their patriarchal frame-
work of simple exploits and gives them back to us as larger-than-life but believ-
able, real women’ (Bolen, 1984: xii). Bolen follows this work in 1994 with her
memoir, Crossing to Avalon, in which Bolen combines thealogical experiences
and enquiry alongside analytical psychological theories and models.
In her memoir, Bolen’s Individuation pilgrimage is offered as a pilgrimage of
‘rebirth,’ and unlike Downing’s memoir, Bolen’s journey begins with her enrapt in
a State of Grace. Bolen uses Jungian and post-Jungian threads to weave her memoir,
and she relates additional, and in some ways, more complex, steps along the Path
of Individuation. Bolen focuses on child-like wonder and being vulnerable; docu-
ments her psychological ‘rebirth’ as ‘pilgrim’ from the womb of Chartres; experi-
ences various forms of Jungian Union, including an embodied Union of deities, of
beliefs, and of imagery. Bolen’s memoir complements Downing’s and builds upon
it in several important ways. The underlying theories behind Bolen’s memoir are
vast, varied, and complex. A long history of depth contemplation is shown to be a
contributing factor in Bolen’s beliefs and assertions in Crossing to Avalon. Jungian
Feminism, Goddess Feminism, Joseph Campbell’s post-Jungian Monomyth, and
creation of a Monotheaism combined with Bolen’s bridge from analytical theory
to religious or spiritual praxis were all necessary modifications of Jung’s original
theories and models to create an almost perfect Goddess storm in the West.

Jung’s legacy: the birth of a post-Jungian Goddess religion

Did Jung intentionally create a new religious movement? Richard Noll has been
quite critical of Jung, calling him a prophet of his own religion. In The Jung Cult,
Noll writes: ‘Now the prophet of a new age, Jung promised a direct experience of
God’ (Noll, 1994: 240). Noll continues:

Jung offers the promise of truly becoming an individual after becoming a

god, or rather, after learning to directly experience the god within. This is a
process of self-sacrifice and struggle during which one must give up one’s
former image of god [. . .].
(Noll, 1994: 257)

Jung stands accused of creating a personal religion in analytical psychology. Noll’s

assessment is not altogether wrong. In his memoir, as in interviews, Jung does not
256  Rev. Patricia ‘Iolana
deny his personal tumultuous relationship with organised religion. Jung explains
in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1995) how his upbringing in a Christ-centred
home (his father was a pastor in the local church) served to first alienate Jung from
organised religion. However, Jung’s denial of the Church and organised religions
in general does not imply that Jung does not believe in a Divine Creator/Creatrix,
appreciate the importance of faith and belief, nor value the human soul. On the
contrary, Jung speaks at length about the need for a personal relationship with the
Numinous, and most especially the immanent Goddess. The boundaries between
theology and psychology in contemporary times, however, are inherently blurred.
Dourley explains:

Jung’s theoretical understanding of religion makes of the analytic process a reli-

gious event. It recalls the Gods to their psychic origin and encourages unmedi-
ated conversation with them within the containment of the psyche [. . .] to be
valued for a number of reasons. The internalization of divinity curtails enmity
between religious communities bonded by external Gods. More than this, Jung’s
total myth contends that divinity can become conscious only in humanity.
(Dourley, 2006: 43)

Dourley makes a very important theological point that is worth further considera-
tion. Stating that Jung’s divinity is ‘conscious only in humanity’ is, by extension,
to say that God can only be experienced within the confines of the human psyche
which is psychologically verifiable by the individual rather than the Abrahamic
doctrine of a creator God which is theologically substantiated yet requires a leap
of faith. It is this proposition that puts Jungian theory at odds with the Church, but
not necessarily with all theologians. However, seeing as any image of the Numi-
nous is merely a projection of the human attempt to describe the ineffable (McF-
ague, 1982), analytical psychology offers a safe location for one to contemplate
the various images of the Numinous outside the confines of traditional theology. If
the only means humanity possesses to connect with and relate to the Numinous is
imaging; then the human psyche is responsible for creating and maintaining con-
scious paradigmatic constructs of the Numinous. According to Jung, archetypes
of the Numinous emanate from the Collective Unconscious, which, in and of
itself, contains the Numinous (Anima Mundi) at its centre. The Numinous creates
and brings to consciousness representational archetypes of its own choosing. In
other words, the Jungian Divine decides how it wants to be imaged in humanity.
Demaris Wehr agrees with Dourley and Noll; Wehr states: ‘Jung’s psychology
[. . .] actually is a religion’ (Wehr, 1987: 79). Wehr also writes:

Besides being a religion, Jung’s psychology is in some ways a theology and

ontology. Since this is so, it can be addressed appropriately by feminist theo-
logians, who, like Jung, explore the realm of images and symbols. Also like
Jung, they cross the boundaries between the disciplines of religion and psy-
chology [. . .].
(1987: xi)
 Jung’s legacy 257
It is precisely this blurred boundary between theology and psychology that makes
Jung’s theories and models so accessible to theologians and especially fruitful terri-
tory for thealogical analyses. It is also in this rich, spiritually-charged environment
that the Western Goddess Movement has been allowed to evolve and grow. While
Jung denied that he was creating a religion that is Goddess-centred, post-Jungians
are more eager to describe Jung’s Path of Individuation as a ‘spiritual quest’ for
wholeness that culminates with the individual’s union with the Divine Anima Mundi.

In summation
From the publication of Jung’s theories and models shortly after the turn of the
twentieth century to contemporary forms of Goddess Feminism, Goddess Con-
sciousness, and Goddess-centred faith traditions which are integral components
of the Western Goddess Movement, Jung’s legacy is both visible and viable.
Taken from their original purely analytic and internal state, Jung’s theories have
been revised and transformed by those who follow to offer both women and men a
Path to Goddess which includes rituals and praxis and strives for psycho-religious
union and wholeness. In short, Jung’s theories and models have been taken from
the psychodynamic space to the liminal space of thealogy and religious praxis.
In this realm, as in the original theories of Jung, one’s psychological health and
well-being is directly connected to one’s faith. What many authors, such as those
in my recent study, offer their readers is a psycho-religious or psycho-spiritual
path to union with Goddess that is transformative, interconnecting, and multi-
dimensional and transcends time and space; moreover they demonstrate the great-
est legacy of Jung: Goddess as Great Mother/Creatrix who offers her adherents
the tools and ability to heal one’s Self, and, by extension, the world.

Notes
1 This paper is revised from a section of my unpublished 2016 doctoral thesis: ‘Jung and
Goddess: The Significance of Jungian and post-Jungian Theory to the Development of
the Western Goddess Movement.’
2 My initial analysis was drawn from a close reading of five ‘spiritual rebirth’ memoirs:
Christine Downing’s The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine (1981); Jean
Shinoda Bolen’s Crossing to Avalon: A Woman’s Midlife Pilgrimage (1994); Sue Monk
Kidd’s The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradi-
tion to the Sacred Feminine (1996); Margaret Starbird’s The Goddess in the Gospels:
Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine (1998); and Phyllis Curott’s Book of Shadows: A Mod-
ern Woman’s Journey into the Wisdom of Witchcraft and the Magic of the Goddess
(1998).
3 A term from Susan Rowland which means the projection of the Anima and Anima Mundi
archetypes onto existing religious or spiritual pantheons; see Rowland 2002.
4 While a number of post-Jungians contributed to the revisions of and continuation of Jung’s
theories and models into present day, and relying on classifications established by Susan
Rowland’s 2002 Jung and Feminism, this paper will cite specific individuals who I rec-
ognise as key contributors to the transformation of Jung’s Anima to Goddess and Jung’s
Anima Mundi to the Great Mother worshiped in the Western Goddess Movement. It is in
no way an inclusive or exhaustive list of contributors writing during this time period.
258  Rev. Patricia ‘Iolana
References
Anthony, M. (1999) Jung’s Circle of Women: The Valkyries. York Beach, ME: Nicolas-Hays.
Bolen, J.S. (1984) Goddesses in Everywoman: Powerful Archetypes in Women’s Lives.
New York: One Spirit.
Bolen, J.S. (1994) Crossing to Avalon: A Woman’s Midlife Pilgrimage. New York: Harper
Collins.
Dourley, J.P. (2006) Jung and the Recall of the Gods. Journal of Jungian Theory and Prac-
tice 8(1), pp. 43–53.
Downing, C. (2007 [1981]) The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine. Lincoln,
NE: Authors Choice Press.
Goldenberg, N.R. (1976) A Feminist Critique of Jung. Signs 2(2), pp. 443–449.
Harding, M.E. (1971) Woman’s Mysteries: Ancient and Modern. Boston, MA: Shambhala
Publications.
Jung, C.G. (1968) The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Second Edition. Hull,
R.F.C. (Trans.); Read Sir, H., Fordham, M., Adler, G. and McGuire, W. (eds.). Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XX.
Jung, C.G. (1976) The Portable Jung. Campbell, J. (ed.); Hull, R.F.C. (Trans.). New York:
Penguin Books, The Viking Portable Library.
Jung, C.G. (1982) Aspects of the Feminine. Hull, R.F.C. (Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, Bollingen Series XX.
Jung, C.G. (1995) Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Winston, R. and C. (Trans.). London:
Fontana Press.
Jung, C.G. (2001) Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Dell, W.S. and Baynes, C.F. (Trans.).
London: Routledge Classics.
Keown, D. (2000) Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McFague, S. (1982) Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language. Phila-
delphia, PA: Fortress Press.
McGuire, W. and Hull, R.F.C. (eds.) (1977) C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encoun-
ters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XCVII.
Neumann, E. (1955) The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype. Manheim, R.
(Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XLVII.
Noll, R. (1994) The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement. Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press.
Paglia, C. (2006) Erich Neumann: Theorist of the Great Mother. Arion 13(3): 14 pages.
Boston University Press.
Rowland, S. (2002) Jung: A Feminist Revision. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Wehr, D.S. (1987) Jung and Feminism. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Whitmont, E.C. (1982) Return of the Goddess. New York: Crossroads Publishing.

Further reading
Adler, M. (2006 [1979]) Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers,
and Other Pagans in America. New York and London: Penguin Books.
Armstrong, K. (2005) A Short History of Myth. Edinburgh: Canongate Books.
Campbell, J. (1949) The Hero With A Thousand Faces. New York: MJF Books.
Campbell, J. (1986) The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion.
New York: Harper and Row.
 Jung’s legacy 259
Campbell, J. (2001) Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor. Kennedy, E. (ed.).
Novato, CA: New World Library.
Campbell, J. (2013) Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine. Rossi, S. (ed.). Novato,
CA: New World Library.
Campbell, J. and Moyers, B. (1988) The Power of Myth. Flowers, B.S. (ed.). New York:
Anchor Books.
Christ, C.P. and Plaskow, J. (eds.) (1979) Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Reli-
gion. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row.
Curott, P. (1998) Book of Shadows: A Modern Woman’s Journey Into the Wisdom of Witch-
craft and the Magic of the Goddess. New York: Broadway Books.
Dourley, J.P. (1981) The Psyche as Sacrament: A Comparative Study of C.G. Jung and
Paul Tillich. Toronto: Inner City Books.
Goldenberg, N.R. (1979a) Dreams and Fantasies as Sources of Revelation: Feminist Appro-
priation of Jung. In: Christ, C.P. and Plaskow, J. (eds.) Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist
Reader in Religion. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, pp. 219–227.
Goldenberg, N.R. (1979b) Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional
Religions. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Keller, C. and Schneider, L.C. (eds.) (2011) Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Rela-
tion. London: Routledge.
Kidd, S.M. (2007 [1996]) The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey From
Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine a Reprint of the 10th Anniversary Edition.
San Francisco, CA: Harper One.
Perera, S.B. (1981) Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women. Toronto: Inner
City Books.
Starbird, M. (1998) The Goddess in the Gospels: Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine. Roch-
ester, VT: Bear and Company.
17 Boundaries of healing
Insider perspectives on ritual and
transgression in contemporary
esoteric theatre
Alison Rockbrand

This ritual is now open.

It is now a participation.
As it is read,
Let it be performed
In the body of the reader.

Introduction and preliminary issues

From a historical perspective esoteric theatre spans the plays of Florence Farr
(Beloved of Hathor and Shrine of the Golden Hawk, 1900) or Rudolf Steiner (The
Portal of Initiation, The Soul’s Probation, The Guardian of the Threshold, 1913)
and Aleister Crowley (Rites of Eleusis, 1910)1 to the transgressive and gnostic
theatre of Antonin Artaud (Sontag, 1976), Rosicrucian Order performances of the
1930s (Hutton, 2001) and the cabaret style public rituals of Satanist Anton Lavey
in the late 1960s. These are plays and public performances of various kinds (here
called theatre/performance) which are produced within the context of western
esotericism and which adhere to its main cultural-spiritual tenets.2 Many of these
above are still being produced today, but there is also a new form of esoteric thea-
tre emerging with its own contemporary style and practices; the performances of
Angela Edwards and her boundary breaking psycho-sexual rituals, the Metamor-
phic Ritual Theatre of Orryelle Defenestrate and the healing theatre of the multi-
media group Foolish People. The focus of this article is a study of these western
esoteric ritual performances, their transgressive ritual components and how they
can lead to transformational healing experiences.
As part of this research I will be discussing the experience of liminality or ‘in-
betweenness’ in these performances and the healing aspects of ritual as a change
in a performer’s core identity.3 A change of identity can be healing because it
transforms a practitioner/participant from one state of being to a new desired state
of being, taking with it old modalities or creating a new experience of ‘initiation’
as part of an expansive and individual spiritual journey. This is an idea explored
for instance by Edith Turner (Turner, 1992), who has written about the healing
aspects of ritual culture in tribal religions. To fully understand and explore this
experience, this research is also being done within the context of insider research
 Boundaries of healing 261
and active participation as part of a research methodology; interviews and perfor-
mances mentioned below having been conducted from an insider’s perspective
both on performance and western esotericism.
Much of the research on esoteric ritual has focused mainly on non-western
tribal ritual forms as explored through anthropological and ethnographic meth-
odologies (Turner, 1974, 2009; Van Gennep, 1909; Bell, 1997; Douglas, 1984).
While these are valuable, they are limited in terms of insider perspectives and
present a possibly problematic western context onto non-western ritual and per-
formance culture.4 Grimes’s study of the rituals of media and art (Grimes, 2006)
and Greenwood and Pearson’s much more insider-based research on contempo-
rary Neo-Pagan rituals (Greenwood, 2000, 2009; Pearson, 2001) are part of a
new direction in the approach to ritual studies. These approaches can further be
directed inward to autoethnography (Ellis, 2004, 2007; Didion, 2005, Denzin,
Lincoln and Smith, 2010) and discussed in terms of phenomenology (Husserl,
1964; Plummer, 1983; Garner, 1994) in an effort to discuss ritual in a way which
is an experience or a participation.5 All of these are part of the interdisciplinary
methodology which has been applied here to the study of contemporary western
esoteric theatre.
As with many practices in the western esoteric tradition, ritual is also the central
praxis of western esoteric theatre; in this case it is a public, theatrical or performa-
tive ritual which is either shared with or includes the audience. This form of ritual
being practiced by esoteric theatre practitioners (which will be called here ‘eso-
teric ritual’) is similar to non-western forms previously studied by Turner and Van
Gennep as ‘Rites of Passage’ (Van Gennep, 1909). These are rituals comprised of
three phases: ‘The first phase (of separation) comprises symbolic behaviour signi-
fying the detachment of the individual or group . . . from an earlier fixed point in
the social structure’ (Turner, 2009: 80). This is a detachment from a former self in
preparation for the ‘transmutation’ of the self via the ritual.
In the second phase, ‘the attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (“thresh-
old people”) are necessarily ambiguous since this condition and these people
elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states
and positions in cultural space’ (Turner, 2009: 95). This is the ‘in-between’ phase
where the individual is neither who they were before nor who they will become;
their identity is in flux, non-concrete, liminal.
The third phase comprises of a re-integration in which ‘the passage is consum-
mated [by] the ritual subject’ (Turner, 2009: 80). This can happen both physically
and symbolically through the idioms of re-integration such as the ‘sacred bond,
[or] the sacred cord’ (Van Gennep, 2004: 166).
The practice of esoteric theatre is similar to these rites of passage in struc-
ture, but the defining aspect of esoteric theatre is the liminal phase of the ritual
which leads not to a change in social standing or cultural space but to a type of
experience which has been called by Greenwood ‘magical consciousness’ (Green-
wood, 2015). This type of consciousness she defines as ‘an affective awareness
experienced through an alternative mode of mind’ (Greenwood, 2009: 64).6 It is
within this magical consciousness that the esoteric practitioner is able to change
262  Alison Rockbrand
identities and experience ‘transmutation’, which in this case is a change in inner
meaning, identity, consciousness or awareness which is a permanent and signifi-
cant change (Greenwood, 2005; Hanegraaff, 1998: 42–61).
In terms of practices leading to or creating ‘liminality’ and change in identity,
often taboo breaking and transgression are part of contemporary esoteric theatre
praxis.7 This is true of some practices outlined in this paper, along with other
integrated practices such as durational ritual, pain, danger, rituals dealing with
ideas of purity and impurity, spirit possession and healing (Lingan, 2006, 2014).8
Other practices include a tendency to site-specific theatre in which holy, haunted
or sacred places are used for performance, mythological texts and collective crea-
tion in which plays are crafted out of several contributors in order for all per-
formers to be able to integrate individually into a sense of initiation or identity
transformation.
What follows below is an introduction to the healing and transgressive aspects
of the esoteric theatre of Metamorphic Ritual Theatre, Foolish People and Angela
Edwards. My own experiences as a performer will also be addressed in the article.9

Foolish People and the Theatre of Manifestation

Foolish People is a theatre and film making collective based in the UK, well
known for their series of plays Dark Nights of the Soul, performed over a two-year
period in London (2005–2007). These plays were created around the collective
work of local occultists as performers and drew large crowds of esoteric practi-
tioners as participating audience members. The work of Foolish People is founded
on dramatherapy, western esotericism and shamanism in an overall practice they
refer to as the ‘Theatre of Manifestation’.10 For his article I’ve researched the ele-
ments of site-specific practice in their work and how this relates to their transgres-
sive, healing and mythic theatre rituals.
Many of Foolish People’s ritual performances are similar to the performative
healing rituals discussed by dramatherapist Sue Jennings, who defines drama-
therapy as ‘healing through drama allowing the client through the use of dramatic
structures, to receive insights and explore emotions in a special place in real and
imaginary time, within a social encounter’ (Jennings, 1994: 19). Jennings has
based some of her dramatherapy thesis on her research into the ritual séances of
the Senoi Temiars (Jennings, 1995) with whom she lived in Malaysia. In a recent
public lecture Jennings also referenced the healing elements of liminal trance
states; trance states she claims are necessary to ‘get in touch with healing energy’
(Jennings, 2012: Lecture). As director John Harrigan has a background in drama-
therapy, healing has become a focal point for the rituals of the Foolish People,
and within the particular, special or liminal space of site-specific performances,
Foolish People explore the healing crisis.
Foolish People are focused ultimately on creating a ritual space in which audi-
ence members are invited to become initiated into a personal and healing form of
western esotericism.11 To do this they produce plays designed to create healing
and transformational experiences in the audience such as Dark Nights of the Soul,
a six-chapter extended ritual performed at the Horse Hospital venue over two
 Boundaries of healing 263
years (2005–2007) in London. In this production transgressive techniques such
as ritual cutting, bleeding, nudity and violence were performed by the actors as
part of various personal explorations of initiation. Harrigan explains this by citing
pain as a part of the liminal experience of healing which is then passed on to the
audience:

Through each ritual, each project we undergo healing and that is a process
of reducing and refining ourselves. We heal the audience. It is about healing
them and others though our work so that they can see their own truth and
reason for being here, and through this you can see ailments and physical
problems get healed. Pain we also accept as a part of healing. That pain and
suffering is perhaps necessary.
(John Harrigan Interview 2: 2016)

They also lead performative workshops in which their healing practices are shared
with a small group of people. These are participatory and initiatory workshops
in which dramatherapy, liminal shamanic techniques (such as trance) and pagan
mythology are used to increase a personal connection which director John Har-
rigan calls the ‘numinous’:

Certain actions will increase your connection to the numinous. Yesterday we

did a long ritual in which we went very deep [into a trance] and we did not
know what was going to happen next. It was transcendental. I had an out of
body experience. And this has an effect on the audience definitely.
(John Harrigan Interview 2: 2016)

Part of the process by which Foolish People create liminal healing performance
is also contemporaneous with ideas of the walking ritual performances of mytho-
geography as explored by Phil Smith, in which the space itself inspires stories,
myths and workings which are brought about by individual interactions. The space
of mythogeography is interacted with in a nonlinear and possibly also liminal way
for ‘the space of mythogeography is neither bounded nor sliced by time’ and ‘it
is also a geography of the body’ as well as ‘a philosophy of perception’ which
‘is self-reflective in the sense that it regards the mythogeography, the performer
and the activist as being just as much multiplicitous and questionable sites as the
landscapes they move in’ (Smith, 2010: 113–115).
In many of the performances of Foolish People, such as Desecration (Galleries
of Justice, Nottingham, 2007) or The Abattoir Pages (The Old Abattoir, London,
2009), audiences interact with performers in and around specific places and the
space itself serves as the main medium of ritual modality and creation. Harri-
gan speaks about the space in terms of this very personal and healing relation-
ship, implying even that a space can ‘suffer’, which will inform an individual and
shared ritual practice:

We start with the geographic space and this is the framework for the whole
ritual and performance. The story for the ritual comes from the physical
264  Alison Rockbrand
space. We do rituals in the space and allowing ourselves with the space first
and we interact and have a relationship with the space. If it is a space of suf-
fering then we respect that and that informs our practice.
(John Harrigan Interview 2: 2016)

In this way since rituals of Foolish People are based very specifically on the mean-
ing and nature of places, there is an aspect of ‘admitting the ghost’, which Gordon
writes is a ‘special instance of the merging of the visible and the invisible, the
dead and the living, the past and the present – in the making of worldly relations’
in which the marginal and ‘what we never even notice’ becomes the starting point
of an experience (Gordon, 2008: 25). There may be also something in the use of
mythologies to evoke this crisis or healing moment. In writing of the self-defining
of new age and Neo-Pagan spirituality, Bloch, for instance, writes of mythology
not only as ideology but also of the trend to mythologise crisis situations and
‘one’s spiritual identity’ (Bloch, 1998: 102).
It is these marginalities, ghosts of space and place, which are integrated into
mythologies both personal and historical to create the rituals and healing perfor-
mances of Foolish People. As well it is within these marginal or liminal spaces
that esoteric theatre differs from other contemporary theatre: there is after all a
history of the use of ritual forms in theatre practice which is generally understood
as part of experimental theatre work.12 However, they do not go far enough, or to
put it another way, they go and yet they return, the ritual meaning is not changed.
Ritual was done, but it was not liminal, magickal or esoteric; meaning and identity
were not permanently transcended, destroyed or altered according to the gener-
ally accepted meanings of initiation or transmutation among contemporary occult
practitioners (Greenwood, 2015; Schechner, 1993; Innes, 1981).

Angela Edwards and the performance of sacred pain

Angela Edwards is a London based visual and solo performance artist who spe-
cialises in themes of sacred prostitution, pain, taboo and endurance in public eso-
teric rituals. She performs these rituals in a wide variety of spaces including sex
clubs, graveyards, galleries and traditional theatre spaces. Recent work includes a
series of rituals called Death Shrine and Death Shrine to the Holy Whore (Perfor-
mance Space 2013: London, various graveyard spaces, London, 2015) and Holy
Corpse Sculptural Shrine: St. Steven’s Church Yard, London, 2016, The Celes-
tial Shroud (Figure 17.1), ritual skin-sewing performance at Chronic Illness of
Mysterious Origin III, London 2016. I have worked with her on several projects
as an assistant. Contrary to the work of Foolish People, for Angela Edwards the
body is the only ritual space and her ritual performances are designed to push her
body into trance states through a transgression of her own physical and emotional
boundaries.
In anthropological studies of tribal ritual culture, there has been a focus on the
issue of pain, taboo, danger and durational experiences (Turner, 1992; Whitehead,
2002; Walsh, 2007; Douglas, 1984). Mary Douglas has for instance written about
ritual uncleanness and the dichotomy of taboo as something dangerous and yet
Figure 17.1 Angela Edwards in The Celestial Shroud, ritual skin-sewing performance at
Chronic Illness of Mysterious Origin III, London 2016.
Source: Alison Rockbrand.
266  Alison Rockbrand
existing as part of an integrated ritual meaning in culture. In the context of how
this differs from western thinking, she states that:

For us sacred things and places are to be protected from defilement. Holiness
and impurity are at opposite poles. . . . Yet it is supposed to be a mark of prim-
itive religion to make no clear distinction between sanctity and uncleanness.
If this is true it reveals a great gulf between ourselves and our forefathers.
(Douglas, 1984: 8)

This echoes Eliade, who likewise interpreted the sacred as potentially ambiva-
lent in that ‘it attracts or repels. The sacred is at once “sacred and defiled” ’ (Eli-
ade, 1958: 14–15). In Douglas’ analysis, she finally turns the looking glass back
towards her own culture and possibly herself when she sums up her discussion by
deciding that ‘we shall not expect to understand other people’s ideas of contagion,
sacred or secular, until we have confronted our own’ (Douglas, 1984: 29). It is
a self-confrontation of the sacred and the profane that inspires the pain-centred
durational performances of Edwards’ healing ritual cycles.
There are instilled in many of her performances ideas of religious inversion
healing by religious or spiritual ordeal, found also in the ‘sacred pain’ rituals
which occur cross-culturally (Glucklich, 2001). In one instalment of Death Shrine
to the Holy Whore, performed in a ‘voyeuristic’ experimental box space at the
Edinburgh Fringe (Edinburgh 2013), Edwards crucified herself on a free stand-
ing cross while her labia was stapled by an assistant, after which she was ritually
buried under a pile of dirt and could only breathe through a straw for a duration of
30 minutes. Edwards, who is a practitioner of a non-traditional form of Voodoo,
also cites shamanism as a reference to pain in rituals of healing:

Those rituals were healing in that they were transformative. Many things to
do with the body are healing such as with acupuncture, so when I use needles
I also think of that as a healing touch on my body. There is that whole shamanic
tradition of cutting as healing or initiation. Also having scars on my body and
healing for months and months with the scars is a constant reminder of the heal-
ing process. All my endurance rituals require me to heal physically and that is
a reminder of the healing process. It’s a dedication of the body to the practice.
(Angela Edwards Interview 3: 2016)

Pain and durational experiences in the context of ritual healing are something
which can been seen in all of the performers being written about in this paper. For
Angela Edwards however, pain, durational experience as part of the experience
of the sacred is the main motivator of her work. Like Mary Douglas’ inward gaze,
she is using her own body as an experience, to explore the meaning of the sacred.
She does this through the creation of the abject body as her own body in the unit-
ing of the sacred with the profane. One of her ritual modalities is that of the physi-
cal embodiment of the ‘Holy Whore’. Edwards, who has worked as a sexworker,
re-interprets the abject through its integration as sacred, in a way which echoes
Kristeva’s psychoanalytical approach to healing in Powers of Horror (Kristeva,
 Boundaries of healing 267
1982). This is possible because ‘through abjection, bodily processes become
enmeshed bit by bit in significatory processes, in which images, perceptions and
sensations become linked to and represented by “ideational representatives” or
signifiers’ (Grosz, 2001). In the performance Death Shrine to the Holy Whore Part
7 (London 2015), Edwards lay crucified over a bladed cross in a local cemetery
for a period of 5 hours. In Death Shrine to the Holy Whore Part 8, she lay within
a specially created death shroud, completely covered, for almost 12 hours. These
rituals were done as part of a two-year-long ritual in which Edward also engaged
in what she describes as ‘sacred sex work’ to heal past painful and traumatic expe-
riences she has had while doing ‘profane sex work’.
Her experience of pain or danger however is mitigated by the creation of the
ritual space as the totality of her own body and the allowance of liminality as the
path to a place between or in in some cases without identity:

I don’t see it as danger. I see it as death, and transgression and confronting

into my own mortality and this is also a part of Spiritualism or Voodoo where
people honor the dead and this is part of this confrontation. I see this as
destroying my own ego and confronting death. But also I don’t feel the pain
because I am in a trance and I am not thinking about that.
(Angela Edwards Interview 3: 2016)

It may be this transcendence of pain and experience of miraculous ‘painlessness’

in the sacred space of the body which can create the healing moment of transition.
This is the case with the rituals of sacred pain as discussed by Glucklich in which
‘The correlation between pain and truth . . . is not punitive but “gnostic” (truth
eliciting)’ and ‘The power of pain, or the miracle of insensitivity to pain, is attrib-
uted to divine oversight in the proceedings’ (Glucklich, 2001: 20).
Edwards does not call herself a performance artist because she sees her work as
real and actual, as ‘non-acting’ (Kirby, 1995) and not within the same tradition of
other artists who explore similar themes. Artists like California performance artist
Chris Burden, whose ‘painful exercises were meant to transcend physical reality’
(Goldberg, 1993: 159), are not on the same level of experience because they are
not in the process of creating esoteric ritual, that is they are not creating the kind
of ritual within a tradition of western esotericism which leads to a liminal space in
which magickal consciousness is experienced. According to Edwards this is some-
thing which one must participate in and be fully oneself in, not as a performance of
the self, but as the self in what is called performance because it is being watched
by others. It is this self as oneself in the ritual space which creates meaning in the
work of Angela Edwards. As well, to return to Douglas’ assessment of the rituals and
purity and danger, it is ritual itself which creates these special and specific meanings:

Ritual . . . can permit knowledge of what would not be known at all. It does
not merely externalise experience, bringing it out into the light of day, but it
also modifies experience, in so expressing it. . . . There are some things we
cannot experience without ritual.
(Douglas, 1984: 65)
268  Alison Rockbrand
Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule and the
Metamorphic Ritual Theatre
Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule is a prolific artist and performer, well known in
Neo-Pagan and occult communities for his varied arts and mythic esoteric per-
formances. He has not only created paintings, drawings and a tarot deck with
imageries based in the western esoteric tradition, but has also produced, writ-
ten and performed in ritual theatre projects with his Australian-based collective
Metamorphic Ritual Theatre (Lingan, 2006). These performances have toured
across Europe, the UK and the US, to audiences of mainly other Neo-Pagans
and occultists. I have worked with Orryelle on several projects (Parzival a Fool’s
Journey 2005: Glastonbury, Loom of Lila, 2007: Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Solve
et Coagula 2012: Brighton, Alchemical Chess: 2015 Exeter University) as a per-
former and deviser. I will be discussing the private and public aspects of his per-
formances in sacred spaces which are mythic, transgressive and based in long
term initiatory practices.
One of the ways Neo-Pagan communities create meaning in the context of
having no accepted religious authority is to collectively devise new ritual texts
(Bloch, 1998; Stone, 1978; Adler, 1979). Barbara Rensing explains that ‘neo-
pagan spirituality is flexible and personal’ and how ‘this personal spirituality is
expressed in poetry’ (Rensing, 2009: 184).13 These ideas are reflected in the work
of Metamorphic Ritual Theatre. Poetic plays such as Parzival a Fool’s Journey
(2005), which was performed outdoors in locations considered sacred (such as
Glastonbury Tor), use integrated mythologies from various traditions.
This use of specific mythologies is linked to the style, direction and meaning of
the ritual format of the play. Within the context of establishing a text for perfor-
mance, the text will always be based on personal rituals created for the experience
of magical consciousness, liminality, initiation and healing and yet at the same
time, shared in a public and open space as part of a healing for a ‘collective con-
sciousness’. In the Metamorphic Ritual Theatre play Oedipus Tyrannos (London
2008):

The whole idea of doing a rewrite of the Oedipus myth was based on a heal-
ing or transformational premise, not necessarily for myself or the cast but it
seemed this myth mostly through theatre has made a very strong impression
on the collective consciousness of humanity . . . and I felt this to be a primar-
ily negative one. It is symptomatic of patriarchal ‘heroism’ mythology in that
the central character is so proud of his ‘wit’ which ‘defeats’ the sphinx and yet
he seems ignorant of his own subconscious and his own fate.
(Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule Interview 4: 2015)

Similar themes abound in other Metamorphic Ritual Theatre plays such as

Loom of Lila (2007), a dance based piece in which the performers challenge their
own ideas of fate through an embodiment of the goddess Kali (Figure 17.2), or
in The Choronzon Machine (2003), a rock-opera in which ideas of initiation and
Figure 17.2 Metamorphic Ritual Theatre in performance of Loom of Lila (2007). Eleven
dancers form the face and hands of Kali-Arachne, a composite form of the
Mother Goddess.
Source: Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule.
270  Alison Rockbrand
transformation were the main focus. This ritual framework is a way of delineating
space which is esoteric from everyday normal space, the main difference between
these being the level of liminality which is being experienced. In the ritual space
an esotericist is creating a liminal zone where different types of transmutations can
take place. Turner as mentioned has written of how liminality in ritual structures
leads to various types of initiatory changes (Turner, 2009), while Van Gennep
describes the ‘transition’ stage in a rite of passage as the place between identities
(Van Gennep, 2004; Bell, 1997).
Where a ritual is public or private then is a matter of degrees, and making
public what is private means in some way opening or expanding a traditionally
and probably practically closed space (Bogdan, 2007). The public or open per-
formance of rituals allows personal experiences to be communicated and in this
way also changed or shaped; for the private ritual has now been compromised
and a public form of it is taking place, leading to changes and transformations
of the ritual. This is part of the fluidity of the open ritual as it is a step into the
unknown, into the possibly chaotic event of performing and including strangers
in a public display. This is true for all public esoteric rituals, from the open ritu-
als of the Pagan Federation in London to the performance of esoteric theatre.
Although in the context of esoteric theatre this chaotic process is refined and
specialized.
In the Metamorphic Ritual Theatre, although the rehearsal process is private,
and the creation individual, poetic and initiatory, containing a variety of rituals
within its process, the ultimate ‘Rite of Performance’ is always in public. How-
ever these boundaries between private ritual and public and inside and outside of
a ritual or liminal space are themselves in a state of change and flux as private
overlaps with public:

I find degrees of privacy in my work rather than it simply being either public
or private . . . the (often ritualistic) process of its creation is a more private
one. Yet a part of this process imbues what the viewer eventually receives. . . .
So all ritual really has aspects of the private and the public, there are just dif-
ferent degrees, levels and means of interaction.
(Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule Interview 4: 2015)

At some point the public-making is itself a ritual and a point of transmutation

since as the ritual transforms so may the performers and an unknown variant may
add to the experience of liminality. Part of the meaning of esoteric theatre as
public ritual performance is that through the opening of a doorway and the com-
munication of a ritual in a chaotic or unknown fluid ritual, space creates a liminal-
ity extending back to the ritual boundaries and almost re-sealing the public space
into a private one:

The energetic feedback of the audiences can affect the performer as well as
the audience, and this is part of the purpose of public ritual. In a way all ritual
 Boundaries of healing 271
is a kind of performance, as you are establishing parameters of sacred time
and space, and therefore become more conscious of your behaviour.
(Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule Interview 4: 2015)

The experience shared among all the people present becomes a new private space
and the spectators are now transformed into participants, having shared in the eso-
teric knowledge or mytho-signifiers of the ritual makers. The work of the Meta-
morphic Ritual Theatre has for instance led to many audience members asking to
be initiated into his ‘Chaorder of the Silver Dusk’, an occult order associated to
his theatre company. Concurrent with the work of Foolish People, audience mem-
bers are able to become initiated into or at the very least have a liminal experience
of the western esoteric tradition.

Conclusion: insider perspectives on ritual practice

and the rite of performance
As part of my work with esoteric theatre I have become focused on issues of the
insider as a performer, researcher, experiencer and the necessity of continuing to
develop appropriate insider research methodologies. This is because the creation
of ritual in esoteric theatre is based on very specific meanings already known as
well as codes and knowledge which the performers have already integrated.14 As
well, in terms of esoteric theatre, once the ritual space has been opened, all who
are ‘in’ this space are in it as various types of insiders. Outsiders are the ones
who are not present, not participating, not knowing. As has been expressed in this
article, this ritual then leads to a liminal space wherein a new meaning, which
can mean healing or a new form of identity, or some type of permanent magical
change, occurs (Greenwood, 2005; Hanegraaff, 1998: 42–61).
There are many ways in which this insider perspective or collection of ‘insider
codes’ has been expressed as part of my experience working with the groups in
this article. While performing with Metamorphic Ritual Theatre for instance,
I  was first formally initiated into the occult order associated to the group and
founded by leader Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule. I was then asked to pull a card
from a tarot deck to determine what my interaction with the group might entail;
I pulled the card called ‘Babalon’ which in turn was a character I played in a
number of productions. My playing of the character as well as my interaction
with the performance in general were predicated on my experience in a formal
initiation.
I feel that to study esoteric ritual and specifically esoteric performance is to par-
ticipate in it on some level. This idea is echoed in the participatory mythogeogra-
phy of Phil Smith (Smith, 2010) and other performers or practitioners of western
esotericism who have written about their own practice (Evans, 2007; Letcher,
2001). There is a shared experience which is based on insider codes and which is
able to be interpreted both communally and individually, hence how initiations,
ideas or experiences may be passed on to the audience as Harrigan spoke of above.
272  Alison Rockbrand
This place ‘between’ identities or realities, this place where in magic as an
active force is part of consciousness, leads into a definition of esoteric ritual in
which one meaning creates or practices a ritual which creates or develops into a
new meaning. For instance:

Meaning A = Ritual = Meaning B.

‘Meaning A’ is the previous self, set of circumstances and/or previous rituals

which lead the individual to the creation of a new ritual. ‘Meaning A’ could be
the self in a way which the individual wants to alter, to heal or to initiate into a
new understanding of magic, the world, the self, the body or into a hierarchical
magickal order.
The ‘Ritual’ in this model is all the actions which take place in whatever is
being called the ‘ritual space’. This space may be by its nature transgressive since
it is outside of regular time and space; it ‘transgresses’ the normal boundaries of
experience. Therefore if ‘ritual’ is the action, then ‘ritual space’ is the conceptual
space of that action. In my work with Angela Edwards on Death Shrine I was
able to enter in a liminal space which allowed me to stick over 50 needles into her
skin, which is not something I had ever done before, but which as part of the ritual
we engaged in was necessary; it was part of the code of the ritual. In this liminal
space audience members were also invited to stick needles in and they did, thus
becoming part of a transgressive act which was outside of the normal experiences
between strangers.
‘Meaning B’ is the new identity being created by the ritual experience. The way
in which the identity is altered depends on the ritual itself, its content and structure
are all important aspects which influence the outcome and the new meaning being
created. Also there is an element of the unknown, in which the new meaning may
not be fully understood or may not be as expected.
I feel that similar to the aforementioned ‘Rites of Passage’, what is being
practiced by esoteric performers may be called something like a ‘rite of per-
formance’. This possible rite of performance would be the creative process of
esoteric theatre; from the inception of the idea to its performance in front of an
audience. There is no form or specific content to a rite of performance but types
of practice which draw together various elements of esotericism and theatre
into a repeatable model of performance, comprising an extended set of rituals
in rehearsals, performances and repeat performances. It is based not only on
the body and identity of the actor but also on a greater text of mythologies and
ideas which have a place in the history and culture of western civilisation. It
is in this way an important part of western culture questioning western models
of liminality, the interaction of private and public spaces, transgression and
taboo in contemporary western spirituality, current models of ritual practice for
healing studies, new insider research methodologies and ways in which the arts
interact with ideas of the sacred and the profane, hopefully to be discussed as
part of ongoing research.
 Boundaries of healing 273
This ritual is now closed
Its meanings have entered
Into the space of the reader
Let it create more meanings,
Wherever it goes.

Notes
1 During the occult revival as explored by Lingan (Lingan, 2014). Another example
would be the occult plays of W.B Yates, who was a member of the Hermetic Order of
the Golden Dawn (Macneill, 2013).
2 For the purposes of this article, western esotericism is defined as a world view or mode
of thought with four essential components as proposed by Antoine Faivre (Faivre,
1994). These are: (1) Correspondences: ‘Symbolic and real correspondences are said to
exist among all part of the universe, both seen and unseen’; (2) Living Nature: ‘Nature
occupies an essential place’; (3) Imagination and Mediations: ‘. . . mediations of all
kinds such as rituals, symbolic images, mandalas, intermediary spirits’; (4) Experience
of Transmutation: ‘. . . understood also as “metamorphosis”. It consists of allowing no
separation between knowledge (gnosis) and inner experience’ (Faivre 1994: 10–14).
3 See Innes and Schechner on various types of non-esoteric theatre practice using ritual
and containing esoteric ideas but in which ultimately the performers are not aiming at
the same kind of esoteric transmutation, nor do they uphold an esoteric worldview or
claim to be western esotericists (Schechner, 1993; Innes, 1981).
4 There is currently a lack of academic writing on contemporary western esoteric ritual
practice, with most studies of ritual being written in a historical context. Bodgan has
written at length about rituals of initiation in western esotericism but limits this to the
Freemasons and ends his study with Gardnerian Wicca era 1950 (Bogdan, 2007). Histo-
rian Ronald Hutton likewise has written about many aspects of Neo-Paganism but with-
out a specific focus on the contemporary ritual experience or practice (Hutton, 2001).
5 As well, these participations themselves and the nature of participation and researcher
engagement, insider research and insider lexicography can be looked at through the
sociological and pedagogical methodologies of Adler and Adler (Adler and Adler,
1987) both of whom involve themselves in the ‘core activities of group members’
(Dwyer and Buckle, 2009: 55).
6 According to Greenwood the ‘magical’ state of consciousness is also something which
‘must be experienced’ in order to be understood and has an ‘intrinsically subjective and
sensory quality’ (Greenwood, 2005: 7).
7 For a discussion of transgression as a part of western esoteric practice in general see
Urban (2003).
8 Unlike much of the historical esoteric theatre, such as that of Rudolf Steiner and Flor-
ence Farr, contemporary esoteric theatre has a tendency towards these extreme expe-
riences and has more in common with the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ of Antonin Artaud,
who believed that ‘There is a mysterious identity of essence between the principal of
alchemy and that of theatre’ (Artaud, 1958: 48).
9 Interviews and experiences with these three groups are varied, and each performer uses
slightly different language to describe similar events. For this reason some words will
be used interchangably; esotericist/occultist/pagan/Neo-Pagan; initiation/transmuta-
tion/identity change.
10 Recent productions include Virulent Experience (Conway Hall, London, 2012), The
Woods Trapped at the Edge of Midnight (Cornbury Park, Oxfordshire, 2015) and the
feature film Strange Factories (2013).
274  Alison Rockbrand
11 Their esoteric practice is more akin to the flexible and individual spirituality of Neo-
Paganism (Evans, 2007; Rensing, 2009; Hanegraaff, 1998) than to the more formal
initiatory rituals of contemporary occult orders (Bogdan, 2007; Faivre, 1994).
12 See Peter Brook and his Artaud inspired Theatre of Cruelty Season at the RSC (1964–
65), Jerzy Grotowski and his Paratheatre to Barba and the Odin Teatret, and more
recently Nicholas Nunez and his work on ‘Anthropocosmic Theatre’ (Nunez, 1996).
These are approaches which venture to some degree into the same territory as the ritual
performances of Foolish People.
13 These elements accord with other definitions posited by Faivre and Hannegraft, both
about the involvement with nature (Faivre,1994) and the ‘re-illusionment’ of the indi-
vidual through new age spiritualities (Hanegraaff, 2000).
14 According to practitioner-researcher Evans, ‘participation within magical rituals
requires compliance with tacit and often complex, and in some cases contradictory
codes of conduct, plus some prior knowledge’ (Evans, 2007: 61).

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Websites accessed
Angela Edwards Art, www.angelacarolinedwardsart.com. Last accessed 09/08/16.
Foolish People, www.foolishpeople.com. Last accessed 07/08/16.
Metamorphic Ritual Theatre, www.crossroads.wild.net.au/morph.htm. Last accessed
05/08/16.

Interviews
Angela Edwards, Interview 3. January 2016.
Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule, Interviews 3–4. December 2015-January 2016.
John Harrigan, Interview 2. June 2016.
18 Reading three ways
Ask me how!
professor dusky purples

A reading by professor dusky purples

Preparation
Why are you here?
Why are you really here?
Are you doing your work?
Are you doing the work someone set you the task of doing?
Isn’t that satisfying?
Is that satisfying?
How did you learn to read?
Do you remember it being painful?
What was the first book you read?
What was the first book from which someone read to you?
Were these words read over your little body?
Were you a little boy or a little girl?
Were there witches?
Were there evil spirits?
Was there Jesus?
Was there war?
Did we win?
Were there prophets?
Did they see it coming?
Were their faces clear?
Could they see you?
Could you hear them?
Did you hide from them?
Did you think about them in the dark?
Do you pass these stories on?
Do they frighten you?
Do they bring another feeling?

Get to know that feeling, sit with it, let it sit with you.
 Reading three ways 279
Orientation
What are you asking?
Or are you seeking?
Is it yes, a confirmation?
Is it no, a negation?
Is it neither?
Do you have something – an object, a talisman, a totem, a stone – at hand?
Can you take it in hand?
Can you put the question there?
Can you inquire?
Can you ask it in a good way?
Can you anticipate an answer?
Can you find out where the question wants to be put now?
Is there a right way to place it?
What are the elements of this way?
Do they have the quality of air, water, earth, or fire?
Are they fixed, cardinal, or mutable?
How do these elements relate to each other?
Are they harmonious, tense, oblique, acute, distant, or near?
If the question lives in your body, where is it most comfortable?
If the question lives through your body, what are its points of entry and exit?
If the question itself has a body, what is your posture toward it?
How can you face it?
Does it unmask you?
Does it speak with one voice?
Are you at home with the question?
Is it traveling with you?
Is it orbiting you?

Pull at the thread of the question and, when you reach a snag, an uncertainty, take
a chance.

Cherished Reader,
Since this is a piece about where we have been and where we might now be
going, let me begin by asking you to travel. Move inward from the vitreous humor
that suspends your eye. Release the worldly seer. Make contact with your bodily
ancient. Forgo the demands of faciality. Take off the mask. Flow inward through
the teary mineral headwaters of your overprivileged oculus. Cross the apparent
border of your sebum coated skin. Glide through the cerebrospinal barrier that
encases your grey brain. Let the fungus of experience decompose your self-con-
sciousness. Through the sticky cerumen yellow residue that gathers to protect you
from aural inculcation, drift carefully across the endolymph lubricated passages
of your inner ear. All sound is a soft touch. Swallow saliva, treasure of language.
Gently sniff/slip through the mucoidal deposits of your sinus. Let your pleural
280  professor dusky purples
fluid flow as you take in the substantiations of air. Churn and swish through gas-
tric middle earth, your other brain. And, as you come into yourself, in whatever
way, with whatever fluid, feel that breath which makes your not yet red blood
flow. We begin from this place of in-folded containment, this bodily present/tense.
We meet here, at dusk. We work in the purple twilight of the idea that theory
comes from nowhere, has no biography. We greet the night sure that the world is
subject to other influences, is not One, is comprehensible neither through force
nor through field.
Now that we are a bit closer, I should tell you why I am here and where I’ve
been. My last appearance, at the 2015 Emotional Geographies (#EmoGeo) confer-
ence in Edinburgh, Scotland, was prompted by an invitation from a longtime col-
league and friend, Toby Sharp, ‘ “tool” for urban change’ (McLean, 2016, p. 39).
Sharp reworks tired readings of regenerative/regenerating urban landscapes – the
realm of the fabled creative class and its boosters – to show us how feminist,
queer, and anti-racist performances walk the tightrope between neoliberal appro-
priation and creative subversion. Though I had long ago left behind the abandoned
lots of urban creativity to join an autonomous feminist separatist commune in
the last remaining swamplands of the Po River Delta, near Marina Romea, Italy,
I could not resist the invitation to reflect on my life as a ‘dirty, sweaty other’ of
urban theory, the field in which I had formally been trained as an akademik. So
I convened a collectivized reading ritual in Edinburgh which culminated in taking
a look at Henri Lefebvre’s astrological birth chart, during which we discovered
that he has a distinct lack of fire in his chart. Fire is the element associated with
spirit, with sacred transformation, with warmth. So, we tried to bring some to him.
I had an array of implements with which to work: rocks, smells, fabric. In the
end, we held the circle and we danced to Buffy St. Marie’s ‘Keeper of the Fire,’
from her 1969 masterpiece Illuminations.1 And then we hiked up Arthur’s Seat, an
ancient dormant volcano just behind the Edinburgh conference center where we
all met. We recalled its ancient fire and drank cheap spirits.
In akademia, such forms of conviviality, let alone conjuring, tend to be kept
until after the end, in the drift space between scheduled events. Because I arrived
to the conference after a long absence from the akademy, it felt easier to draw
on a deeper embodiment of my femme-inity and to reconnect with two reading
practices which had long ago characterized my life as a teenage witch: tarot and
astrology. Both are conversation starters; they put us into relation with images,
arrangements, constellations, orientations, chance (not so much fate, not for me,
anyway), and, sometimes, they put us in relation to each other. Tarot deals with
archetypal and situational dramas, casting the pieces of the present tense into new
geometries according to the disposition of a querent and their encounter with a
deck of cards, a particular question, and a reader, who is sometimes the same per-
son as the querent. Astrology, on the other hand, renders the sky under which we
were born as a stage with the planets as actors. The stories of their interactions, the
tone and tenor of their relationships, is related to differing patterns and tendencies
borne out in the life of the person whose chart is being cast. Astrology has many
iterations, its own literatures, conferences, controversies, and charismatic figures.
 Reading three ways 281
It is not apart from this world. Astrology is like meteorology for everyday life; it
is a guide, an indicator, a storytelling device.
I learned to read tarot and astrology through filters of gendered detachment and
degendered attachment. To read, I had to access parts of myself not worn on my
body while paying both more and less attention to those parts which are found
there. Tarot and astrology attempt to re-link biography and geography over and
above the dominant western figure of territory (see Povinelli, 2016, pp. 77–78).
Popular conceptions suggest that tarot or astrology might be matters of belief.
So many friends have asked me, just before they ask me to read their cards or
their chart, ‘Do you really believe in all that?’ As practices long abjected into a
vague realm of ‘spirituality,’ they have fallen out of conversation with dominant
forms of contemporary literacy. They arrive from an ‘enchanted’ pre-capitalist
realm (see Federici, 2004); their endurance in the present remains a sign of the
incomplete, yet insistent, colonization of everyday life and expropriation of bod-
ies and communal practices by the dominant order. Skeptics tend to overstate the
extent to which tarot or astrology is absolutist, fatalistic, deterministic, a so-called
pseudo-science or superstition. But it’s not about that. Or, at least, that’s not why
I am here. It’s about storytelling. The cards or the chart cannot tell you what you
do not already know, but they can help you understand what you may know bet-
ter. They might help you shoulder that burden of being who you are. They might
help you carry that which you can neither put down nor push forward. They ask
us to release what is no longer useful or what keeps us from learning more about
what might be useful. Both practices rest on the notion that a querent, a person,
someone with a question and a trajectory, can be understood in relation to both
localized events, like drawing a card, and cosmic patterns, like the movement of
planets and celestial bodies. We come to reading from both places. More than
meaning, these modes question motive, stoke capacities for change in perspective
and behavior, and reveal tendencies in what the Freudo-Lacanian mode might call
‘the unconscious.’ They are what we already know, but just a bit too deeply to
claim with rationality.
Why conjure up tarot and astrology for the conference? During one of our
routine letter exchanges, Toby informed me of the emergence of a framework
in critical geography called planetary urbanization (Brenner, 2014). Propo-
nents of the framework return to Henri Lefebvre’s (2003) work in The Urban
Revolution to substantiate the claim that the process of (urbanizing) capital-
ism must be understood as encompassing the entire surface of our beloved
Earth. I was curious, so I took a look through the public archive of the project.
Among the many rich cartographic and theoretical representations of this con-
dition realized by the proponents of the framework, one apparently peripheral
rendering stood out to me. Namely, that urbanization extends itself into the
extra-atmospheric, insofar as the telecommunications and surveillance satel-
lites orbiting the earth form a geocentric visualization prosthesis. As a by-
product of this extension of vision and ‘remote sensing’ into orbit, the Earth is
also a center of gravity for a proliferating cloud of ‘space junk’ (Figures 18.1
and 18.2).
282  professor dusky purples

Figure 18.1  professor dusky purples in Edinburgh, 2015. Source: Heather McLean.

Looking at this image, it occurred to me that the discipline of geography is still

struggling to come to terms with even the most basic tenets of its own cosmologi-
cal, if not cosmopolitical, orientation. The eye-like image of satellites and other
stuff orbiting the earth appears, in aggregate, to form just another, larger Eye.
This fundament of sensors sees without visualizing – or, better, without clearly
acknowledging – its own prophetic aspirations. If this particular horizon of geog-
raphy, is located ‘out there,’ what are we to make of its reliance on techniques and
technologies which recursively cover the surface of the earth with the thought of
urbanization, weaving it into the very fabric of everyday existence – human and
not, living and not? Efforts to understand the planetary dynamics of urbanization
stake out an enunciative position which may or may not necessarily negate the
theoretical positions which preceded. Nonetheless, it seems to me that analytics
organized around these dynamics tend toward an apparently singular approach to
apprehending capitalism’s survival in and as this world. How might the proposed
priority of urbanization over other forms of cohabiting with and on Earth circum-
scribe the transformative potential rooted in other ways of knowing/sensing/inter-
preting both the origins and destiny of the planet? What are the modes of knowing
and struggling together adequate to the present tense? Insofar as the epistemo-
logical orientation of planetary urbanization identifies a trajectory, a direction in
which the planet might be headed, how does the architecture of its way of know-
ing constrain us to read the surface of the Earth? What difference does it make that
this particular epistemology is the product of an akademik process?
As I made the journey North to the conference – where, in July, the sun rises at
4am – I asked myself these questions. I saw them all floating around the practice
at the core of the reproduction of akademik knowledge: Reading. As I sped across
Figure 18.2  The back page of a U.S. Passport. Source: Darren Patrick.
284  professor dusky purples
Brexit territory, I thought about the perils of reading in only one way. I thought
about divination, that maligned and minor realm of reading. I thought about
divided nations and the ostensible retrenchment of the decadent imperial powers
into their own miserable territories of hoped for homogeneity. I wondered about
the signs of the times and the system/s adequate to interpreting those signs.
What better place than a speeding train to confront the dilemma of epistemic
location? What is the cost of going there from here? And how might being in that
there invite a challenge to our sense of what it is to be here now? So much aka-
demic knowledge is narrowly concerned with the object of epistemology. That’s
fine, that’s okay. There are objects. But, might other ways of reading – of divina-
tion, even – give us a better sense of the movement/s of the moment? Perhaps
they will leave only a bitter sense. Addressing precisely these issues, Manulani
Aluli Meyer (2010) draws on/unfolds Hawaiian Indigenous teachings (2001) to
present what she calls holographic epistemology (2014). Meyer shows the eco-
logical unity of three parts: knowledge rooted in experience, knowledge which
is floating, and aloha, loosely translated, knowledge learned in the practice of
loving and in service to others. She constellates epistemology as the trinity of
knowledge, knowing, and understanding; noun, verb, and liberating practice,
respectively. Together, these three modes give rise to questions which Meyer
(2010) poses:

What do you want to understand in your life? [. . .] What brings you mean-
ing? What gives you meaning? When you do that in the practice of deep self-
inquiry, then you hit the bottom of your own regenerative spirit. We truly know
that true wealth is about giving; collaboration is more of an enduring practice,
and truth telling is a higher frequency than the accumulation of facts . . . What
is the difference between knowledge, knowing, and understanding?

While Meyer also demonstrates the wide array of cognate formulations in phi-
losophy, metaphysics, spirituality and, yes, some religions, the distinction of her
presentation seems to rest on the apparently ephemeral mode of understanding. As
those of us who have been schooled – forcibly or otherwise – in dominant Western
ideas of epistemology could no doubt attest, the pieces that Meyer calls collabo-
ration, service, relation, loving, and truth telling are often mishandled, misun-
derstood, derided, or destroyed as we attempt to know more. These pieces are so
often the seeds of understanding. Such tendencies toward neglect are correlated
to the elevation of the so-called life of the mind, the mind scanned and mapped
in MRIs and with radioactive isotopes, the mind ramified in the institution of
the uni-versity, the mind which devises borders and property lines to steal and
to criminalize and to outlaw. Though the uni-versity is becoming a corporation,
and some states think of corporations as people, the uni-versity is not a person. It
does not, as far as we know, have the capacity for embodied experience. And so it
incorporates, developing new tools for epistemological validation and extraction;
it is a factory, born of a guild. The uni-versity is a place where crude opinion is
formed into transferrable knowledge by Learned Men.
 Reading three ways 285
Like all institutions, the uni-versity is both a formation and in formation; we can
leave its re-formation for another day. It may not be a person, but it does relate, or
acts as a relay. As a formation, it aspires to secular modes of uni-versality. Lately,
it has been struggling, at least in North America, with diversity and inclusion, a
signal that it is still in formation. It wants to know more about particular strug-
gles without necessarily being changed by them or allowing itself to be the site
of such struggles. It wants to know more about you and your relations. Because,
if the uni-veristy is to become something else, and therefore to survive the great
transformation, it will likely not be because of the Learned Men. It will be because
of you and your relations. Here, perhaps, we shift from epistemology to ontology;
we might enter and be together in the uni-versity, albeit with some struggle. We
could dither about struggle against or within, we could quibble about struggle for
power over or power to, these are certainly moments that hang between knowing
and being. But, once we have crossed that bridge from epistemology to ontology,
we have, at the root, struggle. Whether we persist or fail, whether we transform
or remain rigid, each of these is a mode of struggle and has, as disciplinary geog-
raphy will no doubt attest from its colonialist history and present, much to do
with where we are born, how we remain there, or, if we move from that place, the
conditions under which that happened and the losses and reorderings immanent
to that displacement.
How do we come to whatever might be next from here?
This is also a political question.
How we navigate that question brings us closer to cosmology. A cosmology
unfolds in the conversations we have with the night sky, rocks and rivers, mag-
netic fields, clouds and birds, these are conversations we can have with each other,
sometimes without words. Cosmology is how we locate ourselves in the mesh of
images, signs, stories which make us human and social. It is how we make sense
out of the simultaneity of partial vision and an uncanny sense of wholeness. There
are as many ways to locate cosmologies as there are vantage points from which to
look up, out, in, and through. I do not claim to describe every possible cosmology,
I could not! Besides, city lights are too bright. Instead I ask a question: How is it
that the same geo-graphic/earth-writing apparatus that brings us space junk has so
little to tell us about cosmologies? Are we reading correctly? When what we know
or how we struggle to know it appears apart from, or without understanding or
acknowledging where and how we have come to wonder, we are in danger. That
danger may, in some sense, be symptomatic, especially if we are talking about
highly specific akademik debates confined to particular disciplinary formations.
Nevertheless, let’s step over that threshold to consider, instead, what happens
when we enter our reading practice not from the standpoint of epistemological
subjecthood – unsure of who we know ourselves to be – nor from the immanence
of ontological struggle – unsure of how we might be other/wise else/where. Let’s
begin again from a grounded spiritual cosmo-logic, a place which refuses and
stands a-part from the Enlightenment vanquishment of spirit and the sacred, a
place where we are reminded that, to be in a world, we must locate ourselves, our
persistence, our ancestry, our lost memories, our dead ends.
286  professor dusky purples
Living in a world is not the same as living in the world. Even our neighbor may
live in a world; distinct from, but adjacent to, ours.
Worlds too touch.
Though we are living, breathing beings we find ourselves subject to certain and
defined logics. Or, at least, logics that tell themselves and us they are certain and
defined. Like interstate highways, twelve hour clocks, Google Maps, and other
networks of ordination and navigation. Some of these logics proclaim their uni-
versality, their applicability to all questions at all times and in all places. They
wear their one-ish-ness too lightly and too seriously all at the same time. They can
take you anywhere. The surety of these ways of knowing and reading the world
is a patrilineal bond. It tends to order knowledge vertically, eclipsing story. Story
asks us to listen, to understand, to stand with and draw lines of connection. In this
way, we see that the patrilineal uni-versal is but a series of ramified (mis)align-
ments and premature unities.
From here to there through this.
From you to me through this.
By turning to different reading practices, we loosen the bind of that bond a bit.
We do not try to save face in front of the baffling mysteries. We do not assume that
the newest instrument is the best instrument. We do not operate in a mode of falsi-
fication. I am not for you and I am not against you. Instead, we begin to assess an
agenda, a posture, we query unarticulated desires and sate unacknowledged needs
while running a tired finger along lines marking paths of arrival and departure.
Tired because falsifiability remains the reality of much of akademik knowledge
production. Falsifiability and verifiability, specie and doubloon of crude empiri-
cism. If you can do it here and there and elsewhere, so it is done to all. That is how
laws are made. Crude empiricism is but a market whose trades ride the promis-
sory rails of proof positive. Progress will be made. (We do indeed have a problem
of science literacy – for which we may all be STEM’d to death – but I’ll leave
that to the scientifically literate to talk about; I am addressing the deficiency in
sacred literacy. We don’t need to choose between them, we need to see where they
converge and where they complement each other.) We do not put our faith in the
breakdown because we do not use a constituent model. We try to understand how
the present configuration matters, how it might tell a story, point us in a direction,
bring a prophecy, heed a warning. If only we could learn to read again . . .
Did akademiks forget to how to read? Perhaps not. But, who and what gets read
in the contemporary uni-versity cannot be understood apart from the economy
of citations,2 itself a prosthesis of enduring heteropatriarchal masculinity. In the
mode of falsification/verification, one must first recite the genealogical ancestry
of Men quite apart from the man himself. The man’s bio+geo+mytho+graphic
location is not part of the metadata, it cannot easily be admitted. The man does
not belong everywhere, and so he stakes his claim and travels motionlessly across
an imaginary unified space, making laws for every body. Now it is flat, now it is
round. Now we are central, now we are not. I should say, since I anticipate criti-
cism for this point: I do not oppose the presence of some men in the academy,
no more than I oppose science, no more than I refute the Copernican revolution.
 Reading three ways 287
Despite all of this, my decision to take that indefinite sabbatical was hurried for-
ward by the particularly masculine insistence on taking up more space, being more
well-funded, and remaining more entrenched than everybody and everything else.
From my vantage point: It is well past time to de-masculinize the process of
knowledge production.3 Such an operation cannot be prescribed, but it can easily
be imagined. Why we must have read ‘x’ (xy) Theorist♂ to understand ‘y’ (Y?)
event-horizon? Perhaps they had something interesting to say. Perhaps they just
said what somebody else said. Maybe so. How does this situation demand our
attention, our intention, and, maybe, our reply? Let’s say that discernment grows
when turning away from economies of citation as such. Look a way! I don’t mean
to say we should institute a boy-cott – citation is also a way of paying respect, of
honoring origins, and of passing stories. It is a system of currency and so divest-
ment assumes we are also gathering in other ways, sharing ideas in other ways,
and honoring those gatherings and sharings beyond the matrix of equal value
or differential value. Though I have been separatist, I know there is also a time
and place for mutual acknowledgment. Let’s be as concerned with how, where,
and when we read the situation because our collective survival depends on redis-
covering that ability to maintain a foot in other worlds, to hold fast to intuition,
to cultivate rigorous belief, to honor collective knowing and ancient wisdom, to
assemble with clear intention. All of these modes may only be ballast against the
bleakness of the new formations of uni-versity knowledge, but still, we need them
and we need them now (see Harney and Moten, 2013). We must continuously read
differently, read more, and read better. We must get an education in spite of the
uni-versity (see Kelley, 2016).
I don’t just cite you, I see you.
I am not leasing you, I am listening to you.
I am not trading you on the marketplace of ideas, I am sitting with you.
I am not just processing your words, I am asking where you have been and how
you have reached me here.
We meet each other in the way that water meets land.
To be sighted, to be at sea; to wade from the shallows to the depth, to fear the
tide and, still, to confront what it brings ashore.
Come to the edge, one foot on the soft boundary of unblown broken glass, the
sands of understanding.
Here, we learn to read.
After all that, I returned to the swamplands and, eventually, back to North
Amerika, where the reading and ritual documented here was undertaken. This is a
reading which asks: What does the un-masking/de-masculinization of geography
look like? How can we prepare the space? I offer you some ritually produced
maps (Figures 18.3 and 18.4) documenting responses to these queries and call-
ing in various writers, thinkers, and storytellers. These maps are guides toward a
reconstructed femme-inist reading practice. They are a mutation, an adaptation,
an attempt at salvaging something from the pieces. For the tarot reading, I used
a spread called the Path of Balance, which Angeles Arrien (1997) describes as
‘an opportunity for us to see how balance is present in six areas of our nature:
288  professor dusky purples

Figure 18.3  Map of the Path of Balance reading conducted on 30 December 2016.

Source: Darren Patrick.

in our self-esteem and self-trust; in our ability to give love and extend love; in
what we are learning and teaching; in use of power and leadership; and in our
relationships’ (p. 260). I modified the reading with additional cards to aid in inter-
pretation. I used the Thoth tarot deck because of its astrological inclinations, and
in spite of its cloudy past. The tarot reading preceded and provided a framework
for the effigy ritual, which you will find documented in the photo series at the end
of this piece (Figures 18.5–18.12).
As a result of these efforts, I have been left with some visions of what I want to
call unreconstructed masculinity. Masculinity in pieces. Now that these pieces are
on the table (or, in this case, the floor): How will we decide which to keep, which
to repurpose, and which to consign to the compost bin? How will we keep read-
ing? How will we purpose reading? How will we consign ourselves to purpose?
 Reading three ways 289

Figure 18.4  Photo of the Path of Balance reading conducted on 30 December 2016.

Source: Darren Patrick.

Each piece of the ritual is, like anything worth repeating and working with
ritually, borrowed or taught in friendship, siblinghood, comradely struggle,
magick. That my sense of reading comes from elsewhere must be acknowl-
edged, even if that acknowledgment is only ever a partial reflection of how I am
still learning to read. Taken together, the reading is a testimony of my process
to re-cover and to re-lease stories. The enclosed photos were made with the
enwitching assistance of a poet and dear Spiritual SuperSheroe friend, Deidre
‘D-Lishus’ Walton, who also suggested I read the work of Joseph Roach (1996).
The subtitle – Ask Me How! – was suggested by Lauren Berlant during the
Q&A in Edinburgh.
Figure 18.5 Ritual.
Source: professor dusky purples. All quotations as attributed.

Figure 18.6 Ritual.
Source: professor dusky purples. All quotations as attributed.
Figure 18.7 Ritual.
Source: professor dusky purples. All quotations as attributed.

Figure 18.8 Ritual.
Source: professor dusky purples. All quotations as attributed.
Figure 18.9 Ritual.
Source: professor dusky purples. All quotations as attributed.

Figure 18.10 Ritual.
Source: professor dusky purples. All quotations as attributed.
Figure 18.11 Ritual.
Source: professor dusky purples. All quotations as attributed.
Figure 18.12 Ritual.
Source: professor dusky purples. All quotations as attributed.
 Reading three ways 295
The ritual itself was performed on Turtle Island, in a place that has been home
to humans for more than 10,000 years. Drawing on stories, teachings, acknowl-
edgments, and writings from indigenous educators (see for example Mehot, 2012)
and non-indigenous educators, I can tell you that the place now called Toronto
has been home to the Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations,
the Seneca, and, most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. The land
is subject to the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant between the
Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Confederacy of the Ojibwe. The covenant
is a significant referent for U.S.-Amerikan democracy, appropriated uncited. The
place where I live in Toronto used to be underwater, lending to one of the ways
it is known: ‘where the trees stood in water’ (see Bambitchell, 2015). Today, this
place is still home to many indigenous peoples from across Turtle Island, and to
refugees, settlers, and new arrivals. I have learned and been taught that living
on this land means we are all treaty people and, though we must walk our own
path, we who live here all have obligations to this land and to resurgence (Simp-
son, 2011); we who live on Earth must continuously push toward decoloniality
(Mignolo, 2000).
I offer the ritual reading, in part, as a modest expression of gratitude for the wel-
come, teaching, understanding, and friendship that I have received here; I offer
it to friends and relations who continue doing the hard work of holding on and
remaking relations. Misreads and half-steps are my own, everything else is for
you. I ask only that you take this reading and make it your own. Make your own
sense from it and, if things don’t seem headed in that direction, ask for help.
Where is that feeling which you asked to sit with you? Where has that thread led
you? All is not lost, even if we are not quite sure where it has been stowed for
safekeeping. Keep reading.
Yours in femme-inist struggle and siblinghood,
d purples/dp

Notes
1 The album, while critically panned upon release, is doubtless one of the most forward
thinking of its generation. On the cover, Sainte-Marie appears in a pose similar to the
Rider-Waite tarot’s depiction of The Magician, which is the first numbered card in the
Major Arcana.
2 This phrase comes from the SomMovimento NazioAnale [Natio-Anal Uprising]

(Acquistapace et al., 2015), a network of Italian trans*feminist-queer collectives with
which I had the immense fortune of working while in Italy.
3 This is another term/praxis I learned in Italy, from Laboratorio Smaschieramenti [Labora-
tory for De-mask-ulinization]. For more on the fate of this autonomous collective project,
see ‘#AtlantideOvunque: Statement of Solidarity for the Evicted Trans*-Feminist-
Queer-Punk Space,’ at https://atlantideresiste.noblogs.org/post/2015/10/11/atlantide
ovunque-statement-of-solidarity/ (The statement is available in Italian, French, and
English.)
296  professor dusky purples
References
Acquistapace, A., et al., 2015. Transfeminist scholars on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Feminismos, 3(1), pp. 62–70.
Arrien, A., 1997. The Tarot Handbook: Practical Applications of Ancient Visual Symbols,
New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin.
Bambitchell, 2015. Where the trees stood in water. Undercurrents, 19, pp. 62–66. Available
at: http://currents.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/currents/article/view/37295/36069.
Brand, D., 2001. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, Toronto: Vintage
Canada.
Brenner, N. ed., 2014. Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization,
Berlin: Jovis.
Federici, S., 2004. Caliban and the Witch, Brooklyn: Autonomedia.
Galeano, E., 2010. Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, New York: Nation Books.
Harney, S. and Moten, F., 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study,
Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions/Autonomedia.
Jones, G., 2015. I’ll Never Write My Memoirs, New York: Gallery Books.
Kelley, R.D.G., 2016. Black study, black struggle. Boston Review. Available at: http://
bostonreview.net/forum/robin-d-g-kelley-black-study-black-struggle [Accessed May 1,
2017].
Lefebvre, H., 2003. The Urban Revolution, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press.
McLean, H., 2016. Hos in the garden: Staging and resisting neoliberal creativity. Environ-
ment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35(1), pp. 38–56.
Mehot, S., 2012. “Toronto” is an Iroquois word. Dragonfly Consulting Services Canada.
Available at: http://dragonflycanada.ca/toronto-is-an-iroquois-word/ [Accessed May 1,
2017].
Meyer, M.A., 2001. Our own liberation: Reflections on Hawaiian epistemology. The Con-
temporary Pacific, 13(1), pp. 124–148.
Meyer, M.A., 2010. An introduction to “Indigenous Epistemology”. Available at: www.
youtube.com/watch?v=lmJJi1iBdz [Accessed May 1, 2017].
Meyer, M.A., 2014. Holographic epistemology: Native common sense. In C. Smith, ed.
Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. New York: Springer, pp. 3435–3443.
Mignolo, W., 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges,
and Border Thinking, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Povinelli, E., 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press.
Roach, J., 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, New York: Columbia
University Press.
Simpson, L., 2011. Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation,
Resurgence, and a New Emergence, Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring.
Index

Afro-Brazilian Spiritist religion 186 broadchurch 128

Alchemical Chess (Metamorphic Ritual Buddhism 54, 56 – 59, 63 – 65, 127, 173,
Theatre) 268 175 – 176, 225, 247
ancestor veneration 177 Burden, Chris 267
Anglo-Catholic churches 128
Anima 248 – 250, 251 calling 85 – 88
Anima Mundi 250 – 251, 252, 257 Candomblé 186
Anthony, Maggy 252 Catholic Church 22, 37 – 49
astral travel 241 Catholicism 39, 49, 73, 76, 127, 173, 186
astrology 281 Celestial Shroud, The (Edwards) 264
automatic writing 226, 230 Chapel of Our Lady 228
automatism 226 – 228 Choronzon Machine, The (Metamorphic
Az-Zahraa Islamic Centre 104, 111 – 112 Ritual Theatre) 268
Christianity 42, 128 – 129, 132, 234, 239
Balfour, Arthur James 208 Christians 31 – 32, 122 – 124
Bartlett, John Allen (John Alleyne) 222, Chronic Illness of Mysterious Origin III
225 – 226, 229, 230 (Edwards) 264
Bawa, Geoffrey: Lunuganga estate 62 – 64; churchgoing 120 – 121, 130
parliamentary complex 54 – 65 Church of England 37, 85, 89,
Benedictine monks 86 126 – 127, 129
Besant, Annie 208 Church of Joseph of Arimathaea 228
Black Circle, The 209 civil partnerships 45
Black Lives Matter movement 31 Collected Works (Jung) 245
blasphemy 155, 162 – 165 collective unconscious 226, 245 – 246,
Blavastky, Helena Petrovna 208 249 – 250, 256
Bolen, Jean Shinoda 245, 250, 255 Connexion 85 – 87, 89, 91, 94
Bond, Frederick Bligh 221 – 231 conversion careers 184
Boyce, Philip, Bishop of Raphoe 45 cosmology 285
Brazilian migrants: in London 172 – 179; Crossing to Avalon (Bolen) 245, 255
portable and virtual spiritualities Crowley, Aleister 209
177 – 179; religion in the home Cullinan, Phonsie, Bishop of Diocese of
168 – 169, 174 – 177 Waterford and Lismore 42
Brighton, England 135, 138 – 152
Brigid, Saint 67, 75, 79 Death Shrine (Edwards) 264, 272
British Columbia Muslim Association Death Shrine to the Holy Whore (Edwards)
(BCMA) Mosque 104, 109 264, 266
British Methodist Church: brief history Death Shrine to the Holy Whore Part 7
of 83 – 85; Connexion 85 – 87, 89, 91, (Edwards) 267
94; itinerant ministry 85 – 91; reverse Death Shrine to the Holy Whore Part 8
mission 91 – 94 (Edwards) 267
298  Index
Dee, John 207 Fraternity of Inner Light 211 – 214
Descent to the Goddess (Perera) 254 Freemasonry 207
Dharma Drum Buddhist temple 104, 112 Fujian Evangelical Church 104
disaffiliation 193 – 194
‘Divine Mind’ 211 Gardner, Gerald 209
domestic religious spaces 170 – 172, Gate of Remembrance (Bond) 226
174 – 177 geopolitical religion, 205 – 218
domestic violence 184 – 195 Glastonbury: excavations at 221 – 231;
Doran, Kevin 43 Fortune’s spiritual geography and
Douglas, Mary 264 – 266 212 – 214
Dourley, John 248, 256 Goddesses in Everywoman (Bolen) 254
Downing, Christine 245, 250, 252, 254 Goddess Feminism 251 – 255
Dr Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Goddess, The (Downing) 245, 254
Garden 112 Goldenberg, Naomi R. 245, 252 – 254
Grail myth 254
Edgar Chapel 221, 224, 227 – 228, 229 ‘Greater Memory’ 222, 224 – 225, 228
Edwards, Angela: The Celestial Shroud Great Mother, The (Neumann) 245,
264; Chronic Illness of Mysterious 251 – 252
Origin III 264; Death Shrine 264, Greek goddesses 250, 255
272; Death Shrine to the Holy Whore ‘Group Mind’ 211
264, 266; Death Shrine to the Holy ‘Group Soul’ 211
Whore Part 7 267; Death Shrine to the
Holy Whore Part 8 267; Holy Corpse Harding, Mary Esther 245, 248,
Sculptural Shrine 264; sacred pain 250 – 252, 254
rituals 264 – 267 haunting 223 – 224, 231
Eliade, Mircea 239 – 241, 266 Hawkins, Larycia 26
enchantment 115, 137 Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn 209
esoteric theatre: Angela Edwards Hess, Rudolf 209
and performance of sacred pain Highway to Heaven see Number 5 Road
264 – 267; Foolish People and Theatre Himmler, Heinrich 209
of Manifestation 262 – 264; insider Hinduism 225, 247
perspectives on ritual practice and the Hindu worship 109
rite of performance 271 – 273; issues Hitler, Adolph 209
260 – 262; Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule Holistic Healing Centre 125
and Metamorphic Ritual Theatre holographic epistemology 284
268 – 271 Holy Corpse Sculptural Shrine
evangelical churches 128 (Edwards) 264
evangelical intelligentsia: dismissal home 170 – 171, 174 – 177
proceedings against Larycia Hawkins Hove, England 135, 138 – 152
26, 30 – 34; IVCF theological position human rights 45
paper on sexuality 26 – 30 Hume, Octavian 208
Evenki (Tungus) tribes 236 – 237, 239 – 241
everyday violence 186 – 187 Icke, David 218
Indian Cultural Centre/Gurdwara Guru
family 41 – 43 Nanak Niwas 109 – 110
Feilding, Everard 227 indigenous North American peoples 238
feminism 251 – 255 individuation 246 – 248, 257
‘Feminist Critique of Jung, A’ InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF):
(Goldenberg) 252 endorsement of Black Lives Matter
Flannery, Tony, Priest 47 movement 31; theological position
Fleming, John, Bishop of Killala 41 paper on sexuality 26 – 30
Foolish People 262 – 264 Ireland: members of Catholic clergy
Fortune, Dion 210 – 217 opposing same sex marriage 40 – 45;
Francis, Pope of the Catholic Church 32 members of Catholic clergy supporting
 Index 299
same sex marriage 45 – 49; same sex love 43 – 45
marriage issues 22, 38 – 49 Lunuganga estate 62 – 64
Israelite Movement 208
itinerancy 88 – 90 ‘Magical Battle of Britain’ 211 – 217
itinerant ministry: calling 85 – 88; future of mapping 234 – 244
90 – 91; theologies of itinerancy 88 – 90 Marginalized Spiritualities project 158
marriage: Church’s ‘traditional’ view
Jung, Carl: birth of a post-Jungian Goddess of 43; constitutional definition of 41;
religion 255 – 257; Collected Works 245; heteroactivist arguments regarding
Memories, Dreams, Reflections 256; 41 – 43, 46 – 47; Irish referendum on same
Modern Man in Search of a Soul Jung sex marriage 37 – 49; purpose of 43 – 44
253; notion of Anima 248 – 250, 251; Martin, Diarmuid, Archbishop of
notion of Anima Mundi 250 – 251, 252, Dublin, 45
257; notion of collective unconscious Martin, Eamon, Archbishop of Armagh
226, 245 – 246, 249 – 250, 256; notion of and Primate of All Ireland 42
individuation 246 – 248, 257; revision of material-immaterial spirituality 206,
251 – 255; Western Goddess Movement 212 – 213, 217 – 218, 222, 230 – 231
245 – 257 McKeown, Donal, Bishop of Derry 40
Jung Cult, The (Noll) 255 Measurement of Diverse Adolescent
Jung (Rowland) 251 Spirituality (MDAS) 156
Jung’s Circle of Women (Anthony) 252 meditation 138 – 152
mediumship 237 – 238, 242 – 243
Kabbalistic mysticism 225 Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Jung) 256
Kendal Project: congregational domain memory 222, 224 – 225, 229
128 – 129; holistic milieu 124 – 126; Metamorphic Ritual Theatre: Alchemical
methods and theory 129 – 132; overview Chess 268; The Choronzon Machine
120 – 121; revisiting data and town 268; Loom of Lila 268; Orryelle
124 – 132; schools 126 – 127; street Defenestrate-Bascule and 268 – 271;
survey 121 – 124, 130 – 131 Parzival a Fool’s Journey 268; Solve et
Keown, Damien 248 Coagula 268
Kirby, John, Bishop of the Diocese of Modern Man in Search of a Soul
Clonfert 41 (Jung) 253
knowledge production 286 – 287 Morgan, Evan 209
Kristeva, Julia 266 – 267 Mormonism 127
Muslims 31 – 33
Lefebvre, Henri 97, 280, 281
lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and Queer narrative 223 – 224
(LGBTQ) persons 37 – 49 Neary, Michael 44
liminality 70 – 71, 73 – 75, 79, 270 necromancy 222, 229
Lingyen Mountain Buddhist temple 104, neo-pagan spirituality 268
110 – 111, 114, 115 Neumann, Erich 245, 251
Ling Yen Shan monastery 110 new age spirituality 135, 136, 157, 162,
List, Guido von 209 218, 264
‘lived religion’ approach 169 Number 5 Road: architectural styles of
London, England 172 – 179 religious buildings 106 – 113; creation of
Loom of Lila (Metamorphic Ritual 103 – 106; faith communities re-located
Theatre) 268 to 104; planning designation 104,
Loretto Chapel 228, 229 107 – 108; religious rituals 113 – 115;
Lough Derg (Saint Patrick’s Purgatory): suburban religious landscapes 101 – 116
aspects of pilgrimage 72 – 73;
liminality of 73 – 75, 79; origins and occult: geopolitics and 206 – 209, 211 – 212,
history of 71 – 72; pilgrimage 67 – 79; 217 – 218; intersections with Third Reich
transformation and renewal of faith 209; relation to war 208 – 209; vision of
through pilgrimage to 75 – 79 place and 223
300  Index
O’Connor, Gerry, Priest 47 190 – 192; in Latin America 185 – 187;
O’Donovan, Iggy, Priest 46, 48 maintaining confession level of
Ó Fearraigh, Brian, Curate 46 189 – 190; to Pentecostalism 187 – 195;
Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule 268 – 271 separation and 192 – 193
religious identity 124 – 126, 171
paedophile scandals 39 religious rituals 113 – 115
Paganism 127 retreat settings 137
parish churches 128 Return of the Goddess (Whitmont)
Parliament Complex, Sri Jaywardenapura 245, 254
Kotte, Sri Lanka: design for 55 – 56; reverse mission 91 – 94
location of 58; style of 58 – 59; tropical Richmond Chinese Mennonite Brethren
architectural innovations of’59 – 62 Church 104, 108
Parzival a Fool’s Journey (Metamorphic Richmond Evangelical Free Church 104,
Ritual Theatre) 268 108, 114
Patrick, Saint see Lough Derg (Saint ritual practices 208, 264 – 267, 270 – 272
Patrick’s Purgatory) Rowland, Susan 251
Peace Evangelical Church 104, 108 ruins 224 – 231
Pentecostalism: current literature on
conversion to 185 – 187; life-cycle sacred: building suburban architectures
consequences of the women’s 106 – 113; essentialization of 57;
involvement in 189 – 194; role of performance in suburban architectures
violence in religious conversion of 113 – 115; suburban geographies
women to 184 – 195 101 – 116
Perera, Sylvia Brinton 249, 254 sacred modernity 56 – 64
pilgrimages: characteristics of 68 – 69, 78; sacred pain rituals 264 – 267
as journey of transformative capacity sacrilege 158 – 161
69 – 71; Lough Derg 67 – 68, 71 – 79; same sex marriage: Church’s official
rationales for 77; transformation and stance on 43; Irish referendum on 22,
renewal of faith and 75 – 79 37 – 49; priests opposing 40 – 45; priests
pilgrims 69, 72, 78 supporting 45 – 49; refusal of Church of
places 223 – 224 England bishops 129
Plymouth Brethren Meeting Hall 104 Sanctuary City movement 15 – 16
portable spirituality 177 – 179 São Paulo, Brazil: religious conversion in
Portobello Spiritualist Church 237, 185 – 187; role of violence in religious
242, 243 conversion of women to Pentecostalism
Powers of Horror (Kristeva) 266 – 267 184 – 195
prayer 67, 70 – 73, 75 – 77, 79 secularism 54
Protestant Christianity 234, 239 Shaker practices 238
psychic archaeology 221 – 231 shamanism: as academic field of
Pure Land Taiwanese origin Buddhist enquiry 239 – 241; comparison with
temple 104 spiritualism 237; definition of 236,
239 – 240, 243 – 244; spiritualism and
Rainbow Cottage 125 234 – 244; traditions across globe
reading practices: ritual 288 – 295; tarot 237 – 239
and astrology 278 – 295 Shirokogoroff, Sergei Mikhailovich
religion: de-centering of church-like 133; 236, 240
European concept of 57 – 58, 64 – 65; shrines 171, 175 – 176
everyday life and 170 – 172; geopolitics Smith, Phil 271
and 205 – 218; in home 174 – 177; spatial Solve et Coagula (Metamorphic Ritual
approach to 171 – 172; transnational Theatre) 268
168 – 180; transnationalism and space 97
170 – 172 spectrality 222 – 224
religious conversion: at conversion level spirits 137, 171, 174, 200, 207, 226 – 227,
and problem-solving 192; disaffiliation 230 – 231, 234, 237, 240 – 241
and 193 – 194; empowerment and spiritual geopolitics 213 – 214
 Index 301
spiritualism: archaeology and 221 – 231; Theatre of Manifestation 262 – 264
comparison with shamanism 237; Thrangu Tibetan monastery 104,
public settings of demonstrations 110 – 111, 114
241; shamanism and 234 – 244; youth Thule Society 209
spirituality and 155 – 158, 160 transnational religion 168 – 180
spirituality: current research 136 – 138; Trithemius, Johannes 207
definition of 157 – 158; everyday
geographies of 101 – 102, 170 – 172; growth Umbanda 186
of 132, 135 – 136; new age 135, 136, 157, United Kingdom (UK) 37, 168 – 180
162, 218, 264; portable 177 – 179; profile
in Britain 120 – 121, 125 – 127, 133; virtual Vedic Cultural Centre 109, 110, 113
177 – 179; of youth 155 – 165 Vietnamese migrants: ancestor veneration
spiritual landscapes: Glastonbury 177; in London 172 – 179; portable and
221 – 231; at Lough Derg 71 – 78; virtual spiritualities 177 – 179; religion
spatialities of occult geopolitics in the home 168 – 169, 174 – 177; shrines
205 – 218; in Sri Lanka 59 – 62, 64 – 65; 175 – 176
suburban 101 – 116 virtual spirituality 177 – 179
spiritual practices: alternative 158; among
Brazilian and Vietnamese migrants in Walpole, Robert 207
London 168 – 180; attention to everyday Wehr, Demaris S. 253, 256
encounter and 162 – 164; migrants’ Wesley, Charles 83 – 84, 90, 94
everyday 168 – 180; Number 5 Road Wesley, John 83 – 85, 90, 93, 94
103, 113 – 115; of sacrilege 158 – 162; western esotericism 273n2
yogic/meditative practice 138 – 152 Western Goddess Movement 245 – 257
Sri Lanka: first parliament building 58; Wheaton College 30 – 34
Lunuganga estate 62 – 64; parliamentary Whitmont, E. C. 245, 252, 254
complex 54 – 65; religion in 54, 57, 59; Wiligut, Karl Maria 209
secularism in 54, 56 Williams, Raymond 56
stability 86 Woman’s Mysteries (Harding) 251
Standún, Pádraig, Priest 48 Wotanism 209
state actors 15 – 16
Staveley Natural Health Centre 125 yogic/meditative practice: beginning
stillness 137 the class 140 – 144; during the class
Subramaniya Swamy temple 104, 113 – 114 144 – 147; leaving the class 147 – 151;
suburban religious landscapes 101 – 116 space-time diary-keeping methodology
supernatural truths 33 – 34 138 – 140, 151
youth spirituality: accounting for
Taoism 247 156 – 158; encounter 162 – 164;
tarot 281 sacrilege 158 – 161