Introducing the core themes of this book entails recognition of the complex and contested nature not only of the comparisons involved but also of the practice of comparison itself. Paul C. Johnson’s coinage of the term “indigenizing” is tested in the main chapters of the volume for its applicability and value in relation to religious movements in Europe. The term is part of a continuum, at the opposite end to “extending” or “universalizing” and Johnson deployed it to advance understanding of Indigenous movements and cultures in the Caribbean and South America. The possibility that it works for other religious movements, and once that are not “Indigenous” in Johnson’s sense, is debated here. Thus, the comparative categories “World”, “New” and “Indigenous” are introduced – and challenged.

This chapter explores the ways in which contemporary Pagans in Ireland engage with traditional culture, as well as with notions of the Celtic, in forming identities that are regarded by some practitioners as being indigenous identities. Drawing from ethnographic research into Irish Pagan beliefs, practices and worldview, this examination will include examples of rituals and other activities that modern Pagans utilise in order to connect to ancient European ancestral cultures as well as specifically to the traditional culture of pre-modern Ireland. Pagan culture reflects a desire to restore older spiritual traditions, particularly pre-Christian ones, and Pagans are known for combining disparate cultural elements in unique and novel ways. The sources that Pagans draw from for information and inspiration are examined, including the ancient myths recorded in medieval times (in the Irish context), archaeological sources, and antiquarian folklore collections of the eighteenth and nineteenth century; all of these resources are used to garner information about native Irish cosmology and lifeworlds and also inspiration for a new type of Irish indigeneity. This analysis includes a detailing of some of the ways in which Pagans innovatively utilise Celtic and pre-Celtic symbols, as well as Irish myth and folklore, in creating rituals, artwork and material culture. Also explored is the relationship between modern Irish Pagans and magical practices understood as native tradition, especially in relation to the Sídh (fairies) of popular belief which has strong roots in the traditional Irish context. In claiming a lineage to ancestral cultures now shrouded in the mists of time, modern Paganism in Ireland involves an interesting re-contextualisation of tradition. Folk religious customs and native Irish cosmology are reinterpreted in a new milieu. This chapter will provide an overview of the processes by which Pagans employ tradition in constructing their ‘indigenous’ identities and to communicate why this inventive creation of new Pagan traditions is culturally significant in the Irish context.

Reception of academic debates about animism have led to an increase in the number of people who self-identify as “animists”. This is part of the diversification of contemporary Pagan identities, practices and self-understandings. As many Pagans seek to promote a universal or global vision of their religion, several new “animist networks” explore an indigenising trajectory. In the UK, the Bear Tribe is one of these experimental groups. The “tribe” was set up in 2007 after the founders had read several academic publications concerned with the “new animism” (i.e. ontologies in which the world is treated as communities of persons, most of whom are other-than-human persons). Although there are no “wild” bears in the UK, the Bear Tribe founders proposed that a yearly ritual of “compassionate gratitude” towards all sources of food (“food persons” perhaps) could make creative use of pan- Arctic and sub-Arctic bear hunt and feast myths and rituals. They collected songs and ritual repertoires from ethnographies about diverse nations (including Ainu, Anishinaabeg and Sámi) along with folklores from Britain, Finland and elsewhere to form a resource for ritual improvisation. They identified a location in southern England in which the first few annual Bear Feasts could be held in relative privacy and comfort at midwinter. The location also enabled them to source venison from local red deer herds as well as organic vegetables (enabling people with diverse diets to participate). The Feasts proved a success and a “neo-tribe” has developed, including with a closed Facebook group. Midwinter Bear Feasts are now held at a number of venues across Britain, from the Orkney islands to England’s south coast. While there are pragmatic reasons for this (easing travel in midwinter), the proliferation of venues is also ideologically motivated as an element of the strong localising / indigenising commitments of participants. This chapter will outline the ideas and activities of the group. It will consider the tension between a desire to promote a potentially global message (“respect those you eat”) and a commitment to localism or regionalism. Tensions between learning from others and the danger of appropriation are similarly evident. One distinctive theme raised by the Bear Tribe experiment is the effort to revitalise the doing of ritual after 500 years of denigration of ritual as “vain / meaningless repetition” in Britain and other Protestant Christian influenced countries. Thus, this animist movement provides scholars of religion with valuable resources with which to explore a range of critically important themes of current interest: ontology, indigeneity, embodiment, consumption, appropriation, globalisation and creativity but, above all, indigenising.

The Glastonbury Goddess religion in the South West of England began in the 1990’s by a small group of women dedicated to reviving the Goddess of the land surrounding Glastonbury, interpreting and revitalising myths and legends in relation to her, and reclaiming the Goddess as their own after centuries of male Christian dominated religion. Much of this ‘reclaiming’ has been done through loud and colourful presences such as processions, ritual creativity where goddesses are claimed at significant wells and springs, and the exclusive use of willow that is indigenous to the land around Glastonbury to make the statues of the Goddess. Hugely successful, the group have constructed what they claim to be the first Goddess Temple dedicated to the indigenous goddess of Glastonbury in over 1500 years. Currently, people come from all over the world to be trained as priestesses at the Goddess Temple where they are encouraged to take their Goddess training back to their particular locale and set up temples in honour of their local goddesses. Thus this chapter will argue that territorialisation, or ‘re-territorialisation’ as one of the main strategies for indigenizing the Goddess, is carried out through the use and development of Glastonbury Goddess material cultures, as well as international Goddess training programmes. Prompting the reclamation of ancestral indigenous traditions all over the world, the Glastonbury Goddess religion is having global reach.

This chapter will begin by asking if ‘indigenous’, associated as it is with ‘colonised peoples’, is being employed strategically by Druids in Britain to support cultural or political aims. Prominent Druids make various claims to indigeneity, presenting Druidry as the pre-Christian religion of the British Isles and that it originated there. By ‘religion’ it also assumes it was a culture equal to if not superior to Christianity – similar to views of antiquarians in earlier centuries who idealised a pre-Christian culture equal to ancient Greece. Although British Druids refute the nationalist tag, and make efforts to root out those tendencies, it can be argued that it is a love of the land rather than the country per se that drives indigeneity discourses in British Druidry.

Paul Johnson suggests in his article ‘Migrating Bodies, Circulating Signs,’ that the “identifying practices of indigenousness… are imagined through global media and often expressed in their forms” (2005: 65). And nowhere is this more the case than with a specific group of Europeans who find a form of Indigeneity through interactions with North American Indian spiritual lifeways, typically mediated via the global media; European Powwow enthusiasts – individuals who, put simply, dress-up and dance as Plains American Indians in Powwow-style events. Powwows are essentially highly symbolic North American Indian ceremonial social gatherings with spiritual elements. Although their roots lie with the Plains and Prairie peoples of North America, powwows have become a pan-Indian phenomenon, a dynamic and evolving tradition that features singing and dance. Powwows act as an opportunity for North American Indian peoples to honour their cultures and heritages, and powwowing now stands as a major signifier of Indianness for both North American Indian people, and the wider populace. The predominantly White-Western pursuit of dressing, dancing and ritualising as a North American Indian, although not a mass activity is one to be found in North America, Canada, Australia, Japan, the former USSR, and across large stretches of Europe with regular gatherings in England, Germany, Denmark, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. Although not all Powwow enthusiasts seek to identify as Native American, that they experiment with Indigeneity is beyond question. This chapter seeks firstly to explore in brief, the long history of global media representations of North American Indians and their spiritual lifeways, that allowed, and continue to allow, Europeans to take on aspects of the Indian Indigenousness, and secondly to examine how Johnson’s processes of Extension and Indigenizing, can be applied to European Powwow enthusiasts own processes of locating themselves within a form of Indigeneity.

From the very birth of the term, Strega (‘Witch) is used with a negative connotation to describe women with powers aimed at harming people. Strega has its etymological origin in the Latin Strix, the owl believed to feed on human blood. Pop culture, books and media alike, also portrayed the witch as an evil character to the point where it became common parlance to address a person deemed evil as a witch. In the last three decades, with the popularisation of Paganism and Wicca, the term has been reclaimed and somehow sanitised by Pagans who neutrally describe this figure as someone who has the ability to change reality in accordance with the will. In more recent years, with the spread of Shamanism, more practitioners start to either renounce the term witch in favour of Sciamano/sciamana (‘Shaman’) or use them both to define themselves. By analysing the discourse that practitioners create around the use of the terms ‘witch’ and ‘shaman’, I will illustrate the differences between the two and the possible reasons as to why ‘shaman’ appears to be increasingly favoured. For instance, Shamanism is not considered a Religion and hence has no contrast nor a history of antagonism with the Catholic church as Witchcraft does. Shamanism is also believed to be more connected to Nature and to be freer of rituals, tools and rigid ceremonies than Witchcraft. An inner contradiction is also disclosed as, despite the fact that Shamanism is commonly interrelated with the indigenous cultural framework, Italian practitioners appear to favour forms of trans-cultural Shamanisms over their own autochthonous traditions.

The chapter presents research into the implementation of environmental and spiritual ideas of alternative communitarian movements through the establishment of quickly spreading nature-based spirituality communities and their settlements in the post-Soviet region. It also studies current socioreligious processes, discussing diverse manifestations and changes of religious phenomena concerning individual religiosities in (trans)national and (trans)regional levels. The chapter focuses on the Anastasia “spiritual” movement, classifiable as New Age, which emerged in Russia in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and since has spread to East-Central Europe and beyond. It concerns particularities and expressions of nationalistic and traditionalistic ideas in the movement. I will discuss how a process of Anastasian negotiation, interpretation and presentation of nationalistic and traditionalistic ideas serve as a basis for a visualization of (trans)local prehistoric and local national pasts, nationalistic moods and attempts to reconstruct variously perceived tradition, as well as a development of utopian visions of prospective heaven on Earth – intended to spread widely in future social projects. One part of the research has been focused on the relative importance of social and ideological contexts in the construction of the alternative religious identities of Anastasians. The chapter also explores the meaning of religious identity and how it influences – and is influenced by – local and global cultures ultimately producing a religious subculture. Particular attention is given to the role of these dynamics in the development of post-Soviet cultural heritage in Eastern Europe and in the communication of Western cultural influences on the religiosity in the region. Findings are based on data obtained from the fieldwork in 2005–2017, including participant observation research and interviews with respondents in the Baltic countries, Russia, and Ukraine.

Romanticisms, not colonialisms, drive the indigenizing and the religionizing in the cases described and analyzed in this special issue. In what follows, I shall explain what I mean by thisobservation and suggest ways to think about it critically. The task of this essay is to highlight entangled methodological and political contexts for the discussion about ‘indigenizing’that Graham Harvey opened in his introduction, a discussion that the different case studies then continued and exemplified. Inspired by Paul Christopher Johnson’s theorizing about indigenizing (Johnson 2002a), Harvey asks whether it is useful to employ the concepts ‘indigenous’ and ‘indigenizing’ in studies of contemporary movements in Europe: British Druids (studied by Suzanne Owen), Italian shamans and witches (by Angela Puca), The English Bear Tribe (by Graham Harvey), Irish or Celtic Pagans (by Jenny Butler), English Powwow enthusiasts (by Christina Welch), Anastasians in Lithuania and Russia (by Rasa Pranskevičiūtė), and Goddess devotees in Glastonbury (by Amy Whitehead). These are movements (and scholars) that have been associated with the study of paganisms and the study of new religious movements, but usually not with the study of indigenous religions (except Harvey and Owen who have worked extensively in both fields of research).

Since the mid-twentieth century, religious movements identifying themselves as Paganism, shamanism, native faiths and others have experimented with two forms of indigeneity. One arises from claims to be reviving or re-presenting previously hidden religious practices from ancestral or pre-Christian times. The other form of indigeneity is found in lessons learnt (directly or indirectly) from Indigenous peoples (especially Native Americans and/or Siberians). In the last decade in particular these two trends have sometimes fused in what we call “indigenizing movements”. This book tests the interpretive and methodological value of this. “Indigenizing” was coined by Paul C. Johnson in a discussion of lowland South American and Caribbean religious traditions as the opposite end of a continuum from “universalizing”. The continuum recognises tendencies to emphasise resonance with and relevance to local and ancestral traditions (indigenizing) and tendencies to stress universality or global engagement. These need not be dualistically opposed and are most likely to be matters of stress. Those who conceive of themselves and their cultures as maintaining and enhancing discrete ethnic, cultural or religious communities may represent one trajectory. Others not only assert that they have something to say to the rest of the world but may also seek to revise “local ancestral” traditions in the light of more global traditions. We might recognise a tension here between “Indigenous” and “World” religions but the contributors to this volume contest the value of that categorisation of what are, in reality, more dynamic and fluid realities. The chapters test a differently conceived tension: that between indigenizing and universalizing. This experimentation is propelled by examining European originated movements in which engagements with Indigenous animistic, shamanistic or “nature venerating” traditions are employed in self-conceptions and in the discourses of identity formation, maintenance and dissemination. Seven main chapters test aspects of our key theme by focusing on specific movements or phenomena. These are followed by a responsive afterword considering the effects of applying a notion coined for the critical examination of Indigenous South American and Caribbean religions to the different context of European movements. The book aims to enhance understanding and enrich debate not only about evolving European movements but also about the concept and practice of Indigeneity, indigenizing and of scholarly practices in relation to such phenomena.