Meet Your Neighborhood Neopagan
John Seel
October 1, 1997
With the Gaia ponderings of Lilith Fair and the post-apocalyptic blow-up of the Burning Man festival in the desert of Nevada, the summer of 1997 seemed to suggest that Neopaganism had reached a cultural critical mass. America, having longed viewed itself as a "Christian nation," showed signs that it was decidedly not. With its moral compass adrift, and its cultural North Star no longer fixed upon Puritan or Enlightenment foundations, America seems to be searching for something spiritual it can sink its teeth into. Among the most hungry are its youth, a growing number of whom are finding in Neopaganism a spiritual home attuned to their way of thinking. Offering a spiritual outlet in keeping with the Zeitgeist of a postmodern and post-Christian America, Neopaganism is not only culturally plausible—it is "cool."
At Lilith Fair, this summer's most talked-about musical event, concert organizer and singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan played her current hit single, "Building a Mystery," whose lyrics speak of being in love with a man involved in a Goth/Rastafarian variant of Neopaganism:
You come out at night
That's when the energy comes
And the dark side's light
And the vampires roam
You strut your rasta wear
And your suicide poem
And a cross from a faith that died
Before Jesus came
You're building a mystery.
Many adolescents are setting out on a quest to resacralize their world—to restore a sense of mystery after the disenchantment of modernity. Disenchantment occurs, Max Weber explains, when "there are no mysterious forces that come into play, but rather when one can, in principle, master all things by calculation." Norman Lear laments, "We have become a numbers-oriented culture that puts more faith in what we can see, touch, ...
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