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 when they appropriate the Burning Times mythology. Call it patriarchy, bureaucracy, capitalism, or whichever label one prefers, it represents the forced assimilation of individuals into an economy that circumscribes meaningful dissent and individual difference.

Conclusion: The Possibility of Wiccan Community

[20] The creation of this type of alternative community, one that resists the pressures to normalize behavior and institutionalize forms, remains an idealistic process, however, as Sarah Pike’s work on Neo-Pagan festivals demonstrates. The temptation always exists to reify the movement into a “PC Paganism,” or an externally imposed morality that undermines the delicate process of negotiating an ethics of community between free subjects. For Pike, the difficult demands of festival life often conflict with mundane reality and the tendency to form clandestine elites, leaving the process incomplete (Pike: 51-56). Pike’s Foucauldian archaeology of power within Neo-Pagan festivals reveals that the ideals are far from the deployed practices, as she points out with debates over drumming and routine groundskeeping. Pike’s research, however, may help Neo-Pagans approximate the ideal, as it encourages a re-assessment of certain qualities Neo-Pagans take for granted, like egalitarianism. By constantly rooting out vestiges of objectified power, one might yet approach a polity that emanates from free individuals, a limit condition re-negotiated in every moment across time and space not allowing for the development of harmful absolutes. In this sense it is even more like Foucault’s articulation of a selftransformation that ends only at death. Wicca, like many other contemporary spiritual movements, constantly encourages new opportunities for self-transformation. Taken this way, the Burning Times mythology reads not as a crippling apologia for victimization, as some critics charge, but as a manifesto for growth.

[21] Power, however, must remain flowing, never allowed to reify into new orthodoxies. Wiccans describe power as something emanating from the Earth and all its occupants, both organic and inorganic. The witch is one who channels and directs this power, bending and directing energy through acts of will. But unlike the Hegelian subject as discussed in Foucault’s The Order of Things, the idealized witch’s body does not represent the center of the universe or the locus of power discourse. Wiccans seek to re-initiate alternative power relations. Admittedly, however, this is a difficult and dangerous process, but nevertheless one of which Wiccan writers are well-aware.

[22] Wiccan author and activist Starhawk describes this condition, quoting a close friend, Lauren, who summarizes both the opportunities and dangers the mythology provides:


 * The torture stories and the rage come from the dark. But if you retell the horror without creating the dark anew, you feed it. You do not break the mold. We need to dream the dark as process, and dream the dark as change, to create the dark in a new image, because the dark creates us (Starhawk: xxviii).

Bibliography

Adler, Margot
 * 1986Drawing Down the Moon. Boston: Beacon.

Journal of Religion & Society