International Review of Sociology—Revue Internationale de Sociologie, Vol. 11, No. 3, 2001
The Religious Meaning of Space and Time: South and
Southeast Asia and Modern Paganism
GEOFFREY SAMUEL
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia
Introduction
While the societies of South and Southeast Asia, like those of Europe, have
undergone dramatic processes of modernization, these processes began later
than they did in Europe, and took a different course. This is particularly noticeable in relation to the traditional cultural and religious meanings of space and
time, which are only gradually succumbing to the universalizing forces of television, cinema and the other mass media.1
The network of sacred sites, holy wells and pilgrimage places characteristic
of Western Europe in the mediaeval period lost much of its meaning during
and after the Reformation, particularly in regions where Protestant Christianity prevailed. So did the elaborate cycle of calendrical rituals and festivals
through which the church year was given local meaning in the various towns
and villages of mediaeval Europe (e.g. Hutton, 1996 for the British Isles). This
was a long and gradual process, but it was perhaps rendered inevitable by the
progressive withdrawal of the Church from secular and pragmatic concerns.
Thus while Christian rituals and sacraments were widely used for pragmatic
and this-worldly purposes in 12th–13th centur y England, particularly for
healing and protection against supernatural danger, such practices had
largely disappeared from England by the 18th century (Thomas, 1997).2 In
the process, the shrines and holy places, which in England had anyway been
largely destroyed in the 16th and 17th centuries, lost most of their residual
meaning. The transition to an industrial society similarly undermined the
foundation of traditional agricultural practices on which the calendrical cycle
was built.
In Christian Europe, the religious meaning of space and time was conceived
of, formally at least, in Christian terms, with locations, relics and calendrical
festivals associated with Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the Christian saints. In traditional agricultural societies elsewhere one could Ž nd, and often can still Ž nd
today, closely parallel conceptions expressed through different sets of symbols.
This is certainly the case in South and Southeast Asian societies, where the
religious meaning of space and time still retains many elements of these traditional patterns. In the South and Southeast Asian context, signiŽ cant places
are typically associated with holy men and women or supernatural beings of
Hindu, Buddhist or Islamic traditions, including the tombs of SuŽ holy men
and the relics of the Buddha and Buddhist saints. Calendrical festivals may
ISSN 0390-6701 print/1489-9273 online/01/030395-24
© 2001 University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’
DOI: 10.1080/03906700120104999
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be linked to events from Buddhist, Hindu or Muslim history, legend and
mythology. As was no doubt the case in Christian Europe as well, much of this
material is however local in nature and only tenuously linked to the mythology
and symbology of the formal religious tradition. In the main body of this
article, I shall demonstrate and exemplify these concepts of space and time
through a series of case studies drawn from the Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim
societies of South and Southeast Asia.
In contemporary Europe, we can undoubtedly see signs of nostalgia towards
a society so closely grounded in place and time. We can also Ž nd conscious
attempts to recreate something of this linkage between human life and the
physical and natural environment within which it takes place and on which it
still ultimately depends. In the closing sections of this article, I discuss contemporary Paganism, a growing movement within the UK, North America,
Northern and Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand which is claimed
by many of its proponents to be a religion grounded in the natural world and
in the cycles of the seasons. I shall ask how far contemporary Pagans have succeeded in re-establishing a sense of the religious meaning of space and time.
How do their efforts compare with religious traditions which can plausibly
claim to have developed an organic relationship with nature and its cycles over
many thousands of years?
Space and Time in South and Southeast Asian Religions
When looking at religious conceptions of space and time in South and Southeast Asia, a primary emphasis on the textual and philosophical traditions of
Hinduism and Buddhism is not necessarily helpful. My focus will be rather on
space and time as part of the lived realities of South and Southeast Asian
peoples. For the vast majority of the population, Hindu and Buddhist textual
and philosophical understandings have only tangential relationships to those
lived realities. Even Brahmin or Buddhist monastic scholars grow up in a
society whose spatial and temporal conceptions are grounded in other and
more immediate matters. Among these, in particular, are the physical
environment within which they live, spatially differentiated in terms of its uses
for habitation and agriculture, and the ongoing cycle of the year, also closely
tied to the agricultural cycle on which human life depends. To these one
could add the speciŽ cally human experience of childhood, maturation,
ageing and death, with its biological and social concomitants of family and
parenthood. 3
‘South and Southeast Asian peoples’ needs a little qualifying. I am concerned primarily with the majority populations of the South and mainland
Southeast Asian region. These are still for the most part agriculturalists living
for the most part in lowland areas, along river valleys and in  ood plains. They
grow rice, or in some areas millet or wheat, through intensive irrigation techniques. They have been historically integrated into the Buddhist, Hindu and
later Islamic states of South and Southeast Asia. The highland peoples, often
culturally quite distinct and frequently labelled ‘tribal’, especially in South
Asia, are not directly part of my picture, nor are areas such as most of modern
Vietnam which are in cultural terms more part of East Asia.
Space, then, for the peoples of South and Southeast Asia as deŽ ned here,
has an immediate and material basis in subsistence technology. Yet space of all
Religious Meaning of Space and Time
397
kinds, from parts of houses to villages and the wider environment also has
religious meaning. Anyone familiar with South and Southeast Asia will be
aware that religious meaning is inscribed onto the physical environment at all
levels, from shrines, simple or elaborate, within village houses, through
shrines, temples, or sacred trees in the village, to local and regional places
which are centres of supernatural power, positive or negative.
At the apex of this process are the major temples and shrines that serve as
regional places of pilgrimage. Such places have by now all been incorporated
into the major religious traditions of South and Southeast Asia, and have
ofŽ cial identities as Hindu, Buddhist or Islamic, sometimes Sikh, Jain or Christian sites. Even today, however, they are only partially deŽ ned by their ofŽ cial
contemporar y religious identities. The dominance of Brahmanical religion, of
what was eventually to become ‘Hinduism’, was achieved slowly throughout
South and Southeast Asia, and was never complete. Nor did those other Asian
religions, the Buddhist and Jain traditions, which derived from renunciate traditions opposed to Brahmanical dominance, achieve a more total hegemony
in the areas where they came to dominate. Both Brahmanical religion and the
Buddhist and Jain traditions were throughout contested by and had to come
to terms with locally based forms of religion. The same is true for all other premodern South and Southeast Asian religious traditions, including the local
versions of Islam and Christianity.
Local spiritual forces, and local modes of access to them, remain vital parts
of the ongoing religious life of South and Southeast Asia, assimilated to varying
degrees to the ofŽ cial traditions. If their presence in our histories of Asian
religions is marginal, indeed often barely visible, much of this is because
Western scholars have always tended to get on best with indigenous scholars—
whether Brahmins, Buddhist bhikkhus or lamas, or other local literati—and to
accept their versions of what their religions and societies are about. These
people speak our language, metaphorically at least—they have texts, philosophies, histories—and of course what they have to tell us is both fascinating and
informative. But it is not the whole stor y, and over-reliance on it can easily lead
us into some ver y dubious models. This problem was perhaps summed up in
the famous response of Gerald Berreman’s untouchable informants, when he
told them a version of Louis Dumont’s theory of Indian society: ‘You’ve been
talking to Brahmins’ (Berreman, 1971).
The idea of a common earth-centred basis to South and Southeast Asian
religion is not a new one. It was suggested many years ago by the great French
Indologist Paul Mus, who argued for a common religious substrate throughout South and Southeast Asia centred on deities of the soil, local manifestations of the energies of the earth (Mus, 1975; Wijeyewardene, 1986; Metcalf,
1993). Mus held that Vedic religion, early Brahmanism, mature Hinduism
and Buddhism were all accompanied by and existed in relation to this religion
of the soil, which was essentially the same throughout South and Southeast
Asia.
While I shall not engage in detail with Mus’s work here, he undoubtedly had
a point. There are striking commonalities to much of this material throughout
South and Southeast Asia, although there are also noticeable contrasts and
local vocabularies for dealing with the spirit world. In the following section I
want to sketch and exemplify some features of this common religious substrate
as it has existed in recent times through both space and time.
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The Religious Meaning of Space in South and Southeast Asia
In spatial terms, the common religious substrate can be seen as existing at
several levels, corresponding to centres of varying degrees of geographical
in uence. At the highest level are major shrines and religious centres such as
Puri, Varanasi, Tirupati, Bodhgaya or Ajmer in India or Kataragama in Sri
Lanka, whose in uence extends over vast areas, and to which hundreds of
thousands or even millions of pilgrims come annually, often from great distances. Often focused on a sacred river or other conspicuous geographical
feature, some of these places have probably been centres of human veneration
for many thousands of years. Other shrines are signiŽ cant for smaller regions,
others for a single village or a few neighbouring villages. At the most local level,
most households in South Asia have at least some kind of internal shrine or
altar.
The highest level centres tend, on the whole, to be relatively strongly integrated into the ofŽ cial tradition, but what is perhaps surprising is the extent
to which they nevertheless retain traces of local identity and non-ofŽ cial
religious forms. To give a few examples, I will take a brief look at four wellknown hill-shrines in South and Southeast Asia: one Hindu, one Vajrayana
Buddhist, one Theravada Buddhist, and one Muslim.
I start with the hilltop temple of the Hindu deity Murugan at Palani in Tamil
Nadu. This is the most important of a series of six shrines of Murugan, all
apparently ver y ancient, and mostly associated with hills. Murugan or Subrahmanya is generally regarded as a pre-Hindu Tamil deity who was identiŽ ed
after the arrival of Brahmanical religion in South India with Karttikeya
(Skanda), the son of Siva (Clothey, 1978).
The principal image in the temple at Palani is of Murugan as an ascetic,
holding a staff as his weapon, and called Sri Dandayudhapani. It is held to have
been compounded out of nine poisonous substances (navapashana) by the
famous Tamil siddha Bogar. A siddha, like a rishi, is a kind of holy man; speciŽ cally he is someone who is held to have attained supernatural powers or siddhi
through Tantric practice. Tibetan Buddhist, Jain and northern Indian traditions all have lists of 84 great siddhas, with extensive overlaps between the
lists. There is a separate South Indian siddha tradition of which Bogar is held
to be one of the originators, and it is connected to a living tradition of siddha
medicine in South India. Bogar’s dates are unclear, though if there was a Bogar
who was historically associated with the Dandayudhapani image at the Palani
shrine, he was perhaps a more recent Ž gure of the same name, dating from
the 17th century (Venkatraman, 1990; Das, 1991).
Bogar incidentally is said either to have travelled to China or actually to have
come from China, and he has been cited as evidence for possible Chinese
origins for the internal yogic practices of Indian Tantra (White, 1996). At any
rate he attained the siddhi of long life—or maybe it was the Taoist magical
accomplishment of immortality—and rather than dying, disappeared into a
hole in the hill, where he remains to this day. His shrine or samadhi consists of
a number of small rooms built into the corner of the courtyard surrounding
the temple. The famous image made out of the nine poisonous substances is
given regular abhiseka with a wide variety of materials, including oil, rice
powder, milk and honey, ash, rose water and sandalwood paste, and the materials which have come into contact with the image become medically effective.
Religious Meaning of Space and Time
399
Visitors to the shrine buy and take away these healing substances. Like, in fact,
almost all major Indian temples, Palani is a location for practical, ever yday
religion. Many visits to this, as to all such places, are made in response to successful vows for the help of the deity (or saint, in the case of Muslim shrines)
in pragmatic, ever yday affairs.
Palani is not visited only by Hindus. It is also patronized by Muslims, who
apparently have a separate location at the rear of the shrine where they regularly worship. This is not an unusual feature, although in recent years the
nationalistic politics of contemporary South Asian societies has led to the
separation of people of different religious afŽ liations who formerly lived alongside each other. Another famous Murugan shrine, at Kataragama in Sri Lanka,
though apparently Tamil Hindu in its origins, has been largely taken over by
Theravada Buddhists, and is also extensively patronized by Christians and
Muslims as well as Hindus (Gombrich and Obeyesekere, 1988).
The stor y of the sage who disappears into the hill, but is still alive, may
remind the reader of European mythology, but also of another Asian hillshrine better known to Westerners: Swayambhunath, just outside Kathmandu
in the Nepal Valley. Swayambhu, as its name implies, was ‘self-created’: it came
into being as a miraculous and radiant lotus which emerged from the lake
under which the Kathmandu Valley was originally submerged. Then another
siddha, Santikar Acar ya, the legendary originator of the Vajracar ya tradition of
Tantric Buddhism in the Nepal Valley, buried the magic light under a stone
slab and built the stupa on top. Santikar, like Bogar, had achieved the siddhi
of long life, and he still lives in a secret underground chamber within a building on the hill of Swayambhu known as Santipur. Like many of these holy men
and women, he had power over rain, and a well-known story tells how the
Newar king Pratap Malla entered the chamber in 1658 during a prolonged and
severe drought to retrieve a magical diagram written by Santikar and so bring
the drought to an end (Slusser, 1982; Brinkhaus, 1993).
Swayambhu is ofŽ cially a Buddhist site, but it is fully integrated into the
complex mixture of Hindu, Buddhist and local practices which make up the
religion of the Newar people of the Kathmandu valley. One of the most important places on the hill in terms of practical religion is the temple of the goddess
Hariti or Ajima, who has special responsibility for childbirth and women’s
health and is linked to a still-active tradition of women healers (Iltis, 1995;
Merz, 1996). She has been associated with Buddhism for many centuries, and
a myth describes her as another demoness converted by the Buddha from
destructive to healing purposes.
Moving to the Buddhist society of Thailand, we Ž nd another hilltop shrine
with strikingly similar features. Doi Suthep overlooks and, in Gehan Wijeyewardene’s words, ‘dominates the physical and mystical lives of the people of
Chiangmai city’ in northern Thailand. Here again the chief attraction is a
Buddhist stupa, enshrining some hairs of the Buddha, who is believed to have
visited the area, but the hill is named after another magical Ž gure with power
over the rain, the rishi Suthep (in Sanksrit, Vasudeva). The myth of the rishi
Suthep credits him with the foundation of the city of Chiangmai and with the
inauguration of the Ž rst local ruling dynasty. Suthep was the child of two local
demons who were tamed by the Buddha but still receive regular buffalo
sacriŽ ces from the people of Chiangmai, sacriŽ ces which are linked to the
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recurrence of the rains at the proper times (Swearer, 1976; Wijeyewardene,
1986; Rhum, 1987).
A Ž nal example of a hilltop shrine is Muslim. This shrine, or dargah of the
Muslim pir or holy man Pir Badr is back in South Asia, at the summit of a hill
which now forms part of the city of Chittagong in Bangladesh. Badr is believed
to have arrived in Chittagong  oating on a rock which you can still see in a
glass case in his shrine. He lit a lamp on the hilltop where his shrine is now
situated, and its light drove out the jinn, the evil spirits then infesting the neighbourhood, so enabling the establishment of Islam in the region. The myth is
typical of myths of major Muslim shrines in South and Southeast Asia, including, for example, those of Java. The shrines themselves almost always centre
around the tomb of the pir, and the pir’s intervention is called on for healing
and other pragmatic purposes in much the same way as that of the Hindu
deities or the powers at the Buddhist shrine. Pir Badr is strongly associated with
water and the sea and particularly invoked by sailors and Ž shermen. In the
1920s there were apparently still shrines to Pir Badr, who viewed by the Muslims
as a saint, Buddhists as a nat, by the Hindus as a deva and by the Chinese as a
spirit, all the way down the Burmese coast into peninsular Malaysia. Asim Roy
gives a version of the legend of the pir according to which he married the
(apparently Hindu) Emperor of Delhi’s daughter and went off into the woods
with her where they eluded their pursuers by transforming into the Hindu
deities Ram and Sita (Roy, 1983).
These myths of siddha, rishis and pir, demons and asura are a small selection
from a large number of narratives, and the religious ambiguity I have noted is
a feature of quite a few of them, with the holy men involved often showing a
marked reluctance to be characterized as Hindu, Muslim or Buddhist. One can
view such stories as the product of ‘syncretism’, or of Hindu in uence on
Muslims, but it is more helpful, I think, to see them in terms of an underlying
religious consciousness which was never fully absorbed by the ofŽ cial religious
structures of Hinduism, Buddhism or Islam.
Of course, the stories as we have them have usually been transmitted by
orthodox scholars, and there is a sense in which we are looking for traces of
other meanings in stories which have been often heavily reworked in Brahmanical or Buddhist terms. Yet there are often traces of what seem to be much
older elements. Thus stories which explain the formation and shaping of the
landscape in terms of myths of heroic founding ancestral Ž gures with superhuman powers are found around the world, from the Aboriginal dreaming
stories to the Dindshenchas narratives of Celtic Ireland. The main South Indian
legend of this kind is the stor y of Agastya, who was responsible for shaping
much of the South Indian landscape, being directly or indirectly involved in
the creation of hills, mountains and rivers throughout the region. These
include the Sivagiri hill at Palani on which the Murugan temple is built, and
the Kaveri and Tamravarnia rivers (Ghurye, 1977; Mitchiner, 1982; Das, 1991).
Agastya is a supposedly Vedic sage, and is associated with the introduction of
Brahmanical culture into the south, but he is also held to be responsible for
the institution of learning and scholarship in the Tamil language. He should
perhaps be interpreted more as a Sanskritic transformation of a general founding Ž gure, parallel to, for example, Padmasambhava (Guru Rinpoche) in
Tibet, than as an ideological statement about Brahmanical supremacy.
So far I have been talking about one end of the spectrum of local religion:
Religious Meaning of Space and Time
401
the major regional pilgrimage and cult centres. We could summarize the
pattern here: there are powers in the landscape or the environment with whom
enduring relationships are set up at shrines and holy places for pragmatic purposes: healing, maintenance of appropriate weather for agriculture, a variety
of other everyday aims. These relationships coexist with var ying degrees of ease
with functions more related to state religion, which are centred around major
Brahmanical deities and more ‘ofŽ cial’ constructions of Buddhism or Islam.
This is, as I said, one end of the spectrum. It needs to be extended through a
consideration of a more local and immediate level.
This local level is made up partly of more minor shrines, points of access to
power, at district and village level, and within the household. I shall not look
at these in detail here, but in general we could state that the environment
around and between these major regional centres is also seen in both Hindu
and Buddhist societies in terms of local spirits and forces of all kinds. The
village, its Ž elds, the rivers and water sources, and the dangerous, wild and
interstitial places between villages, each have supernatural guardians, who may
be friendly or malevolent, but are always liable to offence and to intervention
in human affairs. These local guardians and spirits may be described in Hindu
societies as some kind of local transform of Brahmanical deities, normally Siva
or Durga (or other forms of Siva’s consort, such as Parvati, Gauri or Kali). They
may also be referred to the formal tradition in some way in non-Hindu regions.
In either case, though, this process, if it takes place at all, is less thorough and
more superŽ cial than for the major cult centres.
Local religion is largely concerned with maintaining harmony with these
powers through ritual procedures, both in order to avoid misfortune through
the powers being upset or offended, and in order to gain their assistance for
positive outcomes.
In the next section, I move on to look at local religion in terms of the passing
of time demonstrated in the annual calendars of rituals and festivals. Here I
present two Asian examples, one Hindu, from Southern Nepal, and the other
Buddhist, from Northeast Thailand.
Sacred Time in South and Southeast Asia: The Annual Ritual Cycle
In early 1994 I spent a few weeks in the small town of Janakpur in Southern
Nepal, carrying out Ž eldwork with my wife, Santi Rozario, which focused in
part on women’s religion and domestic ritual. Janakpur is (or at least has been
since its ‘rediscover y’ in the 18th centur y) the traditional birthplace of a major
Ž gure in the Hindu pantheon, Sita, wife of Rama and heroine of the
Ramayana. The region, though politically in Southern Nepal, is really a northwards extension of Northern Bihar, and the population, like that in Northern
Bihar, with which it is closely linked, is Maithili speaking and mostly Hindu.
Janakpur is a major pilgrimage place, with several substantial temples, the
most important being to Sita herself, with a subsidiar y shrine depicting a kind
of diorama with full-size three-dimensional Ž gures of Sita’s wedding. (They did
a good trade in Hindu newly weds coming to be photographed in front of
Rama and Sita.) Other attractions include a temple with an immensely overweight monkey, reputed to be both an incarnation of Hanuman and the heaviest monkey in the world. He is no doubt even heavier now, if he is still alive.
Some miles to the north is the place where Rama is supposed to have drawn
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Table 1. Ritual calendar in the Maithili village of Sonapura, near Janakpur, southern Nepal
(from Bina Labh Karna of Sonapura, January 1994, augmented by other materiala)
Vaishakh (April/May)
JORSITAL/SATUAIN—New Year; offerings to Sur ya. Women do puja on behalf of all
community.
Jest (May/June)
VARSAT (VATA SABITRI) Groups of married women do puja to bot tree which represents
their husband. They put sindhur on the tree so that their husband doesn’t die before them.
Asarh ( June/July)
No major calendrical rituals.
Shrawan ( July/August)
MADHUSHRAVANI Observance by married women, for 15 days.
Bhadra (August/September)
KRISHNASTHAMI Village puja to large image which they make of Krishna.
CHORCHAND (CHANDRAMA) [12 days later] Puja to Moon.
Ashwin (September/October)
JITIA [20 days after Chorchand] Married women worship the god Jit-Bahan for life of
husband, son, daughter and other relatives.
KOJAGRA (mainly Brahmins?) Gift-giving by newly married girl’s family to groom’s family.
DASAIN [10 days after Jitia] (less important than with Nepalis).
Kartik (October/November)
DIVALI (LAKSHMI PUJA) [16 days after Dasain, at new moon]
GOBARDHAN PUJA (also called BAZARI) [following day] Married women make offerings to
cowdung (gobar) image of Mahadev, then worship and decorate cows. (Mahadev is god of
wealth—when rice paddy is harvested, they also make a gobar image of him and worship it.)
BHAI TIKA [following day] Brothers get tika from sisters.
CHHAIT [6 days after Divali—sometimes falls in Agrahan] The eldest woman of the family
fasts for 4 days. Married men and women (mainly) wait all night in pond for Sun to rise and
then make offerings to Sur ya. These offerings are to get rid of sickness, blindness, lameness
and infertility.
Agrahan (November/December)
No major calendrical rituals. A good time for weddings and hair-cutting rituals.
Paush (December/January)
No major calendrical rituals.
Magh ( January/February)
TILA SANKRANTI Married women make offerings to ghar ka devata [household god]; then
offer the remainders to their sons ‘so they will be obliged to her’.
NARAK NIVARAN Puja to Shiva and Parvati.
SHIVARATRI (may be in Phalgun) Mainly a ‘Nepali’ festival, a national holiday.
Also TUSARI PUJA and SANZH (at Makar Sankranti)—Tusari in morning, Sanzh in evening—
done by newly married women for 5 years after their marriage.
Phalgun (February/March)
BASANT PANCHAMI (SRI PANCHAMI = SARASWATI PUJA) Mainly in schools; also worship
of ploughs; this is also the start of HOLI.
People do parikrama [pilgrimage circuit] of Janakpur for 15 days in Phalgun.
Chait (March/April)
No major calendrical rituals.
aAnother listing of Maithili festivals can be found in Ishii (1993).
Religious Meaning of Space and Time
403
and broken the bow, so earning Sita as his wife. There is a regular annual pilgrimage circuit around the region, and many people come from far away in
Nepal and North India to participate.
When Santi and I spoke to women and men in villages within only a mile or
two of Janakpur, however, we found that Janakpur and its temples played a surprisingly minor role in their religious life. Much more important here than
Rama and Sita were Siva and his consort (here usually known as Gauri), and a
series of calendrical rituals and life-cycle rituals, some of which are found in
variant forms over much of India, but many of which are regional or local.
Table 1 gives a brief listing of major calendrical rituals from one informant. I
am not entirely certain about the local version of the lunar–solar calendar, and
this may have led to some errors in sequence.
As can be seen, this is a fairly full ritual year, although not everybody takes
part in all festivals. Our main informant was a married woman in her 30s, and
we doubtless missed some festivals that were primarily for men. Ritual activities are not spread evenly throughout the year, and there is particular emphasis in the August–November period (harvest and post-harvest). The great
pilgrimage centre of Janakpur, which is within easy walking distance of this particular village, is mentioned only once, in relation to the pilgrimage circuit in
the month of Phalgun (February–March). My impression was that while some
local villagers went along, this was mainly an occasion for outsiders. Janakpur
is a market town, and village people going into town for shopping might visit
one or other of the temples, but the major focus of these regular rituals has
no reference to Rama and Sita at all.
What the village calendar does emphasize is family relationships. Wives make
offerings to husbands, mothers to sons, brothers to sisters. Women fast for the
welfare of the family, as indeed many do throughout South Asia on a weekly
or occasional basis, employing an ancient idiom, the vrat, common to almost
all contemporary South Asian religious groups, including Buddhists, Jains,
Muslims and Catholics. This is not to say that the women who undertake these
fasts are being purely instrumental or pragmatic in their observance, since
fasting for one’s family’s welfare can certainly also be seen as being a good
Hindu or Muslim or Catholic,4 but it is important to appreciate the grounded
and local nature of the concerns of religious life.
The deities who take leading roles in the annual cycle are also not quite what
one might expect. Sur ya, the sun, and Chandra, the moon, who are hardly
major Ž gures in most accounts of contemporar y Hinduism, are each the object
of major village festivals (two in Sur ya’s case), with the more important Surya
festival (this is Chhait, in November, celebrated over much of Mithila,
Magadha and the Bhojpuri region) being perhaps the highlight of the ritual
year. Siva (Mahadev) and Parvati (Gauri, etc.) appear several times in one or
another form. Divali, with its emphasis on Lakshmi and domestic good
fortune, also seems to be quite important, although one would really have to
live in the village around the year to get the full picture. Doing this, as studies
of calendrical rituals in other Hindu villages have suggested, would also make
clear the subtle interlacing of natural, agricultural and ritual calendars, with
the three major seasons (cold, hot, monsoon) and the regular cycles of rice
cultivation and harvest which underlie and give meaning to the various ritual
occasions. Divali and Holi of the major Hindu festivals retain most traces of
pre- and anti-Brahmanical themes, and it has been suggested on the basis of
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Table 2. Ritual calendar in the Isaan village of Baan Phraan Muan, Northeast Thailand (after
Tambiah, 1970)a
5th lunar month (March–April)
*SONGKRAN (Skt. Samkranti) (Sun enters Aries) (originally 15th day of lunar month; now
Ž xed on 13–15 April)
Traditional New Year, still observed in rural areas [end of dry season, approach of Ž rst rains]
Day 1: End of old year. Buddha statue washed to wash away ‘sins’ of past year
Day 2: Intervening day; the dead visit the living; making merit for dead ancestors
Day 3: First day of New Year. Climax of general merry-making.
6th lunar month (April–May)
*WISAKA BUCHA (B = Visakhapuja) Day of Buddha’s birth, enlightenment and death [15th
day of lunar month]
[Start of rains and wet season; time for ploughing Ž elds.]
LIANG PHII Offering in village before ploughing to guardian spirits of village and wat;
offerings at regional shrine to regional guardian spirit in nearby swamp.
BUNBANGFAI Young men of the village ordained as monks, followed by rocket-Ž ring festival
asking regional guardian spirit to bring rain. Ritual licence, status reversal, etc.
7th lunar month (May–June)
No special ceremonies.
8th lunar month ( June–July)
*KHAW PHANSA [B = Vassa] [1st day of lunar month] Start of Buddhist rainy season retreat.
Period of piety and asceticism.
9th lunar month ( July–August)
No special ceremonies.
10th lunar month (August–September)
*BUN KHAW SAAK Making merit for spirits of the dead with puffed rice offerings.
11th lunar month (September–October)
*ORG PHANSA [B] End of Vassa.
12th lunar month (October–November)
*BUN KATHIN [B] Presentation of robes and gifts to monks; young men resume lay life.
[End of rains]
1st lunar month (November–December)
No special ceremonies.
2nd lunar month (December–January)
Rites addressed to the female spirit of rice (Nang Phrakosob) [?]b
3rd lunar month ( January–February)
LIANG PHII Post-harvest offering to guardian spirits of village and wat. Offerings at regional
shrine to regional guardian spirit.
*MAKHA BUCHA (B = Maghapuja) Commemoration of institution of Patimokkha rules. This is
a national festival, but only a minor occasion in the village.
4th lunar month (February–March)
BUN PHRAAWES Merit making for Vessantara.
[Harvest celebrations]
*Precedes festivals celebrated in the wat (Buddhist monaster y).
[B] indicates festivals celebrated generally by Theravada Buddhists.
aThe sequence of lunar months is based on Phongphit and Hewison (1990, pp. 24–32). They
are clearly describing basically the same festal calendar, although the names of some of the
festivals differ somewhat in their account.
bTambiah mentions these rites, but does not say when they are performed. I have put them in
the second month, following Phongphit and Hewison (1990, pp. 29–30).
Religious Meaning of Space and Time
405
archaeological evidence that they may go back to times well before the ‘Aryan
invasions’ (Allchin, 1963).
The importance of family relationships would seem stronger again if one
included the vital life-cycle rituals surrounding birth, puberty, marriage and
death, and the regular offerings to the household deity (ghar ka devata) within
the household.
Buddhist communities in South and Southeast Asia are not much different
in their emphasis on seasons, agriculture, community, and family relationships.
Tambiah’s material on the annual ritual cycle in a Northeast Thai village5
could serve as example (Table 2).
There are considerably fewer festivals here than in the Maithili community.
In part this may be because some events less signiŽ cant for Tambiah’s argument have been omitted, but in fact it seems to be the case that there is rather
less ritual activity overall in Isaan villages than in Sonapura.6 At Ž rst sight, the
penetration of Buddhism into this community appears to be considerably
greater than that of ‘ofŽ cial’ Hinduism into Sonapura. Certainly, several of the
major festivals take place in and around the local Buddhist temple (wat), but
even when they are, on the face of it, ofŽ cially Buddhist rituals, they turn out
to be interwoven with symbolism and ritual actions which have little to do with
Buddhism and much to do with the local agricultural calendar and the village
guardian spirits.
Perhaps the most obvious example is the process of temporary ordination
of a group of young men of the village each year during the rainy season
retreat, in a sequence which is related closely to the fertility of the rice Ž elds
on which the village depends. It also links closely to human fertility, as the
explicitly phallic rockets of the rocket festival following the young men’s ordination, and the accompanying obscene songs (Bayard and Uthaiwee, 1985)
make abundantly clear. In fact, the period of temporar y ordination is also
explicitly seen as a preparation for marriage. You may have to read the anthropologists to Ž nd it out, but this is the context in which most men in the
Theravada societies of Southeast Asia traditionally experienced monasticism,
and its connection with the attainment of nirvana is indirect to say the least.
Monks in these traditional Thai village monasteries ran village schools, but
meditation as we know it in the Western Buddhist context barely existed. The
training in Pali which young men acquired during their temporar y ordination,
especially the few who stayed somewhat longer, could come in useful if they
afterwards became lay ritual practitioners. Tambiah rightly emphasizes in his
account the extent to which the Buddhist monastery was part of a complex
Ž eld of local and pragmatic religious activity.
What I hope has emerged from the material I have presented so far is the
centrality of these local and pragmatic issues to the living experience of
religion in ‘traditional’7 Indic societies. I am not suggesting that the ascetic and
monastic pursuit of liberation and Enlightenment in its various forms, the cults
of the great Hindu and Buddhist deities, the major philosophical schools of
Hinduism and Buddhism, are not of vital importance in Asian religions. They
are. But they exist, and survived, on the basis of, and in relation to, this much
more ever yday kind of religion, deeply grounded in the ongoing cycles of the
seasons and the agricultural cycle, of birth, marriage and death, of a physical
environment which was highly differentiated and localized in its religious
meaning.
406
G. Samuel
Paganism and the Resacralization of Space and Time
While this whole question of local religion, of the religious meaning of local
places, of the passing of the seasons within the village community, of family
relationships, has certainly not been entirely neglected by Western scholars, it
has, with the partial exception of the anthropologists, received relatively little
attention. I do not think that this is accidental. It re ects the lack of religious
signiŽ cance of such matters within our own lives. Few of us, in Western
societies, live within genuine village communities, and there are few villages in
the British Isles, Western Europe or the USA which have retained more than
fragmentary survivals of local cults or seasonal rituals. Western societies
achieved a much more thorough transition from a religion of locality to a universal religion, and while the process of universalization was a slow one and
perhaps never entirely completed, we have been taught to perceive the truths
of religion as universal, not as local, and the world of the spirits as superstition,
not a respect for the environment within which we live. We still have a ritual
year, of a kind, but it is a national one, not a local one, and such meanings as
we give to Easter, Christmas and New Year increasingly have little to do with
the ongoing life of a local agricultural community.
Yet I think it is clear that there is ambivalence about these developments,
and that the desire to recreate a viable ritual community has more than a little
attraction. We can see this, perhaps, in a range of forms, including fundamentalist churches and the charismatic revival as well as the interest in Asian
religion, which seems to me often to be as much about community as about
enlightenment, but I shall focus here on Paganism, which is of all the so-called
New Religious Movements probably the most interested in questions of the
resacralization of nature.
To refer to Paganism in the UK or North American context as a New
Religious Movement is risky. This is not primarily because of the question of
whether Paganism is really new. Whatever the answer to the complex and disputed issue of the origins of modern Paganism, there is no doubt that contemporary Paganism as a large-scale public religious movement dates from the
1950s at earliest, and that much of its growth has taken place in the 1990s. The
oversimpliŽ cation is because Paganism is in no way a uniŽ ed movement. Major
groupings, such as Wicca, Druidry and the Norse revivalists, can be identiŽ ed
within the general Ž eld of Paganism, and share some common ritual procedures and features, but the basic unit of modern Paganism is small, local,
and subject to rapid change. Anybody’s experience, and this certainly is true
of mine, is at most a small sampling.
My own knowledge of Paganism largely dates from my becoming one of the
organizers of a Lancaster University conference on Paganism, shamanism and
esotericism in April 1996. We called the conference Nature Religions Today,
and it is quite common for the more academic followers of these new religious
traditions to use ‘nature religion’ as a general term for them.8 This return to
nature and refocusing on the human relationship with the earth is a frequent
theme in Pagan writing. Thus a recent collection of interviews with American
Pagans was entitled People of the Earth (Hopman and Bond, 1996), Graham
Harvey’s recent survey of UK Paganism is called Listening People, Speaking Earth
(Harvey, 1997), while the main academic computer mailing list on Paganism
is entitled NATREL-L. The themes of connection with nature, of respect for
Religious Meaning of Space and Time
407
nature, and of ecological activism turn up over and over again in the writings
of contemporar y Pagans in Britain and North America.
Paganism’s orientation towards nature is one of its most appealing features,
especially since the Pagan willingness to make things up as you go along (not
to put too Ž ne a point on it) means that they carr y much less problematic doctrinal baggage than most religious traditions. If you feel, as I do, that any really
adequate response to the global ecological crisis will ultimately have to be a
spiritual or religious one—it will involve, in other words, a radical re-imagining of our relationship to the planet and our physical environment—then it is
perhaps among the Pagans that you are most likely to Ž nd people who are seriously engaged in this project. However, it seems reasonable to suppose—and
this was part of the point of the Asian section of this paper—that in part at least
this re-imagining will involve rediscovering the sense of groundedness in local
place and community and in the annual cycle that we have noted in South and
Southeast Asian village religion. How are the Pagans managing?
In some respects, Pagans do indeed seem to have a good claim to be reconstructing an attitude to religion closer to that of village Asia than to that of
modern Western Christianity or secularism. I refer here especially to the question of authority. Pagan rituals are participator y and locally based and there is
little authority beyond that of the immediate group. Published sources are
many, but they are drawn on eclectically, and there is little or no feeling that
there is a single right way to do a ritual. The Pagan interest in magical ritual,
generally performed for healing and other pragmatic purposes, also links
them back to the pragmatic nature of much Asian village ritual. However
scientiŽ c rationalists might regard Pagan magical practice, it is clearly in
psychological terms a strong statement that Pagans individually or in groups
can tap into spiritual power for this-worldly purposes, without any need for the
intervention or mediation of an ofŽ cial clergy or priesthood.
The question of the role of nature in Paganism is a complex one and worth
considering at some length. The creators of modern Paganism drew on a
variety of sources of inspiration, but the writings of Gerald Gardner and the
rituals of Gardnerian Wicca emphasize themes of closeness to nature, of nature
worship and fertility ritual. The Wiccan Goddess is ‘the beauty of the
green earth’; Gardner himself was a naturist and Gardnerian ritual is often
performed unclothed (‘sky-clad’). Gardner’s collaborator Doreen Valiente has
emphasized the signiŽ cance of the ‘back to nature’ theme in relation to
Gardner’s naturism: Gardner ‘believed that communal nakedness, sunshine
and fresh air, were things which were natural and beneŽ cial, both physically
and psychologically’ (Valiente, 1973, p. 157). Elsewhere she says of witchcraft
more generally:
Witchcraft is concerned with the forces of fertility, through among
other things its practice of moon worship (though it is not the material
moon which is worshipped, but the feminine power of Nature behind
it) . . . Sun worship, too, is essentially the worship of Life. Without the
light of the sun, no crops would ripen; and all things on earth would
wither and die. (Valiente, 1973, p. 134)
In an interview in 1995 she said that Wicca when she Ž rst encountered it meant
‘the world of nature . . . The ethos of ecology and caring about natural things
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G. Samuel
like the forest[,] of nature and the seasons: that was there in the coven’
(Valiente, 1995, pp. 21–22).
One feature shared by Gardner’s Wicca and the various traditions that grew
out of it (including the new Pagan Druids of the UK and North America)
played an important part in this convergence of Paganism with environmental
religion. This is the cycle of eight seasonal rituals that is practised in some form
by the vast majority of Pagan groups, and is often known as the Wheel of the
Year.9 These seasonal celebrations (Imbolc or Candlemas on 1 February,
Beltane on 1 May, Lammas or Lughnasadh on 1 August, Samhain on 31
October, plus the solstices and equinoxes) have come in practice to be perhaps
the most characteristic and widely shared features of Pagan religion. From one
point of view, they provide an essential shared basis for this highly localized
religious movement. Pagans of most persuasions can come together to observe
these occasions, and given certain shared elements of ritual grammar, most
importantly the casting of a circle and the calling of the four quarters, along
with a small repertoire of ritual symbols (the pentagram) and a few widely
known ritual songs, they can perform a ceremony which all can partake in and
recognize as appropriate.
In relation to the argument of this paper, both the shared ritual grammar
and the shared festival cycle are worth considering in more detail. Pagan ritual
can be performed at places which are thought of as important places of power
within the landscape, in the British Isles generally stone circles or other megalithic sites or hills seen as having signiŽ cant associations with the Pagan past.
Later I shall discuss the question of sacred space in Paganism in more detail.
For the present, it is enough to notice that most Pagan rituals are not performed at such locations. Perhaps necessarily, given the uncertain levels of
public tolerance, most Pagan ritual is performed indoors in urban or suburban living rooms. Larger gatherings are likely to take place in country camp
grounds or similar areas hired for the weekend, and without any special associations with the supposed Pagan past. Whatever the actual circumstances, the
circle-casting and calling of the quarters deŽ nes any space temporarily as an
appropriate space for the performance of Pagan ritual.
It does so, though, in relation to the calling of the quarters, and of the Elemental powers associated with them: Air (W), Fire (S), Water (W) and Earth
(N) according to the standard Northern Hemisphere Pagan attributions. The
elements constitute a basic set of symbolic counters through which the entire
natural world can be perceived. It is true enough that, by general Pagan
magical assumptions, the concrete foundations of an ofŽ ce block constitutes
Earth, its bathroom sinks provide access to Water, the carefully controlled
atmosphere within is Air, of a sort, and the electricity operating the computers
corresponds to Fire, but these are not what most Pagans are interested in contacting through their rituals. The four elements direct one to the natural
world. So too do the chants the Pagans sing at their rituals: to take a couple of
well-known examples:
We all come from the Goddess / And to Her we shall return
Like a drop of rain / Flowing to the Ocean
Hoof and horn, hoof and horn / All that dies shall be reborn
Corn and grain, corn and grain / All that fall shall rise again!
Religious Meaning of Space and Time
409
Table 3.
Dates (Northern
Hemisphere)
After Farrar and
Farrar (1989)
After Beth (1990)
After Phillips and
Sandow (1994)
31 October
SAMHAIN
Communion with
spirits of dead;
appointment of
Lord of Misrule
Death of old year,
festival of returning
dead, New Year;
clairvoyance and
divination
New Year; Union of
God and Goddess in
the Otherworld; life
is conceived in the
womb of the Great
Mother
21/22 December
YULE
Oak King kills
Holly King and
begins his rule over
the Waxing Year;
rebirth of the Sun
Rebirth of the Sun,
the longest night,
illumination of the
inner world
Sun is symbolically
reborn
1 Februar y
CANDLEMAS
(IMBOLG)
Triple Goddess;
Making of ‘Brigid’s
Bed’
Early spring;
Goddess in Maiden
aspect
Goddess as Virgin;
female mysteries
21/22 March
SPRING
EQUINOX
(OSTARA)
Time of sowing;
fertility of
vegetation
Transition; fertility
in nature;
emergence of new
life
God as young man;
male mysteries
1 May
BELTANE
Death and Rebirth
of Oak King; human
fertility
Horned God
impregnates the
Goddess;
celebration of life
and love
Sacred marriage of
man and woman;
fertility
21/22 June
MIDSUMMER
(LITHA)
Holly King kills
Oak King and begins
his rule over
the Waning Year
Sun King changes
direction, sets sail
for Isle of Rebirth;
he will become
Lord of Night
Man and woman
rule as King and
Queen; maturity
1 August
LAMMAS
(LUGHNASAD)
Death and Rebirth
of Holly King =
Corn King
Festival of First
Fruits; Goddess
gives birth; Sun God
wanes, dies and is
reborn
Harvest festival;
end of summer;
birth of child
21/22 September
AUTUMN
EQUINOX
(MABON)
Completion of
harvest; salute to
waning power of the
Sun; cycle of rebirth
and reincarnation
Harvest Festival;
celebration of
Goddess as Lady of
Abundance; disposal
of unwanted things;
cycle of rebirth
Death of the King;
Queen becomes the
Crone
The chants, and others like them, direct the singers to the onward continuity
of life in the natural world, outside of and contrasting with the urban scene of
technological innovation, progress and change.
The seasonal rituals are likewise about continuity, repetition and connection
with nature. While at least six of the eight festivals (Imbolc, Beltane, Midsummer, Lammas, Samhain and Yule) are signiŽ cant occasions for folk calendrical observances in one or another part of the British Isles (Hutton, 1996), the
410
G. Samuel
full set of eight, evenly spaced around the calendar, is a modern invention. It
was apparently designed by Gerald Gardner, perhaps in collaboration with his
friend Ross Nicholls, who was a signiŽ cant Ž gure in the origins of modern
Pagan Druidr y.
Gardner treated the eight festivals primarily as occasions for celebration and
festivity, but he also associated characteristic ritual actions with several of them,
such as the circle dance with torches to bring back summer at Yule (Winter
Solstice), which is already mentioned in his 1949 novel High Magic’s Aid
(Gardner, 1994). Later Wiccan authors, most notably Janet and Stewart Farrar
(Farrar and Farrar, 1989), developed an elaborate mythos in which the successive festivals are linked to the birth, growth to maturity and sacriŽ cial death
of the God and the three aspects of the Goddess (Maiden, Mother and Crone),
ideas derived from Sir James Fraser, Margaret Murray and Robert Graves
among others.
The details vary considerably from one group to another, but a basic idea is
that the Wheel of the Year links the cosmological (the phases in the life of the
God and Goddess) with the natural (the cycle of vegetation). Thus Imbolc, in
early spring, is associated with the Goddess as a young girl (with or without the
God as a young boy), their sexual encounter and marriage take place at Spring
Equinox and/or Beltane, and the death of the God at Lammas corresponds to
the harvest. Samhain (corresponding to Hallowe’en), at the onset of winter, is
the time where the Goddess encounters the world of the dead, and Yule, taking
up the Christian symbolism which Christianity itself borrowed from older
religions, is the time of the rebirth of the God. The festivals are often represented schematically as the eight spokes of a wheel (the Wheel of the Year)
and they are clearly intended to be seen and felt as linked to the natural cycle.
Table 3 summarizes three different accounts, and it gives some idea both of
the underlying story and the range of variation.
The Wheel of the Year is one of the favourite Wiccan and Pagan themes, and
if there is one thing on which most Pagan groups agree, it is that the seasonal
festivals should be observed. Yet there are some qualiŽ cations to make before
accepting this as evidence for a strongly developed sense of nature within contemporary Paganism.
One thing is immediately obvious when this highly symmetrical scheme is
compared to the Maithili and Northeast Thai ritual calendars I considered
above. The eight Pagan festivals do not relate to the seasonal or agricultural
calendar at any speciŽ c place. Gardner was based in the south of England, and
they make as much sense there as anywhere, but in reality they have a generic,
one-size-Ž ts-all character. This provides for universality and a certain  exibility,
but there are associated problems.
Thus neither Spring Equinox nor Autumn Equinox correspond to signiŽ cant traditional celebrations in England, and they have clearly posed problems
for Wiccan theologians. Spring Equinox (21 or 22 March) does correspond to
spring festivals in parts of Southern Europe, but it is too early for a full-scale
outdoors spring and fertility festival in the south of England, let alone in (for
example) a Canadian Pagan community. In any case Beltane on 1 May normally fulŽ ls this role. One can see in Table 3 that the Farrars, Beth, and Phillips
and Sandow all Ž nd somewhat different solutions to this duplication, and none
of these has been universally accepted.
Similarly, the Autumn Equinox duplicates Lughnasadh as a harvest festival.
Religious Meaning of Space and Time
411
Harvest is a fairly problematical concept anyway in a modern society. When is
the harvest? Does the concept of harvest even make much sense for a population much of which lives in cities and where supermarket stocks barely vary
around the seasons? Does the symbolism of midsummer mean the same thing
in the burning heat of, say, Arizona or New Mexico, as in the gentle warmth
of an English summer?
Some of the more nature-attuned Pagan writers suggest that Beltane (for
example) should be observed when it feels like spring where you live, but my
impression is that the vast majority of Northern Hemisphere Pagan groups go
by the calendar date and attempt to hold their Beltane celebration on or as
close as possible to 1 May, whatever the local seasonal cycle.
Some early Australian Pagans did the same, despite their location in the
Southern Hemisphere, though Australians now generally celebrate the whole
cycle 6 months before (or after) the Northern Hemisphere. The various Australian seasonal cycles, however, vary from temperate to tropical monsoonal.
In addition, with few deciduous trees around, the vegetation symbolism so
central to the English rituals makes little sense. The landscape in coastal New
South Wales or Queensland looks much the same in summer and winter. Nor
does winter mean a period of darkness and short nights, of bareness, latency,
and absence of vegetation, of life closing down and hibernating until the new
growth of the spring. It is simply the cold time of the year. If anything, it is
summer rather than winter which is the period of latency, in human life at
least. Spring, rather than the explosion of new growth familiar from temperate areas of the British Isles or North America, is a relatively brief transition
between cold and hot weather, and the imported liquidamber trees aside,
there is little sign in a Sydney autumn of the greens, reds and browns of
England or New England. The most marked feature of the annual cycle in suburban NSW is the regular  owering of ornamental trees such as the jacarandas.
It is possible that these rough edges may get smoothed over if Paganism persists for long enough, just as the Church festivals in different parts of Europe
gradually accommodated to local weather and agricultural cycles through
emphasizing (or devising) festivals that were locally meaningful and giving less
stress to those which made less sense locally. All this, however, does not seem
to be a matter of great concern to most Pagans, which leads to some question
as to the actual relationship between the seasonal rituals, which are frequently
celebrated indoors anyway, and the natural cycle. In reality, the rituals are not
so much about spring, harvest or winter, as about the idea of spring, the idea
of harvest, the idea of winter. The cycle of the seasons, after all, no longer functions for most citizens of modern Western societies as the fundamental basis
on which the community lives through its agricultural cycle, disengaged by the
mass production methods and long-distance distribution characteristic of
modern agribusiness. Harvest festivals were once a means by which the bringing in of an actual harvest was given spiritual meaning. A harvest festival in an
age of supermarkets cannot work in the same way. Rather than giving meaning
to a cycle of events which is already a basic datum of everyone’s existence, the
Pagan festivals remind their participants of an agricultural cycle of which they
may otherwise have relatively little awareness.
It is certainly true that many introductor y books on Paganism insist on the
need to be aware of the cycles of nature, to acquire knowledge about the
412
G. Samuel
environment and about plant and animal species (e.g. Beth, 1990; Green,
1991, 1997). Yet much of contemporar y Paganism is an indoors religion, and
the commitment to nature often seems superŽ cial. There has, however, been
a growing involvement with the environment within Paganism, and this can
perhaps be seen most clearly if we turn to look at attitudes to ‘sacred sites’ such
as the stone circles and other megalithic monuments of the British Isles.
Here it may be useful to distinguish three phases. The Žrst phase, which may
be taken as stretching back to the Celtic and occultist revivals of the late 19th
centur y, and further back to the invention of modern Druidry in the late 18th
centur y, marks the beginning of the attribution of positive spiritual signiŽ cance to such sites. The early Druid revivalists were Christian in orientation,
and saw Druidry as a kind of indigenous version of the Christian revelation,
but by the late 19th century one Ž nds Ž gures such as William Sharp (‘Fiona
Macleod’) or W. B. Yeats whose inclinations were rather towards occultism and
pre-Christian Celtic Paganism. A series of authors, among them Helena
Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner and Dion Fortune, elaborated the idea of the
transmission of secret knowledge from Atlantis, thus providing a mythic
background in which the builders of Stonehenge and other megalithic
monuments could be seen as possessors of the same initiatory knowledge
which the Golden Dawn and other magical orders of the late 19th and early
20th century claimed to transmit.10 A key early location was Glastonbury, a site
which came to symbolize a hidden tradition of ‘Celtic’ Christianity with close
links to pre-Christian occult and Pagan knowledge (see e.g. Benham, 1993).
Alfred Watkins’ theor y, Ž rst enunciated in the 1920s, of ‘ley lines’ linking
signiŽ cant points in the British landscape, was another signiŽ cant contribution
(Watkins, [1925] 1987). Watkins’ lines typically included both pre-Christian
and Christian sites, and helped to popularize the idea that early British
Christianity had taken over pre-Christian Pagan sites. The revival of ‘dowsing’
as a way of detecting traces of ley lines paved the way for a more general quest
to recover psychic traces of earlier spiritual practices.
One cannot really speak of a self-conscious Pagan religious revival in the
1920s, but there were undoubtedly groups who incorporated what they saw as
pre-Christian or Pagan nature worship as part of their activities. Among these
were youth organizations such as the Order of Woodcraft Chivalr y and the
Woodcraft Folk, in origin Socialist and Quaker-inspired breakaways from the
Boy Scouts who emphasized nature mysticism rather than the nationalism and
militarism of Baden-Powell’s mainstream organization (Rosenthal, 1986;
Webb, 1991). Gerald Gardner’s coven in the 1940s and 1950s, with its naturism and its stress on the Goddess as the ‘beauty of the green earth’ (see above),
comes from the same general ambience as these groups, whether or not there
were direct connections between Gardner and speciŽ c groups of this kind. Yet
it was his group which seems to have taken the decisive step towards an explicitly Pagan religion.
The 1960s and 1970s can usefully be seen as constituting a second phase. This
was the period in which Gardnerian Wicca was beginning to grow and to systematize its ritual practices. Looking at the writings of early authors such as
Doreen Valiente (1973) or Patricia Crowther (1981), it seems that most ritual
took place indoors, but there was some use of outdoor sites. It would have been
difŽ cult to make use of major megalithic sites for Wiccan ritual at this time,
and the British climate is hardly suited for outdoor ‘sky-clad’ rituals during
Religious Meaning of Space and Time
413
much of the year, but references to less well-known locations such as Chanctonbury Rings (Valiente, 1973) or Brimham Rocks11 (Crowther, 1981) as ‘traditional’ locations for witchcraft rituals were probably coded ways of saying that
they were used on occasion by contemporar y Wiccans. Alex Sanders, the originator of the ‘Alexandrian’ tradition of Wicca, carried out semi-public rituals
at Alderley Edge, a place with Pagan associations, with journalists in attendance, and these undoubtedly helped to popularize the image.
One major megalithic site, the Rollright Stones near Oxford, was used for
an important series of public rituals in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They
were directed by the well-known occultist W. G. Gray, and a number of leading
Ž gures in the Pagan revival took part (Gray, 1975). Gray describes his psychically derived insights into prehistoric ritual practices at the Rollright Stones,
an approach that was taken up by, among others, Gray’s student Bob Stewart
(e.g. Stewart, 1992) and two other well-known occult writers of the period,
John and Caitlín Matthews (Matthews and Matthews, 1985).12 Gray and others
in his group also worked with the self-styled hereditary witch Robert Cochrane.
Cochrane’s covens wore robes rather than working ‘sky-clad’, and he stressed
the importance of outdoor rituals (Valiente, 1989; Valiente and Jones, 1990;
Jones and Clifton, 1997).13
At the same time, the growth of a popular neo-shamanic literature, in particular in the early works of Carlos Castaneda (1968, 1989), introduced other,
primarily Native American-derived ideas of ‘power spots’ and ‘power places’,
locations in the natural landscape where one can access supernatural power,
and these were supplemented by a growing popular and academic interest in
pilgrimage, sacred sites, the Chinese tradition of feng-shui, and the like.
My third phase begins around 1980, when many of these ideas were beginning to attain quite wide distribution. Books on ‘earth mysteries’ and ‘sacred
landscapes’ were beginning to become relatively common (e.g. Michell, 1972;
Dames, 1976; Devereux, 1990, 1992). ‘Sacred sites’ such as Glastonbur y in
England, or Mount Shasta in California, became important locations on the
New Age landscape, and while much of the ritual activity being carried on in
this context differed markedly from that of the revived Paganism, this sense of
the sacred signiŽ cance of particular places became part of a wider popular consciousness. One can see here too the growth of a sense that visiting a ‘sacred
site’ could be an act from which some kind of spiritual beneŽ t might be gained.
The idea of pilgrimages to Pagan sacred sites has led to a growing number of
organizations, guide-books, Pagan-friendly bed-and-breakfast establishments,
and the like.
Workshops to connect with the spirits of the land become meaningful activities to undertake. Thus, to give one recent example, in April 1999 the US
fantasy author and Norse revivalist Ž gure Diana Paxson, who had explored
aspects of environmental awareness in several of her novels, came to London
to give a workshop on ‘Living with the Landwights: In Search of the Earth
Religion of the Northern Tradition’:
The Great Gods come and go, but all over the world, people have continued to honour the local wights—spirits of hearth and heath, Ž eld
and forest. In Iceland, they do still. Wights—from Puck and the brownies of Britain to the Roman lares and the Kami of Japan, the ‘Genius
loci’—inhabit the spiritual ecology of our world. Even in the city we can
414
G. Samuel
work with them and reconnect to the world around us and enrich our
lives. We will explore these spirits of places with lecture, discussion, ceremony, exercise for getting in touch with them.14
It is also in this third phase that we can see a growing convergence between
Pagan political activism and the wider environmentalist movement. Pagan linkages with anti-nuclear and feminist politics were already part of the American
witchcraft of Starhawk (1989, 1990), Margot Adler (1986), Margo Adair and
others in the early 1980s, and of the women’s campaign at Greenham Common
in England. The confrontations between police and ‘New Age travellers’ at
Stonehenge helped pave the way for the coalescence of interests between New
Age travellers such as the Dongas tribe, environmentalists and Pagans at the
major British road protests such as Twyford Down (1991–92) and Newbury
(1996–97).15
Most signiŽ cantly for my general argument here, this phase was marked by
the growth of regular gatherings and festivals associated with regional Pagan
communities, in some cases at megalithic sites such as Avebury or the Rollright
Stones. In practice, most regional communities have limited access to such
places, particularly in North America or Australia, where ‘classic’ megalithic
sites on the UK model are not present, and Native Americans or Aboriginal
Australians may object to Pagan use of sacred sites belonging to the indigenous traditions. Consequently, many Pagan festivals take place on land which
has been rented for the occasion, where there is little opportunity to set up a
permanent relationship with the land, though if they return regularly to the
same location there may be a sense of building up an ongoing relationship of
some kind.16
Increasingly, though, Pagans have been buying land that can be used on a
regular basis for Pagan observances. I know of at least three cases (one in the
USA, two in the UK) where groups are constructing stone circles to sacralize
areas of land owned by individuals with Pagan sympathies so that these can constitute permanent ritual centres, and two further examples, in Australia, where
circles are being constructed using earth, trees and  owers for the same
purpose.
The gatherings which take place at these sites may last for 2 or 3 days, and
increasingly are occasions for much more than a simple seasonal ritual (see,
e.g. Orion, 1995 on the annual gathering at Circle Sanctuary, Wisconsin).
Other events which take place around the main ritual may include workshops
on ritual practice, magical techniques, or general Pagan topics, as well as
musical performances by Pagan bands. Gatherings of this kind are also often
occasions for the performance of life-cycle rituals such as name-givings of
babies, hand-fastings (weddings) of Pagan couples or commemorative rituals
for Pagans who have died during the year.
We can see in these modern Pagan contexts many of the elements of the
‘traditional’ South and Southeast Asian patterns of sacralization of space and
time: a sense of sacred places, and of spiritual beneŽ t to be obtained by visiting them; a regular cycle of calendrical rituals to be performed throughout the
year; annual gatherings at places which are or have the potential to be seen as
of sacred signiŽ cance, and which are being used for rites of passage and
incorporation into the community.
Whether these elements can be put together over time to form a meaningful
Religious Meaning of Space and Time
415
whole, and whether such a whole could eventually come to have the ‘organic’
relationship to the life of a local community that can still be seen in many South
and Southeast Asian communities, are moot points. Pagans in the UK, North
America or Australia are rarely more than a small fraction of the local residential community, and few such communities today in any case have much of
a sense of common identity or common interests. The Pagans who gather at
Circle Sanctuary in Wisconsin or at the Pagan Summer Gathering in Canberra
are an elective and part-time community whose mutual ties are not, for the
most part, grounded in day-to-day interaction. Yet some of these occasions have
by now been taking place annually for 20 years or more, displaying rather more
permanence than one might expect. Perhaps only time can tell whether the
Pagan attempt to rediscover the grounding of traditional communities in space
and time will yield any lasting success.
Notes
1. Earlier versions of this paper were given at Lampeter College, University of Wales in December 1997, Carleton College, Minnesota in Februar y 1998 (as the Lindesmith Lecture), University of Sydney in April 1998 and University of Newcastle, Australia in May 1998. I would
like to thank the participants on all those occasions for their comments, and particularly
Fiona Bowie and Gavin Flood at Lampeter and Roger Jackson and Jim Fisher at Carleton
College for providing the initial occasions, and Richard Roberts for encouraging me to
revise the paper for publication.
2. In much of Catholic Southern Europe or Orthodox Eastern Europe, however, they persisted into modern times (e.g. Christian, 1972 for Spain, De Ferrari and Niccoli, 1998 for
Italy, du Boulay, 1974 for Greece).
3. It is true that for many South and Southeast Asian populations these matters are to some
degree framed within the overall conception of rebirth, an idea which has become closely
associated with Buddhism and Hinduism. Yet even here, the popular understandings of
such matters may diverge widely from the textual, and the role of rebirth concepts in the
ever yday life of South and Southeast Asian people can easily be exaggerated (see Pocock,
1973, pp. 37–39; Maloney, 1975).
4. In this respect, David Mandelbaum’s well-known distinction between ‘transcendental’ and
‘pragmatic’ aspects of religious life can be somewhat misleading (Mandelbaum, 1966). I
made similar comments in relation to Spiro’s nibbanic-kammatic-pragmatic distinction in
Samuel (1993).
5. While the village is situated within the present-day Thai state, the cultural and linguistic
afŽ liations of the whole Northeast Thai region (isaan in Thai) are with Laos rather than
with Central and Northern Thailand.
6. Phongphit and Hewison mention a few other festivals in their account (e.g. khao pradab din,
khao-kam, loy krathong) but most of these seem to be primarily urban (as with loy krathong)
or infrequently performed (as with khao-kam).
7. ‘Traditional’ is a problematic word, yet it seems reasonable to regard agricultural communities such as the villages around Janakpur in 1994, or those of Northeast Thailand at
the time of Tambiah’s study, as representative of widespread patterns of ritual activity which
in their essentials go back to pre-colonial and pre-modern times.
8. The usage is sometimes referred back to Catherine Albanese’s book Nature Religion in
America (Albanese, 1990), but Albanese herself was only peripherally concerned with
Paganism in this book, as she made clear in a panel discussion on nature religion at the
American Academy of Religion meeting in Orlando, Florida in November 1998. Margo
Adler’s somewhat earlier Drawing Down the Moon (Adler, 1986) also uses the term ‘nature
religion’, and may be a more relevant source for the current Pagan usage.
9. Exceptions include the Norse revivalist (Asatru, Odinist) groups who have their own ritual
calendars. Some Wiccan and Druid groups celebrate only four or Ž ve of the eight festivals,
though most recognize the full eight.
10. The constant recurrence of the Atlantis myth in contemporary Paganism is quite striking,
and deserves more serious analysis than it has generally been given. Its main competition
416
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
G. Samuel
is the ‘feminist Pagan’ myth of the universal religion of the Great Goddess, deriving principally from Marija Gimbutas. While the two may be combined, as in the novels of Marion
Zimmer Bradley (The Mists of Avalon, The Firebrand, etc.), the Atlantis myth incorporates a
stress on initiatory lineage and hidden knowledge which is much less signiŽ cant for feminist-in uenced varieties of Paganism.
As Crowther notes, the rocks at Brimham Rocks were shaped by natural processes, not by
prehistoric humans. The place has however long had ‘Druidic’ associations.
I have heard this phase described by a contemporary ‘hereditary’ witch as a time in which
sacred sites which had been ‘closed down’ after the advent of Christianity were being ‘reopened’ by people who had been born speciŽ cally to carr y this out. While this may be an
individual interpretation, it re ects the wider context of the Atlantis myth and similar ideas
of the transmission of hidden knowledge. Matthews and Matthews (1985) and Stewart
(1992) both talk about the process of ‘awakening’ the energies of sites which have been
long neglected, if not necessarily actively closed down.
Julia Phillips has noted the participation of many leading Ž gures of the Wiccan and Pagan
revival in Cochrane’s covens (Phillips, 1991).
I would like to thank Susan Greenwood for bringing this occasion to my attention and supplying me with the text reproduced here.
The politics of contemporary Paganism has been little explored. While many Pagans
express little interest in politics, I would agree with George McKay that, as with the wider
environmentalist movement, there are risks of chauvinist and racist elements Ž nding
Paganism a convenient philosophy (McKay, 1998, pp. 42–43). In practice outright racism
is most noticeable among some of the Odinist and ‘Asatru’ (Norse revivalist) groups,
though milder chauvinist attitudes are not that uncommon among UK, North American
or Australian Pagans. The prevalence of such orientations can nevertheless be exaggerated.
Many Asatru groups go out of their way to reject racist attitudes and members, while the
politics of Starhawk’s Reclaiming Collective, perhaps the single most in uential modern
Pagan group, are consistently anti-racist, pro-feminist and non-hierarchical.
For example, when I attended the Pagan Summer Gathering at Camp Cottermouth, near
Canberra, in January 1997, the location on the camp ground where the Ž rst Australian
Pagan priestess had been consecrated at a gathering some years previously was pointed out
to me.
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