fitchersvogel:
sunsinherbranches:
answersfromvanaheim:
notyourexrotic:
Homestuck, Steven Universe, Undertale, Harry Potter, My Little Pony, Supernatural, Sherlock, Doctor Who, Sailor Moon, Dragon Age, ATLA, a handful of others.
Some of these make some sense, as their canon involves a very rich mythos and/or literally incorporate spells and witchcraft.
But there are a few that I’m surprised don’t have a bigger PCP/PCM following - at least on Tumblr anyway. The Sandman series, for example - I know one person who openly documents their workings with the Endless ( @murcielagobrujx). Or The Wicked + The Divine, which is literally In A World Where Pop Culture Paganism Exists.
Is it because Tumblr fandoms in general skew younger than the target audience of Sandman and WicDiv? And because a lot of those fandoms share a lot of the same fans?
I mention Tumblr specifically because I’ve noticed that the older, not-entirely-based-on-Tumblr folks (e.g. @teriel et al) tend to work with either slightly older pop culture works (e.g. Buffy) or works that don’t have quite as strong an organised fandom presence.
Thoughts?
I suspect there isn’t more Sandman stuff because Neil Gaiman came out and said he didn’t think it was a good idea to worship beings who don’t want to be worshiped. I think a lot of people went a bit quiet after that. It’s a bit difficult to continue if the creator of the media disapproves of it, you know?
Some people might also hide their pop culture work for fear of being ridiculed. I don’t talk much about my Kushiel’s Legacy stuff. I do talk about the stuff in my own novel, but it feels to me like a very personal thing, so I don’t really talk about it much either.
I think there’s also a… okay, I just figured out a metaphor for this.
Talking about fandoms in pop cultural paganism is basically the hard polytheist / single pantheon approach. It’s the media/pop cultural equivalent of “Which Culture’s Gods Do You Deal With?” And it’s also really easy to talk about, because if one’s dealing with gods in their cultural context (or fictional entities in their cultural context) there’s all of this additional infrastructure that makes it easy to put a handle on things.
Also, things that tend more towards pop culture *magic* appears to me to be *vastly* easier to talk about. (I have some thoughts about why that is, which are tangential.)
But the combination of these things means that a lot of what people will be talking about will be stuff that has a set of coherent, consistent, and developed entities, with religion being easier if those entities are placed within a religious, ritual, or related coherent context. Magic doesn’t depend on the entities being Powers; for example, calling upon a particular character as the equivalent of a patron saint or inspiration, magically, can be done regardless of what the character is.
And that will bias the discourse towards things that either have established pantheonic-structured stuff, or ensemble casts, or ritual content, or magical content, or which can be readily harnessed for magical purposes. (I don’t know off the top of my head if there are shifts in how much of that sort of thing is in the media over time; someone might find it worthwhile to do so, I have different obsessive nerderies.)
A side point: a lot of the discussion I have seen is heavily biased towards *visual media*, as well. Which I find fascinating on a number of different levels, but, again, that is not the full range of potential pop culture sources.
Anyway, back to that hard polytheism / cultural polytheism metaphor. That’s one way of doing things. And operating within that model, there’s space to talk about, “Oh, I work with Captain America” or whatever, even if one doesn’t have an entire Marvel Pantheon to play with.
But that doesn’t cover everything. Because I think a huge amount of Stuff out there isn’t something where you can say ‘I do a THAT FANDOM THING’ at all.
What’s someone who believes in the Vulcan (Star Trek) principle of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations going to talk about, for talking about pop culture paganism? They’re probably got tons of other stuff going on in their stuff, but that will inform how they do it. Are they a Star Trek pop culture pagan? Nnnnnh. But they’re not NOT a pop culture pagan.
How about someone who finds profound spiritual meaning in The Creation of Éa from A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin?
Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk’s flight
On the empty sky.
That’s a philosophical or theological point, but it’s not a religion, and the Earthsea books don’t really provide a lot of space to build a canon religion around it. But people will adopt that kind of thing.
How about the humanistic theologies of Terry Pratchett. I don’t mean the Discworld pantheons, I mean the *actual theologies* that he wrote about in his books. “You need to believe in things that aren’t true. How else can they become?” (Hogfather) “That’s no call to go around believing in [gods]. It only encourages ‘em.” (Lords and Ladies) “Just because you can explain it doesn’t mean it’s not still a miracle.” (Small Gods) “And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things.” (Carpe Jugulum) “Everywhere I look, I see something holy.” (Ibid.) “There isn’t a way things should be. There’s just what happens, and what we do.” (A Hat Full of Sky) “There’s always a story. It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.” (Ibid.)
Or, say, a person who has a primary affiliation with a form of religious witchcraft, and their sense of what that *means* is partially drawn from Pratchett? “Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.” (Carpe Jugulum) “Third Thoughts are thoughts that watch the world and think all by themselves. They’re rare, and often troublesome. Listening to them is part of witchcraft.” (A Hat Full of Sky) “The natural size of a coven is one.“ (Witches Abroad) “You needed at least three witches for a coven. Two witches was just an argument.” (Maskerade) “The trouble is, you see, that if you do know Right from Wrong, you can’t choose Wrong. You just can’t do it and live.” (Ibid.)
… I’ma stop now. I could quote religio-magically relevant Pratchett all day.
Okay, one more.
“Genuine anger was one of the world’s greatest creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn’t mean you let it trickle away. it meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge.” (Wyrd Sisters)
Anyway. Very little of that stuff is going to come up to talk about sensically in a discussion of pop cultural paganism in specific. Because it’s not a specific, ideologically, ritually, and fandomly coherent whole. (Okay, a Pratchettesque religious witch might be, but.) It’s in at the level of how people build their theologies, how they shade the world.
In my experience, that’s one of the most common and pervasive forms of pop cultural paganism - the stuff that’s informed by and intertwined with the media but not defined within the context of the media in question.
(I could probably come up with more examples if I wanted to poke my brain, but one of the things about theological concept PCP is that it sometimes takes being reminded of ‘oh, right, I got that from….’ to pull it up again. All of the above are me, of course.)
Oh, and for a pop cultural magic/pagan thing that is completely fucking trippy: I am partially spirit-taught in reading runes for divination, where “spirit-taught” is “learned it from one of my characters from a fanfic I wrote in the universe of a Harry Potter AU fanfic, I guess that counts as a spirit, Andy you are a fucking weirdo, but thanks?”.
Yes, exactly, to all of this. Thanks for putting all my scattered Pratchettian-witch thoughts into really good words.
See, if we’re going by “that will bias the discourse towards things that either have established pantheonic-structured stuff, or ensemble casts, or ritual content, or magical content, or which can be readily harnessed for magical purposes.”, then Sandman or WicDiv should totally be more popular in Tumbr PCP fandom then it currently is. The point about Neil Gaiman kibboshing the idea of worshipping the Endless could explain some things, though there are PCPers that are less “worship” and more “work with”.
(paging @popculturepagan)