It's a confusing time to be a witch. Culturally, I mean.

On the one hand, recent polls suggest that alternative forms of spirituality are appealing to an ever widening group of people, numbers of self-identified modern Pagans and Wiccans are growing worldwide, the US government has acknowledged Wicca as a formal religion, and, whether you like them personally or not, highly visible people like Laurie Cabot and Starhawk have worked to elevate the public profile of witches in this country.

Then there is that other hand. The one where organized groups of evangelical preachers are chomping at the bit to challenge the law that says they can't remain tax exempt while they use their pulpits to tell people how to vote, public cases of people losing jobs and custody of children demonstrate how misunderstood and reviled we still can be, movements to ban the most popular children's story of all time proliferate because people believe the books are teaching their children how to be Wiccan, and the Republican party not only is trying its damnedest to turn our government into a Christian theocracy but also scaring the beejeezus out of thinking and rational people everywhere by choosing the most anti-feminist, anti-environment, anti-science, anti-religous-freedom candidate they could find to be their Vice Presidential nominee.

In the fantasy where a witch is standing on the steps of the US capital, one has to wonder whether she will be adding a Pagan voice to a pan-spiritual inaugural benediction or whether she will have a proverbial noose around her neck as the victim of a modern-day witch trial. Both scenarios are possible to imagine, even if they represent the two extremes on either end of the spectrum of possibilities. What is there to make us believe that reality will look more like one than the other? Hope comes in many forms.

This morning I stumbled across the article A New Generation, Poised to Reinvent, in which The New York Times interviews author Patricia Martin about her book RenGen: The Rise of the Cultural Consumer - and What It Means to Your Business. Bizarrely placed in the shifting careers section, the article presumes to be about how a new generation of Americans can best be managed in the business world. But what they're really talking about is a dawning renaissance of American culture, ushered in by a whole generation of idealistic young people with a "growing interest in cultural pursuits, diversity, authenticity and social responsibility."

The cultural consumer isn't really a new concept, introduced as we know it in 2001 by Paul H. Phd Ray in his book The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World and reinforced in 2003 by Richard Florida in his book The Rise of the Creative Class. Of the RenGen persona, Martin says it's more of a psychographic than a demographic, characterized as follows:

. . . they are eco-conscious; they take their cues from nature so they are willing to accept products that are flawed but authentic rather than slickly produced and inauthentic. Dove figured this out with the real-women campaign. They want to make a difference. They want to live many lives. They don’t want to be told, “You can’t be an architect and a poet.” They are sensualists. Because they are both idealistic and cynical at the same time, they have learned to trust what they experience rather than what experts tell them. That is why design and aesthetics are so elevated right now.

Does any of this sound familiar?

The contrast between the RenGen world view and that of an outmoded 20th-century mindset sounds remarkably like the way modern Pagan spirituality distinguishes itself from the more dogmatic religious traditions with which our culture is more familiar. Just as many people are no longer content to follow an outdated monotheism that fails to serve their spiritual needs, turning in unprecedented numbers to more fulfilling alternatives, so is the culture at large ready for a profound change.

Civilizations end, and not for reasons people often think, like military overreaching or corruption. What happens is that so much change occurs right before a civilization reaches a mature point that all the values, institutions and beliefs that give meaning to our lives are no longer as relevant. So we shed them.

As witches we know very well that moments of great personal transformation are often precipitated, if not directly caused, by a significant crisis. In the US we have arguably been facing one of the darkest nights of our collective soul and whether or not we arrive on the other side to a bright, sunshiny day depends on what we do with the opportunity we've been given to reinvent the American culture. Again, I turn to Patricia Martin:

There is one worry. It is possible if we mismanage this period we could fall into a dark age, so who is in charge will be a pivot point.

So, what will it be? Another dark age or the Age of Aquarius? What do YOU think Martin was talking about?

Coming up next, Changing the World Part Two: A Spell for Sarah Palin.

Posted by Angela-Eloise at 5:47 PM