Marion Bowman

Healing in the Spiritual Marketplace: Consumers, Courses and Credentialism

This article explores the ways in which the widely perceived “need for healing” at individual and global level have given rise to a range of new professions within the spiritual marketplace. It examines attitudes to money, the provision of training and the growth of credentialism in this sector of the spiritual service industry, where both clients and practitioners regard healing as important elements in their spiritual quest.

Drawn to Glastonbury

Here if anywhere resides the religious soul of England. It breathes across the time-washed landscape and invokes its energy through the carefully arranged geomantic monuments of earth and stone. The revolutionary revival of Albion’s true spirit will be the precursor of a New Age and that apocalyptic revival will spring from the eternally universal fountainhead that is Glastonbury. (Anthony Roberts, Glastonbury: Ancient Avalon, New Jerusalem, 1978: 12) Glastonbury, a town of some 7500 inhabitants in the South West of England, is a holy or special place which has attracted pilgrims and tourists for centuries. Popular tradition has linked Glastonbury with King Arthur, Joseph of Arimathea and even Jesus himself. There is a belief that it is the ‘cradle of English Christianity’, where Joseph founded a church. Numerous saints are said to have visited, attracted by Glastonbury’s reputation, and they in turn have added to its appeal. Glastonbury has been identified with Avalon, where King Arthur was taken after his last battle, and in 1190 it was claimed that the remains of Arthur and his queen Guenevere had been found in the ancient burial ground of the Abbey.

Procession and possession in Glastonbury: Continuity, change and the manipulation of tradition

Glastonbury, a small town in the south‐west of England, is considered significant by a variety of religious groups and spiritual seekers. While there is a large degree of peaceful co‐existence between people holding radically different worldviews, the contested nature of Glastonbury as a spiritual centre is occasionally played out by means of public displays of religiosity, the most obvious example of which is the procession. This paper compares Christian and Goddess‐oriented processions as case studies in the use of traditional means to assert historical, spatial and spiritual claims in contemporary Glastonbury.Glastonbury, a small town in the south-west of England, is considered significant by a variety of religious groups and spiritual seekers. While there is a large degree of peaceful co-existence between people holding radically different worldviews, the contested nature of Glastonbury as a spiritual centre is occasionally played out by means of public displays of religiosity, the most obvious example of which is the procession. This paper compares Christian and Goddess-oriented processions as case studies in the use of traditional means to assert historical, spatial and spiritual claims in contemporary Glastonbury.

The noble savage and the global village: Cultural evolution in new age and neo‐pagan THOUGHT

This article examines some of the assumptions underlying cultural evolution and such concepts as the Noble Savage and the Golden Age. Looking briefly at the influence and inference of these ideas in the past, their use and appearance in certain aspects of contemporary Pagan and New Age thought are then explored. The notion of the Noble Savage has recurred in various guises since at least classical times, and people have looked longingly to a lost Golden Age in history, myth or religion throughout recorded history. The theory of cultural evolution has had ramifications for both concepts, while in some respects seeming inimical to them. Now aspects of these three ideas are having spiritual implications for a large number of people. Examining the connections between them and contemporary religiosity can therefore provide useful insights towards our understanding of the present phenomena.

Vernacular religion and nature: The “Bible of the Folk” tradition in Newfoundland

In this paper I shall set out some of the basic ideas and terms underlying my views on the relationship between folkore and the study of religion, and on why I believe this can be such a fruitful partnership. I shall then use the case study of the “Bible of the Folk” tradition in Newfoundland to demonstrate some of these points.

Learning from experience: The value of analysing Avalon

Abstract In this article some of the experiences and insights gained from roughly fifteen years of conducting a long term study of Glastonbury are examined. Glastonbury, a small town in the south west of England, has become a multivalent pilgrimage site for a variety of spiritual seekers, and an icon of integrative spirituality (my preferred term for ‘alternative’ or ‘New Age’ spirituality). The concept of vernacular religion is explained, and its appropriateness in relation to both place-centred study and research into integrative spirituality is demonstrated. The rationale and some of the methodological complexities underlying this type of study are explored, and some of the trends and phenomena that the long term observation of one location has revealed are considered. The contextual detail and depth of knowledge gained from such long term study feed into an appreciation of both the internal dynamics of Christianity in Glastonbury, for example, and the growing institutionalisation of the Glastonbury Goddess movement and the spread of its influence through a variety of conduits. The role of the internet in framing expectations and presentations of Glastonbury is examined, and research relating to its unique spiritual service industry is briefly summarised. While Glastonbury is by no means ‘typical’, it is indicative of a number of trends in relation to ‘integrative’ spirituality and therefore lessons learned from there can have wider implications for the study of phenomena increasingly common in the contemporary milieu.

Religion in bath: Beyond the Fagade

This article sets out to provide an overview of religion in Bath. It arises from research in progress at Bath College of Higher Education which focuses on Bath as a centre of religion, healing and pilgrimage.

The contented collector: materiality, relationality and the power of things

Collecting vernacular religious paraphernalia is, for me, a constant, highly enjoyable and largely harmless compulsion. It adds a third dimension to the many photographs I take in relation to fieldwork. It mixes the genuine fascination and pleasure I derive from studying vernacular religion with physical reminders of places, contexts, stories, ideas, the affordances of materiality and the importance of relationality. The artefacts can, furthermore, enhance lectures and conference papers; audiences often seem to respond well to seeing/ touching/ experiencing examples of material culture. Having to think for this piece about how to characterize my “stuff,” I have identified a number of fairly loose categories, but I cannot pretend that I have hard and fast rules as to what I collect and what I choose not to acquire. During the research for my Folklore MA dissertation on devotion to St Gerard Majella in Newfoundland I had collected St Gerard Majella medals, prayer cards, a nappy pin with miniature medal attached on a card that proclaimed it “Baby’s first medal,” for example, and I continue both to collect and be given St Gerard paraphernalia by people who know of this interest. I have not personally gone out in the middle of the night in a blizzard with my St Gerard medal in order to save the life of a woman having a difficult childbirth—but I know a woman who has! That is what gives it “added value.” Having grown up in the Church of Scotland, I enjoy Protestant material culture, in part because so many Protestants do not think they have any! I have some delightful Methodist and Temperance china (Figure 1) and lust after more. I was thrilled to purchase a Playmobil model of Luther last year in Erfurt during the International Association for the History of Religions conference, which came packaged with information about the forthcoming Luther 2017 celebrations (Figure 2). One of my favorite Protestant artifacts is a little assemblage, hand crafted for a Church of Scotland sale of work (Figure 3). It is “The Cross in My Pocket”—which can also be found as a little card with a small cross either attached by laminate or simply printed on it. The text which accompanies the cross and lives in the little pouch can have a variable number of verses; here an extract must suffice:

Christianity, Plurality and Vernacular Religion in early Twentieth Century Glastonbury: A Sign of Things to Come?

This essay focuses upon a significant place, Glastonbury, at an important time during the early twentieth century, in order to shed light on a particular aspect of Christianity which is frequently overlook: its internal plurality. This is not simply denominational diversity, but the considerable heterogeneity which exists at both institutional and individual level within denominations, and which often escapes articulation, awareness or comment. This is significant because failure to apprehend a more detailed, granular picture of religion can lead to an incomplete view of events in the past and, by extension, a partial understanding of later phenomena. This essay argues that by using the concept of vernacular religion a more nuanced picture of religion as it is - or has been - lived can be achieved.

Jennifer Westwood (1940–2008)

Jennifer (‘Jen’) Westwood, folklorist, author and broadcaster, was remarkable in many ways. Through her books and broadcasts, lectures and letters, exhibitions and emails, she informed and inspired many, enhancing their appreciation of folklore generally, and in particular communicating her passion for the complex and creative interaction between legend, location and landscape. Born in 1940 in Norton Subcourse on the edge of the Norfolk marshes, Jennifer’s “rootedness” in her village nurtured and informed her deep sense of place and tradition. Despite time away at university in Oxford and Cambridge, research in Scandinavia and Iceland, periods of residence in America, Iran and London, and fieldwork in the Camargue, Norton Subcourse remained central to her physical, intellectual and folkloric world. That she was able to live in the three-hundredyear-old house in which she had been born, and reside in the village about which she had learned so much from her grandparents, gave Jen more than an abstract understanding of continuity and change. The little girl who cycled home on dark winter evenings pedalling fast and singing hymns to ward off “Shuck,” the black ghost dog of East Anglia, eventually became the author of such books as Albion: A Guide to Legendary Britain (1985) and, twenty years later, The Lore of the Land (with Jacqueline Simpson, 2005). After attending the Sir John Leman Grammar School in Beccles, Jennifer studied English Language, including Anglo-Saxon, at St Anne’s College, Oxford. An influential and oft recounted incident was a lecture by J. R. R. Tolkien on Beowulf, an event in which, after removing his false teeth, he simply declaimed the poem, to considerable effect. Jennifer subsequently read Old Norse at Cambridge, and researched for her Ph.D. in Scandinavia and Iceland. Jennifer’s versatility (knowledgeable plantswoman, foodways expert, acute observer of vernacular religion) was most apparent in her extraordinary publishing career. Starting with Mediaeval Tales, the first of a number of children’s publications with which she was involved (she even wrote the text for a couple of Rupert Bear Annuals), Jennifer’s publications were numerous and varied, including contributions to the Gothic Guides series of county-based folklore compendiums, the production (with Bruce Marshall) of the Atlas of Mysterious Places, the influential Albion (in various editions), Sacred Journeys (a two-hundredpage account of the background to many of the world’s major pilgrimages), The Lore of the Land (with Jacqueline Simpson) and, most recently, The Penguin Book of Ghosts (edited by Sophia Kingshill). Jennifer’s aim was always to make folklore accessible to the public, but without compromising on accuracy. The tenacity with which she would track back references to their earliest source was but one example of her meticulous scholarship. An enthusiastic and engaging speaker, Folklore 119 (December 2008): 346–348