Description
Paganism is a contemporary religious movement, which believes in many gods, nature being
sacred and worshiped in seasonal rites, with adaptations to life in modern society. The
inspiration and reconstruction of the old pre-Christian European religions and / or the
indigenous traditions of the country and origin of the practitioners is sought. Our work sought
to understand how the reality in Paganism is. So we come to the thesis that Pagan reality is
magical. Unlike the magic-religion-science triad, we created the concept of triple magic to
represent pagan reality. It is divided into ritual magic, symbolic magic and participatory
magic. And such a system of thought can be called magism. We have discovered that magic is
the founding link, and agglutinator of Paganism. And that, therefore, magic in Paganism is a
resource, rather than a dump. And the various responses given by our 40 interviewees
revealed to us that it is the myth that plays the role of belief, and distinguishes Pagan
religions. To reach these conclusions we have come a long way. We use Paul Veyne's
concepts of "truth programs" and "constitutive imagination." We investigate religion as
everyday life with Graham Harvey, and we use Ian Jamison's bodily ethics, in conjunction
with Hanegraaff, Pasi, Thomas, and Mauss's magical studies. So we were applying in the:
investigation of the origin of formation of Paganism in the romantic movement, which was
nostalgic of a past gone (Pagan), seeking an organic union between people, culture and
nature; and the new form of magic that comes with secularization, which seeks a mystical
union with the divine, combined with the spirit of optimism and faith in human progress and
perfection. Having understood this world context that includes the myth and the contemporary
Pagan rite, we went to Brazil. We investigated eight Pagan religions: Wicca, Druidism and
recon, Heathenism, Hellenism, Shamanism, Goddess Spirituality, Witchcraft and Piaganism.
We did: field research in almost all regions of the country, with the exception of the North,
visiting eight states, bibliographical research, documentaries and interviews, of which four
were face-to-face and 36 were open questionnaires with 31 questions. The interviewees are
from all regions of the country, distributed in 15 states. Prioritized people with more time of
practice, and with a significant character in the development, dissemination and actuation of
contemporary Paganism in Brazil. All the data made it possible to see magic as Whitehead's
“process”. It is the imagination, the enchantment, the magic that makes real life, which makes
belief in a set of myths a great number of strangers, which enables the practice of a set of
gestures to create a reality, and insert their practitioners in a community, perpetuated by the
same process of experiencing the subjects.
