O caldeirão da bruxa: a magia e o sincretismo religioso na Wicca

Abstract

Wicca is a religion created in the middle of modernity, in the 20th century. Its growing popularity draws attention, in the attempt to understand its relations with modernity and the structuring of its countercultural response and agenda. This dissertation aims to reach deeper understandings and reflections on the relationship between Wicca and current counter-modern criticism. Wicca is thus understood here as an intermediary institution, capable of playing a role of mediation between the religious and the social, here understood as religious privatization, therefore as a mediation between individual senses and values in the plural collective of modernity. The opportunities for an affirmation of Wicca as a consolidated religion leads it to important revisions of its practices and adaptability in the modern world, so that the assertiveness of its answers will depend on its broader relations with the space and the circuit in which it is inserted within Paganism and Modern Witchcraft. Through field research in a Wiccan coven in São Paulo/Brazil, in virtual forums, based on participant observation through subjective mediation between the researcher and the interlocutor, and through academic and native bibliographic review, the present work will poses articulations of how this relationship occurs, analyzing the relationship between Wicca and modernity from its religious and institutional structure, the study of local leadership, and the articulation of its participants. In this way, it is possible to strive towards understanding both the agendas absorbed by Wicca and its insertion in the struggles against the hegemony of modernity. Permeating this understanding, we can also see how Wicca responds to the “crisis of meaning in modernity” described by Berger and Luckmann (2012) and how this response can be better adapted from the internal criticisms raised to the “Witches' Religion”.