Dr Angela Puca: Hello symposiasts! I’m Dr Angela Puca, Religious Studies PhD, and your online resource for the academic study of magic, esotericism, paganism, shamanism, and all things occult. I’m very excited to be here to talk about a topic that I think was long overdue to be tackled on this channel, and we will do that with an expert and a friend that I will bring on in just a second.
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But before we dive in, I have to do a bit of symposium keeping, and that is reminding you that if you like my project and enjoy it, and you have the means to support it and keep it alive, I would really appreciate it if you supported with donations on PayPal, joined my Patreon, which has a fantastic community—we have monthly lectures, a book club, we have lots of things going on—and you also have Ko-fi and lots of ways of supporting me that you can find in the info box and in the cards and everywhere. So now that I’ve done the symposium keeping, I can bring on my special guest for today. Hi Chris, how are you?
Meet Dr Chris Cotter
Dr Chris Cotter: Hello, I’m good, thank you. I always still get weirded out when I’m referred to as an expert.
Dr Angela Puca: Why, all academics are like that; we all have this impostor syndrome.
Dr Chris Cotter: At one point, I eventually realised, you know, if you feel like you’re faking it, constantly faking it, as long as you know, what is the functional difference between faking it and keeping it going and actually being an expert? And then I go, well, if everyone’s faking it, then I guess if people call me an expert, maybe I am. I don’t know.
Dr Angela Puca: Well, I would suspect that having a PhD and several academic publications and books would kind of count as something, just as a little reminder.
Dr Chris Cotter: But I’ll take it, I’ll take it, yeah.
Dr Angela Puca: Chris and I have known each other for a few years, I’d say. I think you’ve seen me grow up academically. I think we first met in the first year of my PhD at the BASR conference, which is the British Association for the Study of Religions, for people who are not familiar with the acronym. And we were both committee members—you still are, I think.
Dr Chris Cotter: Yeah, oh well, for another few weeks and then I won’t be. Yeah, I’ve been treasurer for coming on nine years and that’s a long time. I’m finally stepping aside from that role. And then I think our first, like, proper real interaction was in Switzerland. I remember we recorded a podcast, yes, at the European Association conference there. Yeah, can’t remember what we talked about. I think we did a podcast about podcasting or something; it was a bit weird.
Dr Angela Puca: Yes, it was very meta. It was a podcast about podcasting, but I think one of the things that I really like is the fact that you were one of the co-founders of The Religious Studies Project, which was actually definitely an inspiration for my own channel. So I really, I really like that project, even though I know that now it is going through a hiatus.
Dr Chris Cotter: But yeah, it’s been on the go since 2012, covering all things related to studies, so there’ll be some things there that might not be of interest to your symposiasts, but there’s plenty that would be. Yeah, it’s been on a bit of a hiatus for about a year, but we’ve got, yeah, over 10 years’ worth of weekly podcasts with academics, so it’s a good resource to go check out.
Dr Angela Puca: Yes, I would definitely recommend people check it out. You can find it on podcast platforms and also on YouTube. I’m definitely a fan of The Religious Studies Project, so I hope that it gets recognised.
Dr Chris Cotter: But you took it to the next level with live streams and video content. We got so used to doing audio; just trying, and the extra effort that goes into video production was too much, so I’m glad that you’re taking it to the next level.
Dr Angela Puca: Thank you, yeah. I find that the video helps people to engage with the content a bit more, but it is definitely an extra effort with filming, cutting, editing, and all of that. So, tell us a bit more about your research before I start drilling you with questions.
Dr Cotter’s Research
Dr Chris Cotter: That’s okay. So, as you said in the blurb, I do the non-religious stuff, and sometimes people might be a bit weirded out by the fact that you’re a Religious Studies academic and you study stuff that’s apparently not religious. I would always say, well, if you’re interested in this core term of religion, whatever it is, you should also be interested in the stuff that is apparently not part of that category. But there are so many crossovers and relationships, you know. We’ll be talking about atheism—you know, if someone says that they’re an atheist, they’re clearly participating in a conversation about something that they’re rejecting, and that act of rejection, that claim of rejection, as I’m sure we’ll get to as well, should be of interest. And also, you know, people would say, well, why don’t we look at other things like non-golfers or non-stamp collectors, right? You know, what is it about being non-religious? They’re just not. I’m like, religion, whatever it is—and I’m sure you discuss this a lot here as well—you know, it’s an amorphous concept, but it’s a powerful concept. It’s something that we can trace influences of throughout human history, however, it’s defined, it’s powerful, and it means something to people. It’s entangled with politics and values and life and death and the meaning of life and all of that. So, I think studying folk who are positioned outside of that, whether by their own choice or by others—people saying you’re not part of our club—I think that’s immensely important because of the cultural dominance that this religion word has had. So, I’m just interested in all those sorts of things.
I got drawn into it by the end of my undergraduate degree. That was when Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and others were quite prominent in the nascent Twitter-sphere and everything, and they’d published a few atheist books, and so I was drawn to just go, “Oh, it’d be interesting to look at this stuff through my religious lens.” And then it went much broader, and now I tend to—you know, I still get asked to do things about Dawkins on occasion, and I go, “Fine, but I really don’t want to talk about Dawkins anymore”—but much more broad to not necessarily people even taking a position, but just, “What about folk who just don’t seem to really engage with religion or spirituality at all? What’s going on for them?”
How can Witches and Satanists be Atheists?
Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, I was about to say that I started to have more of a reflection over the concept of being non-religious and even atheism in relation to, as you know, I specialise more in witchcraft and esotericism. I was running my Left-Hand Path online course, and we had a conversation about that because we had a lecture on LaVeyan Satanism and the concept of it being atheistic. And I myself advanced some doubts about it—I mean, about whether something that claims to be atheistic but then involves lots of different entities and involves forms of magic can really be said to be atheistic. And so that kind of sparked my interest in trying to understand better, with an expert such as you, what it means to be atheistic. What would it mean for a religious practice or, in this case, an esoteric tradition to define itself as atheist? , for instance, in many claims that I’ve seen with atheistic witchcraft and atheistic Satanism as well, what they use even when they perform magic, they are only leveraging psychological factors or affecting something that is psychological. But then why would they still use entities and demons or whatever it is that, in the specific case, is employed, which is very religious? Why would they employ a religious ritual or a religious setting? So if it was purely psychological, it would just be psychological; it wouldn’t include religious elements. So that’s why there’s a part of me that wonders whether the emic definition here is accurate or whether an etic intervention is needed. For people who are not familiar, emic means the definition that practitioners give themselves—the self-definition—and the etic perspective is what scholars or people analysing the practice from the outside give to the practice.
Religion for Breakfast Series
Yeah, well, I’ve got a lot of thoughts, a lot of thoughts here. And in our preamble, before we started broadcasting, you mentioned the Religion for Breakfast’s recent YouTube video on “What is Atheism?” So I would highly recommend that. That’s a really good overview of just what the concept could be taken to mean.
Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, Andrew is really good.
Definition of Atheist
Dr Chris Cotter: Yeah, yeah, he started just after the Religious Studies Project started, and we were like, “Oh, there we go, he’s doing it as well.” But, you know, if we’re going to break it down to, you know, the dictionary definition, you know, atheos—atheist—without gods, so God being the theism part and A being without. But even within that definition itself, you know, does it mean anyone who doesn’t have belief in a particular god or in anything that’s a deity, or does it mean the supernatural in general? I think most people would say, no, it’s specifically about deities. It also tends to be very culturally specific, so, you know, someone saying that they’re an atheist, they’re not consciously necessarily rejecting a whole pantheon of potential deities; they’ll be rejecting the one that’s culturally dominant in the context that they’re saying it, which, you know, in a North American or European context, will probably be the Abrahamic or Christian God that they’re saying, “I don’t believe in that.” But being without could just mean not having—so, does it have to be a conscious “I don’t believe in this,” like an assertion, or could you be implicitly atheist without realising it? We could maybe say that for huge swathes of the population in, say, the UK, where we’re recording, but that’s only when you’re talking about the identity.
Practical Atheism
Then you’ve got what it means functionally in practice. You say that someone is behaving atheistically if they live as if there is no deity or supernatural, and again, that could maybe apply to a lot of people who might say, “Oh yeah, there’s a God, right?” But if it doesn’t mean anything in their day-to-day life, are they living atheistically? And then who’s to decide, who’s to say? Is it for scholars to go, “You know, well, you are an atheist,” or should it always be down to what an individual is saying? And then other thoughts were floating around, like even Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion, rejects the existence of God and/or gods but would say that because he can’t be 100% sure because he’s a rational scientist, then technically he’s an agnostic because you shouldn’t make a definitive statement about this being definitely the case if you don’t have 100% proof or whatever. But that’s just using the words “gods” and “deities” and so on.
Scientific Rationalism
The whole idea of atheism is also entangled with a kind of scientific rationalist discourse, you know, like to be scientific, to be rational, to be modern, is to reject sort of supernatural fairy tales or whatever, so we should all be atheists. But how does that manifest again in day-to-day life? Buying into that narrative would presume that people were behaving 100% rationally 100% of the time and weren’t buying into any beliefs rituals traditions or values which were non-falsifiable. And you’ll find plenty of people who might claim to be atheists who will still engage in family traditions or they’ll hold on to, you know, like British values, or they’ll get offended by people not wearing a poppy and remembering certain things, which you can’t, you know, there’s no—that’s not rational. Or they’ll believe in love, you know, like, you know, love is—it’s not a rational concept like that’s something there’s no—you can’t look at the world and prove that that’s there, but it’s believed in and it’s acted upon. And so, just because someone claims to be an atheist and might claim that that is, you know, that feeds into their very being and that they’re rational, they don’t believe in silly things that they can’t prove, there’s going to be a whole swathe of things that we do as human beings which, you know, aren’t rational decisions. I think I’m done with my initial rant on, you know, what it even means to be an atheist.
Practitioners Defining Themselves
Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, I think that my stance in terms of whether we should always accept the self-definition of practitioners or not—I have a sense of something in between because I think that practitioners are notoriously inaccurate at defining what they do. That is because when somebody defines what they are doing, they don’t have in mind as a priority to be accurate; they would just use a definition that has to do with how they want to be perceived in the community that they live in. So it’s not about really giving an accurate representation of what they do; it’s more about portraying and, in a way, giving the image that they want to give, you know, to the community around them. An example of this that I often mention is that, for instance, in my research on Italian witchcraft, the Italian witches wouldn’t define themselves as witches, even though to all intents and purposes what they were doing was witchcraft. They would say that they were devout Catholics. Were they devout Catholics? I don’t think that that was the case. And the reason why is that the term “strega” in Italy has a very negative connotation, and I even wrote an article, a peer-reviewed article, about the fact that “shaman” is substituting “witch” in Italy because “shaman” doesn’t have a history of antagonism with the Catholic Church. So people who in effect practice witchcraft would prefer to use the term “shaman” to the term “strega” or “witch” because it doesn’t have a negative connotation attached to it. So you can see how practitioners are really interested in how using a specific term will make them be perceived and appreciated by the community that they live in. And that’s why I always argue that self-definitions are incredibly important because they inform us about lots of things, like, for instance, even trying to understand why Italian witches wouldn’t use the term “witch” for themselves—that is informative in itself, and all the rationale behind it. So it’s very informative, but I would argue that it’s not the most accurate explanation, it’s not the most accurate definition of their practice. So that’s why I think scholars are important.
Scholars Telling Practitioners What They Are
However, I don’t think that scholars should tell practitioners, “Oh, you are not this” or “You are not that,” because it is just about presenting the analysis, and then people do what they want. If they want to keep referring to themselves with the label that they choose because their primary aim is to be perceived in one way or another, so be it. But at least the research and the information, the knowledge, is out there for them to access or for other people to access.
Being a Religious Studies Scholar
Dr Chris Cotter: Exactly, yeah. When anyone makes any statement or identification claim, you’ve got to think about the context in which it’s being made. I’m sure census figures and what will come up—you know, when people are asked on a census, “What religion do you belong to?”—well, that gives you an answer of what they think they should say in the context of a census questionnaire. Similarly, you know, I’m sure you do it, I do it; when people ask, “What do you study?” you think about the context in which you’re being asked the question. And sometimes I’ll be like, “Oh yeah, I’m a Religious Studies academic,” but you think in context, what reaction is that likely to elicit? You know, it might produce a hostile reaction. Once religion comes up, people tend to want to tell you their thoughts, whatever they are, and if at that moment you don’t particularly want to have that engagement, you might say something like, “Oh, I’m a social scientist,” or just to sort of deflect a little bit, “I work at a university.” So, you know, we choose how we present based on what we think people will interpret things as.
Dr Cotter’s Book from PhD Dissertation
And in my book, which grew out of the PhD, so it’s The Critical Study of Non-Religion, I talk a lot about these things, the sort of identification claims. And I use one example of an interviewee who, you know, said, “When I think about it, I’m an atheist; when I’m in trouble, I’m not.” You know, so she acknowledged that at certain points in her life, she was willing to claim that label, but sometimes when things got tough, she found herself drawing on other elements of her religious upbringing. And in some way, many religions will talk about people who have doubts, you know, and what to do about people who are doubters in the tradition and getting them back. But there can be atheist doubters too who, you know, they’ll claim to be atheist, but they’ll lapse into religious thinking at certain times. And then I also use an example of an individual—by a survey that I did, I allowed people to tick as many different boxes as they wanted, and I provided them with a list of about 32 religious identities that they could pick from—and there was someone who, I think, said they were an atheist, agnostic, Buddhist, humanist, spiritual, something else, something else. And of course, if you go into these things…
Dr Angela Puca: I rest my case.
Being in Multiple Religious Categories
Dr Chris Cotter: Yeah, yeah, if you go into these things thinking that these are discrete categories and you can only be one, you’d be like, “This makes no sense.” But when engaging with that individual, you know, it became perfectly clear that each one of those labels made sense to them, and they didn’t see any problem with their Buddhist practice because it was a non-theistic tradition. They were like, “It’s not,” so they saw atheism as sort of rejecting a lot of the Western conceptions of deities and so on. And their agnosticism was because, again, the sort of Buddhist self-doubt and non-knowing and stuff, so they couldn’t be definitive. And then humanism was how they wanted their interaction with other human beings and their concern for human welfare, etc., to be perceived, and so on. Not everyone is going to be as—you know, it made sense for them when I delved into it. For others, it might be much more contradictory and fluctuating, and that’s okay. That’s how people do stuff.
Humans and Contradictions
Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, human beings operate in very contradictory ways sometimes. It’s just that we are complex, I guess, exactly. And what do you think about traditions like, for instance, esoteric traditions that use religious ritualism and entities and spirits or demons or deities, and they claim to be atheistic?
Atheists Who Use Religious Traditions and Rituals
Dr Chris Cotter: Yeah, well, as we’d say, yeah, up to them, that’s fine. But I think there’s going to be a whole host of things going on there. I mean, as you know, human beings are ritual beings. We ritualise everything, from morning routines and things that we do for luck and always wearing—you know, I don’t know why I keep building up, I’m just getting more and more bracelets and stuff. And especially important stuff, even these live streams and so on, there’s a certain ritual to the way that they’re done: birthday parties, graduations, celebrations, funerals. But even just the sort of Erving Goffman’s notions of how, you know, just all human interaction is a sort of ritualised performance when we’re out there interacting with others. So I think one should always be careful making claims about things that are inherently human, because then you get into the, “Well, where’s your evidence for that?” But it seems to be quite a human thing to ritualise and to impart significance to things through making them more ritualised—the more ritualised it is, the more significant it is.
Religion as a Toxic Brand
So in one sense, it makes perfect sense that there’d be a draw if you’ve got a whole host of esoteric and occult rituals and iconography and so on that can be drawn on. You know, why not? If you can draw on that, you know, why reject it? If it ain’t broke, don’t try and fix it. And then I think it comes down again to that discursive thing about religion. Linda Woodhead uses the phrase “religion in the modern world,” or in the modern West, as kind of a toxic brand for a variety of factors, from various scandals associated with institutional religion and perceptions that religion’s behind the curve and socially conservative and all these things. It’s grown into something that, to be associated with it, is not the best, to put it mildly, for a lot of people. So rejecting that, and atheism is a good label to show that you’re rejecting. You’re saying, “Well, we’re non-religious.” But it doesn’t have quite the same—being non-religious, it doesn’t have that same kind of definitive rejection quality about it. So atheism has that kind of, “No, we are rejecting a lot of the negative stuff that society has come to associate with established religions,” and so on. So I can see a discursive element to wanting to claim atheism.
Atheism and the Supernatural
And then also, yeah, if you’re going to break it right down, atheism refers to a rejection of a relatively narrow concept. It doesn’t say anything about the supernatural more broadly, doesn’t say anything about the efficacy of rituals, doesn’t say anything about, you know, religiously following the scientific method, and so on. But…
Dr Angela Puca: So do you think that the concept of atheism and working with the supernatural or other types of entities is not in opposition or contradiction?
Atheists with Supernatural Beliefs
Dr Chris Cotter: Not at all. It would, you know, it tends to be—again, we keep bringing up this word discourse—you know, you would tend to find that the Venn diagrams of atheists would cross over with people who are sort of rational naturalists, I suppose, you know like that Venn diagram is going to be quite close. But there’s nothing to say that it should be. And again, I know plenty of atheists who have a whole variety of supernatural beliefs, and again, I’m never going to point that out like, you know, “Does that make sense? No, you do your thing.” But it’s a very narrow area that is being rejected, and again, people might oppose atheism versus religion, but again, if you go by strict definitional terms, it’s not about religion; it’s about belief in a very particular concept of a deity or deities. God, yeah, we’ll just say God, right? It’s not about being anti-religious. Again, lots of atheists are anti-religious, whatever religion is, but they’re not part of the same dichotomy, even though people will tend to slip in between, you know, theism and religion as if they’re the same thing.
Viewer Question
Dr Angela Puca: We have a question. I-Mystic is asking, “What is the distinction in this discussion between religious and spiritual? Is it a social construct?”
Religion and Spiritual Are Social Constructs
Dr Chris Cotter: Yes, it’s a social construct. Well, you know, I think I am a social constructivist, so I do see all terms as socially constructed, and it’s going to shift and change depending on the context and who’s doing the defining, and so on.
The Problem of Definitions in Religious Studies
So how do you define religion and spiritual or religious? And yeah, this is where I’ll get nervous about saying something that could come back to haunt me because I tend to push those questions aside and go, “Well, I’m not doing the defining; I’m looking at how the terms work out there in the world.” But I would say they’re not the same thing. Religion need not be institutional; it doesn’t have to be institutional, but in the way that most people tend to conceive of religion, it tends to have some sort of institutional quality to it, whereas spirituality might have a more individualised quality to it. I’ve said Venn diagrams already; you know, a lot of things that people might recognise as religion would have quite a spiritual element to them, and they could overlap. But it’d be entirely possible to be a practising member of a traditional religion and not really be particularly involved in the spiritual aspects of it. And then it’s also quite possible to do various things religiously without being associated with an institutional religion. They’re very slippery terms, but you know, historically, spirituality as a notion has only really come to the fore kind of since the ’50s and ’60s, and it’s sort of become a bit oppositional to this idea of religion. On the one hand, you’ve got institutional, rigid, traditional religion, and on the other side, you’ve got more sort of individualised, liberating, personal spirituality, and people judging religion based on that: “Well, you know, that doesn’t fit with my own personal spiritual path,” and so on.
Exterior and Interior Aspects of Religion and Spirituality
So I think one is seen as something that’s exterior and that one is part of, and spirituality comes from within and is authentic to the self. But I wouldn’t want to say that that is what they are or are not, but that would probably tend to be how the terms are used. What about you, Angela? What would you say?
Dr Puca’s Definitions
Dr Angela Puca: Well, one thing that I sometimes try to express, especially with my patrons, with whom I share more of my opinions because on my public YouTube channel I just really tend to present what research is out there—one thing that I always think is that if people used religion in a more liberal way and not only to mean Abrahamic religions, people who define themselves as spiritual would probably benefit. So that’s something that I always argue because I think that the term “religion” has for a very long time been monopolised by certain religions. And so now there’s this cultural zeitgeist where people think, “Oh, religion looks like that, it is institutional, it is…” and it looks in that specific way. But religion is many things, and the fact that people give up the term “religion” in a way makes the monopoly win, as opposed to actually challenging what religion means and saying, “Well, you know, I work with Hecate or with Lucifer or whatever; this is a religious practice. It is spiritual, and it is also religious. I have rituals, and I have offerings, and I have a continuous relationship, and you know, this and that.” And I don’t know, I think that part of me would prefer it if people would kind of challenge the concept of religion a bit more and help redefine the term “religion.” Because I know that this is something that has been happening among us scholars for a long time; there have been lots of papers and publications on the definition of religion and how it needs to be broadened, and so on. But I think that there is a bit of a disconnect between us as academics and people, you know, people that practice different forms of religions. And, you know, I guess that giving up the term “religion” because your religiosity doesn’t resemble the Abrahamic religions just means that you are allowing the monopoly to win, as opposed to challenging it. And I also feel that religion is more of a social and political agent than spirituality is.
The Need to Redefine Religion
So one of the reasons why I think that people would benefit from engaging more with the term “religion” and helping redefine it is the fact that spirituality and being spiritual is not a social and political agent as much as religion is. I mean, we have Religious Studies departments; we don’t have Spiritual Studies departments, and religion tends to be something that just has more gravitas, in a way, in our social structure. It is an active agent, and perhaps one could argue that spirituality might become one over time, but I just have this sense that, you know, people should just reconsider the term “religion.” So if you ask me what I think is religious and what I think is spiritual…
Spirituality Should Be a Subcategory of Religion
I would say that “spiritual,” in my opinion, is something that belongs in the category of religion. So I would see religion as this big category, and then inside religion, I would see a circle where there’s spirituality. So I think that people can be religious but not spiritual when they follow specifically what the institutional structure says, but they are not actively participating. But I doubt more that you can be spiritual and not religious if that makes sense. If you are spiritual, then it means that—I would also agree that “spiritual” means that there is an individual engagement with the divine, and this happens also with institutional religions because even every single Catholic will engage with the divine in their own specific way when they do so, when they are also spiritual. So to me, it’s like when somebody is spiritual, it’s very difficult for them not to be religious, in my opinion, because they are still engaging with some form of religiosity, whether it’s ritualistic or not, whether it is a sense of cultivating a sense of connection with the environment, whether it’s connecting with spirits of the land. Obviously, I tend to have examples in my mind that come from my research, which is more on paganism, but I struggle to see how you can be spiritual and not religious. But I can see how somebody can be religious and not spiritual. So to me, it’s like “spiritual” is a subcategory of religion.
Spiritual but Not Religious in the Mainstream Religions
Dr Chris Cotter: Yeah, yeah, I get you, and there’s—you know, this always gets very sort of hazy for me. Yeah, like, I tend to just go, “Well, you know, my working definition of religion is just sort of anything that people do that sort of isn’t entirely naturalistic or evidence-based.” So I’m quite broad in my notion, but I’m also constantly like, “Yes, this is a social construct.” But I think the rise of spirituality discourse, you know, was very much tied to a rejection of a lot of the negatively perceived things about institutional religion and a sort of quest for personal authenticity, in a sense. And then that’s been taken up within institutional religion—you know, spirituality discourse has become a major part of it. And then there’ll be many Christians who will reject, “Oh yeah, we’re not religious, we’re not a religion, we’re spiritual,” or, “You know, we’re Christian, we’re not religious,” because they’ve taken on the critique of the spirituality discourse at the same time. And then I often think when we talk about people who say that they’re spiritual but not religious…
Role of Survey Questions
I know that was part of the headline of what this interview would be about. We’ve got to think about the context in which that identification has taken place. If it’s a survey where, you know, people are asked, “Are you this? Are you that?” and it’s like, “Are you spiritual?”—well, what in people’s minds is the opposite of spiritual? I don’t know, materialistic? Only concerned with material things or rational stuff? So I think many people would if you put it on a survey, think, “Spiritual sounds like I’m interested in more than just the base things.” So what does “spiritual” mean to that person who’s maybe ticked that on a survey? We don’t know what they’re setting it up against. Is it just being a bit more deep? Is it having a bit of, you know, like, “Oh yeah, I watch movies and I get a sense of awe,” or, “I like looking at nature”? You know, what does it mean? But then I would say, well, it doesn’t matter—none is more authentic than the others. They’ve chosen the word, and they’re using the word to describe something about themselves, something desirable about themselves. And then “spiritual but not religious” I think just has that negative—you know, well, religion is something that people maybe do unthinkingly, or it’s something that people do that’s associated with a big, negative, lumbering institution. But “I’m spiritual”—I’m engaging with stuff for me, and authentically, I’m actually doing it, as opposed to people who just do it religiously, where it’s maybe seen as a sort of unthinking thing or something that’s imposed or something that’s rigid, something that’s inauthentic. And I wouldn’t want to say that that’s true or not, but I think that is part of what people are trying to convey by saying, “I’m spiritual but not religious.” I’m interested in all this stuff, and I have my own personal, authentic relationship with it, but I’m doing that outside the confines of being told what I have to do.
Spiritual but Not Religious Christians
Dr Angela Puca: That’s interesting. There are also Christians who would say that they are spiritual but not religious. I was not aware of that.
Related Memes and Pop Culture
Dr Chris Cotter: Yeah, I’ve got a few slides somewhere that I could share. Yeah, if you search for, like, you know, you can get t-shirts and, like, you know, “Christian atheist” or “We’re spiritual but not religious” and stuff but with quite Christian inflexions. And then, of course, just, you know, drawing in more into your Symposiasts’ area of interest—I mean, especially in, you know, like, interest in the occult and the esoteric and magic—and so it seems to come in waves in popular culture, as I’m sure you’ve noted. And at the moment, I’ve noticed we seem to be in kind of a renewed wave of, you know, pop culture engaging with a lot of this sort of stuff. And people, people, I’ll say, like, vibe with it, like it, and seem to find it—you know, whilst they might reject, “Oh, I’m not into religious stuff,” but all this, you know, thing that’s all—it’s magic and demons and rituals and symbols and, you know, they—but they don’t see their rejection of traditional religion (I’ll keep using that in scare quotes) on the one hand, and their enthusiasm for a lot of other things as being incompatible at all. But then, of course, I wouldn’t want to say that just because someone likes watching things about magic and so on they’re actually properly engaging with it because that’s a whole other level as well.
Compartmentalising Beliefs
But people seem to be able to quite easily compartmentalise—well, there’s that stuff that I’ll reject, and then there’s this whole bunch of other stuff that I’m much more willing to give time to because it’s exciting and feels much more authentic.
Atheistic Witchcraft
Dr Angela Puca: And what do you think about the concept of atheistic witchcraft?
Dr Chris Cotter: Again, I think it’s entirely, entirely compatible. I guess some atheists might have much more of a problem with that; they’d be like, “You can’t possibly be engaging in witchcraft if you’re meant to be an atheist.” But yeah, I would say that that’s placing those practitioners outside of a religious framework. But whether we as academics would look at what they were doing and go, “Is this outside a religion-related framework?” I doubt we would as academics, but we would have to look into what’s going on with the claim. And you were saying there that, you know, a lot of it seems to be purely psychological perhaps.
Claims of Psychological Magic Working
Dr Angela Puca: It’s claimed to be purely psychological, but I kind of wonder if it is purely psychological, why do you have to employ religious things and rituals and entities and demons, and why do you even call it a church, like the Church of Satan, for instance? So I don’t know. I think that you know, part of this conversation is also to see whether you can change my mind about that because I don’t know, I just feel sceptical about atheistic witchcraft, to be honest. But maybe, as you say, it’s really about ritualism and that human beings need rituals.
Beliefs About Non-scientific Concepts and Objects
Dr Chris Cotter: Well, coming back to when you said that, you know, you’ve got religion and spirituality, and perhaps spirituality can be a part of that. Again, we do not want to make claims about what religion definitely is or isn’t, but yeah, you have elements which are about beliefs, right? Beliefs about things that are beyond the scientifically observable, beliefs about what we should and shouldn’t do, and that sort of thing. So there’s that area, but there’s so much else—there’s the practice and the iconography and the ritual and the dress and all the aesthetic, affective stuff: the smells, the emotions, the states that can be induced through engaging in practice, or even just being in a space; architecture and the music and all the soundscapes. There’s so much more to the word “religion” than just that one narrow aspect of what it is they believe or don’t believe. So I can absolutely see that atheistic witchcraft might wish to reject a certain element of the belief side of things, but also see great value and getting great value from a lot of the other elements—from the aesthetics and the experience and the places and everything else that comes with it that’s not just that relatively narrow thing that is the belief and the supernatural side of things. There’s so much more going on there.
Religions for Atheists
Although I’ve never been able to get through it, I’ve got a book back there—Alain de Boton’s Religion for Atheists—and it’s basically a book-length musing by a philosopher on, you know, “Yeah, yeah, we reject the supernatural stuff, but look at all the other aspects of religion.” And it’s kind of like a more recent attempt to develop a, you know, a secular religion, I suppose. I’ve delved into it a little bit, but I’ve got better things to do with my time than reading this. But I understand the impulse there in that there is so much. And again, a lot of very vocal critics of religion would also be quite open to acknowledging a lot of the positive, functional elements of religious traditions, and so I can see how that could play out. There’s something that atheistic witchcraft will want to be rejected—there is an element, you know, but then also, well, yeah, it could just go down as a sort of medicalized psychological thing, but there’s a lot more that comes with the connection to the witchcraft side of things than just that belief element.
Atheists and Religiosity
Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, I think that the use of the label “atheistic” in the realm of witchcraft and esotericism is definitely an example of people using a term because they want to be perceived in a specific way and not to be accurate. As you say, my impression is that they are atheistic in the sense that they reject a specific type of religiosity, which is the dominant one of their cultural context, and in the cases that I’m thinking about, it is primarily Christianity. But they are not non-religious because they employ religious elements, religious rituals, and so I guess that, as I said, I’m sceptical that what they do is purely psychological, as some of them claim, because if it really was psychological, you wouldn’t have to call upon Belial or this demon or this other entity and engage with them in a ritualistic way. I think that it’s part…
Soft and Hard Polytheism
Dr Angela Puca: So the way that I interpret it is through a lens, through a psychology that I find very useful and I’ve mentioned on my channel in the past, which is hard polytheism and soft polytheism. Are you familiar with this concept?
Dr Chris Cotter: I mean, I can infer what you mean, but…
Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, but yeah, so basically, hard polytheism is when people believe in the ontological reality of deities and entities, and soft polytheism is when people believe in entities as archetypes and part of themselves or, you know, forces of nature. So, soft polytheism is more the belief in entities and supernatural beings as something that is part of you, so in a way, this is more a psychological interpretation, and it is similar or adjacent to the psychological model of magic. So to me, it feels like when the claims of atheistic witchcraft are made, they are more by people who lean towards soft polytheism and oppose the dominant religious system.
Religions for Atheists
Although I’ve never been able to get through it, I’ve got a book back there—Alain de Boton’s Religion for Atheists—and it’s basically a book-length musing by a philosopher on, you know, “Yeah, yeah, we reject the supernatural stuff, but look at all the other aspects of religion.” And it’s kind of like a more recent attempt to develop, you know, a secular religion, I suppose. I’ve delved into it a little bit, but I’ve got better things to do with my time than reading this. But I understand the impulse there, in that there is so much. And again, a lot of very vocal critics of religion would also be quite open to acknowledging a lot of the positive functional elements of religious traditions, so I can see how that could play out. There’s something that atheistic witchcraft will want to be rejected—there is an element, you know—but then also, well, yeah, it could just go down as a sort of medicalised psychological thing, but there’s a lot more that comes with the connection to the witchcraft side of things than just that belief element.
Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, I think that the use of the label “atheistic” in the realm of witchcraft and esotericism is definitely an example of people using a term because they want to be perceived in a specific way and not to be accurate. Because, as you say, my impression is that they are atheistic in the sense that they reject a specific type of religiosity, which is the dominant one in their cultural context, and in the cases that I’m thinking about, it is primarily Christianity. But they are not non-religious because they employ religious elements, religious rituals, and so I guess that, as I said, I’m sceptical that what they do is purely psychological, as some of them claim, because if it really was psychological, you wouldn’t have to call upon Belial or this demon or this other entity and engage with them in a ritualistic way. I think that it’s part…
Soft and Hard Polytheism
Dr Angela Puca: So the way that I interpret it is through a lens, through a psychology that I find very useful, and I’ve mentioned on my channel in the past, which is hard polytheism and soft polytheism. Are you familiar with this concept?
Dr Chris Cotter: I mean, I can infer what you mean, but…
Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, but yeah, so basically, hard polytheism is when people believe in the ontological reality of deities and entities, and soft polytheism is when people believe in entities as archetypes and part of themselves or, you know, forces of nature. So, soft polytheism is more the belief in entities and supernatural beings as something that is part of you, so in a way, this is more a psychological interpretation, and it is similar or adjacent to the psychological model of magic. So to me, it feels like when the claims of atheistic witchcraft are made, they are more by people who lean towards soft polytheism and oppose the dominant religious system.
Yeah, that would make sense to me. You’ve got, yeah, something that’s more literal as opposed to something that’s more metaphorical and open to individual interpretation.
Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, exactly. Because with soft polytheism, there’s more metaphorical interpretation, and you don’t have the belief that the entity is ontologically existent in and of itself, like that, for instance, Eros is a deity that is out there and is dressed in a specific way and wants specific things and offerings. You can interpret Eros—or Eros, as probably English speakers say—as the archetype of passion or the passionate love that is within you. So that is a more psychological interpretation, but to me, I find that soft polytheism is a more helpful and probably a better descriptor for what the people who claim to do atheistic witchcraft do.
Dr Chris Cotter: But yeah, but it’s not for us to…
Dr Angela Puca: Well, I’m not labelling people, I’m just analysing the phenomenon, and I think that’s what scholars do. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to, you know, call my book Italian Witchcraft, because if the Italian witches were saying, “Oh, we are not witches; we are devout Catholics. We are just curing people and cursing them and removing curses, but we are just devout Catholics,” so I think that it’s not up to me to go to them and say, “You have to call yourself a witch because you are, to all intents and purposes, a witch.” But I think that as a scholar, it is my job to analyse what they do in relation to the definitions that we have at our disposal.
Etic and Emic
Dr Chris Cotter: To make an argument and draw connections and back that argument up with, you know, “Well, I can see there is a whole range of discursive connections going on here, and there are lived realities which connect as well, and on the basis of this, that, and the other, I am going to categorise this in this way despite the fact that that category will not necessarily match up with the category on the ground because of these reasons that I’ve just outlined, and here’s my evidenced argument, and this is why I’m saying that.” Because ultimately—and I’m sure you’ve found, perhaps when you’ve been teaching students and introducing them to just what the academic study of religion is—you can only do so much in the time that you’ve got. And perhaps first-year students who’ve never been introduced to the academic study of religion—your job is really just to sort of blow their mind and show them how a lot of their presumptions that they brought to study are wrong, but not necessarily for them to start to, like, make these kinds of connections that you’re talking about. And I often find that you then get a lot of students making the argument that, “Well, this one individual says this thing, therefore this theorist’s work is wrong because I found one person who, you know, does this thing which contradicts their theory.” And then you have to go through the extra step of going, “Yeah, everyone is an individual, and everyone has their own authentic experience that is authentic to them, and we’re not here to denigrate that or to tell them that they’re wrong,” and so on.
Looking for Patterns in Groups
But at the moment, unless you just want to have as many studies of religion as there are individuals on the planet, if you want to say something actually useful that isn’t just going to be an autobiography of every single individual, you have to start to draw connections, see patterns, and be able to make bigger claims about groups. And once you start going out from the individual and moving out to a group level, then the individuality gets lost, and you start having to do things like label, you know, apply labels that individuals wouldn’t use, but making justified arguments for saying, “No, but this group can broadly be described in this way because of this.” Otherwise, the only alternative is that you just have lots and lots of micro studies and you don’t make any connection. Unfortunately, although we all feel that our individual motives and decisions all are entirely personal to us, once you zoom out to, say, the level of society, you start—you become part of a trend. You know, people don’t like to be told, “Well, you’re doing this because you have these various social characteristics and you’re a member of this group and you make this much money,” and so on. But when you actually zoom out and abstract it, you can see clear patterns in the way all these individuals, with their own relationships with terms and characters, their own understandings of spiritual and witchcraft and so on—you zoom out a bit from the individual, and you start to go, “Well, here’s a useful category and here’s a useful category, and this is why.” And doing this allows us to understand this broader social phenomenon in a much better way.
Authenticity and Being Authentic
I certainly used to get very anxious about, you know, “Oh, I’m not being authentic,” and, “Well, they’re not using that term in that way,” and it—but if you’re going to say anything meaningful, you have to sort of step back a bit, and that’s the job of the academic: to respect the individual, respect the groups, listen, try and understand. But, you know, respecting and understanding doesn’t mean just going, “Okay, yeah, what you say is—that’s the way it goes.”
Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, I think that people can clearly tell that you are a sociologist of religion, and I’m more in anthropology and ethnography of religion. So, you know, given that, I don’t see the macro social impact but more the communities and how they describe things. I mean, I’ve had one of my informants during my PhD fieldwork who said that she was the last Italian shaman of a hereditary tradition. So should I have gone with that and said, “Oh yes, of course, you are the last Italian shaman”? So I think that—and, you know, it didn’t really match up to what was happening on the field. So that’s why I say I think that both perspectives are important. So I’m not disregarding or disrespecting this person for saying this. I think that she had her reasons and the reason why she claimed that was very interesting very informative and very important to understand the whole phenomenon. At the same time, we also need the etic perspective of the academic to analyse things in a way that really compares what the people say with the definitions that we have at our disposal and the body of literature that tells us, you know, what things can be defined as, and also what is actually occurring. Because otherwise, I think that if we lean too much towards the emic perspective…
The Academic Perspective
Then we run the risk of losing an important side of the academic job, which is to analyse things in—I don’t want to use “objective” because I don’t like the term “objective”—but in a more neutral way, in a way that is above parties and is neutral, and is really only trying to give you information about what’s going on there, as opposed to portraying things through the lens of the practitioners.
Yeah, my PhD supervisor, Kim Knott, has a phrase that I use quite often: “There is no neutral standpoint from which to make pronouncements about religion or all of this stuff that we’re talking about.” But it’s at least something we should aim for, would be what I would add to that. You know, that true objectivity and neutrality aren’t going to be possible, but they should always be the thing that you’re striving for, and being self-critical about, and justifying the decisions that you’re making and the categorizations that you’re making along the way, to try and be as close to an authentic representation as you can, whilst also understanding that that is an impossibility because we all write from a perspective and all have an agenda in some way, even if that is just explaining a phenomenon to a particular audience, and so on.
The Importance of Variety in Academic Methodology
Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, I think that one thing that perhaps distinguishes academic scholarship is the fact that we really try to be very clear about what the theoretical framework is that we use. Like, for instance, you said that you’re a social constructivist, so that already tells us that you have a specific perspective whereby you analyse, you know, what you study. So I think perhaps the difference could be that you know, when we work as academics, we analyse things in as neutral a way as we possibly can, using a specific methodology and a specific theoretical framework that is going to colour our analysis, of course. But given that it is something that is premised, it’s also, you know, I wouldn’t say that it’s a bias—it’s more using a specific tool to explain things, and then somebody else can use a different tool to explain the same thing and have a different perspective, a different type of analysis.
Methodological Triangulation
Dr Chris Cotter: Yeah, and you can draw me back to the topic at hand—I’m enjoying just chatting. And as individuals, we can try to be aware of that. You know, I use methodological triangulation when I’m doing stuff, but that basically just means trying to use multiple different methods when you’re approaching a research question. And that’s something sort of internal—that’s like an internal peer review process, I suppose, that you can use. You know, this isn’t just because I’ve gone in and asked a bunch of pre-thought-out questions, got some answers, and I’m making some conclusions based on that. You try and use multiple methods while you’re doing the research, and then the simple fact is that you can do as much as you can to document your research process for others. And that’s why academics can be so meticulous about, you know, your referencing and so on. That’s like academic scaffolding; that’s grounding. You know, what I am saying to you is built upon a scaffold of others’ work, and I am engaging with that, and I’m sort of hinging everything that I’m saying and making sure it’s structured and properly grounded. And you can provide, you know, videos and transcripts and audio recordings and everything of all the stuff that you’ve done.
Multiple Researchers, Different Results
If you’ve been working with your people in the field and you can put that in an archive or something if you can get appropriate consent, the thing is that another scholar can look at the exact same things that you looked at and read different things into it than you did. And, of course, if you were the one doing the documenting, having the conversations, then you are inextricably part of that. But being open about that is part of what we do as well—trying to understand how my agency affected my conclusions, why I asked those questions, and what biases I brought to it. And then we have conversations like this, and we have peer review processes where at least, you know, other scholars are challenging us: “Why did you say that? Maybe if you’d thought about it this way, would something have been different?” So there are two, three, four, five different scholars looking at the same community, speaking to the same people, living with the same people—they won’t have the same subjective experiences, they won’t have the same questions driving them, and so the results are going to be different. But it’s all building into a picture that, when it all is assembled, we’re getting closer and closer and closer to authenticity, whatever that is.
Concluding Thoughts on Atheistic Witchcraft
Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, so I guess that we can draw a conclusion. So, after this whole conversation, what are your concluding thoughts about atheistic witchcraft and atheistic forms of esotericism?
Perceptions of Atheism
Dr Chris Cotter: Yeah, it’s been great to think about it. I’m just racking my brains for, you know, what am I going to be annoyed with myself that I didn’t say when we were chatting, and of course, my brain is drawing a blank. But I guess key takeaway would be that sort of a claim should be seen as what it is—a claim that is participating in a broader societal conversation. So the term “atheistic” means something to those groups and individuals who would use the term atheistic, and it is going to depend upon their perceptions of what theistic means, what dominant religion is, and so on. So it shouldn’t be rejected, but not taken at face value either—like, what is being said with that? What is being rejected? Also, I liked where we got to with going, “Well, yeah, the whole belief and even the spiritual bit of this whole field of this amorphous religion concept that we are interested in—it’s only one aspect of it, and there’s so much else in terms of affect and lived experience and embodied experience and human interaction and community and tradition and heritage and ancestry and cosmology,” all these things. So I definitely think that a group or an individual could claim “atheistic” but still be drawing on all these other aspects of whatever the tradition might be in question. So that’s about just not being so narrow in what you know—yeah, belief, etc., that’s important, but we don’t want to privilege that over all the other aspects that we might associate with terms like religion or witchcraft and things. There’s a lot more going on. And I think that those two things seem to be the most coherent things that have come out of my mouth during the conversation. Like, yeah.
I’m not in the business of claiming whether people are religious or not, whether they’re spiritual or not, whether they’re being appropriately theistic or atheistic. I’m much more interested in trying to understand what’s going on with the terms that people are using—what does it mean to them, and how does that work itself out in their day-to-day lives? Simply having a label like “atheist” associated with something doesn’t really tell you very much about a person. Well, you need to probe into where that identification is taking place and what it means for them. But then beyond that, how are they living? How are they acting? What are they drawing upon? What’s their history? What has meaning for them? There’s so much more than just the term. But we should also respect what the term is being used for and the fact that certain groups are claiming atheistic witchcraft—you know, it means something. So delving into what it means, why it’s being used, what is being rejected, what’s being claimed, and then, as you’re asking, why also draw on all the other aspects if you’re also claiming that it’s purely non-supernatural or purely psychological and so on.
I want to know more. I want to know more about these claims and these groups and individuals, so you should send me some stuff so that I can brush up on it.
Dr Angela Puca: I will, definitely, and we’re also going to see each other in a couple of weeks in person.
Dr Chris Cotter: Yeah, indeed, so we can talk about it in person. Good.
How to Find Dr Chris Cotter
Dr Angela Puca: Good, so is there anything that you’d like to tell my audience in case they want to find your work or, I don’t know, anything that you want to share before we wrap up?
Dr Chris Cotter: Not particularly. Just—I’ll not be doing the sort of racking my brains afterwards. Actually, I’m probably going to watch the video and be like, “Oh!” So if there’s anything that I’ve said that’s confusing or seems inconsistent, or if you’re getting frustrated with the way that I’m, you know, not taking definitive stances on certain things or whatever, you can get in touch. If you search for me, Chris Cotter, at the Open University, you should find my page, which has all the links where you can find out more and also get in touch. So I’m happy—absolutely happy—to be prodded and pushed or asked for clarification or whatever.
Thank you, Chris, and thank you again for being here with me, conversing about all things non-religious.
Dr Chris Cotter: Good stuff. Thank you for having me.
Support Angela’s Symposium
Dr Angela Puca: Thank you again. So I hope that you guys enjoyed this conversation, and if you did, don’t forget to smash the like button, and subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already—what are you waiting for?—and leave me a comment because I want to know what you think about our conversation. What does atheism mean to you, and what does it mean to be atheistic in relation to witchcraft and magic? So I want to know it all! Share this video or any of my videos around so the Symposium can grow, and thank you all so much for being here. I hope that you all stay tuned for all the academic fun.
Bye for now.
DESCRIPTION
Join Dr Angela Puca in an enlightening interview with Dr Chris Cotter, an expert in the study of non-religion and contemporary religion, as they delve into the nuanced meanings behind the phrase “spiritual but not religious”. This discussion will unpack the increasingly popular identification with spirituality outside the confines of institutional religion, exploring what drives individuals to adopt this label. Chris Cotter will also shed light on the evolving concepts of atheism and the broader definitions of religion in contemporary society. This conversation aims to provide a deeper understanding of how personal beliefs and spiritual identities are shaped in the modern world, challenging traditional boundaries and offering new perspectives on what it means to be religious or spiritual in today’s society.
ABOUT OUR GUEST Dr Chris Cotter is Lecturer in Sociology and Religious Studies at The Open University. Chris specializes in all things ‘non-religious’, co-edits the journal Secularism & Nonreligion and co-founded The Religious Studies Project podcast. He is author of The Critical Study of Nonreligion, and co-edited After World Religions: Reconstructing Religious Studies.
