Practicing Spirituality 1. Introduction in the Field of Religious Studies

CHAPTER FIVE PRACTICING SPIRITUALITY 1. Introduction In the field of religious studies, much is known about the history and key beliefs of New Age and the assorted ‘alternative spiritualities’ associated with New Age. Often, these studies are based on literature, his- torical sources and surveys, like the ones mentioned above. Detailed ethnographic studies of the practice of what people call ‘spirituality’ are relatively scarce, especially in comparison to the rich ethnographies that exist on modern Paganism.1 On one of my first visits to Welden, I noticed a flyer on the announce- ment board of the community centre for flower séances held there regularly, led by the medium Maria Bemelmans.2 When I asked some vol- unteers about these séances, I was told that people from all over the area came there to get a message from their deceased relatives. In an earlier research, I had already noticed that there seemed to be a strong strand of spiritualism intertwined with Catholicism in the southern regions of the Netherlands.3 Taking a pluralist notion of religion as a point of departure, I found it important to include these phenomena within the research. In the introduction I argued that what is nowadays called ‘spirituality’, often 1 E.g. Fedele, Looking for Mary Magdalene. Alternative Pilgrimage and Ritual Creativity at Catholic Shrines in France; Anna Fedele, “The Metamorphoses of Neopaganism in Tradi- tionally Catholic Countries in Southern Europe,” in Sites and Politics of Religious Diversity in Southern Europe, ed. Ruy Blanes and José Mapril (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming); Sarah M. Pike, Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture: Folk- lore and Neo-paganism in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Graham Harvey, Listening People, Speaking Earth: Contemporary Paganism (London: C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 1997); Åsa Trulsson, Cultivating the Sacred: Ritual Creativity and Practice Among Women in Contemporary Europe, Lund Studies in the History of Religions 28 (Lund: Lund University, 2010); Jone Salomonsen, Enchanted Feminism: Ritual, Gender and Divinity Among the Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco (London: Routledge, 2002). 2 I do not know if this is a pseudonym or not, but it is a common enough name in Limburg. 3 Kim Knibbe and Iti Westra, “Van Ongeloof Naar ‘zeker Weten’: Betekenisgeving En Legitimatie in De Context Van Het Fenomeen Jomanda,” Sociale Wetenschappen 46, no. 2 (2003): 75–93. 118 chapter five linked to esoteric traditions, has become one of the anchoring points for discourses and practices in relating to the category of religion in Europe. Similarly, I understand the spiritual practices of the group I describe here as experimenting with ways of relating to a kind of power and knowl- edge that is usually thought to be within the domain of religion. This means that, in the case of this research, Catholicism and the spiritualist practices described here have to be understood in relation to each other. I will argue that it is in particular where it concerns religious authority and the ways it is made (im)possible to relate to the supernatural that the practices described here can be understood as an answer to the problems generated by the context of Catholicism in which they take place. Another line of argument that will be explored in this chapter is the question of the ‘spiritual revolution’ that is argued to take place by Heelas and Woodhead.4 As described in chapter 1, this thesis links changes in the religious landscape to societal changes. As societies become more individ- ualized, spirituality will become more popular. Spirituality is then inter- preted as a sacralization of the self, or indeed of modernity. The material presented here will show that what goes under the name of spirituality can also embody quite different modes of practice and believing and may answer to quite different needs than those summarized in the ‘spiritual revolution’ thesis. Besides the ‘spiritual group’ (hereafter called SG to distinguish it from other groups) I participated in, there are many other ‘spiritual groups’ in the villages and cities surrounding the main research area, and countless individual practitioners associated to the tradition of spiritualism, such as magnetists, mediums, and clairvoyants. According to my informants, until the late eighties these practitioners operated “in the shadows”, in obscure back rooms. A favourite topic among insiders of this milieu until this day is the abuse of power that is apparently common between mediums and their followers. Nowadays, mediums operate more visibly, and public interest in their practices is growing. One medium who became particularly famous in the nineties, Jomanda, used to tour the spiritual groups in Limburg in the late seventies and in the eighties.5 The roots of ‘Jomanda’ and the networks from which she emerged go much further back in time than the relatively recent popular interest 4 Heelas and Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution. 5 Knibbe and Westra, “Van Ongeloof Naar ‘zeker Weten’: Betekenisgeving En Legiti- matie in De Context Van Het Fenomeen Jomanda.”.

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