Introduction

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The most frequently analysed factors that have fostered the emergence of a neopagan¹ religious field in Mexico include digitalisation (Medina 2019–2020), a general diversification of the religious panorama (De la Torre, Gutiérrez, and Hernández 2020) and the positive influence of pop-cultural productions (Calico 2018, 149–54; Gründer 2008, 52) like movies, TV-series, and games on neopagan core-tropes like the figures of the witch and the wizard in the public discourse. However, these analyses only survey external influences to the field and do not account for how the active Mexican neopagans got involved in neopaganism on a personal level in the first place. As studies from Europe (Fischer 2009; Gründer 2008, 2012; Hegner 2019; Hutton 1999, 2015; von Schnurbein 2016), the USA (Calico 2018; Harvey 1997; Hutton 1999; Lewis and Pizza 2009; York 2003), and other parts of the world (Ezzy 2009) have shown, various religious phenomena that have been categorised as neopaganism—most prominently Wicca and Asatru—share the characteristics of decentral organisational structures, non-institutionalisation, individualisation, and a focus on personal expertise in relevant topics as well as a historically established tendency towards secrecy. Nevertheless, the question remains how persons with an interest in neopaganism in Mexico originally managed to discover the existence of organised neopagan religions, what let them to delve deeper into those topics, and how they started to build local communities. In order to trace the underlying motivations and initial motifs that sparked their interest and led to further involvement, I show how neopagans in the Mexican capital narratively frame their first contact with neopaganism, thus emphasising the involved emic perspectives.

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Due to the fact that very little academic research has been published about neopaganism in Mexico,² the empirical data used to construct the arguments presented in this paper is limited to those neopagan groups³ and actors that have been subject to my research since 2018, most prominently witchcraft-oriented Hysteria Pagana⁴ and Hermandad de la Diosa Blanca,⁵ as well as Allthing Asatru México⁶ with their respective founders, leaders, and core members. Practitioners without formal connections to established groups have been taken into account, too. Based on a snowball-system for the selection of interlocutors due to the low accessibility of the field and its actors, I’ve conducted narrative and semi-structured interviews⁷ and participant observation in and around Mexico City mostly during wheel of the year celebrations between 2018 and 2023 and supplemented the respective findings with digital data recovered from webpages and social media presences.⁸ Since the abductive approach I employed, based on Glaser and Strauss’ ([1967] 2006) Grounded Theory,⁹ favours a dynamic relation between empirical data and theory, a special emphasis is placed on the emic perspectives and object language during the coding process, leading to theoretical approaches closely linked to the field data.¹⁰ The categories “intuition,” “rebellion” and “tradition” are therefore the result of the initial coding process of my empirical data.

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Although there is a broad range of theoretical approaches available regarding the definition and process of religious transformation dynamics as in the cases considered here, I do not aim to deductively work with a particular theoretical approach. This is due to the fact that neopaganism is often considered a religion without converts, and consequently alternative concepts to “conversion,” like Adler’s ([1979] 2006) home-coming and Luhrmann’s (1989) interpretative drift thesis, are more widely used in the academic study of neopaganism. While I discuss this critically, instead of focusing on conversion, interpretative drift, or home-coming theory in depth, I rather analyse the portion of my empirical data that revolves around the narratives related to the first encounter with neopagan topics which are usually linked to the respective interview item,¹¹ complemented by relevant participant observation data. The analysed material thus comprises information on personal trigger-events that led to a further search for information and involvement in neopagan topics and groups in individual cases, shedding light on the religious transformation processes that lead towards and into neopaganism.

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Consequently, this paper first discusses the idea of home-coming into a neopagan religiosity, the interpretative drift theory, and why conversion theory is often discarded when studying neopaganism. In order to contextualise the narratives, an overview of the sociocultural and socioreligious situation in the Mexican capital is then provided, including the establishment of the first neopagan groups that formed around the year 2000. Subsequently, I present the analysis of the narratives regarding the first encounter with and personal transformation towards neopaganism along three argumentative lines that I have identified as core motifs: intuition, rebellion, and tradition. Finally, the analytical findings are summarised with regard to the wider sociocultural context and implications for the further development of the Mexican neopagan field.

Theoretical Entanglements: Conversion, Home-Coming, Interpretative Drift

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As a pioneer in the academic study of neopaganism in the USA and a practitioner herself,¹² Margot Adler stated already in 1979 in her influential book Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today that neopaganism is “a religion without converts” ([1979] 2006, title chapter 2). Discarding conversion as a viable concept for the approach to how neopagans acquire their identities and become part of a community, she instead coined the idea of a home-coming to a neopagan worldview, emphasising that rather than converting to a new religion, neopagans tend to describe their “home-coming” as finding a proper name and community for a worldview they already maintain. This concept not only set the tone for practitioners’ narratives,¹³ but also the analytical angle in more recent studies (Harvey 1999; Harrington 2002). Harvey later pointed out that home-coming covers the ideas that neopagans come home to themselves, to a community, and often also a specific tradition (1999, 239; Harrington 2002, 26). Nonetheless, Adler’s theory caused critical discussions (Gallagher 1994; Reid 2009; Mayer and Gründer 2010; Anczyk and Vencálek 2013) that repeatedly revolve around her poorly developed concept of conversion, yet all referenced authors agree that becoming neopagan is indeed described by neopagans mostly as some kind of “coming home.” This is not surprising, as different variations of the home-coming narrative play a central role in various conversion theories regarding a wide range of religions.¹⁴

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But why do both neopagans and religious scholars for the most part reject conversion both conceptually and rhetorically? In line with Adler’s ([1979] 2006) still prevailing influence on neopagan conversion discourses, the idea of conversion is embedded in Christian tradition, prominently displayed in Saint Augustine’s Confessions¹⁵ and the biblical account of Saul’s conversion. This often leads to the assumption of conversion as a rupture or radical change, among other features based on Christianity-related case studies, and derived concepts often unintentionally maintain latent Christian connotations. This is not only problematic when non-Christian or non-European religious phenomena are concerned, but also in the specific case of neopaganism with a notably critical if not adversarial attitude towards it. Such dismissive opinions are often argumentatively tied to the European history of forced Christianisation of Norse and Germanic tribes in late Antiquity and the witch trials as well as the Inquisition during the Middle Ages (Hutton 2015, 13). Apart from the problematic Christian tinge of the original notion itself, its focus on a radical rupture and binary change on a personal level omits other relevant perspectives on individual religious transformation, such as their processual and continuous nature and cultural embeddedness. Several attempts to broaden the concept have been made, yet in the field of the academic study of neopaganism, other concepts became more widely used.

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Although more focused on magic practitioners than neopagans in general, Tanya Luhrmann’s (1989) controversial interpretative drift concept is frequently discussed as the counter position to the home-coming hypothesis and the idea of conversion in the narrow sense explained above (Mayer and Gründer 2010; Harrington 2002, 26). Interpretative drift describes the process during which neopagans gradually establish their (magical) beliefs based on meaningful subjective experiences and how they develop strategies of rationalization for those beliefs and their efficacy (Luhrmann 1989, 312–14; Mayer and Gründer 2010, 3). Focusing on the experiential dimension of becoming neopagan, Luhrmann underlines the processual character of the personal transformation of becoming—and identifying as—a neopagan. Analysing the relation of the interpretative drift and home-coming theses, Mayer and Gründer conclude that both are in fact complementary and identify “… (a) the feeling and experience of coming home, (b) the process of interpretative drift, and (c) extraordinary experiences containing strongly subjective evidence” (2010, 15) as three important facets that characterise the process of becoming a magic practitioner, and in their wider perspective also a neopagan.¹⁶ Thus, they recognise the interpretative drift and the home-coming idea as different approaches to the same individual transformation process, adding meaningful personal experiences, e.g. dreams or encounters with transcendent entities like gods, as a third influential factor. In the same complementary sense, Berger and Ezzy (2007) highlight that although the prevalent notion of home-coming rightfully underlines the agency of neopagans as individual seekers, the cultural environment and especially mass media also influence this process considerably. They even point out that the

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… phrase “coming home” and all that it implies can itself be understood as a conversion narrative, that is, a culturally constructed rhetorical device through which individuals attempt to explain themselves and others why they changed religions or joined a religion after being unaffiliated. (Berger and Ezzy 2007, 58–59)

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In line with their observations, the tendency to analyse neopagan conversion narratives from a variety of premises, especially those that focus on conversion as a continuous process, external sociocultural circumstances like mass media, meaningful subjective experiences and other significant factors, going beyond the narrow idea of conversion Adler initially referred to, seems to present a fruitful approach among the referenced authors. The emic perspectives presented in the respective studies show that many neopagans do not understand themselves as converts, rendering “conversion” a rather superimposed label from their perspectives. This underlines the substantial differences between practitioners’ understandings of the concept and more recent approaches to conversion by scholars who make an effort to develop more sensitive, e.g., de-colonial theoretical concepts.

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Following a Grounded Theory based research design, I chose to approach the question of how my interlocutors became neopagans through the narratives they develop about their first encounter with neopaganism, considering external influences like sociocultural circumstances, especially mass media, and internal influences like decisive experiences, without mentioning “conversion” in order to avoid the possible negative connotations of the concept. Analytically, I thus take key elements identified by the aforementioned authors into account, yet use the codes abstracted from the empirical data as the main conceptual axis. The developed categories are therefore the result of abductive coding rather than deductive theoretical work, and consequently maintain close proximity to the empirical data on purpose. As the term conversión was thoroughly avoided by my interlocutors, I chose “first encounter narratives” as an analytical label, encouraging a conceptual inclusion into narration-focussed conversion theories like Jindra’s¹⁷ (2011) approach.

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Without pre-empting the analysis, it must be added that what Luhrmann describes with her interpretative drift, i.e., a processual development of beliefs and their rationalisation, emphasising the experiential dimension and processual character thereof, plays a major role in the narratives I categorise as “Intuition.” As expected, due to the huge impact of the home-coming narrative among both practitioners and scholars, the idea of coming home to a neopagan self, community, and tradition also serves as a core element of both the “Intuition” and “Tradition” narratives as it highlights the continuity many interlocutors point out regarding the development of their religious identity.

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The following overview of the sociocultural context in which the first formal neopagan groups emerged in the Mexican capital sets the stage for the subsequent analysis.

Neopaganism in Mexico City

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Mexico is rightfully known for its particular version of Catholicism, and the official census from 2020 shows that 75.9 % of Mexico City’s residents identified as Catholics at this time (INEGI 2022, 133). However, as De la Torre et al. (2020) argue, global tendencies like digitalisation, decentralisation, an increase in transcultural exchange, and heightened environmental awareness have given rise to a broader variety of religious phenomena as a reaction to the related growing challenges, resulting in diversification and an overall reconfiguration of the Mexican religious panorama during the last decades. In this context, the upsurge of neopaganism can be considered symptomatic, especially due to the known cybercultural affinity among neopagans ever since the popularisation of the internet (Cowan 2005). Although the emerging neopagan field in the Mexican capital is still in an early stage of its development in comparison to other regions, and communitarisation only started around the year 2000, a variety of more or less formally organised groups tied to religious traditions like Wicca and Asatru have been established since then. Not only are the corresponding religiosities locally (re)configured with a focus on the individual and in reaction to the rapidly changing sociocultural context, but they also offer continuities with a wide range of already existing traditions. Among those are over sixty indigenous religions on Mexican soil as well as Afro-American religions, local vernacular healing traditions, so-called folk magic, and a variety of Christian beliefs. The more obvious, predominant, and historically traceable references, however, are pre-Christian and contemporary European cultures as they are considered to be the socio-cultural base or serve as a central inspiration for beliefs and practices.

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In a sociocultural context characterised by Christianity, especially the Catholic Church, neopagan core concepts like magic and the stereotypes of the witch and the wizard in modern Wicca and witchcraft traditions or the Blót-ritual and the Viking warrior stereotype in Norse and Germanic religious traditions tend to be negatively framed as inherently opposed to the predominant values and worldviews in public discourse. Thus, those main concepts are often linked to satanism, demon- and devil-worship, illicit and malicious magical practice (often so-called “black magic”), and counter-cultural ideologies in mass and Catholic media, giving them a negative connotation there.¹⁸ Although ambivalent ties to those publicly discredited topics can indeed be identified within the current neopagan fields, people interested in them during the time when neopaganism in Mexico City was not yet formally organised not only had to deal with the associated prevalent prejudices in their social circles but were also confronted with a lack of relevant sources in Spanish. In consequence, this led them to mostly European and US-American source material in foreign languages. As a matter of fact, prominent pop-cultural productions like “Harry Potter,” “Ghost Whisperer,” “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina,” and “Charmed” have in turn contributed to shifting the public connotations of the respective tropes, presenting them as positive and empowering, and therefore creating possible points of entry into the neopagan field.¹⁹

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A last observation about the specific case of cultural phenomena in Mexico that are strongly related to “Western” (i.e., European and US-American) traditions has to be made due to the colonial history of the country and what is commonly known as malinchismo:²⁰ the tendency in Mexican culture to hold foreign things and ideas in higher esteem than Mexican ones. Although the underlying tendencies of exoticism and xenophilia might hint at superficial reasons for the fascination with pre-Christian European traditions, they can only account for one generalised factor among the many that influence the sociocultural and religious dynamics that lead the relevant individuals to a deeper involvement with those cultures on a personal level. Therefore, the concrete individual narratives are analysed in the following.

Core Elements of First Encounter Narratives

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One of the central items taken up by the interviewees during the first round of interviews is the “first contact with neopaganism.” In response, the interlocutors not only elaborated the back stories of how they became neopagans and their first encounter narratives themselves, but also embellished stories of experiences with deities, energy, magic, or the “call” towards a non-Catholic religion, consequently offering explanations for their search for information and community around them. The three guiding narratives that crystallised out of the interviews are presented below as an empirical basis for further abductive analysis. The resulting categorisation is based on the motivation(s) and context(s) given by the interviewees, resulting in three approaches: intuition, rebellion, and tradition. As they are not mutually exclusive, the individual narratives all contain elements of two or of all three.

Conclusions

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Trying to avoid the ambiguities of conversion theories and the entailing conceptual difficulties known in the field of neopaganism, this paper focused on first encounter narratives in order to trace how individuals describe themselves as becoming neopagans. In the case of the interviewed Mexican neopagans, the transformation processes are often understood as “coming home” to the “right” religion, as a gradual and active process. Although the individual approaches to neopaganism are framed differently in the interviewees’ narratives, all of them contain at least one motif based on which they explain their search for concrete access and connections and subsequently their integration into the neopagan community, usually also into a particular group. One of the central ideas is an intuition based on concrete experiences, thoughts, dreams, or visions that the interlocutors describe as a fundamental feeling that is imposed on them and has to be dealt with, thus placing related and connectable neopagan ideas in the centre of their religious interest. However, there are individually differing variants of this intuition; the motif of returning home to a neopagan culture and that of an intimate connection to a neopagan deity or (Northern) European culture without having known either of them beforehand are two meaningful examples. These encounters are often linked to dreams and visions, that is, altered states of consciousness that do not correspond to a regular mind state. Apart from that, the intuition is described as a latent abstract feeling experienced as a longing or a “call” towards something different than the ordinary and known, which sooner or later leads to concrete involvement with neopaganism.

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Two other tendencies become evident in the empirical material: that of an active rebellion against a Catholic education and the associated worldviews, dogmas, power relations, and rites, on the one hand, and that of the pursuit of a magical tradition or, less specifically, the adoption of a worldview deemed “normal” by the family which already contains meaningful elements that the interviewees interpret as neopagan, for example polytheism, magic, or shamanism, on the other hand. In both cases, the encounter with neopagan contents is presented as a conscious decision or as a reaction to an upbringing within a certain ideological framework, which is either followed (tradition) or opposed (rebellion) to a certain extent, leading to the configuration of individualised neopagan religiosities.

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It must be stressed that these three tendencies are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, the majority of my interlocutors recount both an emotional, experiential, and intuitive approach mostly during their childhood or adolescence, but then highlight that their active decision in favour of neopaganism occurred in the context of, and therefore as a reaction to, prevailing socio-cultural-religious circumstances. Those are mainly shaped by Mexican Catholicism, more often than not interpreted in the light of colonial history, and the entailing public Christian discourse wherein core neopagan tropes remain negatively connoted. Opposing discursive forces that reassign positive connotations to emblematic neopagan content comprise not only folk-religious and herbalist practices as well as indigenous and Afro-American traditions that offer substantial points of connection, but also entertainment franchises that shed a positive, if not heroic light on stereotypes that inspire and shape core ideas taken up in neopaganism like the Viking warrior, the spirit medium, or the witch with their respective idealised lifestyles. As a consequence and in line with Ezzy and Berger’s (2007) findings, the rise of the internet can be understood as a main catalyst for neopagan communitarisation in the Mexican capital: it offered access to information on existing traditions of interest and anonymous communication platforms where interested persons could interact with like-minded people without having to travel abroad to establish personal contact with existing foreign neopagan groups⁴⁰ and without having to fear the negative stigmatisation they may have suffered in their predominantly Christian social circles, in spite of the already broadening and diversifying Mexican religious panorama.

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The three identified first encounter narratives are embedded in complex sociohistorical and cultural entanglements, and therefore reflect the underlying societal power relations and resulting religious configurations in a merely exemplary and simplified way. They still offer insights into the reasons why Mexican neopagans initially decided to proactively engage in neopaganism and how they make sense of their religious trajectory so far, highlighting the subsequent developments as results of arising religious demands. The three categories can thus be understood as narrative framings of personal approaches and entries into the neopagan field as well as the underlying reasons, motives, and triggers as follows:

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  Intuition: fundamental feeling of belonging based on personal experiences related to thoughts, dreams or visions of transcendent entities and relevant foreign cultures, often childhood-related and understood as a latent “call”, later labelled as coming home.

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  Rebellion: active, action-based, often counter-culturally framed opposition against the prevalent social norms, mostly Christianity (Catholicism), often visually expressed and acted out during adolescence.

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  Tradition: continuation of an ancestral lineage or family tradition related to core elements of neopagan practice and world-view, often genealogically framed.

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These narratives point towards further communitarisation processes as reactions to the shortcomings and an increasing demand for information and formal communities. The lack thereof can be interpreted as a principal motivation for those persons who are now main actors in the Mexican neopagan field to found organisations, covens, and clans, set up educational offers like seminars and workshops, libraries, later also websites and presences on digital social platforms. They even strive to become more visible in the public, for example through events like a yearly pagan pride parade and commercial establishments like shops, cafés, and events that cater specifically to a neopagan clientele. It becomes clear that further investigation is not only necessary in order to trace the developments of the ephemeral and fluid emerging neopagan field in the Mexican capital and nationwide, but also to discover the underlying glocal⁴¹ relations and relationalities that influence the ongoing processes of (re)configuration and shape individual neopagan religiosities.