New book by Nikki Bado-Fralick explores Wiccan initiation ritual.
"Competent, persuasive, and succinct."
So begins Choice Magazine's review of Nikki Bado-Fralick's first
book Coming to the Edge of the Circle: A Wiccan Initiation Ritual.
They might also have included "challenging" in their opening sentence. The
assistant professor of religious studies and women's studies says her book
challenges both scholars and average readers to rethink how religions are
practiced by religious people.
Coming to the Edge of the Circle is an American Academy of Religion
book recently published by Oxford University Press. In it, Bado-Fralick
uses an account of the Wiccan religion as it is practiced and lived in modern
America to challenge a theoretical standard - Arnold van Gennep's tripartite
model of initiation ritual or rite of passage.
Bado-Fralick says that Van Gennep's model, which has changed little in nearly100
years, essentially describes rites of passage as a linear, three-part progression
- separation, liminality, and reincorporation - little more than "beginning,
middle, and end."
Coming to the Edge of the Circle is an ethnographic study of the
initiation ritual practiced by a coven of Witches located in Ohio. Her analysis
of this coven's initiation ceremony indicates that instead of a single linear
event, initiation is deeply embedded within an overarching learning process
that engages the body as an active learner and doer of religious ritual.
"Many folks think that religion is all about belief - something that
happens ‘in your head' - and don't recognize the extent to which the body
participates in learning and performing religious identity," Bado-Fralick
said.
In the book, Bado-Fralick wants to expand the concept of ritual while giving
insight into a particular coven's practice of Wicca.
"I include a very detailed description of the ritual process,"
she said, "in order to help us recognize how much somatic praxis or
embodiment is a part of learning about and doing our religions."
Interested in religious rituals since she attended church with her Serbian-Orthodox
mother, Bado-Fralick says religious rituals provide insights into the ways
religions are lived by their practitioners.
"What I'm hoping is that we can construct more accurate models that
better reflect the multiperspectival, nonlinear, and embodied nature of
religious rituals. Then we can better capture the ways that body, mind,
and spirit work together holistically in religious practice."
Bado-Fralick brings another background to her writing. In addition to being
a religious scholar, she is also a High Priestess with the Merry Circle
coven in Ohio. She uses a reflexive ethnography to challenge the academy's
dichotomy of subjectivity/objectivity.
"There are some scholars of religion who say that only if you are outside
of religion, can you say anything academically sound about religion,"
she said.
Bado-Fralick says this attitude has given some scholars a false sense of
objectivity that removes them from the world of real people living their
religions.
Reviewers say that Coming to the Edge of the Circle offers "much
worthwhile about the dilemmas of being an academic observing and participating
in religious ritual, and in the process, raises many good questions about
how religion and ritual can be taught in the contemporary academic world."
