This article discusses Neo-Pagan journeys to archaeological or heritage sites (such as ancient temples and stone circles) associated with pre-Christian religions and deities. It argues that within the rationale of a Neo-Pagan worldview, several common binaries dissolve and reveal themselves as continuities at sacred sites: human body and earth body, the past and the present, inner and outer worlds, self and other, human and deity. In the course of Pagans’ bodily performances at sites, inner and outer landscapes co-create and flow into one another: the lived body becomes a fundamental text and starting point for knowledge. Through somatic modes of attention - by attending to and with their bodies in surroundings that frequently include the embodied presence of others - Neo-pagan pilgrims experience themselves not as isolated subjectivities but as sharing an intersubjective milieu with other pilgrims and with the Earth itself. For women in particular, journeys to sacred sites potentially contribute to a radical re-inscription of the female body by exposing women to alternative representations of the feminine and by providing contexts in which the feminine can be re-imagined, re-experienced and performed differently through symbolic activity and ritual. In Butlerian terms, women potentially perform gender differently at sacred sites.

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The paper draws on three years' fieldwork and twelve years' familiarity withfeminist witches in New Zealand. These women are thoughtful and articulate about their magical practice, and it is their theories about how magic works and the function of ritual-making which are the paper's central concern. Scholarly theories and debates about magic and ritual have frequently been dichotomously constructed: science versus magic, the symbolists versus the intellectualists, causality versus participation, ritual as action versus belief as thought, and so on. The witches who are the focus of this study do not explain their ritual practice in such dichotomized terms. Their spells, forexample, incorporate expressive, dramaticand aesthetic components and values, along with an explicit instrumental purpose. For these witches, magic is not anti-science or pseudoscience: it sits alongside science as another wayofaddressingaproblem. The paper discusses feminist witches' theories and practices in the light of anthropological theories about ritual and magic, explores the role of symbols and energy in magic, and demonstrates how these witchesuse ritual for empowerment and healing.How Magic Works 43 the world are embarking vicariously on magical quests via computer games. Without question, magic is doing magic for business.One of the first anthropological definitions of magic I heard as a student was the classic Victorian one:"Magic is primitive man's science". The social evolutionist, EdwardTylor, viewed my practkK ofthe^agicd arts*or"ocx^scieiK3es"mp ast, while James Frazer declared that "magic was in some ways a precursor of science, but it was its bastard sister" (Tambiah 1990:45, 52). 2 Similarly today, modes of experiencing and understanding which fall outside "ordinary'rationality and consciousness have been viewed by some in science and medicine as "ego regression to infantile states and as a befuddled way of thinking (Winkelman2OOO:3). J Yet here at a time of unprecedented advances in scientific knowledge and accomplishment, magic's popularity is simultaneously flourishing. While no one is suggesting that Harry's fans are seriously interested in witchcraft as a religion, a fairly widespread popular fascination with magic seems indisputable. Moreover, the numbers of those in Western societies who are seriously interested in witchcraft as a religion have grown significantly in the last half century, 4 and particularly in the last twenty years. Witches, practitioners of Goddessspirituality and other neopagans are reported to now number up to 500,000 in the United States, and between 110,000 and 120,000 in Britain (Griffin 2000:14). Popular literature on the many related traditions abounds, and there is a growing body of scholarship on the subject, including a number of ethnographies dealing with contemporary witchcraft in Britain, the United States, and Australia (forexample, Luhrmann 1989, EUer 1993, Hume 1997, Berger 1999, Greenwood 2000c). On the whole, however, there has been relatively little recent discussion of witchcraft...