This article explores bodily interactions, somatic experiences, and embodiment of New Age and contemporary Paganism practitioners conducting spiritual practices in the megaliths of Carnac in northwest France. Inspired from the sensory ethnography approach and applying a specific methodological framework elaborated for this study, the article argues that participants’ spiritual experiences are constructed using three main elements: somatic experience, somatic imagery, and bodily techniques. Collected data provides understanding of the practitioner’s elaboration of spiritual experience, while also suggesting further inquiries to assess sensory models prevailing in contemporary spiritual practices.

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This article explores the learning process to develop a sensing body through visualization and bodily attention in alternative spiritual practices held at Brittany’s megaliths, located in northwest France. Drawing on the sensory ethnography approach, this article argues that participants achieve the experience of their sensing body following four main actions: Practicing visualization techniques to interact with summoned entities, learning another sensory language, establishing relationships between bodily techniques and somatic imagery, and cultivating and verbalizing bodily sensations. Collected data provide an understanding of practitioners’ elaboration of a meaningful experience, while also suggesting how meditative and bodily techniques partake in these activities.

In the last fifty years, different spiritual movements—that do not correspond to the church model and that—have emerged, due to their fluid and dynamic character, have propitiated an advance of global networks and have contributed to making specialized frontiers increasingly porous and permeable fields. A range of practices and beliefs related to Neo-paganism, New Age, and neo-Indianisms/neo-ethnicities have thus emerged. These three spiritual modalities are inscribed in differentiable ideologies that intertwine the spiritual, the therapeutic, the political and the identity. They concur in a search for bodily knowledge and techniques that recover the spiritual meaning of life as a way out of the materialism of the consumer culture in force in these times. However, they also have different emphases that distinguish them, although they are constantly intertwined and often share common elements and can even be practiced in the same ceremony.

Ethnographical studies increasingly testify the conversion of archaeological sites into places used for a myriad of spiritual purposes associated to the culture of personal transformation. Analyzing data gathered at contemporary spiritual practices held in Carnac, a megalithic site located in northwest France, this article argues that the resignification of ancient places as ‘sacred’ and ‘energetic’ is a strategy to develop and enact inner search and work on the self. Collected data provides understanding on the actor’s conceptualizations and uses given to this place, while also suggesting further inquiries to assess the relations between spirituality, personal transformation and the enchantment of archaeological sites.