UC Riverside

Pagans, witches, and occult practitioners regularly engage in a process known to them as personal gnosis. Through religious technologies of trance, ritual evocation and invocation, spiritual kindling, and possession, inheritors of modern Pagan witchcraft and the Western esoteric traditions reportedly engage with spirits, gods, and invisible others in relationships that provide comfort, guidance, and spiritual instruction. This study brings those practices into alignment with scholarship being done in scriptural studies. How might our conception of scripture as containing supernatural communication be applied to groups who claim to regularly receive messages from supernatural sources? Decentralizing text and emphasizing the moment of divine transmission suggests a theoretical framework that the embodied and emotional knowledge achieved through this personal gnosis constitutes among these practitioners a kind of experiential primary scripture, a holy text without text which mimics the reception of scripture from spirits that progenitors of many religions record as the source of their holy texts. This framework suggests analytical tools which may be applied to the practices of Pagans, witches, and occult practitioners who until recently have been minoritized in the study of religions and ignored entirely in the study of scriptures.