It is our postulation that no single theology can address the needs of the Neo-Pagan community, but the initiation of a theological discourse is essential to the community itself. There has been confusion within different Neo-Pagan groups as to precisely what their specific beliefs are. Discord has occurred in ritual, and in conflicting writings by members of the same group, potentially leading to traumatic separation. People looking for a people to identify with have been confused, often finding themselves involved with groups believing things vastly different then they had supposed. Lastly, scholars find it difficult to define just what exactly Neo-Pagans believe.

By initiating an attempt to promote theological discussion within the Neo-Pagan community, it is our hope to help foster this discussion. Within the greater Neo-Pagan movement there are many varied groups. Each of these groups needs to begin analyzing what their beliefs truly mean to them. By beginning this discussion within individual smaller groups, it is likely that a general theological statement could be arrived at. By exploring the nature of the divine and the meaning and intent behind rituals and beliefs, we believe that Neo-Pagan groups will facilitate their own further growth. In addition, with the application of theological examination to individual groups, it might be possible within the greater Neo-Pagan community to reach a theological agreement on some basic fundamental principles. While Michel York, in Pagan Theology, attempted to draw a general 'pagan theological' analysis, it was too broad to specifically describe the Neo-Pagan community. It is our belief that by developing a clear discourse on religious issues, members of the community themselves will be able to challenge and further solidify their own beliefs. While some movements have no defined leaders, even holding this discussion within the community will help to define the beliefs that the group holds.

We will argue that although many academics have attempted to provide a framework for theology, and in fact have attempted to apply it to different Neo-Pagan communities, true theological discourse needs to come from within the community itself. While academics can help members of the community learn to frame their questions, the questions and more specifically the answers come from within the community itself. An emic understanding of belief and praxis is necessary to define the group as a whole.

We recognize that there are many reasons why within the Neo-Pagan community this call for theological discourse could become problematic. The primary argument against the creation of Neo-Pagan theology is that most Neo-Pagans pride themselves on individualism. Most Neo-Pagan belief systems are constructed in ways that allow each believer the freedom to frame their personal worldview within an open and friendly setting. This individual self-determination appears to carry over into group situations as well, allowing for a diversity of views unified by shared set of spiritual technologies, which has become the hallmark of American neo-paganism. A reasonable fear would be that Neo-Pagan theology will stifle the freedom that attracts so many new members to the movement.

Another critique is that the creation of theology will generate official written texts. In many Neo-Pagan traditions pride is placed on the fact that the religion is not text based. Intrinsically, creating a theological understanding will create text around which the religion will function.

My recommendations for reconsideration of the concept of the occult presupposes a feminist worldview. This means, among other things, that I affirm an egalitarian natural world where all beings have worth and that I value embodiment, relationality and interdependence. To seek knowledge of the occult, as I understand the concept, means to seek an awareness of the world outside of ordinary conscious awareness and beyond the purview of rational thought, but within embodied human experience. In many cases Wiccan ritual magic explores just such deeply embodied non-sensory and non-rational experience. I propose process thought as a metaphysical system that can explicate knowledge at this level of experience.

The concepts necessary to a process understanding of occult knowledge correlate well, I believe, with feminist and Wiccan thought and are intuitively accessible to Pagans. These concepts include the assertion that the Universe consists not of material substances, but of events that occur in complex interlocking relations to form a vast web of interconnectivity and relationality. Process thought sees each person, each being, as a complex of events that receives data from multiple configurations of past events; the person shapes this present reality to achieve a subjective impact on the future. According to process epistemology, below the human perception of the world through sensory data and abstractions through symbols, there lies a level of embodied experience that deals mostly with the interconnections among the events. Process thinkers call this root level of experience "perception in the mode of causal efficacy." Keeping in mind the process assertion that all "things" are really events, one might translate this phrase to read "awareness of how events are caused to exist through the effects of other events."

The information one gains through causal efficacy is never clear and distinct the way information from either sensory data or abstract thought can be. Rather, it is always wild and vague, heavy and primitive. As unmanageable as perception in the mode of causal efficacy may be, it lies at the root of all human experience. It is prior to sense perception and supplies the base knowledge from which humans form abstractions in order to grasp the coherence of our lives and our world. For example, causal efficacy provides a sense of personal existence across time. That is, one has a sense of personhood because at the deep root level of causal efficacy she perceives continuity across the events of her life.

This mode of perception is, I contend, a way to interpret Wiccan occult knowledge. That is, occult knowledge is about the relationships among the events of one's personal existence within the web of events that interconnect with, impact on, and respond to one's existence. Another way to state this interpretation would be to say that Wiccan ritual presupposes an epistemology identified among process thinkers as radical empiricism.

While I advocate a process epistemology, I recognize if adopted, it would confront Wiccans with another set of issues. In process thought, causal efficacy is a universal mode of perception. All beings are comprised of events and have at least some minimal awareness of and subjective influence on the complex web of events within which they exist. Thus a process view would not permit Wiccans to claim that their occult knowledge is available to a particular tradition, nor to all Wiccans, nor even to human beings. Therefore, under a process rubric, Wiccans could claim causal efficacy as a source of occult knowledge that is uniquely shaped by their experiences as Witches, but the source of that knowledge is not unique to them as Witches. Conversely, process thought would lead Wiccans to understand that their special knowledge as Witches does not isolate them from other persons or from any other part of the natural order. Causal efficacy is part of all experience. As rational participants in the natural order, all humans can learn to act more in accord with its insights into the depth connections among events, the Web of Being.

After explaining necessary process concepts, and working from a feminist-process paradigm, I will propose the following wording for a Wiccan epistemology derived from process thought: Human knowledge arises from a root sense, which humans share with all beings, of existing in relationship to all events and to the whole of a processive universe. Human perceptions and interpretations of the world obscure this core knowledge, but we have access to it through our bodies. Through ritual it can be raised, however briefly and faintly, to conscious awareness. Wiccans strive to achieve a glimmering of this occult knowledge to illuminate relationships in their individual lives and their connection to the Web of Being.

Based on earlier research into the phenomenon of new religious movements on the Internet, which I freely admit did little more than scratch the surface, I came to Cyberhenge with certain expectations about what I would find during a more detailed exploration of modern Paganism on the Web. In many ways, though, Cyberhenge was a surprise to me, something, I suspect, most useful works of scholarship are. And, I was as surprised by what I did not find as what I did. At the most basic level, despite industry rhetoric about the vast creative potential represented by the Internet, despite the claims of modern Pagan enthusiasts that "computers are like demigods in a box" (Patricia Telesco and Sirona Knight), the majority of what transpires online remains decidedly mundane. Email rules, conversation takes place, but online Pagan ritual, for example, barely makes a showing.

As a colleague pointed out while we were discussing this book, however, a time-honored tradition in sociology-and I would argue one of its chief satisfactions-is the bursting of popular bubbles. To learn that something is not as it is commonly perceived is, to me anyway, infinitely more interesting than simply confirming popular perception. "Social scientists love nothing so much as irony," write Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, and as my father would say, "Never were truer words spoke," for there is plenty of irony on the modern Pagan Internet.

Not surprisingly, like a host of other religious groups and adherents around the world, many modern Pagans are using the Internet in sincere attempts to create new forms of community, some of which were unimaginable little more than a decade ago. Wiccans, Witches, Druids, and Asatruar who would never have had the opportunity to interact offline now forge relationships in the thousands of discussion groups on Internet portals such as Yahoo! and MSN, in site-based chatrooms, and on the ubiquitous alt.-type discussion forums. All of this suggests that there is a vast communal conversation taking place on the Web, and in some ways there is. Surprisingly, though, with the exception of alt.- forums, relatively few of these groups prove at all durable; many have only a handful of participants and most post less than one message per month per member. Not surprisingly, there are a plethora of modern Pagan Web sites on the Internet, everything from elaborate information sites to dedicated search engines and "cyber-stores," from attempts at fully-orbed "cybercovens" to very plain examples of "my Wiccan Web page." Surprisingly, though less so when considered against the larger modern Pagan context, there is little that is particularly creative; that is, many sites simply replicate offline and online resources with no attempt to improve or adapt them. As I have argued elsewhere, at this point, in the technological infancy of popular Internet communications, the world online remains little more than a cyber-shadow, an electronic reflection of life offline. What modern Paganism on the Internet does demonstrate, however, is how new information spaces are being colonized by religion and its practitioners, how these spaces provide alternative, hitherto unavailable venues for the performance and instantiation of often marginalized religious identities, and how potential for the electronic evolution in religious traditions such as modern Paganism is supported by the very architecture and philosophy of the World Wide Web.

My use of the word political mobilises feminist definitions (Pateman, 1979) that place the political and personal in contingent and inter-relational social locations, i.e. 'the personal as political'. It is the dialectical process of making sense of the local and global through dialogue, experience, and (re) conceptualisation that I refer to as 'developing' a political imagination. I use the notion of political imagination as a two-part concept. First, political imaginations act as a meta-narrative, or set of presuppositions about the assumptions and rules that govern day-to-day discussions and shape the social meanings and logical dimensions of those discussions (Walters, 2002). I also use it in a spatial and symbolic sense, where metaphors and symbols shape the possibilities for envisioning political space and concepts of citizenship (i.e. as inclusive, exclusive, organic or mechanical) and where these symbols also work to naturalise assumptions of, or challenge the naturalising of, particular political paradigms (Walters, 2002).

Social locations and ideologies complicate the concept of civil society. Discussions of civil society often hinge on understandings of social imaginaries. Civil society, minimally, refers to "the existence of free associations that are not under the control of state power" (Gaonkar and Lee, 2002:2). Taylor suggests that it is said to exist "where society as a whole can structure itself and coordinate its actions through such free associations…[which] can significantly determine or inflect the direction of state policy" (1995:208). The Comaroffs argue that it is "a relational term, one of a set of interdependent constructs" such as state, citizenship, democracy, culture, society, and the public sphere (1999:viii). They also note that it has been described as a term which "reanimates the move toward modernity", and thus stands accused of furthering old imperialist ideologies under the guise of liberatory rhetoric (viii). There are other, more positive readings of the construct of civil society such as "a 'new cultural fabric' capable of restructuring identities, of challenging existing monopolies of wealth and power, perhaps even of reinventing the terms of modernity itself" (Bayart 1986:20 as cited in Comaroff and Comaroff, 1999:3). The concept of civil society acts as the context and framework within which the 'citizen' engages. This links understandings of citizenship to the development of political imaginaries and political participation in (post)modern civil society . Ultimately, understandings of civil society are predicated on the locations of the individuals and collectives describing the concept. I suggest that Neo/Pagan imaginaries have much to contribute to this ongoing discourse.