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METAGEUM '07
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Conference session: Contemporary Pagan engagements
Book now for whole or part of the Metageum event. |
About Kathryn Rountree
Dr Kathryn Rountree is Senior Lecturer on Social Anthropology in the School of Social and Cultural Studies at Massey University, New Zealand. Her areas of research include Goddess spirituality and Neo-Pagan religions, feminism and embodiment, and the contestation of archaeological sites, including Malta’s Neolithic temples. She has conducted anthropological fieldwork in New Zealand, Malta and Turkey. Her current research focuses on present-day witches and Pagans in Malta.
She is author of Embracing the Witch and the Goddess: Feminist Ritual-makers in New Zealand (Routledge 2004) and numerous articles in journals such as History and Anthropology, Sociology of Religion, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Body and Society, Journal of Contemporary Religion, Environmental Ethics, Journal of Mediterranean Studies and Anthropology of Consciousness.
She is currently writing a book on Malta, with the working title Between the Worlds: Witches and Pagans in Malta Today.
For more information, see Dr Rountree's page at the Massey University web site,
sscs.massey.ac.nz/rountree.htm and a brief online
article on her Maltese work.
See also Dr Rountree's article, Goddesses and Monsters - Contesting Approaches to Maltaís Neolithic Past published in the Journal of Mediterranean Studies, Volume 9, Number 2 (Malta University Publishers 2000).
Neo-Paganism in Malta
Malta's Neolithic temples, claimed to be the oldest free-standing stone monuments in the world, may have first become a destination for religious pilgrims several millennia before Christ, if we accept the suggestion of a tourist video titled 'Sacred Island' screened at the Emigrants' Commission in the capital Valletta. The narrator, whose script was written by a prominent Maltese priest and philosopher, begins by suggesting that 'people from all over the Mediterranean came to worship here since before the dawn of civilization'. From the Bronze Age onwards, the temples were appropriated and contested, re-interpreted and re-used by a host of foreign and local groups for a variety of economic, cultural, historical, scientific and religious purposes. In the last 15-20 years a new group of spiritual tourists, Goddess followers and Neo-Pagans mostly from the UK and the US, has begun visiting the temples wanting to learn more about Malta's Neolithic past and 'see for themselves' its remains, claiming an affinity with the earth-honouring beliefs of the temple-builders, and seeking a personal experience of the numinous.
For most Maltese (and most tourists), however, the temples are not part of a contemporary sacred landscape, at least not in the religious sense of 'sacred'. The sites and their associated artefacts have been symbolically employed as cultural icons in the creation of a Maltese national identity and as unique 'attractions' in tourism advertising, but have no contemporary spiritual relevance. Their current values have to do with history and heritage, science (archaeology) and the economy. While the temples are important symbols of Maltese heritage and cultural identity, this is not linked with a strong sense of cultural ownership. Maltese insist that as World Heritage sites, the temples are 'to be shared by everyone'; they are not owned by Maltese, simply on Maltese soil.
Dr Rountree's recent field research in Malta concentrates on attitudes and agendas in relation to the temples, concentrating mostly on one group of Maltese for whom the temples do hold deep spiritual meaning and significance: Maltese Neo-Pagans. It examines the place of the temples in Maltese Pagan identity, imagination and practice.
At Metageum '07: Contemporary Pagan engagements with Malta’s Megalithic Past
"‘Exploring the Megalithic Mind’ is clearly a tall order from the vantage point of five to six millennia thence if we hope to arrive at final, certain answers to our raft of questions about the people of Malta’s Temple Period. This kind of exploration is very much about the journey (rather than the destination) and the different routes we take depending upon our different starting points. The baggage we carry and disciplinary ‘maps’ we employ span a vast epistemological range from scientific to intuitive, sacred to secular, intellectual to embodied, laboratory-based to experiential. Our various conclusions about the ‘megalithic mind’ probably reveal more about our 21st century minds: they are more reliable mirrors than telescopes.
"My presentation focuses on exploring the minds and bodily engagements with sites of a particular cohort of contemporary visitors to the temples: modern Goddess followers and Neo-Pagans. These visitors, which include a small number of Maltese and a variety of foreigners, claim an affinity with the beliefs of the temple-builders and many seek a personal experience of the numinous at sites. Through somatic modes of attention to sites, ritual and meditation, song and prayer, symbolic actions and creative performances, modern pilgrim/visitors often experience themselves not as isolated subjectivities but as sharing an intersubjective milieu with other pilgrim/visitors, with the site, with the Earth, and, sometimes, with ‘the megalithic mind’. Common binaries may dissolve and reveal themselves as continuities in the vicinity of the temples: human body and earth body, past and present, inner and outer worlds, self and other, human and deity, memory and imagination. The lived body becomes a starting point for knowledge and a valid, trusted instrument for exploring the past.
"The presentation is based on my current anthropological research in Malta and on previous research focussed on contemporary Pagan pilgrimages to ancient sacred sites elsewhere in Europe."
-- Dr Kathryn Rountree