Voices from the Pagan Census: A National Survey of Witches and Neo-Pagans in the United States

The promotional copy for this book, the follow-up to Berger's A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft in the United States (University of South Carolina, 1999), states that it is the "largest-scale survey of Neo-Pagans to date". This "Pagan Census", conducted via national survey between 1993 and 1995, compares Neo-Pagans with American society at large by contrasting the responses gathered from the Pagan survey with the results tabulated from the United States General Social Survey (an average of data calculated from national surveys made over the past twenty years).

Like the first book, Voices From the Pagan Census doesn't delve into specifics regarding the actual practice of Neo-Pagan spirituality. In general, the book tells us what we already know: the majority of Neo-Pagans are liberal politically and socially, Caucasian, and possess college education or higher. It does, however, present the numbers behind the knowledge, making this book invaluable to researchers doing ethnographic research on the Neo-Pagan communities in North America.

However, while this is a landmark survey, the findings in their present form best inform statisticians and anthro/sociologists rather than the Neo-Pagan population at large. A statistical analysis portrait of the American Neo-Pagan community is by its nature inaccessible to the average reader. The information contained in Voices from the Pagan Census needs to be re-presented in an accessible format for the Pagan community itself to digest the findings.

Valuable research, but this text is better suited to anthropologists and social psychologists. This information would be wonderful to disseminate to the Pagan community, but in its current form it will not reach them, no matter how advanced their education.

(c) 2004 A. Murphy-Hiscock. Originally published in Wyntergreene, Ostara (March) 2004.