ABSTRACT
In the twenty-rst century West, the role of institutional religion is in retreat and the rise of personal spiritualities is clearly observable (Partridge 2004-2005). The oppositional cultural trends of the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment (which promoted rationality and scientic experiment) and Romanticism (which championed emotion and experientialism), are visible in both the public acceptance of secularism, science and technology, and the private emergence of a plethora of new self-concepts that embrace the contemporary narrative of the self as central, the creator of reality, and of self-actualisation as the fundamental spiritual quest and ultimate goal of life (Cusack 2015: 181-182; Lyon 2002 [2000]: 73-96). An important strand of contemporary Romanticism is magical thinking. Since the publication of Lupa’s A Field Guide to the Otherkin (2007), scholarly interest in Otherkin (people who believe and live as if they are partly other-than-human, for example, part-dragon, unicorn, vampire, angel, fae or other mythological or supernatural creature) and Therianthropy (a term derived from the Greek for ‘beast-man’ and applied to a group generally distinguished from Otherkin by the ‘otherness’ of their selves being animal, such as wolf, horse, eagle, ram and so on) has emerged (Robertson 2015a, 2015b). This is partly due to the facilitative nature of the Internet, which has enabled hitherto separate individuals to form communities (Shane 2014: 263), and partly due to academic coverage of such crafted identities and niche spiritual communities, which has grown steadily since the Australian scholar, Danielle Kirby, published her pioneering book chapter, ‘Alternative worlds: Metaphysical questing and virtual community among the Otherkin’ (2006).
