ABSTRACT
This chapter focusses on modern Afrikaner pagans and how their practices relate to the transformation of the post-apartheid society. Many Afrikaners have moved away from their relatively closed circles in Stellenbosch and other small towns to join Cape Town's more inclusive and diverse crowds, where they have discovered New Age religions, often alongside English-speaking white South Africans. In their subsequent encounters with a wide range of new and different people and ideas, religious mediations over moral, social, and spatial boundaries are once again of vital importance. While mediating new ideas and spatial practices, the Afrikaans neopagans are still constantly negotiating and defining their faith, not only internally amongst themselves, but also in relation to their ethnicity, other local religions, and the global faith communities which constitute the primary sources of their theology. While Afrikaner neopagans are mainly regarded as subversive or counter-cultural by mainstream society, their practices are based on assumptions of proper (ordentlike) behaviour, and they produce their own moral communities in which utopias and moral orders exist side by side. Their mediations are studied through the rituals and activities of prominent Afrikaner figures in central positions in the contemporary pagan scene in Cape Town, with an analysis of modern pagans at the crossroads of Afrikaner ethnic politics and religious mediation.
