I was introduced to the work of Danica Boyce several years ago by a friend from graduate school. Although my friend describes herself as “the least religious person in the world,” she was attracted to Boyce’s podcast, Fair Folk, for the way it mixed a deep understanding folklore with attention to the natural world and a de-colonial perspective. I started listening too, and found I was also hooked by the wealth of information provided in every episode. From familiar (and not-so-familiar) lore on deities to regional ritual traditions to incredible folk music, I gained a deeper insight into the Pagan world I wanted to live in – and a great appreciation for Boyce’s insightful, warm, and humane perspective.
Boyce and I sat down to talk on December 29th, still in the midst of the Yuletide season, to discuss her work, her approach to modern Paganism, and a new course she will offer starting on January 14th, “Pagan Ritual Song.” We are offering the first half of the interview today. The second part, which focuses on ritual song, will be featured tomorrow.
Here is Boyce’s own biography:
Danica Boyce is a medievalist and folklore researcher with a masters in Medieval Studies and a bachelor of education with a focus on Indigenous pedagogy. She takes a de-colonial approach to the revival of traditional cultures. For the past seven years she has produced the Fair Folk Podcast, a research-based show sharing accessible information about Paganism, folklore, and folk song. She has traveled to research and take workshops in folk singing in places like Iceland, Finland, Georgia, and Lithuania.
She is also a practicing Pagan with a scholarly yet experimental approach to historical materials, and an open mind to multiple ways of seeing the world.
Interested readers can find Danica Boyce on Instagram and join her mailing list at Flodesk.
Editorial note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Danica Boyce, host of the Fair Folk podcast [courtesy]
THE WILD HUNT: Thank you for taking the time out of your holiday season to talk to us. I’ve been a big fan of your podcast, Fair Folk, for a long time, and I really think that it is contributing something special to Pagan Media – whatever that is! So I’m excited to talk to you today. For our readers who aren’t familiar with you, could you give us kind of a capsule biography of who you are and what kind of work you do?
DANICA BOYCE: I’m a folklore and Paganism researcher and educator, and with that I write and I make a podcast. I’m really interested in how reclaiming traditional earth-honoring practices from traditional culture can help us to heal our relationship to the planet.
I came to that because I was a teacher – I was specializing in Indigenous education here on the west coast of Canada, and I was given this really beautiful window into Indigenous traditional culture and spirituality. And I found in the process of that study that spirituality was innate and essential to Indigenous learning, at least in the way it was presented to me, how people would be raised as productive humans. There is no education fully separate from spirituality in the way that it was framed by the Indigenous folks I was taught by.
And I found that all of the Western education in this post-Christian secular era is extremely a-spiritual. I became really curious, inspired by how rich the traditional culture they demonstrated to me was. I became inspired to learn if our healing could come from traditional culture. If Indigenous people are modeling traditional culture as a means to healing and becoming more connected to the world, then what’s available to European-descended people in that respect? What could we do? Because it doesn’t make sense to just suddenly become Indigenous somehow. They’re not looking to adopt everybody wholesale.
What is my cultural inheritance as a settler in North America, and how can I share that through my craft as an educator? That was the research question: what nourishing traditional culture is available to people of European descent, and how can we adopt it in a way that’s anti-imperialist, because that’s my intention with this, is to decolonize. Historically, a lot of the use of folklore, mythology and Paganism, not all of it, but it has often been appropriated by imperial forces.
TWH: Did you consider yourself Pagan before you had these experiences with Indigenous communities? Did that develop as you were thinking through the question of, “well, how do I apply traditional culture as a person descended from settlers – frankly, as a white person?”
DB: I had been Pagan for a long time – I probably self-identified as Pagan since I was maybe 19 years old, or at other times as like, a Witch or as Witchy. But it didn’t occur to me until this program that folklore was relevant to Paganism. I’d usually seen it through the lens of maybe Wicca: I would’ve pictured gathering in a circle and calling the quarters and maybe meditating or gathering herbs. But it hadn’t occurred to me that traditional culture of Europe even existed, or that I might be able to use it in a spiritual way, or that there was spirituality innate in it.
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TWH: One of the recurring features of Fair Folk is your almanac episodes, which give all kinds of folklore and music related to holidays and seasons throughout the year. Recently you posted one of your December almanacs, and probably my favorite part of the episode was talking about the Santa Lucia traditions in Sweden. That led me to think about how this traditional culture often has Christian elements to it.
I think for some segment of our Pagan audience, they would look at anything that has a saint in it and think, “oh, Christianity, Christianity, those are the bad guys. I don’t want anything to do with that.” And some will look at the same thing and say, “oh, well, I’m not Christian. I don’t want to be appropriating things that properly belong to this other group.” What are your thoughts on how to approach those elements of traditional European cultures that are in a lot of ways embedded within a Christian context?
DB: There’s so many layers to that question. First of all, it’s like – what is Swedish culture? Is it a nation? Is it a genetic state of being? How do you prove it? Who decides who belongs and who doesn’t?
Swedish girls singing during Saint Lucy’s Day celebrations in Vienna, Austria. [N_Creatures, Wikimedia Commons, CC 2.0]
When it comes to Christian materials – just as you were saying that, it occurred to me to share that the name “Santa Lucia,” Saint Lucia or Saint anything – the word “saint” just means holy or sacred. It’s not a Christian word necessarily. It just means holy. And you would call any deity or being that you revered holy or sacred in a historical or pre-Christian context as well. And then Lucia in Latin comes from lux, which means light. And so if you’re saying holy light or holy brilliance or holy illumination, the name itself isn’t even referring to Christianity specifically.
The interesting thing about saints is that commonly their narratives come out of Christianity, but then they become attached to regional folklore of the things that people were doing traditionally in relationship with the land and the seasons as they changed throughout the year in any region of Europe. A saint figure whose feast day would occur at that time would become attached to that seasonal folklore and the stories would become interminably mixed. They would often even take on a story about a god, or a being that used to be considered a god in the Paganism of that region.
So there’s this endless tug of war between the Christian framing and the Pagan framing or the more animistic framing of these figures, and I really think it’s up to the individual, what value they see that they can get out of engaging with this. If the Christianity is too offensive or it feels too foreign, they don’t have to engage with it. But saint lore is a beautiful resource, if you can separate the things that kind of turn your stomach and make you feel like there’s propaganda behind it, from the story that seems to be connected to the landscape.
TWH: What sort of intervention do you think your work is making into Paganism? Is there something that you would like to see Paganism look like, or a direction you’d like to see Paganism moving toward?
DB: When I think about how to approach Paganism, instead of always referring to the past as some sort of textbook for how we must proceed, it’s more helpful to break down what paganism was like, what people were doing before Christianity came around. What was paganism?
And paganism had the same features as indigenous religions worldwide. It was animistic: people engaged with the world, its beings as living and having agency. It could be polytheistic, where there would be multiple gods in contrast to the monotheistic Christianity, and it would celebrate feasts of seasonal importance like the cycle of the year. If we define Paganism by those criteria, then Paganism never stopped existing and continues to exist; there’s no debate about its reality or legitimacy.
Studying Indigenous traditions from North America really helped me to see it in that framework. Nobody’s debating – well, they shouldn’t be debating – whether Indigenous cultures are real or still existing. But there’s a real temptation, especially among those of us who really care about anti-racism and decolonization, to think about white people as being different somehow from all other people on earth, in our supposed inability to come back into connection with the planet.
This idea that whiteness is an absence of culture is actually a problematic assumption that leads to the issues that we’re actively trying to deconstruct in decolonizing. Believing that there have been indigenous cultures in Europe, a multitude of indigenous cultures, and that indigenous culture can still exist – and still does, or can regenerate – for me is a really important check on our way of thinking about culture that is very much rooted right now in race. Sometimes in deconstructing race, we can accidentally reinforce it as well. You might ask yourself, what do I actually mean when I say “white people”? Is it possible it would be more meaningful to think in terms of a diversity of cultures originating in Europe?
TWH: Right now, there are these very nativist sorts of politics in the air – it’s an issue in a lot of parts of Europe, and it’s certainly an issue in the United States as well. Some folks may be wondering, how do we reawaken these traditional cultures or practices without also reinforcing those sorts of nativist tendencies?
DB: That’s a fantastic question. I oppose nativism and tribalism as well. I think that one of the main things to keep a handle on is, are we putting cultures in competition with one another? Because that’s one of the main ideas behind colonialism, that there are distinct cultures which are battling one another for dominance.
If we think about indigeneity as belonging exclusively to people of color who have been colonized by only Europeans, then it puts European-descended people and Europeans in the position of the victor, of the oppressor, every single time. If we have this universal sort of definition of these two parties as opposite and mutually exclusive, then we create this logical difficulty where white people can never be indigenous to place. But we need them to become indigenous to place for the earth to survive and for everyone to flourish.
TWH: Let’s say I find out about some really fascinating regional folklore from Europe, and then I am sitting here in my home in the Mississippi River Valley, which is far away from that region in Europe. How do you see people in North America using that kind of information?
Burning of a Marzanna effigy in Poland [Tomasz “Meteor2017” Kuran, Wikimedia Commons, CC 3.0]
DB: Say there’s a tradition in the springtime of drowning the Marzanna doll in the river, in the springtime, in a particular region of Poland, and say you want to follow this tradition. You could notice what the relevant features are in this story or in this ritual – that winter is personified in some way, and an effigy is built of natural materials from that place or from that culture. And then there is a river, which is considered sacred in some way that you can dig into, that is employed in the ritual as well. So you might decide to do a ritual that personifies winter in a way that resonates with you or with the place that you are. And then you might also engage with that river in sacrificing this symbol of winter. You could begin a relationship with that river based on this new knowledge – “I’ve never thought about my river that way.”
Every ritual, every folktale, every folk song has these sorts of elements that you can zoom out and look at, and there’s so much richness in telling you what’s available to be considered sacred in the world anywhere you are. You can revere a source of water, you can revere flame, you can revere stone, you can revere the weather or the sky. There’s no reason that you shouldn’t be able to be fully Pagan and fully engaged in Pagan activities anywhere in the world, as long as you’re awake to your surroundings and available for reverence and curiosity, and available to make offerings to what strikes you as beautiful.
We will return with part two tomorrow, focusing on Pagan ritual song.
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