How To Make a Folk Saint

This is a 90-minute intermediate level lecture, in the Pickman Room (second floor)

Being dead, the saints offer many practitioners with endless opportunities for approachable, goal-specific, and even widely sanctioned necromancy. Even better, saints serve as a profoundly democratic form of witchcraft, with the dead deriving great power once they carry their status as spirits of personal relationship with them and become spirits of collective devotion, identity, and action. Many of the “official” saints of Roman, Orthodox, or other traditions would seem to have become “official” through religious authorities acquiescing to popular mandate in a bottom-up rather than top-down process. The answer to Bartlett’s famous question “Why can the dead do such great things?” may indeed be "because of The People.”

But how does a dead person (or something like it) cross the threshold from being just another local ghost to becoming the subject of mass devotion? This talk examines…