Becoming involved with the faith, Magliocco noted that she no longer remained an objective outsider, but became an active participant after experiencing altered states of consciousness during several Pagan rituals.
In 2002 she published her first book on the subject, Neo-pagan Sacred Art and Altars: Making Things Work, which was followed by the more general Witching Culture two years later.
Gardnerian Wicca revolved around the veneration of both a Horned God and a Mother Goddess, the celebration of eight seasonally-based festivals in a Wheel of the Year and the practice of magical rituals in groups known as covens.
One initiate of both the Dianic and Gardnerian traditions was a woman known as Starhawk (1951–) who went on to found her own tradition, Reclaiming Wicca, as well as publishing The Spiral Dance: a Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979), a book that helped spread Wicca throughout the U.S.[5][6] Prior to Magliocco's work, multiple American researchers working in the field of Pagan studies had separately published investigations of the Pagan community in both the United States and the United Kingdom.
Initially she was interested in Paganism as a "folk revival, in issues surrounding the use of folklore from academic sources, cultural appropriation, and the construction of authenticity in the invention of rituals" rather than in any actual spiritual capacity.
[18] Magliocco dedicated the book to the memory of Andrew Vázsonyi (1906–1986),[19] a Hungarian folklorist and novelist who had worked for two decades at the Indiana University Bloomington in the United States.
Going on to lay out the objectives of the book, Magliocco discusses the history of Wicca, and the influence that early anthropologists like Edward Taylor and James Frazer had on it as a burgeoning movement.
Magliocco then looks at the influence that 18th and 19th century folkloristics and anthropology had on the Romanticists and then Pagan movement, in particular the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Brothers Grimm and Sir James Frazer.
Proceeding to look at this relationship, she highlights the work of Charles Leland, Margaret Murray and Gerald Gardner, who drew from folklore in their own books, all of which heavily influenced modern Paganism.
Finally, she borrows the concept of "textual poachers" from the French sociologist Michel de Certeau, arguing that the Pagan community fit this model well, collating elements from a wide variety of sources and composing them into something new, in this case a religious movement.
She then rounds off the chapter with a discussion of the anthropological fieldwork that she undertook among the San Francisco Bay Area Pagan community between 1995 and 2000, the Coven Trismegiston that she worked with, and the local Gardnerian, Reclaiming and NROOGD traditions that she encountered there.
[24] The third chapter, "Making Magic: Training the Imagination", begins with Magliocco's assertion that the unifying feature of the Pagan movement is the ritual experiences that its practitioners undertake.
[25] My absorption into the Neo-Pagan community and my subjective spiritual experiences during fieldwork beg the question that always bedevils ethnologists: to what extent did my participation in the culture cause me to "go native", to adopt the beliefs, attitudes, and worldviews of the people I studied?
[26] As she noted: In this position, Magliocco was in agreement with Jone Salomonsen, the feminist theologian and ethnographer who had performed fieldwork among the Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco in order to gain research for her book Enchanted Feminism (2002).
He went on to describe it as "my first choice for a textbook in any university class with a significant component on contemporary Paganism" and felt that "Almost every chapter contains either new insights or original analyses that extend prior discussions to a new depth.
"[36] In her review for the Folklore journal, the English folklorist Jacqueline Simpson described Witching Culture as offering a "fascinating analysis" of how U.S. Pagans have "adopted and adapted elements of European folk practice to fit the Gardnerian framework of their rituals and spells".
Believing that Magliocco's analysis had revealed Paganism to be the most "politically progressive and postmodern" religion in existence "despite [its] considerable borrowings of traditional themes", Fine felt that Witching Culture was "an effective and affectionate guide in mapping the development of Neo-Paganism in America and the multiple – and occasionally conflicting – strains from which it draws".
[39] In her review, published in the History of Religions journal, Stefanie von Schnurbein of the Nordeuropa-Institut, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, wrote that Magliocco dealt with "a sadly understudied issue" in her study, but that "To the disappointment of a reader who expects a theoretically advanced discussion of these relations [between religious culture and academic thinking], the historical argument and material do not go far beyond Ronald Hutton's in-depth study of the history of modern pagan witchcraft, The Triumph of the Moon."
Nonetheless, she notes that because Magliocco herself is a practicing Pagan, it "limits to a certain degree the author's ability to scrutinize further some of the problems intrinsic to the reception and resignification of ideologically questionable concepts and theories".
She also notes that in Magliocco's work, "art, creativity, and imagination are depicted as exclusively positive forces that are rooted in experience and are responsible for the potential of resistance to be found in neopagan ritual and religion".
"[40] Writing on The Cauldron website, a practicing Pagan using the pseudonym of "Pitch" described the work as "thoughtful, insightful, fruitful, grounded, and, maybe, provocative" as well as being a "Must Have, Double Bag!"