ethnography, fiction, and the meanings of the past in Brittany

Adopting a reflexive approach, this article interprets a recently created healing ritual in Brittany that integrates local 19th‐century notions about the curative powers of prehistoric monuments with diverse elements from non‐Breton sources. Parallels are noted between this New Age therapy and witchcraft, an older explanatory framework for illness and misfortune in Brittany. The therapeutic discourse associated with the ritual draws on the past and on exotic cultures to construct a meaningful cosmology. Therefore, this discourse—like the New Age movement as a whole—has much in common with anthropology, which, it is suggested, provides Western society with an ordered vision of the world. [Brittany, New Age healing, witchcraft, interpretation of the past, anthropology as cosmology]