“Two people are in custody after police found more than a half dozen dismembered dogs inside a Chester County house Monday night. SPCA officers carried out bags and boxes of evidence from a home in the 2400 block of Wayne Avenue in the city of Coatesville. Officials say the scene inside was dark and disturbing with elements of witchcraft and the occult on vivid display. In the living room, investigators say they found two dog skulls and a dog skeleton that had been gold-leafed. They then walked into the kitchen and found two dog skeletons on the counter and a dog’s head in the freezer.“

This seems pretty bad. It’s one thing to tolerate the sacrifice of a livestock animal like a chicken or goat, but dogs? People love dogs, and those who harm and abuse them are usually treated as no better than if they murdered a human being. Plus, “witchcraft and the occult”? You know that local Pagans, not to mention adherents of Santeria or Vodou, will have to do damage control for years because of this. But what if, just what if, those weren’t dog skulls. What if they were something else?

“Since the remains found in Caln Township haven’t been confirmed as canine, [George Bengal, the director of law enforcement for the state's SPCA] said there may not be cause for alarm. In his experience, goat and dog skulls can be easily confused.“

It’s true! If you aren’t an expert in such matters, and if you are full of adrenaline responding to a “suspicious activity” call, it can be quite easy to confuse a goat skull with a dog skull. Here’s a side-by-side comparison with a domestic dog skull and a domestic goat skull.

For the sake of argument, if these were goat skulls, wouldn’t that explain why they were keeping some in a freezer? Why there were charred bone remains in a fire pit? That they were, you know, eating the goats? Now, I don’t eat meat, so goats aren’t on my menu, but I hear that goat is the most-consumed type of meat in the world, and is increasingly trendy here in the United States. So wouldn’t having a decorated goat skull in your house be no more different than the many, many, folks I’ve met who display decorated cow skulls in their homes (particularly in the Southwest)?

Regardless of veracity, because of the “sacrificed dog” angle that all the initial reports have put out, the local occult/metaphysical community is now on the defensive.

“In my 41 years of practicing the occult, I’ve never come across any ritual or activity that involves killing dogs or cats,” [Eric Lee, co-owner of Mystickal Tymes] said. “This person sounds more like a sadistic individual that should be heavily sedated than an occult practitioner.”

Now think of the owners of that house. Even if the remains were goats that they ate, will they ever have peace again? Or will they be forever branded as the “dog sacrifice” family, and be slowly ostracized and exiled from the community? Will the local media do big flashy “exonerated” stories, or will we just get a quiet addendum that nobody pays attention to?

A final question. Why did the local SPCA officials on-scene instantly jump to the conclusion that these were dog remains, comments that were soon walked back after the fact? Could it be that many SPCA officials received training in “occult” matters from biased sources? In fact, state SPCA official George Bengal, who is quoted above, has made odd remarks about animal sacrifice in the past.

“An animal welfare official says a beheaded dog and cat found in Philadelphia appear to be the result of a ritual sacrifice. George Bengal, Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals director of investigations, said the dog and cat were found … near a bike path in Philadelphia’s Olney neighborhood along with three beheaded chickens. He said he believes the animals were killed elsewhere and the remains dumped where a passer-by found them. Mr. Bengal said there is usually an increase in ritual animal sacrifices at this time of year because of “a lot of high holidays that different groups celebrate.” But he said most of those sacrifices involve goats and chickens.”

A different Pennsylvania-based SPCA official in 2009 harassed a Satanist, accusing him of abusing his pets, despite no evidence that this was occurring. He too was the victim of a “suspicious activity” call. Which makes one wonder, why does the Pennsylvania SPCA think occult practitioners are routinely harming dogs and cats? What data or evidence are they basing this on, and why were officials so quick to exclaim “dog” in Chester County, Pennsylvania when it might have been “goat” instead?

I think it’s vital to contextualize the uniqueness of PantheaCon, because we can sometimes lose focus on how important this event has become to so many, and just what a hothouse of our movement’s vast diversity and creativity is on display year after year. That PantheaCon succeeds where others fall short in mingling groups that can often have vastly different ideas about practice, theology, politics, and worldview. Because of this success it has become an unofficial annual meeting place of our movement’s leaders, clergy, scholars, and activists. Understandings are built, grudges resolved (and sometimes formed), and new projects hatched from talk over dinner, or in hurried conversations between presentations. If one had the time, and the people-power, a year’s worth of stories could be written from just these four days of intense activity. Due to all this, when controversies do arise, they tend to amplify throughout our movement, our interconnected community.

This year, debate, protest, and controversy emerged around a scheduled “genetic women only” ritual led by Dianic elder Z. Budapest, complicating a dialog begun on the issue of gender and transgender within modern Paganism the year before, re-exposing raw emotions and hurts from both sides that we as a community are still in the process of acknowledging, understanding, and responding to. These events have sparked a lot of comment and reaction by those watching from the outside, and I think it is necessary to begin by listening to the voices that were in attendance, and who directly participated in the events the Pagan community are now discussing.

• First, here is T. Thorn Coyle explaining why she decided to organize a peaceful, silent meditation outside Z. Budapest’s ritual at PantheaCon. Thorn’s reasoning was expanded upon in a follow-up post written after the ritual and protest happened.
• Yeshe Rabbit, High Priestess of CAYA Coven, who this year co-led an inclusive ritual open to all, and who held ritual space between the sitters and the scheduled ritual, has posted about her own reactions to the controversy. Earlier, Rabbit had questioned the need for protest, but now describes the action as “moderated, noble, disciplined, and poised.”
• Z. Budapest has not commented at length since the ritual, though you can read part of the prepared apology she gave before the ritual, and that convention staff distributed, at PNC-Bay Area. Her earlier call for support in the face of silent protest can be found at her Facebook page. The alleged statement from last year that helped fuel protest this year can be found, here. It should be noted that PantheaCon staff is now investigating all comments attributed to Z. Budapest for veracity.
• Robert at the Doing Magick blog witnessed the silent protest, took some photos, and shared his thoughts on the matter.
• Lupa, who attended the silent sitting protest, shares her reactions and reflections, with updates, at her Livejournal. She has also posted a follow-up where she clarifies her stance on cis-women only rituals.
• PNC-Minnesota has posted a letter to the editor from a woman at PantheaCon who wanted to attend Z’s ritual, but was discouraged from doing so by news of the protest.

You can find much more discussion on this across the Pagan blogosphere. As more voices emerge, I will document them and share them with you here. I am committed to giving all involved in this matter an opportunity to share their perspectives, what they think the relevant issues are, and what they think the way forward is from this point. You should also stay tuned to PNC-Bay Area, who are planning several articles and editorials around this issue.

While things unfold, I want The Wild Hunt to be a space where all voices can come to be heard, in hopes of encouraging productive dialog and working towards understandings that collectively enrich us. As someone who sits atop the pyramid of privilege in our society, I hesitate to offer off-the-cuff opinions or solutions, and instead hope to be an advocate for transparency, renewed dialog, and building respect between all parties. Considering the thoughtful responses I’ve seen so far from those involved, I want the emphasis to be on their voices, not mine. In the weeks to come I am committed to listening and documenting, to being a resource for those engaged in the direct work.

In the year leading up to the 2013 PantheaCon, I anticipate that The Wild Hunt will cover this matter extensively. I will also slowly unpack my own thoughts as they develop, and hope that I can offer additional light when it is called for. In addition, you can expect coverage of the many other events, panels, and presentations at PantheaCon, so that their good work is not lost amid this storm.

ADDENDUM: Teo Bishop from Bishop in the Grove, who sat with the protesters, has written up his experience of the evening. Working from notes taken that evening. It is matter-of-fact, and essential reading for anyone who is interested in what exactly happened.

Our world is utterly saturated with fear. We fear being attacked by religious extremists, both foreign and domestic. We fear the loss of political rights, a loss of privacy, or a loss of freedom. We fear being injured, robbed or attacked, being judged by others, or neglected, or left unloved. We fear succumbing to an exotic pandemic disease, or losing our homes to catastrophic storms induced by climate change and global warming. We fear the social breakdown that abortion, divorce, and same-sex marriage will supposedly cause. We fear foreign immigrants with their strange customs, coming to our neighborhoods to take our jobs, drain our welfare state, or commit crimes. We have existential fears such as the fear of death, fear of freedom itself, fear of the afterlife, fear of being ‘unreal’ (a surprisingly common one, although difficult to describe), and fear of loneliness and isolation. You might boast of having none of these fears. Yet there is a part of your mind which knows that certain boundaries must not be crossed. We see certain consequences befalling the unprepared, the disbeliever, the nonconformist, the Socratic gadfly. And so we supervise ourselves. We subscribe to moral and political values that separate us from each other, instead of unite us, such as competition, and individualism. We immerse ourselves in escapist mass entertainment, such as ‘reality TV’ programs. We support fanatical politicians and preachers. Our politicians, in turn, support dictators and tyrants in other countries, all in the name of ‘security’ and ‘stability’. And we arm ourselves to the teeth, and pray to God to be saved. Thus even when we say we have no fear of these things, fear still governs our minds.

But life does not have to be that way. There is nothing natural, inevitable, or necessary about the labyrinth of fear. We can liberate ourselves. There are better ways to live. Someone has to take the initiative to love and trust her fellow living creature, and set us all free.

Yet this book is not just about social and moral problems. It is about people and relationships. It is about what our lives might look like if we were not so profoundly governed by fear. As we have seen, fear tends to emerge from disordered and dysfunctional relationships. For one of the deepest and most debilitating fears we endure is the fear of other people. We fear what they might do or say, how they may act, whether they will judge you, harm you, steal from you, interfere with your life, perhaps kill you, or simply ignore you. The liberation from fear requires a better understanding of our relationships, and a rectifying and a healing of our relationships. In that sense, this book offers not one way, but twenty-two ways, to escape the labyrinth.

I also think that liberation from fear requires a sense of the sacred. For just as our fears emerge from our relationships, so does the sacred.

When we think of the words ‘the sacred’, we do not normally think of relationships. We mostly think of ‘things’. We look to sacred places, like the mountain of Croagh Patrick, in Ireland; sacred buildings, like Khajuraho Temple, in India; sacred music, such as Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere, and sacred texts, like the Tao Te Ching. Sometimes we speak of sacred people, like priests, prophets, saints, shaman, seers. Or we might say someone is an elder, or that he is somehow ‘very spiritual’. Sometimes we treat non-religious things in a sacred way, such as a national flag, or the trophy cup of a professional sports league. But as I hope this book will show, these things are sacred not simply because of what they are. They are sacred because of the relations between people which involve them. The sacred, I shall say, is that which acts as your partner in the search for the highest and deepest things: the real, the true, the good, and the beautiful. The name I’d like to give to the kind of relationship that gives us a chance to find such things is a circle of meaning.

“Circles of Meaning, Labyrinths of Fear” (ISBN: 978-1-84694-745-2) is published by Moon Books, in March of 2012, in both paperback and kindle/eBook formats. Click here (or here) for more information, or click here to pre-order your copy. And click here to find out about Brendan’s other books.  Oh, and Brendan has two other books coming out in March! Watch this space, or this one, to find out more, or just to say hi.

Many thanks to Jason for letting me promote this book here on The Wild Hunt! You rock!

And now, here’s some links that are completely unrelated to the book, just for fun.

If you can’t get to Pantheacon, then perhaps you can attend Canada’s first pagan winter camping festival: Northern Lights Gathering.

Evidence is emerging that the science behind the denial of climate change and global warming isn’t science at all, but is (mostly) ideology. Here’s a recent example of that evidence.

Just about everyone knows about how Stonehenge was designed for the play of light, with its solar and stellar alignments at special times of year. Now a new theory suggests it was also designed for the play of sound. Have a look here, and here.

BB!

Pagans are the best of spiritual communities; Pagans are the worst of spiritual communities.

Flashback to a room lit by candles and gently wrapped in incense and the braided sound of chanting.  The light gleams on the warm colors of skin and the wood, steel, silver, and terracotta of the altar and its tools.  My Wiccan coven holds me close on the night when I first draw down the moon, and their trust in me and in our gods buoys me up as I move through waves of anxiety (“What if this doesn’t work?”) until finally, She is there, and when I open my eyes, I am not the only one looking out.  Together, the Goddess and I see my coven-mates through my eyes, and we see them as beautiful beyond reckoning, as if they are each limned in gold.  They are perfect.  We look out at them, and We know who they are, and We love them with a depth and joy I can never describe to you, unless you have felt it for yourself.

Flash forward to another night, only a few years later.  Tension is in the room, fear-stink and adrenaline.  The small Pagan church to which we belong is meeting for business, and we are tearing one another to pieces.  Some are spurring conflict on, some are cringing away.  There are a dozen different versions of self-proclaimed Holy Truth in the room, doing their best to rip one another’s eyes out.  And no one is listening to the gods at all—only to the frantic drumbeats of anger, or fear, or disgust being pounded out by our own hearts.  No one seems to remember: We are beautiful.  We are perfect.  We are part of the Holy.

How can we be so good at knowing and loving one another when we are in ritual space, and so bad at preserving that knowledge and that love when we leave it?  Is there a way we can be spiritual community to one another outside as well as inside of the sacred circle or grove?

Yes, it can be done.  We can do business together, while still remembering what it is like to be beloved and loving children of our gods.

This past fall, I was lucky enough to be invited by a friend in one of my Pagan communities to assist the group in moving forward after a period of destructive conflict.  Individually, most of these men and women were kind, generous, and gifted members of their Pagan communities, but together, they had been creating some very unpleasant politics.  Battle lines had become entrenched, some members had left in anger or in disgust, and what had been an annual experience of powerful ritual and fellowship was becoming a cause of dread and resentment.  My friend, who was in charge of this year’s retreat, was starting to feel a lot like a mom trapped in a van full of angry, squabbling children on a cross-country trip.

You’ve been there; I know you have.  We’ve all seen promising spiritual groups get bogged down in self-righteousness and rage, pettiness and fear.

At the retreat, I was given a chance to share a few tools from the Quaker toolkit.  I got a chance to offer a workshop on something I call spiritual accompaniment.  (Quakers call it something else―eldering―but that word has a completely different connotation than it does in Pagan circles.)

One of the mistakes I see Pagans making, as a group, is that we confuse talking a lot with getting a lot done.  There is a kind of centering into the spiritual heart of a community that can be completely silent and yet is so deep that it helps to center everyone in the room.  I don’t have a Pagan vocabulary for this yet, but I have certainly seen Pagans who have a gift for it.  But where Quakers celebrate this kind of gift, among Pagans it is almost always invisible.

Quakers who travel as speakers or event leaders almost always have a traveling companion with them, on the stage or in the front row, silently holding them in the Light.  The companion focuses on keeping that speaker rooted in Spirit even while the presenter herself is focused outward on the crowd.  At large gatherings, you will see a row of the most seasoned Friends sitting unobtrusively behind the clerk’s table, holding the entire group, clerks and all, in silent prayer.  These people contribute little outwardly, except perhaps for a visible model of stillness and calm.  They may not even be following the flow of discussion, but afterward they remember clearly the effort and exertion that went into trying to hold every person present in connection with the common roots of the community.  I have heard Quaker elders describe gripping the edges of their chair with both hands to pull the group into a more grounded state.  Their language sounds very much like that of Pagan energy workers.

This kind of listening-in (or “holding space” as one Pagan called it this year) is not voiceless passivity, nor is it the “active listening” of apprentice psychotherapists.  It’s not manipulative or goal-directed energy working.  Rather, its purpose is to listen into the community’s relationship with its gods, to help us find those connections that brought us together to begin with.  (Religion: religare: to bind together.)

In our workshop, we began with memories of times we had felt that connection.  What was it like to be with our community and our gods, in a way that deepens our relationship with both?  We paired off, one person attempting to stay rooted and spiritually open enough to help draw out their partner, then trading places.  The depth of memory was matched by the depth of listening, and people found themselves re-experiencing something powerful and precious.  From there, we worked at holding that sense of depth, of openness and respect, in something that was like grounding and also like prayer.

I explained the idea of spiritual accompaniment and offered openings to those who were interested in helping to hold the community’s meetings in that way.

We set up benches for our volunteer cadre of “elders,” where they could be seen and where others could join if so moved.  We sat just outside the confidential meeting of the board, unable to hear a syllable of the meeting, but holding the group steadily, for over an hour.  The next day, we sat in shifts through the set-up for the larger open meeting for community concerns, and continued through the final meeting for business.  There were perhaps a dozen of us doing this at various times.  Our work was to hold our people in the Light: The Light of stars seen through the branches of trees, of candle flames, of firelight reflecting off glasses of mead passed between friends.

The intimacy of the work was remarkable.  Quakers can be very reserved, and it can take a long time to get to know most of them.  Pagans seem more extroverted even in our silences.  One man whom I’d never met before had such a deep gift for this kind of work that sitting beside him was like leaning back on a soft pillow; I felt the strength of his compassion like the warmth of a banked fire, hour after hour.

Did it help?

Well, the conflicts that had riven the gathering did not spontaneously resolve in a single weekend.  None of us (that I’m aware of) achieved satori.  But the meeting for business this year was not a blood sport.  We talked as if we cared about one another.  And most people present seemed to feel there had been something useful going on in all that quiet.

If Pagans do develop some tools of our own for keeping the spiritual in our spiritual communities, even in the heart of conflict and everyday concerns, I think we will be one step closer to being what I’ve heard some Pagans call “a full-service religion.”  More importantly, I think we will retain more of our Pagan elders, people who might otherwise succumb to spiritual staleness or cynicism.  We can hold onto the experience of joyful communion, with each other and with the gods.

For myself, I believe that Pagan spirituality can deepen for us over a lifetime, through conflict as well as celebration in our communities.  But we can only do it by reminding ourselves that we are, in fact, spiritual communities, always, every minute.  Whether we are in ritual or resting, feasting or thrashing out a tough business agenda, we need to remember our gods.  And we need to remember ourselves:  Perfect.  Beautiful.  Limned with gold.

Listening to fundamentalists talk about the looming threats of “witchcraft” and “paganism” can be a decidedly surreal experience. They use the terms in a variety of ways: sometimes they’re talking about actual Witches and Pagans, sometimes they mean anything that doesn’t meet their definition of “Christian,” and sometimes they mix it all up willy-nilly and throw in a few Harry Potter references for good measure. Despite our best efforts to explain who we are and what we do (and don’t do!), they never seem to get their facts straight—or they get things halfway correct in all kinds of weird ways—and they still can’t manage to pronounce “Samhain” correctly. How are we supposed to make sense of all this? I think the core difficulty we’re facing is that it is simply not possible to educate some of these people about our beliefs and practices in any meaningful way, because their underlying belief system renders them incapable of accurately processing and absorbing the information we’re trying to get across. There is no way to convince them that we’re not really a threat, because they perceive the fact that we even exist as deeply threatening.

Fundamentalist Christianity is at its core a deeply dualistic worldview: there is God and there is Satan, there is heaven and there is the world, there is righteousness and there is sin, there are Christians and there are those who follow Satan. From this perspective, we mere mortals are constantly forced to choose sides: we’re either for God or against Him. With no middle ground and no shades of gray, the battle between the people of God and the people of Satan is an ongoing zero-sum game in which one side must ultimately destroy the other and rule the cosmos. One of fundamentalists’ central beliefs is that everyone in the world must be converted to Christianity—not the wishy-washy “lukewarm” variety, mind you, but the good God-fearing “Bible-believing” version. In this worldview, Christians’ primary job is to fight Satan’s influence by following what they call the Great Commission: using the authority given to them by Jesus to convert all the nations of the world to their belief system.

Pagan belief systems are, of course, entirely outside of this framework, but trying to get that point across to fundamentalist friends, family members, or co-workers—most of whom have been immersed in this worldview their entire lives—is invariably frustrating as, well, hell. We don’t even believe in Satan, we keep trying to explain; how could we be worshipping him? We don’t see reality in terms of a great cosmic war between ultimate Good and ultimate Evil, and we certainly don’t mean Christians any harm by wanting to live according to a different belief system. On the contrary, we’d really just like to be left alone to follow our religion while we leave them alone to follow theirs, and it would be awfully nice if they’d stop harassing us about our beliefs every time we’re in the same room. Maybe we do wear funny robes sometimes, and our jewelry may look a little strange, but we like kids and animals and plants and books and computers and ice cream and all kinds of good stuff; if they’d just let us live our lives in peace we’d be quite glad to return the favor.

With more liberal Christians, this approach can actually work—once they figure out the basics of who we are and what we generally believe, they’re fairly likely to shrug and dismiss us as eccentric but Mostly Harmless. A few of the more thoughtful ones might even find us interesting, and be willing to have a genuine dialog with us, at which point we’ll be quite glad to return that favor, too. Fundamentalists, however, cannot do this. It’s literally impossible for them—it would require breaking out of their either/or theological and conceptual framework, which would send their entire belief system tumbling down. Meanwhile, the fact that non-Christians and non-fundamentalist Christians continue to exist around the world, living out in the open where everyone can see them, presents a real problem for fundamentalists, whose “dominion theology” –most recently manifesting in the “New Apostolic Reformation” movement—clearly states that other religions are to be wiped out and that Jesus has given them the authority to rule the world.

But while these “Bible-believing” Christians are busily trying to spread their gospel to all those other “non-Christian” nations, they’re having an increasingly hard time enforcing it in the parts of the world they thought they had already conquered. Europe and the predominantly English-speaking world—regions having what we refer to loosely as a “Western culture” or “Western civilization”—are showing serious signs of backsliding into multiculturalism. More and more, people of quite different religious belief systems (or none at all) are managing to live peaceably together, working towards a common set of shared moral precepts on which to base their government policies and everyday cultural interactions. For fundamentalists, these changes mean that they are no longer allowed to be in complete control of Western societies’ public or private spaces, and can no longer expect their own worldview to be constantly and unquestioningly mirrored back at them. Fundamentalism thrives best when its adherents—particularly children—simply aren’t exposed to any alternative ideas that might lead to questioning and analytical thinking; when people who are different from them live openly and outside of their control—however peacefully this may be occurring—such people are seen as an invasive threat that must be fought against at all costs.

Actual Pagans and a more generalized “pagan worldview,” then, are seen by hardcore fundamentalists as an invading force that is out to destroy their world, both in the sense of attacking their churches and families and of bringing about the downfall of Western civilization itself (which for them is synonymous with Christian thought and social order). They make no distinction between efforts to limit their right to control all aspects of our culture and social structure and a concerted effort to wipe out Christianity that would deny Christians’ right to exist at all. This longstanding theme in contemporary fundamentalist thought was nicely articulated by Peter Jones during his appearance on Janet Mefferd’s radio program a few months ago:

And the problem for Christians is simply this: that for 1700 years, the state defended and supported the Christian faith, and really all these radical Pagan groups of the mystery religions of the ancient world disappeared, and I believe we are moving into what I like to call a post-Constantinian age and I mean by that the government is no longer defending the Christian faith but is actually promoting the Pagan faith… I think in the future it will be very difficult for Christians to speak clearly the worldview of the Christian faith without receiving all kinds of sanctions… So don’t be surprised as this pagan ideology takes over our world that the classic distinctions we have known for 1700 years begin to disappear and we find ourselves totally marginalized as a group of right-wing cultists. This is coming and it’s coming very quickly, and we have to learn how to survive as the early church did in that kind of a culture.

The possibility of peaceful co-existence is never entertained here; Christians are either entirely in control of the government and the culture, or they’re being actively persecuted by those who do not share their worldview. Because their theology insists that Jesus has given them the authority to be society’s ruling class, denying them the right to have control over all aspects of society is perceived as denying them the right to practice their religion at all. When we non-Christians claim the right to exist openly and without discrimination, they turn around and frame our efforts as religious persecution directed against them. Because they have always striven to wipe out any competing belief systems—sometimes by force—they project that motivation onto us, insisting that we must be out to do the same to them and will gleefully do so as soon as we somehow gain the same power over them that they have for so long held over us.

In discussing what Mefferd describes as paganism’s “threat to the Christian church,” Jones also explains a common distinction fundamentalists make between “small-p paganism” and “capital-P Paganism.” When fundamentalists use the term “pagan,” it is important for those of us who are actual Pagans to realize that they are not always talking about us specifically, but rather about more generalized “non-Christian” ideas that have infiltrated society and thus threaten to infiltrate their own carefully guarded world as well.

One is the sort of radical small group…of Pagans who meet together in forests and worship some kind of pole or tree, and are very tied to the seasons like Samhain [mispronounced “Sam-hane”] and other times of the year. That’s a very specific form of Paganism that enjoys being called Pagan, and you have within that system the whole Wiccan movement, witchcraft, and they are very easily identifiable… But if we were to think that that is the only kind of paganism it seems to me that that would be missing the whole point of what is actually happening, because while they are known for their specific rites and practices, there is such a thing as a world-view of paganism, and really that statement covers every religion and every human being which does not and who does not affirm God as the creator of heaven and earth. So you have a much larger category of people who would be aghast to hear you call them pagan who in effect really do worship nature in some kind of way. [emphasis added]

Jones goes on to explain that the small-p paganism is actually much more dangerous and insidious than the self-described Pagans; while you can see the latter coming and stay out of their way (I guess because of the poles?), the “pagan worldview” is what is really starting to take over the West, spouted by dangerous types like Oprah, postmodernists, and yoga teachers.

Because fundamentalists cannot parse anything outside of their either/or worldview, they try to explain the existence of “Pagans” and “paganism” by concluding that there are only two possible religions—those that worship “the Creator” and those that worship “the creation” (extrapolating from one of Paul’s letters at Romans 1:25). Any religious perspective with a concept of immanent deity—animism, duotheism, pantheism, panentheism, some forms of polytheism, etc.—must then fall into the latter category. Deity and “the world” must remain forever separate—there cannot be anything sacred about the physical world, because that is Satan’s domain. Unlike other Christians (and Jews and Muslims) who more logically conclude that because God made it, the world must be essentially good—even given that humans have screwed up a lot of it—fundamentalist Christians argue that because the world is ruled by Satan, it must therefore be essentially evil. Asserting that the world itself is divine and sacred is therefore the height of Pagan/pagan heresy. From Jones’ perspective, then,

paganism as a system wants to get rid of distinctions [i.e. between men and women, acceptable and abhorrent forms of sexuality, etc.], and my hunch is it wants to get rid of distinctions because it finally then removes the distinction between God and the creation. The fundamental evil in paganism is the statement that God, the creator, is distinct from the creation…So that’s the conflict that’s always been, but in the Christian West that conflict seemed to go away for a long long time. And now it’s back with a vengeance, and we as Christians need to know how to be faithful to the Lord, speak the truth, live the truth, whatever that costs.

Again, there is no possibility of peaceful co-existence in this perspective, no acknowledgment of the potential for practitioners of different religions to have an interesting dialogue and learn from one another, no prospect of someday creating a government that truly allows people of all religions (and none) to practice openly without fear of persecution.

What are actual Pagans—and whoever fundamentalists are considering “pagan” these days—to make of such nonsense? How can we be a “threat” to the “Christian church” when we feel like they’re threatening us? I think we need to begin by understanding that our fears—and our definition of “threat”—are very different from theirs. We’re deeply tired of being verbally harassed and insulted, of having our rituals disrupted, of being afraid we’ll lose our jobs, of having to worry that so-called Christians will be vicious to our kids or even try to take them away. Despite their ongoing persecution complex, Christians simply do not have to worry about any of these things happening to them just because of the religion they practice; they can go about their daily lives safe in the assumption that the vast majority of people out there will perceive them as normal, ordinary, nonthreatening regular folks.

What fundamentalist Christians are afraid of is that they’ll no longer be able to take their cultural and political dominance for granted—that, like us, they’ll become just one of the world’s many subcultures, and have to deal with the fact that most of the other folks out there in the big wide world don’t share all of their beliefs. We Pagans are used to that, and I daresay that as long as we’re treated respectfully and left to practice our religions in peace, we really don’t mind it at all. Life’s more interesting in a diverse crowd, after all, and Paganism itself is nothing if not diverse! Those of us who are parents also have less of our identity and emotional energy wrapped up in trying to ensure that our kids will grow up to be just like us than fundamentalist parents do. While I’m sure most of us would like for our kids to choose to be Pagan, I think we’re generally comfortable with the idea of exposing our kids to a variety of belief systems so that they can find out for themselves which path “clicks” for them. Fundamentalist parents, however, live with the constant fear that their kids will be led astray by “the world.” When the rest of the world no longer echoes their belief system back at them over and over again, they have to work harder to keep their kids tightly encapsulated in a bubble that doesn’t allow the penetration of any other ways of life or thought. So they send their kids to Christian schools, listen to only Christian music and radio programs, watch only Christian TV and movies, and spend hours and hours in church, all in the hopes that they can shut out all those small-p “pagan” influences that might invade their homes and go after their children. With any luck, their kids will never have to actually see any big-P real-life Pagans out there, either. You never know, we might smile at them and say hello or something, and heaven knows where that might lead.

This, then, is why Janet Mefferd and her colleagues are so terrified of the thought that “paganism is mainstreaming.” With the age of Christian dominance of the West starting to come to an end despite their best efforts, other people are no longer easily bending to their authority, and some non-Christians are even insisting that the government should protect their rights to be different. Fundamentalist kids are increasingly likely to be exposed to ideas their parents don’t like, and might even find some of those ideas worthwhile and interesting. More and more people are walking around in public with pentacles and triskeles and Thor’s hammers hanging around their necks, daring to assume that they will be treated civilly by everyone else out there. Life gets more complicated when yours is literally no longer the only worldview in town—pretty soon, you end up having to deal with the real world the way it really is, just like everyone else.

So are we big-P pagans, or those amorphous small-p “pagan” ideas, really “a threat to the Christian church?” In terms of Christians’ right to exist, to follow their own religion in the privacy of their own lives, of course not. Despite their silly ideas that we’re somehow after them or their kids, we don’t go around seeking converts in their schools or hog-tying them in front of Harry Potter movies. We’re really not that interested in them, truth be told, and we’d be more than happy to just leave them alone. The key difficulty here, however, is that they will never be willing to do the same for us because their core theology simply will not allow it. They can never be satisfied with the basic right of being allowed to live their own lives as they see fit; they want power and control over everyone else’s public and private spaces as well. By simply existing out in the open, Pagans and people interested in “pagan” ideas do in fact present a substantial challenge to the fundamentalist Christian worldview. We are living proof that not everyone agrees with their theology and not everyone will tolerate their continued efforts to maintain an oppressive, monocultural society “in Jesus’ name.” We don’t proselytize, but we do write and teach and share ideas with anyone who’s interested—and THAT is what these people are truly afraid of.

“The loss of history is always of particular concern in minority subcultures, where change is often rapid and the accurate preservation of historical details is of secondary interest to merely living life and getting by.” - Michael Lloyd, Bull of Heaven, from the Proemium

Many thanks to Jason for his great work here at Wild Hunt and for allowing me the opportunity to address his readership during his absence. As mentioned above, I have completed and am readying for publication the biography of Eddie Buczynski, a Craft elder from New York City who passed away in 1989 from complications associated with AIDS. Buczynski was the founder of three different living Witchcraft traditions in the U.S., including one that is near and dear to my own heart – the Minoan Tradition. Working on the life story of a Craft elder, and reconstructing the history of that portion of the Neo-Pagan movement pertaining to him, has been a personally satisfying experience. It has enabled me to meet fascinating people from all over the world and from many varied backgrounds – artists, playwrights, archaeologists, actors, writers, musicians – in addition to many elders in the Neo-Pagan community. I’ve made some great friends over the nine years that I have worked on this project. However, I am sobered by the realization that, during this process, I have also watched as eight of the more than seventy people I interviewed have passed over to the Summerlands. Several others who survived their battles continue to have serious health issues, many associated with the mundane ravages of time. It is a grim thought that, had I waited even a few short years to begin this project, the effort might have been gutted at the outset.

This brings me to the point of this blog post – we are simply not doing enough to preserve our history. We are steadily losing the elders of the past generation of Witches, Pagans, Ceremonial Magickians, Shamans and the like. Those who were adults in the 1960s and 1970s when they founded traditions, fought for equality, or wrote the texts that shaped and influenced our various spiritual paths are now fast approaching (or have reached) their golden years. That, in itself, is not a cause for alarm for, as we all know, the cycle of life and death is both natural and inexorable. What is alarming, however, is the utter hash we have been making of documenting the history of specific traditions and their founders/leaders. We can thank several dedicated writers and historians for doing a decent job of capturing the general history of the movement, through the auspices of people both within the community (e.g., Margot Adler, Chas Clifton) and outside of it (e.g., Ronald Hutton). But when it comes to preserving the memories or the papers of important historical figures within the Neo-Pagan movement, we are failing, and failing miserably. And future generations will look unkindly upon us for this.

Eddie Buczynski has only been gone for 23 years, so many of his friends and family members are, fortunately, still with us. And while many of the papers which were in his possession when he passed were scrapped long ago, I did manage to locate a surprising amount of material squirreled away in various places throughout the country. What this really means is that I got lucky. But not everyone who ventures down this path with other deceased elders can count on this good fortune, which leads me to address you elders who may be reading this. I appeal to your sense of community and sense of history. If you wish to have some assurance that your legacy will be preserved after you are gone, do a favor for yourself and for those around you – indeed, do us all a favor – and formulate a transition plan that makes arrangements to handle your papers, photos, and other community-related ephemera. And why wait until your will is probated? Consider approaching an archive or university library that might be willing to catalogue and preserve your collection of papers and other materials while you are still alive and before poor health or death makes such arrangements difficult or impossible to carry out.

Even if you do not want to allow others to go through your papers before you pass, do so yourself. I have gone through some absolutely atrocious collections over the years, with papers, photos and books jumbled, folded, thrown into boxes, or exposed to sunlight, vermin and the elements, destroyed by mildew, stained with cigarette smoke, and damaged by spills or floods. If you do not have the money to preserve your papers to archival standards (e.g., acid free boxes and envelopes, mylar sleeves), you can at least organize them neatly in folders and boxes and store them in a manner that keeps them from harm. Do not underestimate the value of your papers to a future historian or writer! Cards, letters, fliers, press releases, interviews, articles, notes, handouts, diaries, datebooks, rough drafts of manuscripts, vouches and other organizational records – and now emails – are all extremely valuable sources of information. Photos are a particular concern, for their lack of preservation is a problem that I have encountered many times over the years. It’s preferable to keep photos in their original paper envelope than it is to place them in a photo album. With the latter, the chemicals in the plastic backing and sleeve eventually react with the photos and glue them into place both front and back. If you can do so, consider digitizing your photographs using a high-density scanner, and then burning them to disc or backing them up in a couple of different places so that they are preserved for posterity. Email is also a preservation priority, with so many people relying on it these days over postal letters. Routinely placing electronic records into pdf format and archiving them someplace safe is probably the best way to ensure that future generations will be able to access them.

In conjunction with Eddie Buczynski’s biography, several years ago I interviewed Harold Moss, co-founder of the Church of the Eternal Source. At some point during our correspondence, Harold lamented that no one would probably bother to write his biography (Moss passed away in 2010). If any other elders out there have a similar concern, then I would like to tell you what I told Harold at the time – consider writing your autobiography, or at least setting down your memoirs on paper. They don’t have to be published, but it is vitally important that your oral history be recorded in some manner, even if in audio/video recordings or a simple draft manuscript. Oral histories (lore) are fine for the campfire, but they are generally unreliable sources of history, as anyone who has played the game of telephone can understand. If your words are recorded, then at least they will be preserved when you are no longer able, or present, to answer questions.

And here is where I make my second plea of this article. If you do go to the trouble of recording your story, please be honest in its telling. Shading the truth (or manufacturing it out of whole cloth) may preserve your dignity and the party line while you are alive, but in the long run you’re only fooling yourself. It’s a safe bet that some future historian, researcher, or writer will eventually come along, dig out the facts, and point out the glaring inconsistencies (or worse, misrepresentations) in your story. So it’s best just to be honest. One should also try to be as accurate as possible. Memories fail us; it’s a fact of life. And we are notoriously bad at recalling dates. But details and dates matter in history and what is a biography/autobiography, if not the history of a person? If you can’t remember or reconstruct a believable timeline for your story, then your efforts will be of limited interest or use (or veracity) to others. So do the best that you can on this score.

I understand that writing one’s life story can be a daunting task. And not everyone is up to it. That is where an independent biographer may come into the picture. Speaking from personal experience, writing the biography of another person is a long, tedious and financially unrewarding process. But from the community’s viewpoint it is a necessary one, and on a personal level it can be highly satisfying intellectually. If you are an aspiring writer who is thinking of tackling the biography of a Neo-Pagan leader, I urge you to think carefully about the task that lay ahead of you. Do it only because a particular story calls to you, not because you hope to become famous or rich at the end of the process – the reality is that neither is likely to happen. It is that passion that will sustain you when nothing else does, believe me.

Approach your subject and the task at hand with humility, patience, perseverance, and gratitude. Unless you’ve been hired to write the book, you must be prepared to pay your own way, whether it’s copying and postage fees, travel expenses, long-distance phone calls, the purchase of reference materials, or any of the multitudes of miscellaneous expenses that may appear along the way. Remember that no one owes you anything, and that you will oft-times be relying on the kindness of strangers. Be respectful and fair to all, but mindful that you are beholden to history, as well as to the future generations who will be relying upon you for the truth (or as close as you can get to it). A story that unquestioningly and unrealistically praises its subject is called a hagiography, not a biography. It is the mirror image of a smear and, in my personal opinion, both are the product of hacks. Be better than that. As one of my interviewees demanded of me early in my own project – “Do a good job!”

• Caroline Tully at Necropolis Now conducts a follow-up interview with historian Ronald Hutton, author  of “The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft”, and host of an upcoming documentary about Gerald Gardner, about questions raised from his May, 2011, interview at that site. In the interview, Hutton discusses the interface between scholars and Pagans, whether he’ll write about modern Paganism again, and the different meanings of the word “witch.” He also shares an interesting tidbit about historian Margaret Murray, author of “The Witch Cult of Western Europe,” who had apparently become “bitterly hostile” to Wicca by 1960. Essential reading!
• In a guest post for Informed Comment, Anouar Majid writes about democracy and Islam, and makes some very important points about where the now-revered notions of democracy and republics come from. Quote: “Democracy and republicanism arose in pagan, polytheistic cultures, ones whose people could live with many gods; they came to an end with the domination of Christianity. Similarly, the American Revolution was the culmination of the 18th-century Enlightenment, when religion was being questioned by philosophers and tested by scientists.”
• The excellent Norse Mythology Blog is a finalist in the 2012 Weblog Awards (the “bloggies”). So head over and cast your vote! Wouldn’t it be nice to see a Pagan-friendly blog win?
• Actress Fiona Shaw, who played Marnie in the show True Blood, tells The Guardian that she “did a lot of research by going to witches’ meetings” in preparation for the role.
• New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd writes about some recent Catholic controversies, and the rising popularity of exorcisms. In the process of this, she talks to famous Catholic exorcist Father Gary Thomas, who reminds us that “there is a growing amount of paganism – New Age practices like crystals, reiki, witchcraft, black magic, tarot cards, Ouija boards, seances.” You may remember that Father Thomas has played this tune before, and is a believer in Satanic Ritual Abuse, the stuff that lead to the “Satanic Panics” of the 1980s and 90s.
• The Greek financial crisis is affecting all sorts of beings.
• A new stage production in Toronto, “Obeah Opera,” is about  “black slaves being caught up in the Salem witch trials due to their association with the practice of Obeah.” Telling the story of the Salem witch trials from the perspective of Tituba sounds very compelling, and I hope we’ll hear more about this in the future.
• New Age guru James Arthur Ray, currently in prison after being convicted of negligent homicide after leading a fatal sweat lodge ceremony in 2009, apparently isn’t quite broke. Ray, recently asked a judge to declare him indigent and appoint him a public defender for his already-filed appeal. However, prosecutors demanded proof of his indigence, wanting to know about his many declared assets. This seems to be something he doesn’t want to do, and has dropped the request.
• Chas Clifton alerts us that researchers from the University of Warwick are doing a survey on Pagan prayer.
• Christians are still debating the inherent masculinity of God, Fred Clark at Slacktivist isn’t happy about it.
• Is there a war on religion, or is there a broader war on civil liberties?
• On February 4th and 5th, the 2012 Conference on Current Pagan Studies was held in California. Joanne Elliot has a wonderful write-up of the event at PNC-Southern California, with some follow-up pictures posted to her Examiner page. In addition, attendee and participant Tony Mierzwicki has written up his experiences of the conference, so be sure to check it out!

That’s it for now! Feel free to discuss any of these links in the comments, some of these I may expand into longer posts as needed.