Tag Archives: Pagan

Paganicon 2013

I had the good fortune to be one of the guests of honor at Paganicon 2013. From the pre-con staff lunch to the after-midnight post-con room party, the Twin Cities Pagan Pride staff went out of their way to make sure I had what I needed and that I had a good time. Wendy sailed through the event serenely solving problems before they became visible. Cei did a phenomenal job of shoehorning the odd scheduling bits together so that the tracks made perfect sense. Elysia always seemed to be on hand to make something happen. Doc had a smile for me whenever he ran into me. There were so many more I can’t call them all out, but they were all working hard and smiling all the while.

It’s a great size for a con, something like 300 people, small enough to meet the people you want to meet, big enough to fill a ballroom and have a great party. Four workshop tracks offered choice that wasn’t overwhelming. Just like the staff, participants were uniformly sweet. I kept saying, “Either you really are as nice as you seem, or you wait to talk about us until we’re out of earshot,” and the answer was always, “That’s Minnesota!”

Jane and Thracie of Eye of Horus supported the event behind the scenes by bringing books written by presenters and running the till for the art show. Oh, and the art show! It was the first for the con. Paul selected pieces in many styles and media and they were displayed well.

I had the opportunity to talk about two of my favorite subjects, women in magic (“The Woman Magician”) and relating to the gods (“Pagan Theurgy”). I was also able to construct a shrine to Seshat and offer people a chance to connect with the Lady of the Library. What better goddess for a writer?

I was able to catch two workshops by Kiya Nicoll, author of the marvelous romp Travelers Guide to the Duat. I hope to see more work from her in the future. I was lucky enough to sign books next to Frater Barrabbas and learn more about his work. Oh – and the headliner guest of honor, Orion Foxwood, was fascinating, engaging, and deeply sincere. These are all folk I hope to see at the Esoteric Book Conference one of these years!

The Twin Cities turned out to have many attractions in addition to the con. Ted and I slipped out on Saturday to catch Mass at Leaping Laughter Lodge, where our sisters and brothers in the order also made us welcome, and we had the chance to see a lovely Mass. On Sunday we caught a play at the Guthrie Theater, a sophisticated and elegant venue hosting amazing quantities of high quality theater. On Monday Elysia took us by Minnehaha Falls, which I think was Ted’s favorite moment!

Every convention has its particular character. Esoteric Book Conference features book sellers and book creators, people who love not just tex but the talismanic physicality of the form, along with a single track of programming featuring speakers from around the country and around the world. For sheer enjoyability in a fully developed Pagan community, Paganicon must surely be developing a sterling reputation.

Ted at Minnehaha Falls

Ted at Minnehaha Falls

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Speaking as Woman Online

Sabine Magliocco presented “The Rise of Pagan Fundamentalism” at the Conference for Contemporary Pagan Studies this January. She has entered into dialogue about her work in the Wild Hunt blog. The post is Sabina Magliocco, Pagan Fundamentalism?. The discussion of her work and the meta-discussion about how to talk about that work are vitally important in their own right.

I am caught by a particular note of her experience:

Finally, I want to counter some of the malicious and untrue rumors about me that are being spread on the Internet by a few detractors: for example, that I am an infiltrator sent by an outside organization to destroy Paganism from within. These falsehoods impugn my integrity as a scholar and could threaten my ability to continue to work with the Pagan community.

Magliocco does not link this harassment to her gender. I cannot help but think of it. If you are a woman, and you write or speak or blog or speak in any way online, you are much more likely to be targeted for harassment than if you are a man. In her 1/28/2013 HuffPost piece The Digital Safety Gap and the Online Harassment of Women, Soraya Chemaly notes, “A 2006 study found that chat room participants with obviously female names were 25 times as likely to be the targets of sexually explicit, threatening and malicious messages.” She adds, “The intent is to silence women online.”

Chemaly talks about her own experience of receiving rape threats. She links to Anita Sarkeesian’s TEDxWomen 2012 talk in which she details the harassment campaign she was subjected to when she announced her project “Tropes vs Women in Video Games”. Here’s Sarkeesian’s talk:

There are so many examples of women being harassed online. I’m particularly drawn to Mary Beard’s experience. Beard is a professor of classics at Cambridge who appears on TV with undyed gray hair. Internet commentary on her appearance followed. The Guardian notes, “The level of the abuse was so shocking that even those accustomed to the cut-and-thrust of online debate were appalled.”

Beard says, “Classical antiquity is always much more complicated than you think. But the basic position is that elderly men are admirable and elderly women are awful [because] what is the point of a post-menopausal woman? Old women get laughed at. I thought we had moved on.”

Women in the Pagan and magical communities are not shielded from this phenomenon. I have had many conversations with women who were attacked with vitriol every time they posted an opinion. We talk about the chilling effect this has on our willingness to go on expressing our opinions in public. We enlist our male allies to come to our defense in comments sections.

Most of the time we aren’t fielding rape and death threats. What we deal with mostly is an immediate attack on the substance of what we say. That reads like engagement – after all men in the magical communities construct quite a bit of conversation as a form of sparring. This engagement becomes attack when:

  1. it persists, not breaking off when requested;
  2. it shifts over time, labeling whatever the woman says as inaccurate.

The end result is that the woman goes silent to end the engagement. Which is the point.

This is compounded when the woman who posts is not white. Xochiquetzal Duti Odinsdottir says “Discussion on a post I put up on Facebook (that I have since removed) derailed, HARD”. Her post Things I Wish White Pagans Realized is a must-read.

The magical and Pagan communities are vastly friendlier to women than, say, the tech communities. There is a sense that women are valued, that older women’s voices are valued too. I was asked to speak at Theurgicon twice partly because I am one of the few Pagan women working in that particular field. There are quite a few women who blog, some of whom express opinions which are not immediately silenced.

That said, I know how much I have been affected by the harassment I have experienced online, and it was far less intense than what Anita Sarkeesian or Mary Beard or Xochiquetzal Duti Odinsdottir have experienced. I wonder how many women are not speaking because the internet is still policed as male space. I wonder how many women are pulling our punches because we don’t want to experience (or experience again) the gut-punch of being attacked.

Here’s what to do about it:

  • Read women bloggers.
  • Repost from women bloggers.
  • If you are a male blogger or a white blogger, become an ally. Give women and Pagans of color guest blog space. When you encounter an attack, defend the woman and/or Pagan of color.

Sabine Magliocco has a right to do her work – let’s defend that.

Chemaly says “it will take more than any action that individual women take to change this manifestation of misogyny in our culture.” Even if our online communities were entirely safe for everyone, they exist in the context of the internet which is decidedly not. Keeping this issue on the front burner is necessary for all of us to be able to exercise our right to speak freely.

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Magical Retreat

20130211_mmI met Alex when I was twenty-four and he was thirty-two. That was a big difference in ages at those ages! We were living in an intentional community and both had other relationships.

I’d been initiated into Witchcraft and kept the sabbats. He had studied Ceremonial Magic and yoga. I taught him Witchcraft, he taught me Ceremonial, and together we studied sex magic, both in theory and practice.

After a few months we ran away together – broke off our relationships and said goodbye to the community. I jumped on the back of his motorcycle and we roared off over the mountains.

Washington is an agricultural state. Every year in September the call goes out for pickers to live in the orchards and bring the harvest in. We ended up in the Okanogan Valley, living in a picker’s cabin without electricity or running water, with a communal shared toilet-shower.

At the end of the harvest season Alex was offered a job in the orchard as a “steady hand”. This came with a cabin with wood heat and running water! We still used the shared toilet-shower though. With a steady job and a place to live, he proposed, and I accepted. We turned up in front of a justice of the peace at the county courthouse with a couple who served as our witnesses, reception at the Dairy Queen after.

Having traded the motorbike for a beater truck, we roared off to spend our honeymoon in a tent on the coast. It rained, the tent flooded, we checked into a hotel, and I took another step in the lengthy process of growing up.

We lived in that apple orchard for three years. Pre-internet, out in the Washington sticks, we had to use mail order to bring books into the house.

Alex worked each weekday, I worked seasonally in the orchard and in the house when there was no work. At night, on weekends, we studied and practiced magic. At sabbats there were just two of us in the circle. We bought the Aurum Solis Magical Philosophy series – we were among the people who sent in money to print the fifth book – and worked through that system as a self-study program, doing rituals together and apart, writing journals, taking notes.

At the end of three years we felt ready to emerge from our lengthy magical retreat. We traded the beater truck for a travel trailer and roared off over another set of mountains to settle in Puget Sound. Seattle is a big town or a small city. We have spent more than two decades working with various magical systems but staying in touch with the same people.

It was such a luxury to be able to focus on nothing but magic for all that time. However far I’ve gone in my magic and travels, that early magical retreat provides a solid substratum for my practice. I am still immersed in the world of community, but I have a thought at the back of my head that I will end up in my old age holed up in a cabin in the woods on one final magical retreat.

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Festivals

In Drawing Down the Moon Margot Adler documents the earliest Pagan festivals beginning in the late 1970s. One of the very first was the Mountain Meet, a gathering of practitioners of the Georgian tradition. The first was held in 1974; I remember a Mountain Meet happening when I was initiated in 1976. They’re still happening too! Up until 2011 the event was free. Last year for the very first time the event had to charge admission to cover the state part registation fee.

Before the internet, festivals were the main way Pagans met other Pagans to network and share ritual. I worked as a festival organizer from 1984 to 1990. Generally the events were themed around a main ritual. With Phoenix Whitebirch I was part of the team that created the first Spring Mysteries Festival in the Northwest, centered on the Eleusinian Mysteries. We also created a Dionysia, and a Summer Solstice Celebration celebrating a Sumerian ritual of Inanna and Dumuzi.

These events took place in state forest campgrounds and environmental learning centers with indoor bunk houses. We would provide two to three days of workshops, ritual, and entertainment, along with three meals a day. Just organizing the kitchen for two hundred people for three days is a logistical challenge! I have fond memories of making huge batches of food in the gigantic large mixers and ovens at the ELCs.

Each event took a year to plan and a volunteer staff of ten to twenty-five people. We’d meet on Saturday mornings to go over our progress. I vividly remember stopping for a coffee one morning and realizing that other people in the coffee shop weren’t going to a meeting on their day off! Pre-internet we mailed physical flyers to people on our mailing lists. A good mailing list was worth a lot! Because we were Pagan we kept the mailing lists confidential. Today advertising is so much easier with email lists and Facebook events.

After spending a large part of my youth in service to community, I realized that I needed to focus on my career. The organizing group I belonged to, Year Wheel, ran our events on a break-even basis. Many organizers around the country were charging enough for their festivals that they could make a living as event organizers. We considered doing the same, but decided not to take that route and disbanded. Individually we went on to organize smaller rituals and day events that we could do with just a few people and a few meetings. For the next five years my income doubled every year. Also, I got Saturdays off!

The internet changed everything. Today I can connect with people from my past, network with the local community and around the world, immediately in real time.

Even though festivals lost the function of being the primary way to connect with community, face-to-face meetings still have a place in the virtual world. Festivals and large events still happen. In my life the action shifted largely to conferences, moving the Pagan celebration inside to hotels. I think this reflects to some extent the aging of community organizers, but also the maturing of the Pagan communities. Face-to-face we can talk, hug, share energy, show each other our rituals. There is nothing like standing in a circle two hundred strong to impart the feeling of belonging to something bigger than ourselves.

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Covenant of the Goddess

Do you know about C.O.G.? It is one of the oldest and largest groups of Witches. Membership in C.O.G. is open to covens and individuals of any type of Wicca or Witchcraft, so long as the group is self-sustaining and centers on the Goddess, or the Goddess and the Old Gods. The Covenant was incorporated on October 31, 1975 as a non-profit religious association.

My coven, Coven of the Mystical Merkabah, formed in spring of 1985, joined C.O.G. in the fall of 1985 as soon as we were eligible, and have been members ever since. In our time together we helped found the Northwest Local Council. The local council subsequently dissolved but C.M.M. has remained a C.O.G. member at large.

The Covenant’s annual meeting, Merrymeet, moves around the country. I co-facilitated Merrymeet in 1990. Phoenix Whitebirch and I themed the event “Merrymeet 1990: Building Pagan Culture”, a five-day festival combining the Covenant’s annual meeting and Leadership Institute with workshops, rituals, concerts, and an art show.

We were elected to chair the national organization (an office called “First Officer” and legal President) in 1990. I was re-elected as First Officer in 1991, co-chairing with Ted Gill. We served a year as emeriti in 1992.

In 1993 I was one of many representatives from C.O.G. at the Parliament of the World’s Religions, held one hundred years after the first Parliament that kicked off the interfaith movement in the world. I presented Wiccan Devotionals.

Since that time I have not held office in the national organization but remain committed to the Covenant’s goals to represent Witchcraft as a legitimate religion. I am the current representative of C.M.M. to C.O.G. Ours is a closed coven of elders holding elder credentials with C.O.G.

Whenever people ask me how to get involved in a Pagan group I send them to the nearest C.O.G. local council, as those folks are likely to know the most about their local communities. In my time as a Witch I have seen media coverage shift from sensational to respectful, partly if not largely due to the tireless efforts of C.O.G. officers and members providing decades of public education. C.O.G.’s interfaith work has resulted in the inclusion of Witches in many interfaith groups.

As a tiny group C.M.M. could not alone make those kinds of changes in the world. Banding together with many other covens, we can do our part to make a difference.

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School of Night

In 1994 seven teachers came together to plan a curriculum: Kallista, Scathac, Raven, Rhea, Alex, Ted, and me. We called our effort “Schola Noctis”, School of Night. In Love’s Labours Lost Shakespeare said, “Black is the badge of hell / The hue of dungeons and the school of night.” Some thought this was a reference to a group of poets led by Sir Walter Raleigh who studied religion and philosophy in secret to avoid the notice of the church.

We characterized School of Night as a “school without walls”. In our first year we took in students for a yearlong curriculum. After that year the original seven teachers decided to break the curriculum and the teaching teams into smaller segments. We all agreed we could use the name “School of Night”, a very amicable arrangement.

Raven, Rhea, Alex, Ted and I went on to teach together for another five years. We broke the curriculum into four segments, meeting once a week for eight weeks in each segment. “Street Magics” was the introductory class. After taking that class students could move on to “Pagan Religion”, “Constructing Ritual”, and “Spellcraft”. Students who completed all four classes received a handsome diploma and were sung the school song.

We sought to provide a way for students to enter into community, to share a common vocabulary, understand basic magic, and survey the choices available in pursuing a Pagan path.

After 1999 once again the five teachers who disbanded agreed to share out the curriculum. Some have gone on to teach “Street Magics” and other courses on a one-off basis. I went on to write Practical Magic for Beginners, the text I wished I had had when we were teaching the courses!

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