Neo-Paganism, or witchcraft, is a religion which has enjoyed a
remarkable 20th century revival in the Western world. Concerned with
ecology, harmony with our planet and social justice, as well as
religious and ritual issues, neo-paganism bears a striking resemblance
to most other activist groups. Divided into decentralized, local groups
who share similar concerns, it spent its formative years surviving
on a meager diet of movement-wide communication via two fora:
Green Egg, the first (and some say only) truly general-interest
neo-pagan journal, and the pagan festivals at which hundreds of
followers from a multitude of traditions spend a few days each summer
living together. In her book Drawing Down the Moon, Margot Adler
describes the struggle for an effective form of communication between
traditions within neo-paganism. The question arises over and over
throughout the Craft's history, how can an identity be formed from among
the followers of a myriad of seperate religions? It becomes clear to
the reader that the question of 'what makes a Pagan?' becomes more and
more difficult to answer in the absence of a medium for communication
which allows all pagans of all sects to interact with one another and
bring their commonalities to the fore.
Finding such a medium has proven difficult, however. In 1976, Green Egg went under after 9 nears of publication, during which time it allowed a "hands-off, free-for-all" forum in which pagans of many different perspectives could share their beliefs and learn from others'. It was typically the only publication in which members of many traditions could write or read about their own tradition as well as others. |
Pagan retreats, beginning in 1977 with the first Pan-Pagan
Festival (and still carried on today through a horde of spirit gatherings),
became popular for the revelations about other traditions made to those who
attended them. Many attendees came away in awe that there were so many
people who shared their beliefs. Others began questioning the
gag-orders imposed by their own traditions. "I was working in a Wiccan
group where you weren't even supposed to talk to people in other
groups." said one witch. "Going to festivals changed everything."
People who had attended a pagan festival felt a bond with those who had
joined them there; a sense of community. They had shared in
discussions, rituals and workshops which, despite their varying
backgrounds, had given them something in common, something to share.
Festivals forced groups with real animosities to confront one another.
Admittedly, some fireworks were set off in the process, but overall the
effect was a bringing together of different people and their traditions.
Few left such experiences unchanged.
Regardless, the fact remains that pagan gatherings are attended by a vast minority of the total pagan population. Adler estimated in 1986 that roughly 10 percent of all neo-pagans actually attended festivals. Ninety percent were still left without this medium for expression and learning, for community-building. In 1986, in the revised edition of her work, Adler described how pagan festivals were still a huge success and more popped up every year; still, however, few pagans enjoyed that sort of cross-traditional community. Communication via a Green Egg-esque publication was nonexistent. The "spotlight" in neo-paganism had shifted towards Wicca, giving a more established tradition the opportunity to serve as a "model" for non-pagans to examine but frustrating the followers of many traditions as it too often seemed that Wicca marketed itself as the only true path when paganism was built around the idea that people could choose their own path, that no one spiritual following had all the answers all the time. Followers continued to stick to their own, receding into the shadows and remaining within the identity of their own sect rather than forging one for all neo-pagans. Without a cheap, easy form of communication of which all or most sects could make use, there seemed little choice. |
A few years later, things changed.
The Internet, with its reasonably cheap access and capability to enable communication with millions of people world-wide at the click of a few keys, started opening doors for community-building which people had never even considered. The entire purpose of the 'net, in fact, had been to become a tool for the scientific community to aid in communication, sharing of information, etc. While the 'net had been in existence for years prior to its explosion into the near-mainstream, in the late 1980's and early 1990's it truly "took off." Here many found a forum they could access, lots of others could access, and in which they could find vast amounts of information previously unavailable or difficult to obtain. In the realm of LambdaMOO, an electronic community housed on a Sparc Centre 1000 in Palo Alto, California, I had the following conversation with Stacey Robert Greenstein (aka Uther_Locksley), owner of uther+pagan@drycas.club.cc.cmu.edu, one of the (if not the) largest pagan mailing lists in the world. While other lists do exist, large and small, his is one of the oldest and best-known. I began by asking him how the list got started. "Back in '89 I was subscribed to PSI-L (an electronic mail-list dealing with psionic/psychic issues and phenomena) for some kicks. A bunch of us started a psychic/pagan thread and we realized that there was quite a lot of traffic being generated on that thread. To spare those who weren't interested in the religious aspects, I pulled that thread off of PSI-L and started it up on my own. That was the start of [uther+pagan@drycas.club.cc.cmu.edu]. I'd say by the end of the first month of having the distribution, I had 100 or so addresses. Not very large. But with bounces going every which way... it was a mess...As time went by, volume started growing larger, and so did the distribution file. It's up to about 1200-1300 addresses now, and the last two years worth of digests are larger than the entire remainder of the collection!" |
I asked Uther if he felt the list had developed a sense of
community among its readers, much the same way the pagan festivals build
a sense of community among their attendees. In response, he asked how
many list subscribers I would guess he had been forced to remove from the
list for starting or participating in out-right flame wars. I guessed
100, taking into consideration my experience as a UseNet poster. His
answer, three, surprised me.
"For the most part, the digest *is* a community of sorts. I hardly need to do anything besides tend to its technical hungers. There have been many arguments, but few that weren't productive in the long run." Curious as to whether the sense of community among members of different traditions who subscribe to his digest could be contrasted to the inter-traditional silence of many groups in the late 1970's and the 1980's, I brought up the failure of formation of a sense of community without more communication than was available at the time. Specifically, I pointed to the example of the Wiccan woman whose group forbade members from speaking with practitioners of other traditions. "The advent of festivals could be seen as a precursor to 'net communications," he agreed. "Yes, I think you're right.. there's a definite contrast, but you can also look at it as an evolution along the communication spectrum... the easier it is to communicate over long distances, the easier it is to feel a kinship with someone further away." Adler described how many festival attendees remarked later that there was a sense of let-down after returning to their everyday lives. The community they had formed at spirit gatherings was so entirely different from the one in which they functioned on a day-to-day basis, they had difficulty adjusting to old ways. Was the same true of members of on-line communities such as the uther+pagan list? "Yes and no." Uther replied. "Virtual community isn't quite the same as real life community. Yes, people in online communities don't have post-whatever kinda blues, but tell them thay they can't get their email for a week, and they won't like it." |
In preparation for this piece, I spoke with several pagans whose
search for a religious community has involved the 'net. While I received
one dissenting opinion, all other responses confirmed that access to
on-line resources and electronic communication has increased their sense
of community with other pagans. "Are you kidding?" one friend said.
"There are pagans all over the 'net. I wouldn't know half as many people
as I do, have half as many resources to access, if it weren't for the
pagan-run BBS's in the city where I grew up. When we all moved over to
the 'net, for the most part, things just expanded from there."
Uther agreed, smiling. "I think the available resources have been growing at about the same rate the Digest has. And most of the subscribers have found some resources and bring the attention of the rest of the subscribers to those resources. I was going to say I didn't think that it magnified the community, but yes it did.... I always knew there were 'lots' of pagans out there..... now I know a whole bunch of 'em, too." Were the increased number of resources available to pagans, as well as the increased communication between members of different traditions, leading to a greater sense of community at the cost of smaller sects' individual identities? "Yes, I think that with the increase in communication, the notion of fixed traditions may be on the way out, with a more dynamic, adaptive technique replacing it. But of course, this is only natural. Wicca, nay all of Pagandom, itself is not one entity but a collection of many entities, some of which bear little, if any, resemblance to each other. With more and more networking being done, both online and offline, more of these entities are able to change and flow." |
Ultimately, the point becomes this: the pagan community, insofar as the goal of defining what a pagan is, has benefited from the on-going, widespread communication available over the 'net. While some disagree with the idea that we are any closer to defining what a pagan may be than we were ten years ago, and it is true that such communication has led to something of a breakdown of individual traditions, the fact is that more people are sharing ideas, beliefs and goals with one another than before. There is a distinct difference between reading about someone in a newsletter and exchanging email with that person or debating directly over a listserv. Uther's pagan digest is the Green Egg of the 1990's, with almost as many subscribers as the paper newsletter had at its pinnacle two decades ago; plus, it comes out every few days, not every few weeks or months. Festivals not only receive more exposure from and enjoy more efficient, timely planning thanks to on-line communication; there are now entire virtual worlds built around the idea of an electronic, on-going pagan festival. We can sit down infront of a computer and step into a pagan society if we so choose. It's not the same, but it often has real effects. Entire WWW sites, such as PaganLink, Anthony Thompson's pagan resources or Dave Hurst's Bibliography of Pagan Books are devoted to archiving the various sites containing information of importance to neo-pagans with 'net access. |
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Can other movements and activist causes enjoy the same
community-building on-line? The answer is, unequivocally, yes. The key
to paganism's successful use of the Internet and the resources it offers
is not some special relationship between witches and computers (although
many have mused that computers and magick have quite a bit in common).
The key is that community can be built through
communication. Once people start talking, things happen. One of
my favorite moments of the 1993 March on Washington for
gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender rights was seeing a male-male couple
wearing matching t-shirts which read: "We're here, we're queer, we have
e-mail." Don't let your group get left behind.
To subscribe to Stacey Greenstein's pagan digest, send an email message to mailserv@drycas.club.cc.cmu.edu with the text of the message containing the line: SUBSCRIBE PAGAN. Research for this piece included on-line communication via LambdaMOO, an English-based electronic community of some 7,000+ people from around the world, direct person-to-person real-world interviews and information taken from Drawing Down the Moon, Margot Adler, Beacon Press, Boston, 1986. Drawing Down the Moon can be found in the New Age, Religion, Occult or Women's Studies sections of most booksellers. Pagan resources can be found in a plentitude of places on the 'net. Any keyword search through Yahoo or WebCrawler using "pagan" will turn up a wealth of information. |