Pagan Festivals Today and the Future of Paganism
The number of Pagan festivals keeps growing, and the number of people who attend festivals seems to be growing as well. As I noted in an earlier chapter, festivals that had five hundred or six hundred people in the 1980s now often draw one thousand attendees. These facts alone have changed the impact of these gatherings on the movement as a whole.
At the early festivals there were few drums. Mark Rudden, whom I met at Pagan Spirit Gathering in 2005, told me he went to his first Pagan festival in 1988. At the time, he says, he remembers seeing a few frame drumsâthat was it. A few years later, doumbeks began to make their appearance at festivals; then, a couple of years later, some people brought Native American drums to gatherings. Then, suddenly, African djembes began to dominate, as they do today. Now, many festivals have all night bonfires and drumming circles, in many cases led by very experienced drummers.
Morwen and Jimmy Two Feathers have been facilitating drumming circles at Rites of Spring for about fifteen years. When the drumming started, says Morwen, it was a small group of people; it was even a bit exclusive. So, in 1989, she and her husband went to Dierdre and Andras Arthen, the leaders of EarthSpirit, and said, “let's have a weekend gathering where we can explore drumming, so that we can create something we can bring back to the larger community.” For six years the Two Feathers led a magic drum workshop circle, exploring how drumming and fire circles could be used to raise magical energy and build community spirit. “Anyone could join and feel welcome.”
And people would begin to have ecstatic experiences and wonder what that was about, and we would say, “go to Rites of Spring and check it out,” and so the Drumming circles became a gateway. When we started there were really no other drum and dance events taking place in New England. Now there are drumming events every weekend.
Many people have powerful, ecstatic experiences at these drumming circles. Some people dance all night; others drop in and out. Food and water are shared communally. Occasionally alcohol is passed around, like you might see in certain Voudoun ceremonies. Energy rises and falls throughout the night and early morning. In some of these events there is a level of spiritual connection and shamanic practice that would have been inconceivable twenty years ago.
There are some Pagans who come to festivals for the drumming circles alone, and some people see this as a downside. And since some of the festivals are now very large events, attracting nine hundred to twelve hundred people, some people can decide to connect with one part of a festival. You can come to a gathering and never attend a community ritual or meeting or workshop. Conversely, there are people who participate in the community rituals and never hike over to the bonfire circle.
David Doersch has been leading rituals at Pagan Spirit Gathering for about fifteen years. He says there is more diversity now, but it has come at a priceâwhat he calls the secularization of the Pagan Movement.
If you came to this festival 18 years ago, there were six major rituals a week and no concerts. Every night there was a major ritual brought in from a different group from around the country. It was a wonderful study in eclectic Paganism. The Druids would do one ritual; the Covenant of the Goddess would present another; The Church of All Worlds would do a third, and so on. Most of people who came to the gathering would come to the rituals and many would stay for ecstatic dancing that would sometimes last throughout the night. Now the bonfire circle is in a different place from the main rituals, so ritual and ecstatic dancing have become separate events. As I look around, I can almost see and feel the various chakras over this valley where the gathering takes placeâthere is the crown, there is the root. People camp in one section or another. The people on this end all participate in the rituals, and the people at that end all participate in the bonfires. There is crossover of course, but there is a split. Some people have no idea of the community life here; they don't go to morning meetingsâthey come strictly for the bonfire. That is why they are here.
Orion Foxwood, an Elder in several Craft traditions and the author of
The Faery Teachings,
says he looks back at the gatherings he used to attendâthose with fifty to one hundred peopleâwith some sadness. The gatherings were a real sanctuary at that time, he says, “and the home feeling was stronger and tighter. Perhaps we were tighter because there was so much less. Perhaps now that there are so many gatherings, they are taken for granted, people don't realize how precious they were, and the struggles people went through to create them.” Some argue that large festivals have less community feeling.
But Shell Skau, who has worked for Circle for many years, says that although she honors the concerns of Doersch and Foxwood, it's somewhat natural that as the movement grows and festivals get bigger that you won't have the same intimate level of community. “Some people can't handle large rituals of three hundred or five hundred people,” she says. “They are just not up for that. So people pick and choose, and there is so much more choice, and isn't that phenomenal.”
We may simply be seeing the price that comes with the growth of a movement. Here's another example. Songs and chants are no longer so universal. In the 1980s the festival phenomenon led to the creation of a national Pagan culture through the dissemination of chants and songs. A new chant would become popular and catch on like wildfire. A song or chant might originate on the East or West Coast, or in the Midwest, but within a year it would be all over the country. Now there are so many chants, singing groups, bands, and Pagan CDs that it is impossible for two or three chants to achieve that kind of universality. On the one hand, this represents a real flowering of art and music within Paganism and Wicca. MotherTongue, a wonderful singing group connected with EarthSpirit, is about to release a CD of its own chants. “Today,” says Andras Corban Arthen, one of the members of the group, “many people at gatherings don't know our songs, and their music is often new to us.” His wife, Dierdre, adds, “perhaps the number of songs was smaller then, but we all shared everything. Now there are so many Pagans creating music, art and dance, there is a much broader spectrum to choose from.”
Another argument I heard at recent festivals is that community rituals have gotten much more theatrical. “It does pull people in,” a man called Cygnus told me, at the 2005 Pagan Spirit Gathering, “but once you get their attention with the theatrics, then it detracts from the point of the ritual, because people see the glitz, and they don't see the spiritual work that is behind it. We are a very surface society,” he adds. “We don't look behind the surface.” David Doersch agrees. “There is a whole segment of the community that is here to be entertained, to watch events rather than to participate in them.”
Tony Taylor, a Druid with the Henge of Keltria, puts forth a slightly different view, a bioregional notion of Paganism: Rituals look different in different parts of the country. In California, there is much more showmanship and theatrics. “When we did a ritual there,” he says, “people were astounded that we asked them to participate. They had never seen that before.” In New England, in contrast, participation was incredibly important. “That's really all there was.” The Midwest was very inclusive; everyone had their own way of doing things. In a way, he said, “New England seems more Gardnerian, the Midwest seems more like Circle, and California more like the Zells and Starhawk.”
That may be a gross oversimplification, but festivals are growing and changing. Take the phenomenon of “fire spinning,” something totally unknown when I wrote about festivals in 1986. Now many festivals have fire spinners, fire breathers, flame swallowers, and other fire magicians as a regular part of rituals. And many teen Pagans have participated and learned the skills.
Besides drumming and fire spinning, there have also been some new shamanic rituals and practices. Oracular seidh and other forms of trance journeying have been demonstrated and taught at some Pagan festivals (see Chapter 9). One new ritual that has taken place at Pagan Spirit Gathering over the last six or seven years is known as The Spirit Hunt. David Doersch, who had been working in a warrior tradition, says he started The Hunt because he felt the gathering needed more male, or “yang,” energy.
The Spirit Hunt is a shamanic rite that uses exhaustion as the main tool to enter an ecstatic trance state. There are three main groups in the ritual: the Hunters, who have some large issue in their life that they need to deal with (go out and hunt and kill and remove this obstacle from their life, or in some cases, they need to absorb its essence and pull it into themselves). The Hunters spend days fasting; they create a talisman, a spear that they will use in the ritual, and they decorate it. Then there are the Villagers, who are the support group. They fashion necklaces or the Hunters, provide them with food and drink at the end, and they link the Hunters back to the community. The third group is the drummers, who do very fast and loud shamanic drumming.
The ritual takes place in a special consecrated area. Doersch has written this about the hunt:
The ritual is based on the notion that each of us has within us things that we would like to extirpate from our lives, or things we perceive that we lack and wish to gain. The ritual is a profoundly personal experience, and therefore no words are spoken during the bulk of it. Only some quiet words of closure honoring the participants at the end are included. No one ever asks a Hunter what he or she Hunted or why. It is taken for granted that the work they do is sacred and should be respected.
The Hunters fast the day of the hunt, they spend time making their talisman or weapon, they mark out an area fifteen feet in diameter, which is the hunt area. When the drums begin, the Hunters run and dance and leap and do whatever they need to do to get themselves into an exhausted place, always pursuing the thing they are hunting. And when they hit that exhaustion, says Doersch,
They then go into the far side where the magic is and they fight their personal demons. We have a hay baleâthat is our effigy kill. I take one hunter at a time, and they stalk the hay bale, and they give it every ounce of their energy. And at the moment when they have reached the state they need to be in, the head of our guardians throws a bowl of red saltwater over them and says, “taste the blood of your kill,” and he splashes the “blood” in their face, and they don't know it is coming, and they usually have this massive catharsis. People burst into tears. After that, the villagers come out to take care of them. They are given water, and oranges and restorative drinks like Gatorade. This last festival, we had 17 Hunters; the whole group was about 45â50 people, including the villagers and the drummers. The ritual culminates when the final hunter has come in and done his or her kill.
In this last festival I remember the second to last person so well. It was a woman and she had killed the hell out of that bale of hay. She was clearly working with some intense issues, and when I went up to her, she was clearly ready. You could see it in her eyes. I found her, because each person stands by a tiki torch, and she had clearly just reached the place inside, and she was ready for her kill. It is hard to describe.
The first year the Hunt came to Pagan Spirit Gathering, there was some negative response. People apparently didn't know what to make of it. “After all,” Doersch said, “this is a pretty pacifistic group,” but by the next year people had calmed down. “Some people say this is the main reason they come to Pagan Spirit Gathering.” Doersch describes the Hunt as “a life-changing ritual, ritual as therapy or ritual as cusp and sacred doorway.”
At the same time that some festivals have experimented with these deep shamanic rituals, many gatherings have gone in the opposite direction; they have become more and more family friendly. At many festivals, both things are happening at once. There is often day care; there are special programs for children and special areas for teens. At a recent Pagan Spirit Gathering, I visited a teen discussion group that had at least twenty participants. Laura Wildman-Hanlon is a Gardnerian priestess and the author of several books on Wicca and Paganism. She is also the mother of three young children. At a recent Rites of Spring festival she was working at the day care area. “If we can retain the children,” she says simply, “then we can become a religion that will alter the world; if we don't, we will go the way of the Shakers; we will be a fad and disappear.”
Morwen Two Feathers said that she once thought of the Pagan Movement as something connected to “youthful exploration, adventure, and fun,” but as years went by, she started thinking about transmitting her values to a new generation.
It became more about looking at the culture in which we were raising our children. What kind of world did we want them to inherit? And when you looked around, the worldâas it wasâit was not something we felt great about passing on to our kids. The difference between now and fifteen years ago is that now it seems more than a movement; it feels like it has its roots down deep enough that it really is a “subculture,” and one with staying power. A place where the kids, when they become teens, won't immediately split. They want to be here, and take responsibility for being in the community.
Laura Wildman-Hanlon has begun conducting interviews for a study of second generation Pagans. She says that most of the teens she has interviewed say they enjoy the community, the values, the love of the planet, the connection to people, and that they plan to pass these values on to their children. On the other hand, she says, many of them say they did not receive much religious education, and they often resent it. “Sometimes they were invited into circles and were expected to understand what was going on by osmosis. Often there was little instruction or discussion at home.” Wildman-Hanlon said she often heard things like “I wish that at Yule, or Imbolc, my family would get together and explain things, just like the parents of my friends who celebrate Christmas do.” Of course, not all Christian families impart that kind of information either.