Wildman-Hanlon says that Pagans now have so many children (according to one census within the Pagan community, more than 40 percent of Pagans have children) that the community needs to create a sense of stability for them, and it needs to alter rituals to include them. Wildman-Hanlon says she has seen the growth of two very different types of Pagan communities. Oneâthe festival Pagan communityâis very eclectic, and open to children. Then you have what she calls the “adult section”: the Mystery religions and the Wiccan, shamanic, Druid, and family traditions, which most children do not participate in, “since they are not usually considered old enough to understand the mysteries.”
David Doersch says he worries a bit that as Pagans have “matured” and gatherings have become more receptive to families, the festivals have been “tamed down.” Yes, he admits, there is more maturity and less freakyness. Many people seem psychologically healthier. When I tell him that I actually heard the term “high functioning Pagans,” at a recent festival, referring to the fact that there are now many people in the community who lead successful lives in the mundane world, he said all that is true, and yet he worries.
Take this Pagan Spirit Gathering (2005). Ten or fifteen years ago it was not unusual to find a workshop on sex rites or some other esoteric and less publicly acceptable topic. That stuff has all gone away; it is all peace, light, and harmony now, and “what will the mainstream think?” When I began there were something like three books on the market, and you had to really search for the gemsâas if you were on a treasure hunt. But if you really wanted it, you found it. Now people go into Barnes & Noble and there are shelves of booksâmost of them crap. I guess the bottom line is that I worry about us losing the fire at the core of it all. If we lose that fire, that sense of rebellion at the root, then we are facing the protestantizing, or the secularization of Wicca. I don't want to be offensive, but we have got to have the fire.
Another person who has been observing the “maturing” of Paganism is Kirk White, the president and dean of Cherry Hill Seminary, a New England institution that trains Pagans in the skills of ministry. “There is greater public awareness of Paganism, now,” he says. “That is the good side; on the other hand, you get people who no longer hold the distinct values that make us Pagan.” White says that originally many people came to Paganism as part of a rebellion against the establishment, but subsequent generations “don't carry those ideas with them. They are asking: How do we become part of the power structure? How do we gain institutional recognition?” On the other hand, some of this, he believes, is simply the aging of the population.
When the movement started, many people were in their twenties, and as they got to marrying age, many of the rituals were about marriage. Now we are talking about funeral rites. Originally, most Pagan festivals were rustic camping affairs, now many of the gatherings on the West Coast are in conference centers because people are getting older and they don't want to sit on the grass anymore.
Ellen Evert Hopman, cofounder of the Order of the White Oak, a Druid order, says that not only is the movement a lot bigger, “there is a real attempt,” she says, “to become a mature religion,” and to take up issues that other religions have always emphasized, but until now, Pagans have not:
When people came to America without a penny in their pockets, the first thing they would do is build a church or temple. It was a priority. Then they would build charities, social supports, and old age homes. We have to begin thinking along those lines. Let's face it, old age is a reality, my knees are going.
At recent festivals there have been workshops that have discussed Pagan funeral rites, nursing homes, and assisted living situations, all subjects that would never have been broached ten or twenty years ago.
Hopman says one of her students is a Druid who is presently on active duty in Iraq. She and many others have been working to get Pagan symbols like the Pentacle and Awen, the Druid symbol with three lines, recognized as official religious symbols that can be used on the tombstones of Pagan veterans. There has recently been a serious effort by groups such as Circle and the Aquarian Tabernacle Church as well as the families of several soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan to have these symbols recognized. Letters have been cordial, but so far nothing has changed. But most attempts to get Paganism recognized happen under the radar; they do not reach the news media. For example, after a seven-year battle, Selena Fox of Circle won the right for Wiccan prisoners at all seven Wisconsin prisons to wear the Pentacle as a religious symbol. It can be worn under clothes or out in the open during ceremonies.
Pagans and Wiccans have become chaplains in prisons and have helped people in the military. There is one Wiccan tradition (Greencraft) that includes many military people, perhaps most of its members. Other Pagans are beginning to form serious charities. This movement is just beginning, but there is already a homeless shelter run by Pagans, as well as a program for learning disabled kids. There are Pagan AA groups, and there are now several charitable organizations that have raised money during recent disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Many Pagan festivals and Pagan Pride events now have a charitable component, with food and money collected as a regular part of the event. Pagans participate in local highway beautification efforts. These efforts are still in their infancy, and some Pagans ask, “Where is our equivalent of Lutheran social services? The Unitarian Universalists have their Owl program for youth sexuality; where's ours?”
Shell Skau finds this “maturing of the Pagan movement” all to the good. As someone who has been involved with Circle for about seven years, and with Paganism for about ten, she tends to lump people into two categories: what she calls, with a bit of a laugh, “fluff bunny Pagans, you knowâthe people called bright-moon-cloud-feather-joy and so forth.” But then, she says, there is this “other group that is really trying to connect the real world to our spiritual world.” This second group, she says, is joining the PTA, trying to get on the city council, doing chaplain work in hospitals and prisons, and being involved in the community:
It is important to say I am Pagan and religious freedom is important to me, but you don't have to wear it on your sleeve. It's not, “I am Pagan and my name is Shell; it's my name is Shell and I have this big huge life, and being Pagan is a big part of that life.” The people who are in this second category are the movers and shakers, fighting the good fight, making the differences that are necessary.
But Andras Corban Arthen of EarthSpirit says while there may be plenty of good reasons to mainstream Paganism, he personally believes it would be better to “paganize” mainstream society. “Look,” he says. “In indigenous cultures there is no word for religion. Religions don't exist as separate from everyday life. If you have a religion, but you don't have a real culture, you are left with American cultureâa culture that, let's face it, destroyed Paganism.” Andras notes the tension between being a countercultural movement and being part of the mainstream. He says the mainstream culture is one that has separated us from the natural world, and the separation is so pervasive that “we have gotten used to thinking it is normal.” He believes it's more important to create “our own culture to support our religion and spiritual beliefs,” and Pagan festivals become a laboratory to do that:
When we are in an intentional community, when we are in nature, we learn that everything affects everything else. Even in the hunting of one species by another, there is cooperation. We are one of the only spiritual groups in the world that can honestly say that our original founders are still alive in the world because the people who taught our spiritual ancestors going back as far as we know, those teachers were not human beingsâthey were mountains, they were forests, they were lakes and springs; they were the land and they were the animals. And as long as they are still there, we still have thatâas long as we develop a culture that will listen to them, and not support the separation that we find in our everyday life. We live in a competitive society, but the festivals are an ideal place to confront these issues, to put forward another model, where we can learn cooperation and interdependence.
And there have been developments in these directions. Many more Pagan festivals have permanent sites at nature sanctuaries, like Wysteria, Four Quarters Farm, or Lothlorien. Larry Cornett notes that there are many more seasonal camps where people come not for just a weekend or week but for a whole summer, or for all their weekends during warm weather. Some of these campsites become an ongoing Pagan community. Some of these are off the grid.
As I said earlier, the festival phenomenon changed many aspects of Paganismâit brought community to the fore and lessened the power of the coven. But Dierdre Arthen of EarthSpirit says there are now new developments. There is a movement away from the predominance of the coven to a local community structure.
There are still small working groups, of course, but there are also lots of groups that get together once a month, perhaps on the full moon, that are community groups or drumming groups, or chanting groups, that are not based on the same coven structure that was the basis of Paganism when you were first writing.
In other words, it used to be that Wicca was once the doorway to a larger Pagan community; now it may be the reverse. Now the larger Pagan community is often the doorway, and then people sometimes go from that community to smaller, more intense working groups; for example, a coven working with a specific Mystery tradition, or a Druid grove or Heathen kindred. And while many of the most selective, initiatory traditions have gotten stronger, the coven is often no longer a person's first doorway into Paganism. For example, when I started out, I joined a Pagan-way group and an outer-court training coven that happened to be near me. It was a Welsh tradition. At the time there were no festivals to go to, nor an Internet to search. If there had been, I might have gone in a different direction. I might have eventually found a group practicing a revival of ancient Greek Paganismâsince that was the mythology I resonated with as a child. Today, many people come into Paganism and Wicca through reading, through the Internet, through festivals, and then later make a choice to go deeper into a particular grove, kindred, or coven.
Here's another big difference from twenty or thirty years ago. It used to be common to say that Wicca and much of Paganism was a religion without a laity. In most initiatory Wiccan traditions, you become a priestess or priest and Witch after a year and a day of training. In most traditions after three years of training you can lead your own group. It is in many ways a religion of equals, at least in potential. But now, with the emergence of larger community groups, you suddenly have people who are acting as full-time Pagan clergy, ministering to a larger community. People like Andras and Dierdre Arthen of EarthSpirit, or Selena Fox and Dennis Carpenter of Circle, or Starhawk, are, in fact, operating as clergy in a way that is much more typical of other religions but was seldom true of the Craft. And there are now Pagans who do not want to be priests and priestesses and who are in fact a kind of congregation. Whether or not this is positive or negative, it is a fact.
This also means that some of the people coming into Paganism are being trained by larger community organizations, as opposed to covens. Jerrie Hildebrand has been working some twenty years in the Pagan movement. She has worked for Circle, for CUUPS, for EarthSpirit, and several other larger organizations. She notes that
her
Pagan upbringing, so to speak, was never coven based. She served on the boards of trustees of large organizations. But she sees these trends as positive. She told me, “People used to talk about community, but it wasn't really communityâit was five or six people sitting around talking, or doing worship.” Now, she says, “there is a trend away from the individual, toward more communitarian aspects. In some ways, we are finally getting to the real idea of tribalism.”
We have always said we were tribal and our roots were pre-Christian. We talked the talk, but we didn't walk the walk. And now, we are doing both. The larger organizations are really communities of smaller tribes; there is much more diversity as well.
A number of people told me, “Let us think of ourselves as a clan of tribes rather than being a unified Pagan nation.”
Orion Foxwood doesn't talk about “tribalism”; he talks about “culture.” “Twenty years ago we didn't think of ourselves as a culture,” he said. “We were Pagans and Druids who did our thing, and we felt a sense of camaraderie because we were all oppressed and scared to be public and we could be weird together. Now there is an actual Pagan culture emerging and there are generations of children and parents who have grown up together, going to certain gatherings.” Foxwood goes further:
Before, there was more of a distinction between different types of Pagans. The Gardnerians were over there and the Druids over here, and Native American and Voudoun people were over there. Now I am noticing that much of that is fading away; there is more of a sense that we are all Earth Religionists. And that bodes well for us; that is healthy. When I think about Gerald Gardner and Alex Sandersâthey brought Wicca together, but I bet they never knew that they were going to start a world movementâthat they were actually opening the door to the entire Earth Religions movement.
Among those who expressed happiness at the growing maturity of the movement, a number of people said they were worried that the deeply ingrained anti-authoritarianism and distrust of hierarchy among so many Pagans had led to a basic distrust of teachers in general, and therefore a lack of respect for elders. Andras asks:
How do we take care of our elders? I see people getting burned out, who step down and leave active involvement. I know many people who have passed on, and most Pagans have no idea who they were. I don't think we have begun to address those issues. I also think we have to get back to the question you posed at the end of the last edition of your book: Is this movement something that has legs; that will survive? That will go on for generations, or is it something that people do for a stage of their lives and then drop it. That is the crucial question for us to be asking.