Stonehenge Schmonehenge

"Early Celtic Stonehenge discovered in the Black Forest" 

proclaims the headline...  and, my my, what a cool looking diagram!  But wait a minute...

Nope... This is precisely the kind of drivel that gives Archaeoastronomy a bad name.

I've been fascinated by the lure of Archaeoastronomy ever since I cut my teeth on Gerald Hawkins' "Stonehenge Decoded" back in the early 1970's.

In those days I was easily swept away by images of druid-ish ancient astronomers standing ghostly in the starlight in their long white robes, marking out their sacred calendars with virtually every standing stone, post-hole, and horizon-notch in the whole of the British Isles.

Taken in its time and context (1963,'65), Stonehenge Decoded was an inspiring and cautiously reasoned work. Nowadays it is considered quaint if not continually problematic to the writers of contemporary works considered "cautiously reasoned" by more modern standards.

No, initially I'd not tasted the venom waiting to be unleashed from the lurking world-wide community of skeptics. They were out there alright, their cruel and sneering attacks to be readily lunged into the soft underbelly of the theories offered by innocent visionaries who made the fatal mistake of not anticipating the danger at hand. Oh, the meanness of those heartless bullies; and, most alarmingly: their fair and critical analysis as experts in their own fields pointing out the huge gaping holes left unnoticed by an "expert" in one field, unsuccessfully assuming his competence in another, largely unrelated, field...

Yes, it's a thin and ricketty bridge that spans the abyss separating one's expertise from the domains of knowledge charted wholly by others...

- E.

==========================

For more cross-disciplinary Stonehenge-abuse drek (click HERE)
(added Feb.17 ,2012)

It's HALLOW, not HOLLOW !!

I just Googled the spelling "HOLLOWEEN" and came up with TWENTY NINE MILLION citations with this mis-spelling and yes,  I do think my head is about to explode...

I started public school as a first grader in the fall of 1959, as part of the first generation of American children growing up under continual exposure to television. The suburbs of Pittsburgh then spoke a very middle of the road, almost neutral American accent, sounding neither of New England, nor was it Southern, nor was it Appalachian. And, in listening to the adults around us or the actors and announcers on television, never did we hear the word Hallowe'en pronounced oddly in those days.  

It was simply always pronounced "hal - oh", rhyming with shallow...

Yet, the mis-spellings we see are basically a secondary effect. This is of course indicative of the huge shift in the standard pronunciation since the first time Americans had ever (ever) experienced a large scale exposure to the "hollow-een" pronunciation back in the 1960's... I really believe this whole mess can be traced to a single, primary source:  1966, in one of the early animated Charles Shultzs' PEANUTS features...

"It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown".

And, to quote good ol' Charlie Brown:   "Sigh..."

Now, a decade into the 21st Century, the general American news and video mediafolk have almost completely converted over to the Post-Peanuts Pronounciation (PPP). Survival of the Lowest Common Denominator, eh? Remember, these are the same Einsteins who lead the world in the New Years Eve celebrations of the "Millenium" at the dawn of the 1999th year of the Common Era...

It's wrong, just wrong, and worse, it's stupid.

Pumpkins are hollow,  HALLOWEEN is NOT !

ALAS, the size of the phenomena indicates there's probably no going back - UNLESS the issue of the pronunciation itself actually makes it back into the big-time media, somehow. Great Mother of us all! If we could -just- get someone on NPR or The Daily Show or Colbert to mention this issue - even once... But beware, there are apologetics afoot now, historical revisionists, who are trying to contrive justifications and false histories to support a pre-Peanuts history for this huge piece of pop-cultural inbreeding...

WHAT CAN YOU DO ??

You can make a difference.
You can Facebook it.
You can Twitter it..
You can re-blog it.
You can post it to The Daily Show
and the Colbert Report  via Comedy Central.

Before it's too late...

 - EARRACH 

---------------

PS - (rant not quite over...) And by the way, in a couple weeks you're going to start hearing a lot of "SOUL-STICE" again too. That pronunciation has been going through much the same shameful de-volution. The New Age-ish pronunciation "Soul-stice" is an erroneous californication of SOLSTICE. 

The Sun is "SOL"... not "SOUL", Mr Winters.

---

From a related rant of mine: 

More on the Ruination of Hallowe'en...

• Through the self-referential dynamics of the media and marketing, our Halloween imagery is becoming severely culturally “inbred”. The result is frequently so brutal that it is virtually obscene in its violent, heartless and vulgar content. What began as a time for the honoring of the Spirits of the Departed and an opportunity for children to shuffle through the Autumn leaves in fantastic garb begging for treats at the doors of their neighbors, has become a theatre of blood, butchery and inhumanity. Halloween may once have been meant to be atmospheric and “spooky” but never was its true spirit upheld by the horrific and brutal.

---------------------------------------------------------------

More Halloween and Samhain content HERE...

On Roadside Shrines

A letter I have composed to be enclosed in a bottle to be left at roadside shrines…
the bottle is clearly marked on its outside :

“ATTENTION: 

Friends and grieving loved ones...

PLEASE READ”

The text of the letter enclosed in the bottle...

“ Friends:

The longer I make this text, the less likely it is that you will read it,

so I’ll try to be as brief as possible…

It is obvious that this location marks the site of a tragedy.

Someone wonderful was taken away from you by something that happened here.

We respect the magnitude of your loss and respect your need to grieve and to give them your continual tribute.

Yet if, in even the smallest way, you believe in the survival of the spirits of the departed, especially of those taken away from us suddenly in a moment of ultimate unfairness, we ask that you pause and please consider what you have been doing at this location.

Here I must be blunt…

===================================================

What happened here was horrible. Horrific...

Why celebrate it with a shrine, here… of all places, why here ?

Why tie the spirit of your loved one TO THIS, 
the site of their last moments of pain and terror?

====================================================

We all have to work toward releasing the spirits of our lost loved ones from unduly-fixed worldly bindings, whether that means at locations... or in our hearts.

That does not mean that shrines are wrong.

Shrines can be wonderful testaments to our love for the departed and they should be setup in appropriate settings. Yes, settings appropriate to the spirit of our loved ones, be it in your home or your garden or at the cemetery - - or even in a beautiful setting like at the beach or in the woods, or at some other location which they deeply loved or shared rich memories of with us.

With love and prayers for you and your loved one,

Signed,

CONCERNED FRIENDS FROM YOUR COMMUNITY "


========================================
A downloadable PDF file of the above letter can be found HERE...

But it's a book ABOUT the Autumnal Equinox !

I'm sorry, I know I've been whining about this for years but in this case I just couldn't restrain myself. My intentions are constructive and I tried to blunt the sharper edges of my prose and even gave her an "out" for my primary complaint. Nonetheless there's at least one counter-review accusing me of being unnecessarily mean to the author. Well, you be the judge...

Mabon: Celebrating the Autumn Equinox
(Llewellyn Paperback, (c) 2002)

MY REVIEW on AMAZON:

OK Kristin, what IS the date of the September Equinox?

I'm sorry but every time I get a chance and have the time in the bookstore I grab this book and scan and scan til my eyes are blurry and my head is spinning... I've probably logged 40 minutes this way over the last couple years and still have not found one place in your whole book about this Pagan holy-day where it states THE DATE of the actual equinox. Perhaps I'm wrong and I've consistently overlooked it?

If it's really not in there, why? What about the likelihood of a book about Christmas or Independence Day being published which never cites the calendar date of the subject? Initially, the absurdity of this just boggles the mind...

If it's really not in there, I can hardly blame you, Kristin, since virtually NONE of the books on Wicca and Neopaganism or Celtic Spirituality ever published by Llewellyn (or their competitors) -ever- get this date right. As a result there is such a towering body of incorrect citations for the date out-there that I could easily imagine Llewellyn's editors forcing you to not give the correct information since it would then indicate that the related statements in 99 of 100 of their other books as being wrong.

Well, regardless, here's the deal: for Western Europe, Britain, and North America, the September Equinox occurs usually on September 23rd and on the other years on September 22nd. NEVER on the 25th; NEVER on the 21st, etc...

If you don't believe me, here is where astronomers and calendar makers go for the actual data for such things, rather than Pagan writers eternally cribbing off of other ill-informed Pagan writers as they seem to have done for generations.

Maybe in the next edition?
Otherwise it could have been a charming little book.

Blessed be,

EARRACH,
Pittsburgh PA

Part II of POST-Reconstructionism...

"Vetting" our deities?
--------------------------------------------------------------
Please see my previous post for the explanation of the context for this material.  
A downloadable PDF of the form below is linked HERE...

--------------------------------------------------------------

Hmm, let's see, where did we leave off last time?  Oh, yeah...

...WHAT ?

YOU SAY WE SHOULD BE 

"VETTING" 
OUR DEITIES - ??

( Damn straight... )

--------------------------------

P o s t - R e c o n s t r u c t i o n i s m

 a new (?) vector for Neopagan Druidism

Part II

EHUMERIZATION is a term for the intentional religious action, or accidental folk-process, in which a heroic or otherwise legendary character from the lore of a people becomes elevated from the status of remarkable mortal-being to that of a deity or exalted spirit, worthy of religious veneration.

SO, using the following (IMO, not unreasonable) form, how do you think the following candidates would fare if vetted for their actual historical or contemporary qualification as a "deity" ?

EXAMPLE CANDIDATES - a mix for comparison:

Zeus; Demeter; Hermes; Herakles

Cernunnos; Lugos; Taranis; Ogmios 
In Dagda; Mannanan; Brighid; Lugh; Cuchulainn

Rhiannon; Arianrhod; Cerridwen; Taliesin; Merlin

Odin; Tiw; The Norns; Freya; Thor; Balder

I intentionally mixed up the list of sample deities to include a lot of "sure things" layered with some who are not. 

Let's see... there's:

1.) the "Sure-Things"

- plenty of evidence of being worshipped as deities in the ancient world. 
(Greeks, Romans)

2.) the "Certain, but without surviving lore"  

- (Romano Gaulish is a good example)

3.) the "Certain, but sources expurgated"

- only surviving lore transcribed by Christian clerics and historians, living roughly contemporary with their sources (Norse, Germanic)

4.) the "Likely, but sources expurgated"

 - only surviving lore is heroic, no one is referred to as a deity, written by Christian clerics many hundreds of years afterward. (the entire Irish corpus)

5.) the "Speculative, literary"

- based on isolated texts of heroic material referring to none of its characters as deities 
( Welsh (Mabinogion))

6.) the "Speculative, folkways"

- based on active folk traditions collected over the last 500 years.

Yep, I'm not ashamed to admit for myself and the rest of us that to a greater or lesser degree we're playing-out a big Druid-"Field of Dreams" operation.

SO... let's coax them out of that cornfield.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE FORM:

VETTING OF DEITY-CANDIDATE

for

FORMAL CONTEMPORARY EHUMERIZATION

1.) Name of candidate spirit/character

2.) Region / culture(s) involved

3.) Estimated time-range this spirit/character was venerated (years BCE/CE)

4.) Estimated time this spirit/character fell out of ongoing formal/public worship.

5.) Did this spirit figure as a character in specific heroic (or other) ancient lore?

6.) Did this individual appear in multiple stories; or in multiple sources?

7.) Was that lore primarily “heroic” lore, telling the stories of a great mortal’s life, or when and to what degree did it contain esoteric elements implying the character was in part or wholly supernatural? Give examples.

8.) Have archaeologists discovered clear evidence of shrines or temples and/or offerings made, or dedicated to the veneration of this spirit/character?

9.) Does the historical record give us mention of worship at shrines or temples, or celebrations dedicated to this individual as an exalted spirit worthy of veneration?

10.) Were said sources writing in a time contemporary with or closely-to the time of said worship? Were the sources quoted relatively friendly-to their subject or could their writing be seen as libeling them as savage, deluded or un-civilized?

11.) MITIGATING FACTORS…

In the case in which the candidate does not do well in light of 1-10 above, give compelling reasons for why our organization should collectively agree to elevate this candidate to the stature of a spirit worthy of veneration (i.e. “worship”) at our public rites.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

CONCLUSION:

On the weight of the above and/or the following scholarly source and reference materials, we the undersigned feel confident this candidate either was formerly worshiped as a deity, or (see #11,) should by now qualify for religious veneration at the status of “deity” or “exalted spirit”…

SIGNED:

DATE:

----------------------------- 

REFERENCES:

---------------------------------------------------------------

Reconstructionism? Hmm, well...

P o s t - R e c o n s t r u c t i o n i s m

 a new (?) vector for Neopagan Druidism

First, some definitions:

“Neopaganism”:  an umbrella-term encompassing all forms of contemporary pagan religious activity if based largely or in part on religious ideas and customs assumed to be closely related to the ways of the ancient, non-Christian peoples.

“Neopagan Druidism”:

Any group or individual since the mid 20^th Century of the common Era practicing modes of activity that would qualify as both “Druidic” and “religious”, concurrently. In other words, a contemporary activity involving public or private worship conducted in a “druidic” modality.This distinction is required since globally there are a significant number of contemporary “Druid”-identified groups who define themselves as not a religious movement but rather, as being “philosophical brotherhoods”.

“Reconstrucionist”   
(Celtic Reconstructionist; Druidic Reconstructionist; Norse, Greek, Roman… etc.)

Groups or individuals strictly limiting their religious expression to the use of those motifs and modalities supported by the findings of up to date, archeological or historical research.

Initially, this is not a discussion of the reconstructionist folks within ADF. 

Here instead I am commenting on the non-ADF reconstructionists one encounters on Wikipedia subject and discussion pages and those who publish articles on pagan forums and are actually critical of ADF for using the term "Druidism" for what it's doing when in fact, they say, not only is it not exclusively "Celtic", ADF is even guilty of committing the cardinal sin of "eclecticism". Yes these are the holier-than-thou trolls who you even catch at times trying to dodge the very classification "Neopagan". 

 

Celtic Reconstructionism quickly reaches its limits...

It's a simple as that. It seems to me that Druidic or Celtic Reconstructionism (“CR”) loses steam especially fast. The Norse, Greek, and Roman reconstructionists have much more authentic material to work with since there survive large bodies of the lore from those ancient peoples written down in a time truly contemporary or closely-so with their original pagan practices. Due to the profound lack of Celtic lore authentically representing the ways of pre-Christian Celtdom, the CR folks quickly find themselves at a loss for the material necessary to fulfil their self imposed “reconstructionist” criteria. Once they find themselves synthesizing for their practices with progressively more speculative themes, cobbling material together from regionally and historically unrelated, albeit “Celtic” sources, and reaching ever further into to their own “UPG” * to make sense of it all… they quickly find themselves performing functionally as heretics to their own draconian standards. Then again, if you chose to be a “Self-Confessed Heretical-” Celtic Reconstructionist, you might just get by; at least until the Reconquisitors catch up with you.

Self definition and definitions based on actual practice are often two very different things. The job confronting us as Neopagan Druids and grove organizers is to create a rational and effective public ritual at least every six weeks and to actually carry it through. In ADF we have made it our obligation to serve our greater Neopagan community openly this way both to members and to non members. If we don’t make our offerings accessible and rewarding experiences to the folks who do show up, we will (and do) find that fewer and fewer folks show up at each event. We consider making our works accessible and rewarding enough to bring in more and more folks to be one of the best ways of attracting and maintaining the favor of the gods and other spirits. Surely you don’t think that just shouting “accept our sacrifice!” while plopping some oil on the fire really impresses "Them" enough?

In my experience (it sounds snarky but that's not my intention,) I’ve gathered the distinct impression that it’s easy to be a Celtic Reconstructionist, as long as you don’t actually do anything. How many of these non-ADF groups actually keep up a system of open, public rituals? How well attended are they? How many of these groups (if they constitute physical “groups” at all) last for any appreciable amount of time? The ADF grove I founded has been doing open, publicly promoted rites every six weeks since 1992 and the attendance at these events varies from twenty to over fifty persons each time. At this writing (2011) that puts us at 152 High-Day events and we’ve learned a lot in the process. We still are always very careful with our scholarship and sources, never saying or implying in our rites that what we are doing is what the Ancients did... yet I'm sure that the Recons would still turn up their noses at our work as "eclectic" and somehow beneath their standards.

So, at length, I find myself confronted with the notion that so-called reconstructionism is based on an attractive yet fundamentally illogical premise. It’s sort of like calling yourself a pro-choice Roman Catholic. Calling yourself a Celtic Reconstructionist and then changing the rules is not the prerogative of one who wishes to  keep calling oneself a CR. Another, even more basic problem here is really simple: you can’t practice an ancient pagan religion, because the fact is that you’re not an ancient pagan. You are a Neopagan, and you can’t escape that definition as long as you seek to practice a pagan religion using ancient cultural motifs which ceased being practiced many centuries ago.You either “are” or you’re “not”, and you don’t get to choose both, it’s one or the other (how dualist of me!). One factor, by definition, automatically precludes the other.

So then, “POST-Reconstructionism” ?

I could go on. There’s a lot more to be said about (my opinions on) the false assumptions and other fundamental problems with reconstructionist paganism, but we’re here to talk about a new and hopefully less contentious definition for our work, a sphere of activity I’m calling POST-RECONSTRUCTIONIST Neopaganism.

Sometimes I’m tempted to suggest that Isaac, for all of his early reconstructionist language, in creating ADF was setting up one of the first great Post-Reconstructionist Neopagan systems. From his youth onward, Isaac’s very identity was based on getting involved in whatever was going on at the time, figuring out the obvious errors involved and broadcasting it back to the community at large and (then, cementing my appreciation for his work,) NEVER doing so without presenting a constructive solution for fixing things and moving forward toward a more productive future. 

Neopaganism was needing something like ADF and Isaac created it for us. We didn’t all just crowd into that brand new ADF because Isaac was such a swell guy; it was because we found the model to be a compelling solution to the problems we encountered in Neopaganism and we wanted to carry it forward. A core principle in what Issac was offering us was reconstructionism... but not reconstructionism alone. In one sense (and I have checked this with him,) Isaac wanted ADF to be an open pagan "church", serving the needs of Neopaganism at-large, not just playing to its own membership. To do this he saw that, considering the populations involved, a monolithic Celtic Recon format just wouldn't cut it and so, right from the get-go, he wanted ADF to be able to provide high quality Celtic, Greek, Norse, Roman, Lithuanian, and even Vedic public rituals at a similar level of quality.

Today, ADF has quite a few members (and whole groves) who would describe their work as reconstructionist. From the mid-nineties through the early 2000's this manifested as a strong shift toward groves forming under the declaration of a single "hearth culture" (solely "Celtic"; solely "Norse", etc.). I have been around long enough though to see a big shift in ADF's membership since then toward a more pragmatic approach recognizing both the limits of reconstructionism and the shortcomings of single hearth culture groves.  

"ACTIVE EHUMERIZATION"? 
a bold Post-Reconstructionist strategy...

Who defines which spirits are worthy of public worship, "Celtic" or not?  

Over the years, I myself have been on hand for ritual-planning arguments such as "Are the Faery Folk (specifically, Oberon and Titania,) spirits qualified for the focus of a rite (i.e. qualified for "worshipful veneration")?". Is "Morgan LeFay" likewise, a spirit worthy of veneration, or a name from fiction? And what of Merlin? Or Arthur himself? - - These are just several of the easier yet still debatable examples; don't get me started on the sure to be inflammatory topics of the lurking scholarly challenges to the authenticity of the Welsh (and even much of the Irish) "pantheon". Some of these "gods" were actually never verifiably gods of the ancient cultures we ascribe them to; many were simply legendary "characters" in items of ancient lore, and many of those were characters who show up in one story in one piece of lore. 

The answer? :   (Conditionally...)  WE do !

The trick here is one right out of Isaac's magic hat: It's honesty and the freedom honesty conveys upon those who embrace it. It involves clearly admitting that certain (if not "many") of these "deities" on our docket offer little hard historical evidence confirming their divinity, or little significant evidence of ever have anciently been objects of worshipful veneration by their peoples. So where does that leave us? Well, there's one thing of which we can be sure for most of them: that, at the least, most of these characters would be considered ancestral spirits of a "legendary" and/or "heroic" stature. Considered this way then, we find such characters lining up as candidates for ehumerization. If not already having been elevated to such historically, then by now they may qualify for a late, contemporary elevation to the status of deity by those who now would consider them worthy of this stature. Yes, it is up to us to 'canonize' them. One might say that we have been doing that all along by giving most of them worship and assuming for decades in our practices that they were verified deities - - yet, in the context of my argument, we have been doing so on far too little evidence and thereby somewhat "dishonestly".

Ok then, if you follow me at all so far, it stands that the authenticity of these spirits' "godhood" should be satisfactorily vetted by each individual or group planning on invoking them in any public rite. Each ADF rite, for example, has a moment in it where the rite's intention and historical precedent is declared. This is the very moment which calls out for our declaration of who the Persona Divinae for the rite are to be and, (a.) why we assume they are worthy of veneration as deities, and (b.) why we are planning to honor them in this particular rite. There's our chance, and there's our responsibility.

W H A T ? 
YOU SAY WE SHOULD BE
"VETTING" 
OUR DEITIES - ??

Damn straight.

- - (more to come / article continued HERE...)

Steps toward a POST-RECONSTRUCTIONIST Druid practice:

1.) Understand, admit, and embrace the fact that, doing this work, you cannot escape being "Neopagan".

2.) Regardless, still maintain the highest standards for scholarship and source material in your public rituals.

3.) Be honest about the amount of "proof" there exists for the historical "divinity" of each of the "gods" you call on. Doing this you will make your work more cautious and prudent than most of the hard boiled CR's.

4.) Consequently, admit that there's not hardly enough "Celtic" (or other) source material to "reconstruct" much of ANYTHING... Still, there's such a wealth of MOTIF elements to work with, it almost makes up for it.

5.) And so, always make it plain to yourself, your grove, and your congregation that to a large degree, you're "making it all up"... and that, as long as you do it well and you're honest about it, THAT's OK.

6.) Understand that ADF groves are for serving their greater Neopagan communities, not primarily their own membership. A grove should be a "team", not a "club".

7.) Remember that your Rites of the Wheel are supposed to be "celebrations", not just solemn obligations.

8.) Work toward finding the best cultural fit for each particular holiday. Seasonal factors should always trump hearth-factors. Don't throw the Yuletide Spirit out with the bathwater and never turn your back on The-Sun-Above at Summer Solstice.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Dedicated to the memory of Isaac Bonewits.

- EARRACH of Pittsburgh

The Mysteries of Lughnassad Revealed!

Don't miss last year's (epic)    Lughnassad / Lammas essays...

For a PDF of the Book of Sassafras'

 Lughnassad / Lammas Point-Sheet , click HERE...

photo by Lassair

More coming soon here too...

 RECENT ADDITIONS:

- Neopaganism and Belief
- Why Do We Druid?
- The Sixth Day of the Moon

- Earrach

The SOLAR APOSTASY

GREAT, GLORIOUS, GOLDEN SUN…

So obvious it’s

as if invisible.

This most brilliant blind spot

in human experience,

this most profoundly absurd

irony in all of our lives…

The Sun,

upon which are we

utterly dependent

for our sustenance

and very existence

yet to which, 
somehow,

we remain

utterly unthankful.

After all,

it’s only

“a thing.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- e.o.p.

POSTULATE:

“The Sun is worthy of our veneration.”

Right?

Oh? Perhaps you personally don’t venerate “things”?

You only venerate “spirits” – beings with whom you can interact?

That’s your choice.

Regardless though, many of us who are inspired to the point of worship by the Natural World actually become comfortable with worshiping* “things” too and not just spirits… Things like places, mountains, springs, rivers, trees, The Sun, The Earth, The Moon, etc.

[ * “worshiping” / “venerating” / “ritually giving honor-to” (-whatever) ]

When you think about it, the Sun is at least as-worthy, if not more-worthy, of our veneration than is the The Mother (a.k.a. the Earth Mother / Mother Nature). Without the Sun, the Earth would be utterly irrelevant and, of course, there would be no “people” to perceive it anyway. Astronomers’ origins-theories posit the Sun as parent of the Earth; or at the least, related to the Earth as a vastly superior sibling. How is it that we modern pagans are so easily worshipful of the Earth as being "more than just a thing", yet not-so with the Sun?

Hmm… Is The Mother Herself a spirit (a being), or a “thing”? It could very legitimately be said that everything that exists, from subatomic particles to beings themselves, are processes rather than "objects"… Object; thing; spirit; being? Where does “you” fall on that spectrum? Are you really “you” to anyone else in the world than you? Even unto yourself, are you anything more than a selectively groomed set of memories and idiosyncratic reflexes? It seems, my notion of “you” is simply a representation; a model I’ve constructed of you through which I filter new perceptions, which I attribute to my sustained model of “you”. In that sense, outside of yourself, you are mainly composed of me; yeah, over here: you exist over here…

Well, back now to that most astonishing thing in our world which we spend 99% of our lives managing to not even notice (the ADF "Two Powers" convention not withstanding), it remains that there -are- two great poles of existence for humans and other living creatures:

--THE SUN ABOVE --

and

-- the EARTH BELOW--

---------------------------------------------

But why then is the SUN continually excluded from

any sense of primacy in our Neopagan symbol systems ?

The roots of our apostasy *

Don’t you dare start reaching for Reconstructionist “scholarship” at this point; the REAL reasons afoot are more modern, psychological and illogical than anything to do with our understanding of the ancient world. 

Unfortunately, getting Neopagans to admit to their true motivations can be like nailing jelly to a tree... and yet, from my point of view, it requires no psychic ability to read their patterns of reflex and cultural conditioning. 

Yes, yes; of course, you are not like them. You are not driven by such transparent and trivial patterns of reasoning. Androphobia, patriphobia and deeply conflicted familial relationships have no bearing on the formation of your system of spiritual symbolism whatsoever? Ok…

And so concludes the current preamble to the actual essay;  
the essay itself is linked HERE...

Sun salutation by Earrach / photo by Lassair

In Service to What?

Is ADF turning into a priest-factory?…

Yes, these “priests” will be by-far and away the brightest and best trained priests Neopaganism has ever seen; our Clergy Training Program is certainly a thing of beauty - - but these earnest candidates, once they achieve their final ordinations, what will there be for them to do? (Other than training and qualifying the next wave of priests?) I don't think the answers are as simple here as it may seem - -
Is anybody doing the math?

CHIEFS and INDIANS…

In my estimation, in only the next decade ADF will have produced several dozen new priests. Some of those priests will be solitaries and without a congregation, some will be the heads of a grove of their own (or at least the liturgical heads thereof), and the most interesting outcome of all: quite a few groves will end up with two, three, or even more ADF priests in the same congregation.

So, what is an ADF priest supposed to be? Why become one? Isn’t everyone in Neopaganism basically a priest/ess (if not “Pope”) of their own religion? Sometimes I seriously wonder how much is there for an ADF priest to do other than the occasional handfasting or funeral. Do you really think a grove can run solely under the liturgical direction of a priest?  Remember, these Neopagans we’re working with are more like herds of cats than flocks of sheep, right? An experienced grove organizer knows that its rare for a grove to remain successful without allowing other members to participate in the production and leading of the high-day rituals. This is particularly true for the obviously committed, longer-term members. They deserve the chance; should we run the risk of discouraging them? It seems to me that some groves do.

What are the models for for maintaining an appropriate degree of participation by qualified members in a grove’s liturgical productions without precluding the role of a priest altogether? Is there a happy medium? Well?  (Um, yeah. Go figure...)

GROVE ORGANIZING as a VOCATION:    

My own history…

My calling to the Neopagan priesthood was based on a heartfelt need to serve a community. In the late 1980’s I came out of my pagan solitude and discovered that there was a community out there to serve and, in coming to that understanding, I discovered it was not a manifest community but in truth it is a “potential” community. What it was, and “if” it was – would be up to me, or up to any other person who chose to do what was necessary to make it happen.

At length I found out that what it takes 
is a strong desire, a realistic approach, 
and a huge amount of persistence...

I had read Isaac Bonewits’ book Real Magic back when it was first published in the early 70’s and then had read, in Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon, about his work in the growth of the Neopagan movement in America. I met Isaac in 1986 at a local festival and got his sales-pitch for this new thing he was promoting called “ADF”. By 1988 I had become a member. So it was that I set-to, with only three or four years of previous experience in creating pagan community under my belt, and established an ADF Proto-Grove in Pittsburgh; by September of 1992 it became a Provisionally Chartered Grove, called Sassafras Grove ADF.

Remember, this was 1992… It’s hard to imagine at this point but there was no Facebook. No Yahoo-Groups, not even an ADF Website! Nobody yet knew anyone who was even using email. Here and there in the next few years the first of us would get our computers connected to the Internet. By the mid nineties that all started to change more rapidly.

Attendance at our rites in 1992 and 1993 would vary from four, to six people, to occasionally even twelve. To supplement our numbers I was roping-in and encourging the overlap between grove events and local goddess-worshiper New Age groups ( a phenomenon which was common then but oddly virtually gone nowadays).

Occasional events like the now Grove-sponsored Community Beltane Picnic and rite drew several dozen people. More challenging venues like our earliest Summer Solstice sunrise rites could draw even as few as three (yes, a high-day rite with only three people; not three dozen). On the other hand came the pleasant surprise of the deep-winter Brigantia (Imbolc) rite starting to draw-out twenty or more in the snows of February; by the end of that decade there would be twice that number showing up. Eventually we started subcontracting rites for a local CUUPS chapter, run by a woman who worked hard to promote paganism in our community but was a member of a closed Wiccan group which didn’t allow her to produce public rituals herself.

By the mid-90’s I had gathered, Diana among them, a couple of regular contributors who were finding room for working their own forms of spiritual expression within the framework of ADF Druidry. Still for them it was a local phenomenon; it was ADF as I interpreted it to them - - it still seemed largely Earrach’s “ball and bat”. It would be only through my enticing them to come to Brushwood for the annual Wellspring Gathering in May, that they would begin to embrace ADF on their own terms and not solely through my constant sales-pitch.

So, bit by bit, our little grove began to grow and then, by 2000-2002, eventually we reached a tipping-point, a critical mass wherein the membership suddenly blossomed, becoming a significant, self perpetuating beacon in the Neopagan population of our area, attracting-in an influx of a some the brightest and most talented characters that population had to offer.

Even though along the way (2002) I had stumbled into a somewhat honorary title of “Ordained ADF Priest”, by the middle of the decade it was becoming clear there was now too much initiative, too many visions to be realized, and not enough room in the Grove for me to execute as central a role as I once had held. I was becoming expendable! Soon they each clamored to guide the plow and cast the seed and again and again they crowded-in to reap the harvest of each returning year. My dedicated work early-on had set the stage and gotten them hooked – yet at length, through their undeniable sense of individual “ownership” in the Work, I actually found myself becoming “crowded-out” of the process itself.

Now?
Now it’s something I had never anticipated. At the dawn of another decade I find myself completely on the outside of every aspect of the grove’s operations, both administrative and liturgical. I attend no business or liturgical planning meetings. I am simply an “attendee” at each of the grove’s eight annual Rites of the Wheel. At best I am a patriarch, a walking piece of history, but I am no longer an active contributor. It seems that I have “retired” from the team. My legacy runs deep and, happily, the grove shows little sign of wishing to erase it – and for that I am relieved and continually grateful.               

-  Earrach

                                                                                                              

QUESTIONS FOR RUMINATION…

What is, functionally, ADF’s current mission?
(Not what they say; rather, what is actually driving its current manifestation these days?)

What was Isaac’s vision for ADF’s mission and how does it compare?
How does ADF’s current mission differ from Isaac’s Original Vision?

What is the role of the priesthood in ADF’s mission?
What good is one priest to an established grove, let alone two or three in the same grove? Is a priest automatically "owed" any special role by their local grove? What is their functional relevance in a grove? Since, per Dumezil,  the top tier of the Indo-European societal structure, "Sacred Sovereignty", was a dual function, comprised of the King and the High Priest working as virtual equals (think Arthur and Merlin), does that serve as a pattern for our exploration?

Why is ADF not growing significantly? (That’s a concern of mine… Is it even true?) Our growth leveled-off some time ago yet I can't see why we couldn't have several thousand more members nationally by now, as well as increasing our overseas numbers.