This article begins a three-part series interviewing five pagans who have witnessed the ups and downs of the greater Seattle pagan community since the 1970s or before. The current article focuses on the past: what the community was like when those interviewed first became active in it. We at Widdershins would term each of those interviewed as an elder, though none of them claim that title for themselves; all interviewed agreed that elder of the community is a title that others have to confer on you, that you cannot claim for yourself. Those interviewed were:
Blacksun, one of the founding members of the local Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans (CUUPS), who also performs rituals at the Aquarian Tabernacle Church. He has taught classes locally in ritual construction and has recently published a book based on those classes, The Spell of Making, reviewed in this issue.
Changing Woman, archdruid of the Greenwood Grove. The grove is by sponsorship only but puts on a community Yule celebration and a talent show and has fielded a dance troupe, live bands and the Greenwood Singers.
Haragano, a high priestess and Outer Grove teacher, who teaches an ongoing class at Odyssey Books, "The Wheel of the Year."
Pete Pathfinder, the pastor of the Aquarian Tabernacle Church (ATC), a Wiccan church located in Index, Washington, which puts on yearly festivals, including the Spring Mysteries Festival.
Shadowhawk, formerly the high priestess of the StarWyrm coven, who teaches a class in magick and spell crafting. She and Blacksun are married.
Another person mentioned frequently in this article is Leon, who for many years ran an Outer Grove in Seattle and who has worked at the shops Beltaine Books and Tenzing Momo.
Each interview was conducted separately, except in the case of Shadowhawk and Blacksun, who were interviewed together. In some interviews, I skipped questions whose answers had already been covered, so not all questions have answers from all interviewees.
Before their interviews got started, both Haragano and Pete Pathfinder had some general comments about the concept of "community," especially in terms of the Seattle pagan community.
Pete Pathfinder: In the April 1 community meeting, everyone said there wasn't a community. Well, a community cannot come about while people are excluding others. You need to be able to let people in and listen. That's what builds the spirit of community.
There are a half-dozen Seattle pagan communities. It's like a cat's cradle. It stretches different directions at different times.
Haragano: As for the community aspect, I find it very interesting, this idea of a tribal society. We don't live in a tribal society. We have a very unique society in this particular culture. We are connected individually to people that may be on the other side of the world. And those connections are extremely powerful, and even land-based, but it will not be the same five acres. You may never have met the person physically. But you have still connected to them and shared your magick with them.
That is a powerful thing, and it's almost as if it's teaching us the value of what energy really is like, rather than, "Oh gosh, I saw this on TV, we should be a tribe." We are something other than these fantasies. And often it is very hard for us to move from that image of inclusiveness, because we want to be a part of something, to how we really are a part of something that is nothing like it used to be. That is very challenging and very frightening.
The Seattle community, I think, is a good microcosm of that. This is a generational community. When I moved up here in 1978, I gained access just to people in my same age group. Not because there weren't (pagan) people around here since the '30s, and not that they were not interested in connecting. But it's as if, in this culture, we have a built-in prejudice to reaching out past people we automatically know will accept us because we have the same memories of watching "The Brady Bunch" or whatever. That's kind of harsh, but it's also something that you don't realize you're doing until you suddenly realize you're on the other side of that fence. And then when you find you're on the other side of that fence, you think, Do I bull in and say, "Well, here I am," or do you just wait, because if you bull in you're disrupting the process that is currently taking place. And it implicitly says that what you are a part of may have been more valuable, which it isn't.
So there's the pre-'78 community that existed here, there's the pre-'50s community that existed here, there's the pre-World War II community that existed here, and there are people that are still here and practicing from each of these quote-unquote generations of community. And they are connected, each of them, by one or two or three or four individuals who have gone to the bother of bypassing their own acculturations to say "Hello, I'm practicing magick here too, I'd like to meet you." Because often there's this idea: If I tell them what I'm doing, they've been here a long time, they're automatically going to say I'm doing it wrong.
Widdershins: How did you make your first contacts with other pagans in the Seattle area?
H: Through the Circle Network News, the resource directory. We got in touch with the people by mail, said, "We're moving down there, and we'd like to meet you." The Greenwood Grove was the first thing we connected with, Changing Woman's group. (We connected) within a year, within six months really.
We met them and the people from Elvenhearth through the mail. And I started going to just about everything that I could find out about. We heard about things through Beltaine Books and Beltaine Herbs. That was a way of meeting people. And we met people who didn't know that other people existed. So I started bringing flyers from one group to another and performing introductions and things like that.
A couple years later, we started a monthly discussion group. And we did that for nine years. And that was a way that people met each other. Often, they had met each other before but there was no clear way of them reconnecting with each other. Because there was a lot of private things going on.
PP: I moved here in 1976 from New Jersey. I had been involved peripherally there with some groups; I received some training there. When I came here, I bought property with the intention to create a place for pagans to go. I've been able to do a lot more than I thought I would. My initial thoughts were to create a place where pagans could go have a worship circle. I had no idea it would be so large. If I had, the (ATC's) stone circle would be bigger!
I first attended a harvest festival put on by the Science of Mind Church. If I'm not mistaken, I saw a flyer on a bulletin board somewhere in the University District. I went to that one alone. At that gathering, I met people, including Haragano, who had a group at the time.
I don't think I'd completed my training yet when I got here. I took more formal training here. I decided I was going to invent my own strain of English traditional Wicca based on service to the community. I decided to do that really before I got deeply involved with the community here. I incorporated the church in 1979; I had only been here three years. It had been in the back of my head a long time. It was a fantasy in New Jersey; in Washington I made it happen.
Changing Woman: I was born and raised in Oklahoma. I first came to Spokane, Washington, in 1967. There wasn't anything going on overtly back then. There was no visible networking; there seemed to be distrust and fear. There were people working solitarily. In Spokane, I worked by myself.
In 1974, I moved to Bellingham. I had received a message that if I moved to this side of the state I would find a priest to work with, and I did. I ran into a guy who was identifying himself as Frater Umbilicus, and the Order of the Feather, a group of hilaric magicians whose purpose is to poke fun at pomposity wherever we find it. We were each basically taking our own heads apart and putting them back together again in a more acceptable way.
He and I ran a magical group in Bellingham for an average of about 15 people starting in about '74, '75. It continued until I moved down to do my student teaching - I'm a teacher by profession - in Tacoma in '77. We did things with basically the same people there (in Tacoma), because a lot of them were coming from Spokane and from Tacoma to Bellingham anyway, driving on weekends. It was a family. We were into it.
W: How did the people in that group come together?
CW: Just by knowing each other and having similar interests. We were at an age where we were asking all the pertinent magickal questions: Who am I, where did I come from, where am I going, what is deity? And we were finding the answers supportively together.
We were in Tacoma while I finished my student teaching, then moved to Olympia and started the Evergreen Grove there. Not the Evergreen Grove that is down in Burien, which is totally separate. I moved up to Seattle in 1980 when I got married.
When I was living in Bellingham, I had run into some people (in Seattle) through an old shop called Beltaine that Leon was later affiliated with. The contacts that I had with some people there were not positive. The group that was formed from there folded within a matter of months. A lot of people have this kind of experience the first time out. You find out what it is you don't want, to later find out what it is you do want. That was around '75 or so. Everybody in the group went their separate ways.
There was nothing overtly going on when I came here in 1980. I started the Greenwood Grove. A lot of the people who are doing things now had experience in that group. Haragano found us within about a year when she moved up here from California. She began doing some networking, community events and things like that. I believe the grove was one of her first contacts.
I basically said, I'm going to continue what I'm doing, and if anybody wants to come and do it with me, they can. And if they don't, I'll do it alone. Because that's where my heart is. I wanted to establish a place where people could come and celebrate the Earth Mother and the Sky Father openly and freely without fear, without judgment, without any kind of condemnation, rules or restrictions. A neutral place where you left your religious politics at the door and where all people were welcome, whether they were in agreement or disagreement with one another, as long as they behaved themselves while they were here.
I met some new people by going out when community events finally started happening, but that took a while. (I started going to community events) as soon as they started happening, because I wanted to support other people and things they were doing, like Spring Mysteries. Because everyone is looking for that support and validation and sense of community that you get whenever you have a big enclave of people. There's a synergetic effect of having 100 people all together of the same mind, or relatively the same mind, celebrating and saying, Hey, we all do this. We're not weird.
Shadowhawk: He (Blacksun) is a native.
Blacksun: I've got the rust to prove it.
S: I moved out here in 1976. I came out here based on a whim and a vision. Somebody had broken into the apartment above mine, in downtown New York, for the fifth time that month. I said, that's it, I'm outta here. My roommate said, "Where're you going to go?" I didn't know yet. I said, "I'm going to Seattle." It was the first thing I thought of. And then we did some research, and we narrowed it down to Portland or Seattle. We went to Portland first, looked around, said, "We don't like this," and came here.
(My first contact with other pagans was through) Beltaine Books over in the University District. I applied for a job and met Leon.
W: Did you get the job?
S: No. - After that, Leon was giving some classes through the store, and I met (Blacksun) through a different social group, wound up dating him, wound up holding classes with him.
B: My first introduction was via my interest in the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism). But I also became interested through Beltaine Books. But we (he and Shadowhawk) actually met through the SCA, on April Fool's Day. We didn't take the hint, and the rest is history, as they say. I was not a practicing pagan until Shadowhawk and I met.
S: I was initiated into a reformed Druidic ceremonial tradition down in the West Village and was with that for several years before I moved out here. I didn't consider myself a witch when I moved out here; I considered myself a magician. But the contacts to magick were pretty much Wiccan. Anybody I met that was practicing magick was pagan or Wiccan.
There was a ceremonial magick community then, but they were very much on the fringe of this reality. The OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis), although it is a very honorable tradition, attracts some very strange people. That was the visible part of it, the strange people who walked around bragging they were joining the OTO. The long-term members who weren't strange usually didn't talk about it.
B: I had been hanging around Leon and Pat, who were running a coven, or at least I heavily suspected they were. (Editor's note: Pat co-operated Beltaine Books with Leon and later helped him run his Outer Grove.) In all of my innocence, one Sunday morning we were having breakfast with them, and I scribbled a note on a napkin and shoved it underneath Leon's nose that said, essentially, "I want in." A little while later, he put his long, dangly arm around my shoulder and said, "Let's take a walk and have a talk." The bottom line was No. Which threw me into a heavy depression, just like in a Russian novel.
Later on, I found out that it was exactly the right thing. He said no because the group that had already been formed would not have been augmented by my presence, and indeed my presence would probably have been a disruption to them. Now, in no way did that reflect upon my relationship with Pat and Leon, or with any of the members of their coven.
As a result, Shadowhawk and I, who by that time were getting to be pretty chummy with one another, started gradually celebrating some of the Sabbats. And then along came the first local Outer Grove, run by Leon. Leon and Pat were running this thing for many, many weeks, and both Shadowhawk and I were members of it. Everybody in it was being a lazy bum, us included, at which point Pat and Leon threw up their hands and said, "That's it! We're going to throw you to the dogs." They certainly had a right to.
What they did was, they handed everybody in the class whom they thought was going to benefit from it a Full Moon ritual, written out, and a set of laws, written out. They said, "Full Moon happens in two weeks. Be ready to do this ritual in two weeks." And we'd never done anything of the sort. Well, fortunately, Shadowhawk had, but I certainly hadn't. I opened up my mouth and said, "Two weeks! We can't possibly be prepared in two weeks!"
S: We're sitting there practicing this ritual and trying to make it so it's going to look nice and feel right and we're not going to stumble while doing it. I was kind of fried by this point. I said, Well, they gave us two weeks. I've got an answer. I have something from my tradition that I can pass on. I'm going to dress it up a little bit, frame it in a ritual format, and turnabout is fair play.
B: So we go ahead and create a New Moon ritual. We performed the Full Moon ritual in the presence of Pat and Leon, we all sit down for cakes and ale, and we're jabbering away, and out of the bag comes the New Moon ritual. And we say, "Oh, by the way, here's the New Moon ritual. You've got two weeks to practice it. We'll be there."
This small, insignificant, easily overlooked piece of total arrogance on our part was not overlooked. And from that moment on, we had to scrape and dig and research and work our tails to the bone in order to get the rest of our rituals together. Because they weren't going to give us any more. We had to make them.
As time went on and other people revealed themselves as Wiccan to us, we'd invite them over for Full Moon or what have you and we slowly but surely started in becoming Grand Central for quite a few people. We developed our own tradition, which is what you do if you start in creating all of your own rituals and doing the research and working with others and trying to purify it and modify it and rectify it and all that other Arlo Guthrie stuff. Now, our tradition doesn't look that much different from other people's traditions, because most of what we researched was ersatz Gardnerian. What we ended up producing was very similar to a lot of other traditions that have sprung off of the Gardnerian tree. And yet at the same time, ours (the StarWyrm tradition) has its own particular flavor. That was more than 18 years ago.
It wasn't till after the fourth year after we handed them (Pat and Leon) the New Moon ritual that one day we invited them over for dinner. We got to talking about some of our more recent adventures in trying to keep everybody balanced out in our Full Moons and this sort of thing, and Pat and Leon turned to one another and said, "Well, I guess it's about time." And in a matter of about 20 minutes, they had written out a rough outline of what they needed to do, and they said, "Okay, we're going to give you third."
S: So we received our third degree the day before, literally hours before, we officially started the coven.
W: What most surprised you about your first encounters with other Seattle pagans in the 1970s?
PP: Initially, what surprised me about them was their openness and gregariousness; they were willing to accept me. I later learned that was an illusion. In New Jersey, it was very hard to get someone to accept you in a group or coven or for training. It was much easier here, as long as you dished out the appropriate adulation. As soon as I questioned anything, I was pushed to the borderline and eventually outcast.
I can't accept someone telling me "You're not ready to know." That means, "I don't know the answer myself." One of the greatest steps to learning is being willing to acknowledge you don't know everything.
H: How open they were. How very open and welcoming. We came from Northern California, the Bay Area. The Bay Area and the Sacramento Valley had always been in the forefront, since the mid-60s. And a lot of people had been burned, a lot of people had tried to establish themselves as the founding fathers of the faith and proceeded to take advantage of people. Little by little, there developed a certain level of, Okay, you should check this out before we offer them the keys to the house, so to speak. And that's common sense.
CW: I don't know that I was surprised. I think I just kind of accept people for what they are - ? And that's always a surprise.
What surprised me about the encounters that I had the first time, back in '75, was that some people were hypocritical, that they didn't practice what they preached, that they didn't have love and trust, that they didn't have compassion or honesty. And that wasn't true of all the people. It was only true of some.
But what that taught me was the characteristics I didn't want to have. I knew there had to be more to it than that. And when I started meeting people in '80, I guess the one thing that continually surprises me is that people continue to return to the grove, year after year after year. I know they're not returning for me, they're returning because they love the Earth Mother.
W: Were most of the pagans you met ceremonial magicians, or Wiccans, or from some other group? Were they English traditionalists?
CW: Both Craft and ceremonial people. And also a lot of people following Eastern paths and Zen.
PP: Well, traditional English Wicca is different from English traditional Wicca. Traditional English is what they do in England. English traditional is what people in America think they do in England. There were some Wiccans; there were also some other groups in town. I'm not sure how to describe Blacksun's group; I'm not sure what he would call his tradition. There were several other strains as well.
The OTO was here. Some people overlapped. People had philosophical differences. People gravitate to people they get along with.
H: There were really not very many English traditionalists at all. There really was no necessity for there to be. The best way to put this is, I met a lot of people, and still do, who were pursuing the spiritual path that is earth religionist. That takes in a lot of different traditions, some defined and some evolving and some not even yet defined.
W: Were there any pagan or pagan-friendly shops or bookstores then?
PP: (In the late '70s) Astrology Et Al. was open, and so was Beltaine Books - it was Beltaine Herbs in the University District, then it moved to Capitol Hill and I think the name changed. That was the place I used to go that seemed to be the center or focus. Tenzing Momo existed but there wasn't that much Craft orientation there then.
B: There was hardly anything (besides Beltaine Books). There was a bookstore downtown, east of the Seattle Center. I can't even remember the name of it anymore, but it was largely centering around astrological books and some stuff that we would now call New Age.
S: And Astrology Et Al., which did a lot of classes and stuff -
B: That didn't come until later.
S: They didn't really encourage people to hang out there. Beltaine Herbs, Beltaine Books, these were nexus points. Because people would go the herb shop and buy a cold soda out of the refrigerator and maybe buy a couple of ounces of various herbs and stand around and talk.
H: Beltaine Books and Beltaine Herbs, those were about it, at the time. Tenzing Momo was kind of there. - It's your opinion of what pagan-oriented is. I think that has changed, not necessarily what they (Tenzing Momo) are doing.
You've got to remember what was in print back then. Not too very much. And if you didn't have those books, people were always making the assumption you weren't pagan-oriented. I've heard in recent years if you don't carry Llewellyn's magickal series, you're not pagan-oriented.
W: Were there any prominent groups then?
CW: No. People began to surface after a few years, like Haragano and Leon and Pete.
PP: There was then a small group who interacted. There was Leon's group, Haragano's group, and Blacksun and Shadowhawk's group. It was like the Samoan island thing, but instead of how many yams you had, it was how many students.
We (the ATC) used to have menhir moving parties. We built the stone circle. There'd be some scrawny woman working the handle of the comealong (dragging a menhir block). There was a lot of social interaction. Social interaction is the glue that holds together any pagan group - people you can talk to who don't think you're completely weird.
I remember the first ATC Spring Mysteries Festival, there were 68 people. There have been as many as 300 since then.
S: There was Changing Woman's group. I went to several of their open circles. It was far more in line with the tradition I had come from. But I never really clicked with the people who were there. Although I love Changing Woman. There was the OTO, they were very visible. But, as I said, the people who were running around talking about them were very strange. There was another coven up in the north end, and there was another group down in Tacoma that I knew of, that I wasn't particularly close with, mostly because of distance.
B: And of course, even then, even though it was a lower percentage, there were still wannabe groups, that started up this month and closed the next. Or maybe lasted a few months and then they all caught their robes on fire with the candles and decided it wasn't a good idea to do it.
S: I think the group that I really miss the most, in terms of groups that have come and gone, is ERCA (Earth Religions Cultural Association). Because they certainly had this wonderful blending, melting-pot variety to them. I'm really sorry that that did not fly.
ERCA began I'd say about 11 or 12 years ago in Haragano's backyard, through a picnic and big community pow-wow. It lived about seven years. Just when everybody started going into really bad financial times, the people who had it were overextended, had to make compromises, and the compromises were the cause of its demise. And they didn't have a choice. There was just not enough money.
B: ERCA had a program where it put on celebrations for many of the Sabbats and Esbats and invited both individuals and groups to present the rituals, and then ERCA would kind of fill in around the edges and provide a lot of the logistics and so forth in order to make that presentation open to just about anybody. It was my understanding that the people who came to the ERCA events were in one way or another invited by people who had come to the events, or knew somebody who was there, and called one and got an invite. It kept, shall we say, some of the riffraff down, and a lot of the fundies (fundamentalists) out. I can't remember any time in which we were bothered by that. And it was a lot of work.
S: It's a lot of work, and to maintain something like that costs a phenomenal amount.
B: And there have been a lot of, and still are, a lot of so-called open Full Moons. CUUPS puts one on, and various people around the area put them on.
W: Was there a true "Seattle pagan community" when you first began doing pagan spiritual work in the area?
CW: No. There was a bookstore that you could go to to find resource material. There were no community events that I had any knowledge of; there was no networking. People who practiced did so by themselves, solitarily. At least, that was my experience. I'm sure that there were groups and people practicing off on their own somewhere, but out of fear there was no networking.
PP: It's hard to say how many pagans were here in 1976. When we'd have a menhir party, we'd have six to twelve people willing to sweat and haul on ropes. How many there were exactly it's hard to say. There's four times as many now.
S: I think we were a big happy family with all sorts of weird, strange relations. Everybody kind of knew everybody else, at least on the surface, and the bond of doing something different is a very strong one. I'd compare it to one of these huge old families where you've got three generations in a household, plus the kids from the middle generation, so there's a pack of 20 or 30 kids, all cousins. And essentially, that's what we were like.
B: We also fought like family.
S: We still do.
H: Again, it's the idea of community. We live in a world where community is not defined by a block where everybody sees each other every day. A community is defined by who is in connection with each other. That can take a lot of different forms: calling every week, being in each other's thoughts and prayers even though we go without seeing or contacting one another verbally. And because we also deal in the world of energies, that is also of course where community happens, within traditions, either traditional lineages or the more eclectic lineages that are created just by years and years of practice. That's community; that's an element of community. But that doesn't automatically confer agreement on anything.
There was one big community where usually one or two people would connect with four or five people who were not known to the other people who they knew of. It still exists like that here. The kicker is, that's the way this particular alternative is evolving. And we keep bridling against it because it doesn't look like our parents' religion.
W: Haragano, you spoke of earlier communities, of the '30s and the '50s. Did you find yourself connecting with those people?
H: As a matter of fact, I heard more about them (than actually meeting them). And I then I thought, Well, let's see, is my area of interest a bridge, or am I just going after them to collect another name? For the most part, the areas of interest did not completely overlap, or I didn't realize that they did originally. Over the years, I connected with a few because we had things in common, or it was, "My God, we've been doing the same things!" I have a tendency not to force things like that.
W: How did the members of these earlier communities differ from the others you were meeting at the time?
H: Most of them usually had a day job and saw that as a part of their commitment to their own life, that their spiritual life sat on top of that. It's like their day job was a cultivated pot of earth, and their spiritual life was sunk into that. It was inseparable from it, but they didn't necessarily think that they were going to make their livelihood off of their religious beliefs. And that's not to say that that's an incorrect choice. But it wasn't until the mid-80s that that became a big issue in a lot of communities. It's a very personal choice.
W: Did you feel those pagans you met were sincere and knowledgeable?
S: No. (Laughter.)
B: Some were, some weren't.
S: I thought for the most part that they were well-meaning but fairly inept people. (Laughter.)
CW: Yes (they were sincere). They were knowledgeable in two ways. There was one category that was knowledgeable because they had read a lot; there was another category that was knowledgeable because they had lived a lot. And both were equally valid and complementary and had things to offer one another. Some people are just intuitive about their magick, and other people are very methodical about it.
H: They were open and welcoming to new people, sometimes with an edge that, we want to build a group, we want to build a center that we can move out from. As with anything else, they were knowledgeable in the areas that interested them.
And that is an important understanding, that most people I've found in this particular area of life become inspired with some particular part of this and find information kind of falls out of the woodwork for them. In that area, they are very knowledgeable, and that's good. The only mistake that most of us make sooner or later is in thinking that that is the only area.
W: Describe the typical pagan of the late 1970s.
S: The typical pagan of that time listened to folk music, liked to play dress-up, smoked a lot of herb.
B: Not all of them.
S: We're saying the typical, the stereotype. And this is certainly not true of all of them. - Loved life. The qualifier of what made a person pagan at that time was the people who had this love of life and this need to expand their souls. And they asked questions that they knew were only going to lead to more questions.
B: I suppose there was a certain snobbery that went along with the more closed and secret type of activities that were going on then. It's as wide open as the plains of Kansas right now, compared to what it was back then. There was a certain amount of remarkably intense people, who really wanted to find a spiritual expression that sang a beautiful song to their insides. And they found it in Wicca. Many of the people who were around back then have gone on to seed a wide variety of ways of expressing this, but they were tied together by a certain common denominator, a certain love of free thinking, a certain rebelliousness.
H: I don't know who the typical pagan would be. The typical Wiccan would be somebody who at least gave some nodding reference to the Goddess as a part of their religious focal point. That started evolving in the late '60s, and little by little it got a clearer name and definition, a list of particular goddesses and things like that. But that's how these things move.
CW: People practicing solitarily, reading, exploring, trying to develop their psychic abilities, looking for companions on the path.
I felt like they were people who were looking for an extended family and validation within their religious beliefs, that they were sincere and that they liked to celebrate, at least the people that I came in contact with. Many liked to celebrate more than they liked to be academic. We have been referred to as the party grove. And it's not that there isn't sincerity in what we do. There is. We just see every day as a celebration of life, and we come together eight times a year for the wheel of the year to join together in that celebration.
W: How secretive or public were people about their pagan beliefs at that time?
H: It seemed that those who had a job were secretive. Those who weren't wanted everybody to come out of the closet. There was this assumption that they were in the closet if they didn't tell their employer or they didn't want to appear on TV. There was a lot of assumptions going on about how in order to be a good pagan, you had to do X, Y and Z. You had to be a liberal Democrat or an independent, you had to be willing to speak to the news media, you were this, that and the other thing. Where those assumptions came from, who knows? But when you'd say, I don't have any urge to talk to the media, they'd reply, "But you have to educate these people." No, I would like to educate the students who are asking me to be their teacher.
CW: They were a lot more secretive about it than what they are now. Most of them feared the loss of their jobs, or the loss of their children. Let's say they were in a divorced situation, where the absent parent knew their religious beliefs. They might try to take the kids away from them, because back then things like that were happening.
PP: There was a much higher degree of paranoia then. But pagans are still secretive beyond what they need to be. W: Were very few people out as pagans in the late 1970s? PP: Very few. Leon was probably the only one willing to give interviews under his own name. Most everybody else was paranoid. Not that there were not reasons to be paranoid. But a dog will chase a cat as long as the cat runs away. If the cat turns and stands his ground, the dog won't chase him any more.
S: People were more frightened. We really have to thank the fundies on this one. Because of the noises they've made, we're a lot safer now too, in terms of, if your boss finds out what your religion is, he can't just fire you. They made a lot of noise when it happened to them. That's brought up the awareness that you can't use this as a criterion. You never could, according to the Constitution, but that didn't stop people. It really was the fundamentalists and the Christian communes -
B: Yeah, the Love family.
S: - that made things a lot safer for everybody.
Yeah, people were in the closet. People were afraid for their jobs, people were afraid of losing their kids.
B: And it has all happened.
S: People were afraid of being kicked out of their houses. And at the time, the public perception of the word "witch" was bad. It's better in some places now. At least there are other definitions out there now. I have to say Leon had a lot to do with that. He did interviews on television; he put out literature. There was a lot of work that's gone into the aura of relative safety that we have now. Starhawk did a lot, too.
B: You also went on television several times.
S: That's all fairly recent, though. We're talking about the atmosphere in the '70s. At that time, I'd do radio interviews, but I wouldn't show my face on TV. In fact, when I decided to go public and grant my picture in interviews and publicly say I'm a witch, I had already sold my half of my business, so that my partner wouldn't lose his lease, in case a stink got raised. I prepared myself for possibly having people throw rocks through my windows, or worse.
B: And checked it out with everyone in our coven, got their okay on it before anything.
W: Did any of that happen?
S: No. I was amazed at how easy it was. I'm a professional psychic, I read cards at people's shops. I did have a boss say, no, he'd prefer not to hire me, he would prefer to hire a Christian because that was the focus of his shop. Very up-front and very nice. Not nasty about it. I went elsewhere and got a job because I was Wiccan. That was about the only real opposition I ran into. I was very fortunate.
W: Do you have any anecdotes about when you first encountered other Seattle pagans that show the essence of the pagan community at that time?
H: Well, people started going to festivals around '83. I mean, going to the Midwest and seeing what people were doing, and that was a big push. I'd mentioned a lot of this stuff in discussion groups because as far as I could tell, very few people had traveled out of the area. Then this area started doing their own. The editorial board of Maidenspirit did the first try at the concept of Spring Mysteries. And as far as I could tell by looking at things, that was a different take on a type of a festival. In other ones, the whole point was, you come together for six days of pagan community, and you build a community, and then you create a main ritual. But they said, We are celebrating a particular type of mystery, and we're asking people to come. And that has evolved all the way across the country, and more and more people are doing it.
It's kind of like the old drum routine. Before, I think, 1983, nobody brought any drums to pagan gatherings. We were just a rattling bunch, for the most part. And somebody started bringing a drum. And then, drums. And the kicker is, for years and years, we would go around in circles, but there would be no dancing. And then suddenly we started dancing! For years and years, we never had chants, and then suddenly we started chanting, and tons of songbooks started circulating.
But that's healthy. That's what we do. We import things that augment our spiritual process. As long as we do that, we're pretty healthy.
W: What do you think was the biggest danger to the pagan community when you first encountered it?
H: People were hungry for something, and often they were willing to go for the first thing that was offered. And every community, every generation or changeover, is prey to that, and there are some people who prey on people like that. It's not anything that you can get around. Because you can't exactly say, "Hey, this person is going to do this to you." Well, you don't know for sure they are going to; maybe they have changed. Maybe they have not. It's more or less saying, take your time, do not leave your common sense at the edge of the circle. You have the right to ask a lot of questions. And it's important that you do because this is your spiritual life.
CW: Loss of job, loss of kids. Pressure from fundamentalist groups. Coming from Oklahoma, a very intolerant place in 1967, and still learning about Washington, I feared things like people throwing rocks through my windows, burning down my house, causing me to lose my job. Because things like that were happening.
(Within the community,) as the community began to diversify, people were developing their own belief systems, and the systems were different from one another. My only concern, if I had any, was that new people coming into the community find positive paths, with people they matched up with well, versus paths that would not lead them into their own personal experience with deity. I would hope that all new people find what they are truly looking for and not get caught up in a bunch of rules and regulations and dogma. Sometimes when people start forming their own groups, they can get really dogmatic about, Here are our rules, and you have to follow our rules. Sometimes just by doing exactly what everybody else does, you never develop the creativity in magick on your own.
I believe that how you do magick is just a matter of style. The magick remains the same no matter what; it doesn't change. Only styles change. It's like comparing a Van Gogh to a Rembrandt. They both use paint, but then it's just a matter of interpretation.
PP: If there were dangers then, they were in the mind of the beholder. Maybe someone might fire you in some cases. In some cases, some people acted like there were Christians with flaming torches after them. That's simply not true in this area.
(In 1989,) KIRO, in order to boost their ratings, had these brief, five-minute segments on the 5 p.m. news for five nights running about "Soldiers of Satan." In one of these evening segments, they showed our stone circle as a background while talking about the Matamoros, Mexico, cult murders. They were talking about that and they were talking about child molestation as a voice-over while they were showing our stone circle. When we contacted them to object to it, they wouldn't even answer our phone calls or letters. They made allegations about this church in Snohomish County that has been investigated and how the police walk a fine line because of constitutional issues. You'd think that we were slaughtering pigs up here or something, when actually we were just doing the same thing we'd always done. And they didn't have a clue what that was, except what some neighbor told them.
We couldn't get to first base with them until finally I sat down and wrote a letter to leaders of all the major faiths in the area. The only person who did anything was Archbishop Hunthausen. He was working on a similar type of program of five-minute things called "The World of Difference" with KIRO about religious tolerance. He wrote a letter, a copy of which he sent to me, that was two sentences, saying that he was concerned and disturbed at the treatment of the ATC and that he hoped the matter would be resolved ethically and promptly. He then had the letter hand-delivered to KIRO by Marvin Stern, the head of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, who was working with him on this project. Of course, the next day we got pleading phone calls from their lawyers wanting to sit down and talk to us.
When our attorneys looked at what they had actually said in this voice-over, they said that this was no accident, they very carefully skirted the edges of the libel statutes. And their ratings went up.
For the last seven or eight years a deputy sheriff's owned the lot across the street from me. When he was bulldozing it out, he came across some deer leg bones and was making ominous noises about they were going to take them to the forensic laboratory, implying that we had buried somebody across the street. For several years after that, every time I'd see this guy - and he was always antagonistic - I would say, "Hi, how ya doing? What did the lab ever say about those deer bones?"
We had an open house back in '89, '90, when that thing happened with KIRO, because we knew that we might wind up in court or something, and we thought we'd better do a little groundwork. As a result of the open house, the people who came from the general store, for instance, donated a big two-door cooler to us, and 20 percent of the population of Index came here. That's only 30 people, but that's still 20 percent of the population.
I used to be the mayor of a suburb of New York City and have some political expertise, so one of the things I did was I ran for the district fire commission, at a time when the fire district owned neither a firetruck nor a building, and showed them how to go about getting both through grant writing and issuing bonds. So they remember me as the guy who got the first firetruck and built the fire station, who also happens to be a Wiccan. It's called paying your dues.
W: What do you think was the most positive thing within the pagan community when you first encountered it?
CW: Support for one another emotionally. Validation that you're not insane, because you're doing something different than society says you, quote, ought to be doing. There's always been a sweetness about the grove, and an acceptance of who people are without a lot of judgment. In 15 years, there hasn't been an instance where anyone has come once and we've said, Don't come back.
H: For the most part, people talked to each other. They didn't necessarily like what each other said. But they were talking to each other rather than listening to third parties. And like with every generation, sooner or later, that lapses. Because it requires a lot of work. It requires you taking some time every week to stay in connection with maybe four or five people. It also means that you have to make choices about who you want to invest energy in.
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