This article is the second in a three-part series interviewing five pagans who have witnessed the ups and downs of the greater Seattle pagan community since the 1970s. The current article focuses on the present: what qualities those interviewed find in the community now. The interviewees were:
Blacksun, a founding member of the local Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans (CUUPS), who also performs rituals at the Aquarian Tabernacle Church. He is former high priest of the StarWyrm coven and is now teaching monthly classes in neo-pagan and Wiccan spirituality at Edge of the Circle Books.
Changing Woman, archdruid of the Greenwood Grove.
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.
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 in this article is Leon, who for many years ran an Outer Grove in Seattle and who has worked at the shop Tenzing Momo.
Each interview was conducted separately, except in the case of Shadowhawk and Blacksun, who were interviewed together. Not all questions have answers from all interviewees. There are several references to the April 1 community meeting in the article; the interviews were conducted from June through August, when that meeting was relatively fresh in memory.
Widdershins: What changes in the attitude of general populace toward pagans have you seen since you first entered the Seattle pagan community?
Shadowhawk: It's better in some places now. Those that choose to be ignorant or choose to see the old archetype, there's nothing we can do about them. They're going to continue to be narrow-minded because they choose to be. However, there were people who were open-minded and just didn't know. There are other definitions (of the word "witch") out there now.
Changing Woman: The ecumenical nature of the New Age opened the door for people of varying religious beliefs to step through. It's only my opinion, but I think the average person has a little more awareness and tolerance of religious differences now. I think they've been through things like the Harmonic Convergence and the myriad of workshops and symposia that come to Seattle Center doing crystals and auras and white light and everything else. When it hits Safeway, and when the music hits Muzak, you know that it's moving somewhere.
I think people are developing a tolerance for individual difference, maybe because this is a city with a very diverse racial population. We have people from all over the world here. They're bringing the richness and beauty of their cultures with them, and that diversity lends to other people opening up to their own diversity and their cultural roots. When the Greenwood Grove first started, I saw hardly anyone doing Santa Lucia, although they probably did in Ballard. Now they do it in the schools; it's a big thing. And it's okay.
When people came in from Vietnam and Cambodia, and brought their celebrations with them, and the Buddhists doing the Cherry Blossom Festival, the pagans said, "Hey, we're the ancient Europeans, and it's okay for us to do this too." As long as they do it within the cultural context, I think it's palatable to the diverse Seattle community.
Haragano: We didn't use to call ourselves pagans. We used to call ourselves occultists. We used to call ourselves New Ageists. New Ageist is a 1930s term; it's not something new. Essentially, any of that said, We are looking for hidden knowledge. In the 70s, we made the word "witch" a cause celebre. But does that really define us? Or does that embrace an identifiable battle? Because sometimes you need to embrace an identifiable battle, just to get the frustration out. But is that really everything that's going on? I don't think so. I think personally it is to find out what your spiritual path is, to embrace it.
Most people (in the general populace) don't care (about pagans). The only time that they end up caring is if something bad is done to them. And that will always affect their view of the group of people that has done it to them. Even if it's just one person. Or they are in a position where everything has been taken away from them, and somebody stands out and says, "This is who did it to you." There's certainly enough people who are using each of those motifs, with pagan as a part of it. But the pagan community is using the Christians as the same too. Or the Republicans. You want to hear somebody go off about "these people," there are a lot of pagans who will tell you about the Devil's spawn called a Republican. It's the same thing.
Pete Pathfinder: I think the attitude has become more open.
Certainly I don't want to discount the efforts of some people like Dana Corby, who have been very active, but I think in large measure the acceptance in Seattle was because for seven or eight years running, John Hinterberger, who was a major columnist for The Seattle Times, every year wrote at least one column about paganism or witchcraft or whatever.
John is a very dear friend of mine as a result of my having seen one of those articles. I wrote to him inviting him up here and asked him if it wasn't true that he had perhaps a more than passing fancy, because he just knew a little bit too much about it. And I'll never forget the letter he wrote me back. He said he had more than a passing fancy in most things, especially ladies in black. While he's no longer a columnist and he's no longer on the radio, because he suffered a stroke, I still stay in touch with him, because he's a thinker.
When he came up here, he didn't want to come alone. So he invited another woman from the Times who was an editor at the time, because I guess he wasn't sure whether we were going to eat him or not. And when they got here and were sitting on the couch talking downstairs, I was talking to both John and the woman, whom I'll call D. And at one point - D. just knew too much about it. I said, "Tell me, D., how long have you been a Wiccan?" To which her response was, "About eight or nine years," and John turned pale.
She had come across The Spiral Dance when it first came out and had been doing rituals by herself. It was through her agency that now, when we send a religious announcement to the Times, it gets on the Religion page. They used to keep us on the Scene page because it was entertainment. Finally, one day I gave her something about Z. Budapest coming to town, and I said, "You think you can get this on the Religion page?" She said, "No sweat, give me the details." I gave them to her.
She went on a vacation. When she came back, she said, "That appeared on the Religion page okay, didn't it?" I said, "No. It didn't appear at all."
She went and found out that the guy who was the acting religion editor had taken a look at it and said, "This isn't religion," and took it out. So she found him in the middle of the city room and dressed him down about it in front of everybody, ending her tirade with, "There are half a million people in this country who are Wiccans, and I'm one of them!"
To which his response was, "I didn't know that. I do now!"
W: Is Seattle warmer to pagans than the rest of the country, do you think?
CW: Yes, definitely. As I talk to people from other places in the country, they certainly don't have the same kind of freedoms we do. They have a lot of freedom in California, especially the Bay Area, and in New York City, but when you hit the Midwest and the Southwest, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, they're back in the closet again. People are still a lot more cautious. I think the cultural diversity of Seattle has helped the pagan community a great deal.
H: Both coasts are usually better, and a couple of places in the Midwest, and always have been. Partly it's because the populations always changing.
The old tribal communities, and I'm talking about farming communities and small towns too, a part of what holds them together is the similarity and longevity, the consistency within that community. Pagans have none of those. Often when we run into the most difficult situations is when we import ourselves to one of those places and set up housekeeping and make demands on that community without becoming a part of it first.
Here, the general population could care less about pagans. This is an extraordinarily bizarre place. If you look at the history of anything around here, this is where a whole heck of a lot of people who couldn't even make it in California went. You're talking about an odd assortment of bizarre individualists who have extraordinary ideas of how things are hooked up. And they came up here in order to live it out.
A number of pagans still have the "them or us" business. And often "them or us" breaks down on Christian versus pagan lines. Well, people don't realize some of the most incredible Christian sects are up here because their way of worshipping was so non-mainstream that they had to get away in order to continue worshipping. Concepts like the Mother-Father Christ grew up here.
Also, I think it's important to realize, this land has never gone to sleep up here. White folks have been here less than 150 years, in most areas less than 100, and in some, not even 80 years. So the land still speaks to you if you talk to it. And it's demanding sometimes. A lot of people cannot stand living up here.
PP: The acceptance by the broader community here is phenomenal. I think that's because there are so many small harmless bands of Indians here, who are perceived as pagans. The Christian Century says this is one of the most unchurched states - it has the fewest people registered in various (Christian) denominations.
The Washington state constitution has a stronger prohibition against combining church and state than the federal constitution does. It's been cited in some Supreme Court cases. There's also a culture of tolerance here, independent of the constitution. People around here are smart enough to realize if you can limit someone's freedom, they can limit yours. You take turns.
In the village of Index, there are some people who I think are convinced we're Devil worshippers or something, but for the most part we're accepted here. At least, I'm accepted here and tolerated. I think the latest development, being elected president of the Interfaith Council, has dispelled what few fears were left. (Editor's note: Pete is current president of the Interfaith Council of Washington and was instrumental in gaining Wiccans representation on that council.)
S: No, I don't think Seattle's warmer to pagans.
Blacksun: I just think that it had a better start than some places. Obviously, we have more people here, and we have more pagans here. You go to Duluth, and they're definitely going to look at you as something very strange and probably something too weird for their taste.
S: They're going to look at you as something very strange and too weird for their taste if you're a guy and you polish your nails, too. Or if you're a girl and you wear motorcycle leathers. The smaller the population density and the further away from the mainstream you are in your lifestyle, the more weird you're going to seem.
Other areas of the country are very hospitable to pagans. New York has this huge magickal community, and they're everywhere. You've seen the movie Bell, Book and Candle? There's this one beautiful scene where he's walking down the street and he's looking down at the grating, and - they're down there. And that's true. The original Magickal Childe shop was underground. It had one of those glass gratings. You go down to Los Angeles, and they're more numerous and more open than we are here.
B: I think any cosmopolitan setting is going to be more receptive to the Bohemian element, no matter how it expresses itself.
W: What changes have you seen within the Seattle pagan community since you first encountered it?
H: We've just gone through another two pagan generations. About every seven years, every area needs to sort of reassess itself, and the same thing happens over and over again. There are a few things that last from the preceding generation, usually for their own reasons, either their structure or their longevity, not necessarily for any outside reasons.
It's cyclic, but we're not aware of the cycles. That's the sad part. We always have to reinvent the wheel. A whole influx of people come into the community, and they say, "There's no community." Then they conjure up reasons as to why there isn't any community in order to make sense of what they're not seeing. And it's the usual thing, it's political reasons, social reasons, it's this or that or the other thing. But that's really not what's happening. There is community, but it needs a lot of work on the individual's part to meet it.
It goes through a period of a lot of public events, and then it slacks off. The reason we have public events is for individuals to meet each other, and we lose sight of that. When enough individuals have met each other and have made commitment in one form or another to a deeper connection, a more private connection, a personal exploration, the need for a public event automatically dissipates for a period of time.
Now, that continues. Sometimes, that level of connection lasts for the rest of the persons' lives. Friendships last. Groups come out. Groups change. But all the while, the overall process is not static. Another group of people is coming in and saying, "Where is everybody? There is no community." It's like a bunch of waves coming onto the shore. You're going to have to have a video camera to see that the waves continuously come in, and then there's the tide, too, but the waves don't stop, even when the tide's out.
CW: It's very different. There's a lot of networking going on. There's a million different groups and subgroups. People are more open about communicating what they're doing. People advertise what they do rather than its just being word of mouth, the way it was originally. It's much more rich and diverse, open and accepting.
The one thing that still bothers me about the community is the arguing, the personal conflicts that spill over into the community as a whole. I try to take a Swiss stance here and remain as neutral as possible, saying all people are welcome. We try not to get involved in personal conflicts or have an opinion one way or another.
PP: Pagans are more open now. I think the fact that pagans are more inclined to be identified as pagans, and explain what it is that consists of, makes people treat us and accept us more openly. Because we're not sending a message that we're doing something wrong here.
In all the years that I have been public about being pagan, and it's been quite a few, I have not gotten an iota of flak from anybody except a small handful of pagans. I have gone to lots of seminars aimed at church management and things like that, because this is what I do for a living now, and I know that there have been a few ministers there who thought I was going to Hell in a handbasket, but they were polite enough not to share that with me. Usually, several of them will want to take me to lunch, because they want to learn more about Wicca.
I hope to see in a few years that if you tell someone you're a Wiccan, they yawn.
W: What do the pagans who have problems with your openness have to say?
PP: Well, they don't say. I think it's because, by my being open more than they are willing to be, they think that somehow I'm a threat to their position in the community or something.
I don't care. There's enough work here for all of us to be busy. There's no need for anybody to be king or queen of the dungpile. This is a plateau. There's a lot of room on the top of it for people who want to get out there and work their tails off and get little in return for it.
There's a lot of us who are outspoken and visible and findable in the pagan community in this country, and essentially what we're doing is desensitizing the rest of the population to it. It's no longer something titillating. It shouldn't be. That's why I fought with the Times. I don't want to be on the Scene page. This is my religion. This is not entertainment. It may be entertainment for you, but I'd appreciate it if you'd keep that to yourself.
W: Do you often work with public groups?
S: We used to do a lot of public rituals. He (Blacksun) still does. I'll be getting back into that myself, but I wanted to take some time off.
B: Mostly now (my public work) is centering around the ATC, and it's occupying a lot of my time. I've been involved in a lot of different public rituals, both in major and in minor roles.
There is a need for good places, especially for newcomers, who have a lot of questions, who have a lot of indecisiveness and maybe a little fear, where they can go, feel safe, learn and aren't immediately subjected to somebody's ego trip. I think there will always be a need for that. That's one of the reasons I've been attaching myself a lot to the ATC events. Pete has done an enormous amount of preparatory work in order to become one of those safe places. I want to help where I can on that.
H: The most public work I do is the "Wheel of the Year" lectures.
I haven't gone to a lot of public rituals lately. I would say that people are at that stage of kind of grousing that there isn't more for them to do, and that they're just on the verge of probably another group coming into the forefront and doing public you name it.
The community Full Moons and rituals are something that I helped start years ago. You feel the need to do something, and you do it. Brandy and Star and Lynn and I talked about it, and I arranged for people to officiate, and Brandy publicized it, and Tom and Lynn gave us space, and that's how that came about. And we developed the idea of sponsorship, so that it made people talk to each other.
There's a downside to public events. If a public event doesn't help you get a one-to-one connection, then it's almost useless. It becomes a spectator thing, sooner or later. That is unsatisfying.
The idea of sponsorship is one person takes it upon themselves to bring one or two people to something and provide introductions. Essentially, you're saying that this person isn't here to geek everybody out. You trust them enough to bring them here. A lot of reticence evaporates, and you're much more likely to be invited to something else, that's maybe a little bit more private. Like men's circles or women's circles or maybe a private drumming thing or a puja or something like that. That's the idea of sponsorship, to cut that time down. It's fallen by the wayside because it's too time-consuming, as far as I could tell. But in the long run, it cut down a lot of time.
CW: It's usually all I can do just to take care of things here. I have done the band, and the choir, and Yule, and the talent show, and the dancers. That's all community outreach. (Editor's note: The Greenwood Grove this year will hold its annual Yule feast and talent show as a combined event on Dec. 9. For more information, see the calendar.)
I take care of those and do general ministerial things like visiting hospitals and prisons and doing healing. I do an Umbanda Spiritus healing circle, a Brazilian form of healing, on alternating Mondays. Plus, I belong to a Craft group that meets monthly. But I try to be supportive of other community events that are going on.
W: How and where do you meet other pagans now? Are they mostly Wiccans, or ceremonial magicians, or from some other group?
CW: They find us. We're not a proselytizing group. But we're not hard to find, if you ask around, if you ask the right people. People within the community know we exist. If people call me up and talk to me on the phone, and it feels okay, I'll usually invite them to come over.
S: They're a real mixed bag. Anything from traditional Celtic Wiccan to Nordic traditions, to ceremonial traditions, to ritualist traditions.
W: I'm not sure I understand the difference between ceremonial and ritualist traditions.
S: Ceremonial descends from Judeo-Christian ritual. Ritualist can have a much broader background, doesn't necessarily use any of the Judeo-Christian archetypes.
B: There's another way of looking at it, too. Ceremonialists, by and large, perform their magick without the imposition of a religious overtone, even though they may use religious symbols.
My primary associations are, of course, Wiccan. You've got to spend your time somehow, and what you spend here, you ain't spending there. I'm doing a lot toward trying to promote the Wiccan brand of neo-paganism. The associations that I make are primarily along Wiccan lines.
But you can't go anyplace - you can't walk into Edge of the Circle, say - and just meet Wiccans. You just can't do it. If you go to things like Spring Mysteries, or Yule Feast, or Hecate's Sickle, or something like that, you're going to run into people that don't count themselves as Wiccans at all. They don't use that label whatsoever. You'll run into what we call Norse and what they now call Asatru. You run into Egyptian, you run into Druidic. It's all flavors and varieties, folks, it's better than Baskin-Robbins.
S: If you want to meet a very mixed bag of people, get on the Internet and go to alt.magick, and you will meet an extremely broad spectrum of people.
This (gesturing to the computer) has made a major difference. Because anybody can talk to anybody. Anybody can get a printout and go make copies of anything. And people do.
I had this vision years ago, 1985, of something I would like to see happen someday. Someday, we're going to cast the circle, and we're all going to turn our turn on our CRTs at the same time, and the words and directions for the ritual are going to scroll up the screen -
B: You can do that now.
S: - and every magickal tradition will be doing the same thing at the same time. We're going to change the world.
B: There are live, interactive rituals that take place now. You'll find them on Delphi, you'll find them on CompuServe, you'll find them on AOL, you'll find them on a lot of local places.
W: How secretive or public are the pagans you meet about their pagan beliefs? Are they more or less secretive than formerly?
H: I think there are people who've had a warped idea of secretiveness. Everybody has a right to their own personal privacy. That should never be up for grabs simply because you share the same religion.
There are people who have used that for their own reasons and chosen to circumvent that. All that does is destroy trust. A person has the right to say to whom they choose who and what they are. When that is abused by somebody else who claims relationship to you, you are likely to never talk to that person again, or always make it a qualified relationship But we do that in our day-to-day lives too.
We forget that these things are human things. If we cannot practice those human civilities within our religion, amongst people who claim relation, who in the hell can we practice them with? Rather than having it used as a political trump card. We can't use each other like that and expect to remain in community.
I remember one instance. There was a public park that people used to use on the Eastside for ritual. Basically, it was a nice park, which people would use for ritual and clean up. The neighborhood kind of accepted that, no big deal. Because they weren't loud, they weren't obnoxious.
Well, a couple of people decided that they needed to speak to The Seattle Times and proceeded to take them to that site and did the whole nine yards about, This is one of our ritual areas, blah blah blah. They ruined it for about 11 groups, lots of individuals. All sorts of lookie-lous and spectators started showing up around the Full Moon, made it a hellhole to the people who lived around that park.
Do you think that any of those people are going to think kindly of someone calling themselves a pagan? After being invaded by the lookie-lous? No! But in the mind of the people who did this, they were just educating the public. They had no sensibility about who was using the park. They didn't even know who all was using it. They did this thinking that they knew how best to serve the community. That is what creates bad blood, is by somebody articulating loudly in such a way that gives an extraordinary impression that isn't accurate and that deprives the rest of us of something, our privacy.
It's not to say that those people were not nice people.
S: When the news interview (of Shadowhawk) hit, about three years ago -
B: "The Witch Next Door."
S: I was a volunteer over here at the Northwest Senior Center on their Bingo days. I still volunteer there. All the little old ladies came in: "I saw you on TV! That was so interesting!" I got not one negative response, not one.
CW: I think some people are more public about their pagan beliefs. I'm probably more public about it than I ever have been, but not as public as I wish I could be. I'm feeling more and more brave, though.
With me, it's a job sensitivity thing, because I teach small children. I wouldn't want people to have a false impression of what I do and think that in some way that would negatively impact the children whom I teach. When I turn 50, I may just say, Screw the world.
I think (people who are less secretive) are developing an inner strength and courage that says, I don't care what you think. I'll do what I want. They're coming into their own personal power, and they're doing it in a time when it's more acceptable to have alternative religious beliefs, in a community that's more tolerant of it.
The 60s up through now have prepared the soil. The seeds that have been planted in it and will be planted in it will be able to grow, because the soil will be nurturing and not shallow but deep, so that things that spring up actually have a chance to work. The big influx of Eastern beliefs into the country has really helped.
I think what people are finding is the basic philosophy of the Order of the Feather (of which Changing Woman is a part), which is that all beliefs are true beliefs, because they're true for the people who believe them. And if you're speaking the truth, nothing can stand against it.
W: Describe the typical Seattle pagan, or two or three typical Seattle pagans, now. How are they different from those of 20 years ago?
PP: I think that the typical pagan now tends to be more spiritual and less rebellious.
The result is they're more serious about this, more serious and more cognizant of their own behavior. I've seen some pretty outrageous behavior passed off as spirituality. I think that the average pagan today is less inclined to say, "I got fired from my job because I'm a pagan" when the actual truth is, I got fired from my job because I wore too much pagan jewelry and didn't do my work.
I run into a lot of people who are looking for help with child custody cases and things of that nature. I help them all, but some of the cases invariably turn out to be that the state took their kids away because they were in diapers with two days' worth of shit in them. It bothers me that there are people who are willing to stay sufficiently in denial that they use their religion as an excuse for their own failure.
You know, the bottom line of this spirituality is personal responsibility. If you stop to think about that for a while, you realize that there ain't a hell of a lot of it out there. Part of our job, I think, as pagan, and as clergy in paganism, is to focus people on that.
But some people have a leftover SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) persona. Some come back to reality after a ritual; some don't. Some pagans change their names like they change their underwear. They go off and be absolutely outrageous as they can as Moonbeam Starshade and then become Raven Mugmuffin.
It makes the general public wonder. I tell people if they need a name to hide behind, to pick something reasonable like Laura Brown.
But I was high when I came out of the (April 1) community meeting. Because the people in the audience were asking good, solid, insightful questions, and they seemed to have their shit together. It was so refreshing.
CW: I don't think there is such thing as a typical pagan. But if there were such a thing, I think it would be a person who practices their own beliefs regularly, both solitarily and in a variety of community situations. They're not locked into one tradition, but they feel the freedom to move around in the richness and diversity that the pagan community has to offer.
They're younger (than in the 70s). But they're equally sincere and knowledgeable. I think they're creative, maybe even more creative than we were when we started out, because they've thrown off a lot of societal restrictions we kept that our parents had. For example, how you look.
I think younger people are open to being more creative and to questioning authority. People in the '60s questioned authority, to be sure. Their focus, I think, was a little more loving, maybe, than people in the '90s. I think the people coming up in the '90s are angry and disillusioned. I think they saw what happened in the '60s and realized it didn't get very far, and that maybe it's not going to get very far, unless they make it happen. So I think they're a little more challenging to authority. They're more proactive and less peaceful-passive.
As long as it remains nonviolent, I think that's good. I think people need to stand up and speak up. Younger people have the energy to do that. Older people may have the wisdom to know when to do it, but younger people have the energy to do it.
My only concern about younger people as they move into being figures of authority is that they remain compassionate and peaceful and not radical to the point that people get a wrong impression of what the Craft really is. They could project their anger as being righteous anger when maybe it's personal anger. Being young, you take everything personally.
H: The people I'm seeing in Outer Grove now are a little older, in their 30s or older. They have tried a lot of other things and are going to try to decide on things for themselves, or clarify the direction for themselves. But they have more than two books behind them, so to speak. They have been living something, and they are past the point of being defensive about anything. They can for a period of time grant permission to another person to quote-unquote teach them. Then when that is over, a large number of them proceed with a try at friendship.
People seem to be more open to changing positions than they used to be. It's not teacher-student only. It's not even just teacher-student-friend. A becomes a student to B, who is the teacher, and then A and B are friends, and then A becomes the teacher, and B becomes the student, and then they end up friends. That is a dance that always goes on. That can take two years, or that can take ten years.
But every so often there are people who have a frame of reference that they are not letting anything else in. Because this is "the Way." Often they're still at odds with their family, they're still angry at Christianity. They have a tremendous amount of unresolved anger at this, that or the other thing. They hide under the distraction of creating ritual rather than understanding the point of doing the ritual. "I got all the boxtops; this makes me a priest."
S: They (the typical Seattle pagans of today) aren't different.
B: I disagree, they are.
S: Well, they're the same people. The people that were the rebels, the people that were on the cutting edge 20 years ago, are the elders now.
B: We're the ones dragging our feet.
S: And our kids are out there on the cutting edge thinking up new things. Although the times have changed, naturally. And the new ideas are new ideas. I think it's essentially the same type of person, same trip. Nothing changes.
B: The institutional part of it has changed. When we first got initiated and so forth, you didn't assume the name of witch or Wiccan unless you could point to somebody and say, "They initiated me. They did it at such-and-such a place, at such-and-such a time. Go ask them." And it was commonplace to go ask them, and to check it out, before you ever opened your yap to this person.
S: There was a reason for that. It has to do with why things are safer now. It's because we wanted to differentiate the people who were involved in this as a lifestyle and as a religion from the nuts.
B: Now lineage has become much less important. I think that is a natural phenomenon. I think it is all part of the evolution of our religion, which ultimately, carried to its most illogical end, will result in Wicca being a dogmatic religion that is being pestered by some upstart religion.
Essentially, (lineage) works like this. Anybody that we've taken to third and given permission to initiate, given permission to start their own coven, we are essentially saying we can be held accountable for our choice of this person doing these things. Even though we have given them carte blanche, and they don't have to report a damn thing to us. So our choice has to be very carefully done. They get the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.
That method of insuring that the Craft survives is a good one. It is necessary in times when there is a need for secrecy. It is less necessary in times of more openness.
S: I don't think that lineage really matters that much. Although book learning and tradition, specific traditions, help a person in some areas, I don't think they're all that important to the overall tone of the work. There's a lot of what we call "intuitives" who are out there doing a fine job. Of course, anybody will benefit from sitting down and studying something. But desire, will and just plain hard work are what really counts.
B: And caring.
W: Describe the Seattle pagan community now. Is the current climate more or less clannish than formerly? What is the general feeling now?
H: No. Not any more, not any less (clannish). I think we may be becoming conscious more of the generationality. This last go-round, at that public meeting, people were asking the question, "Where are all the elders?" Seven years before, the question was, "Why aren't there any elders?" It presupposes that now they're at least aware that there are other people lurking about. But most of them never get asked for their phone numbers.
S: I don't know. I've been out of touch for better than a year. For a while, it got more clannish. I think it may be beginning to open up again.
It's going to go through periods of expansion and contraction because that's just what any living organism does.
B: The Seattle pagan community strikes me as reflecting on the macro level one of the things that is very evident on the individual level. That is that most of us who make up this community have socializing problems that we are trying to work through in a much different fashion than caving into the norm, which is how most of society takes care of its social problems.
S: I'd like to point something out about that. That's not just true of the pagan community. That's also true of the artists' community, that's also true of the writers' community, that is true of any group of creative, different people.
B: Absolutely right.
S: I think you can ask anybody who considers themselves to be of an alternative religion, and they are going to give you the same answer: "All my life, I have known I was different. I didn't see things the way people around me saw them." Some of us have learned to mask that or bury it; some of us have gotten defiant with it.
B: The biggest socializing problem the community has? We don't know how to tell white lies. If I don't like you, I'll tell you. If I don't tell you to your face because I'm too cowardly to do so, I'll tell your best friend.
The arguments are just like that. When I say we argue like a family, I mean it. We don't get polite and bite our tongues with one another and be politic and keep the grease off of our knuckles. We wade in there, and we say it as we see it. Even when we're wrong, we say it loud. And that is typical of creative people no matter what.
S: But there's the other side of that too. If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. If I don't like you, and I have disagreement with you, and I cannot say it to your face, then I'm going to keep my mouth shut. I'm not going to spread rumors about you, especially if I don't know. I can talk about my experiences - we all do. "I dealt with this person, and they ripped me off." But "I don't like this person, and I've heard tales of them ripping somebody else off" - that's not what goes around here. Or at least, not in our group.
I'll tell you another problem that we've got. We get so busy that we forget to say thank you. We forget how much that means. You want to get down to the root of where the most sore places are in this community, it's people who forgot to say thank you.
PP: I think (the Seattle community) is less clannish (now). One of the things that I came out of the community meeting aware of, and a little concerned about, was the fact that there seemed to be so much enthusiasm, so many sensible people with energy, and a serious lack of focused leadership. There are people who are leaders, but they just don't seem to have a lot of experience at it and don't know how to pull it in together tighter.
I've been talking to several people in the national community, who live in this area but who are not prominent in this area. We're trying to figure out how can we help grow some new, younger leaders. We don't want to be the leaders. We don't have the energy for it, but we do have the experience, and we'd like to be able to help a community form here by giving some guidance to some of these people who have the energy to do it.
I think (the community is less clannish because) there are more people interested. The access to other people is no longer tightly controlled by a small handful of individuals, whom if you offended you would be blackballed.
W: What bookstores or shops do you think have a big effect on the pagan community now?
PP: Edge of the Circle, Mandala Books, Magickal Garden in Tacoma, Crystal Cat in Auburn, Orion at Twilight in Everett.
B: The Edge of the Circle, largely.
CW: Edge of the Circle is a place you can go. Mandala Books. Odyssey Books. Tenzing Momo.
The stores change hands a lot. I would like to see some stability, that some people would come in and consistently be there for the community. But it just doesn't happen, because it's not a lucrative business. You have to sacrifice a lot of your own time and money to keep it going, so that it can be a forum and a meeting place for people. Most people just burn out, trying to keep it open as many hours of the day as you need to.
S: Especially when you have people hanging out, reading the books off the shelves and not buying. It's hard to maintain a place that's going to be that kind of open door and welcoming place and make a living off of it too.
CW: In general, I think that if I were a pagan moving into a new community, I would hit the bookstores first. You find your local occult bookstore, and that's how you're going to make your connections. When people say to me, "Oh, we came to town, and we couldn't find anything anywhere," I'd say, "Well, you didn't look very hard."
W: What groups and people do you see as prominent in the pagan community now?
H: Well, groups on what level, is the question there. I know that the Crossroads Learning Center is available and it has an extraordinary variety of things happening.
The Unitarian Church has CUUPS. But it also has had for years a lot of women's spirituality going on that's part of its heart and soul. There's the Outer Grove that's going on. There are lectures that I do. There's a couple of Druid groves, the Greenwood Grove, Ar nDraíocht Féin (ADF). There's the Tabernacle up in Index.
There are individual groups, and there are traditions of groups that are interlocked, dealing with each other. Then there are political things, or associations, that may or may not do rituals together. That is the part that I think I have the strongest problem with. I think you need to do ritual together in some way, or you're not a religious group, you lose the reason why the group is spawned.
There are organizations like the Pagan Prayer Breakfast going on, which I think is a wonderful idea. There are a lot of loose-knit things that people are inviting each other to who know each other. That kind of goes along with the identity of this area up here.
There are other things that are happening, like the Cascadian Pagan Leadership Conference that's coming up and the Street Magick classes. That's a technical approach to magick. Then there are the festivals.
PP: I don't know. I'm not really involved directly with anybody else, except for the ATC. Mainly, that's because we try not to go where we're not welcome.
CW: Haragano, Leon.
H: Leon is committed to service. He's taken that to heart more than anybody I know.
CW: A lot of people come and go. There's the ADF grove down in Burien. Crossroads Learning Center has been a great meeting place.
There are some groups that choose to remain anonymous. There are a few that work within their own tradition and don't want to be public.
I think the people I know have had a really positive effect. I think they've made the Seattle community what it is. I think that younger people coming up need to know what those people have given to the community and what they've sacrificed. Younger people who haven't made those sacrifices themselves don't have a clue as to what it's been like for 15 years, what it's cost financially, the amount of money that has been put into it out of people's own pockets to make it happen, trying not to ever make money a factor for people. The amount of time that people have given from their own lives so that their whole lives have become ones of service. The amount of emotional restraint they've had to use when their own lives were falling to pieces and they still had to keep the community going.
Those people I named don't toot their own horn. I think it's a shame sometimes that some people don't toot it for them and let people know what they've given to the community. Outer Grove is the single best source of learning in the Seattle community. It's the best training a person can get. A position in that class is something to be coveted by anyone who wants to learn the Craft from a traditional focus.
Brandy and Alex are doing their own teaching and have their own classes, Street Magick. They also are serving the community teaching the things that they know.
W: What do you think is the biggest danger within and/or outside the pagan community now?
S: Now, our biggest danger is ourselves, people deciding they're going to have a disagreement and dragging the lawyers into it and making a huge circus out of it. That's the biggest danger.
Another thing is, we could become inbred. That would be very easy. It's very easy for somebody to spend their entire life in this community, marry into this community, raise their kids in this community and never get a perspective of what the rest of the world sees.
H: (Predation) is one of those things. When people go in search of the spiritual life, it's usually because something has rocked them to their core and they found they really need something and they need it now. That makes them ripe for the picking. There are people who are looking for replenishments of energy, devout followers, flock.
They can deplete your bank account, they can ruin your relationships with people, they can set you up for all sorts of things. But you know, it's like any other con, and no religion is immune to it .A healthy devotional prayer life and a lot of practice at self-reflection are about the only things that will protect you from it. Because nobody can tell you.
PP: I think the biggest danger, now that we're getting some measure of recognition from some parts of the Seattle world, is indiscretion in behavior. I think there are a number of things that we need to be sensitive to. One of them is the in-your-face attitude, doing foolish things like waving daggers around in the air in public and making jokes about boiling babies down to people who don't know they're jokes.
And bashing other religions. I think we need to learn how to quit Christian-bashing. Because most of the people out there today are not the ones who have oppressed us, with the exception of a few people like Pat Robertson, who have built an empire based on it, solely for financial reasons. I don't think he gives a shit theologically. But we need not to underestimate the Rebiblican Party.
We do need to act like we have a right to do what we do. If we're not acting comfortable with it, people will think maybe we are boiling down babies. But there is a difference between being public and being in your face. The difference is discretion. A fruitcake is a fruitcake. When someone comes up to your door with a big cross around their neck and one in each ear, you're going to draw conclusions. We need to learn perspective as a movement. I've never denied I'm a Wiccan, but I don't run around with a big pentacle on my finger.
CW: Probably the biggest danger to new pagans would be that they too easily accept things on the surface as being what they say they are. For example, regarding a group that is no longer in Seattle any more, I was really concerned for new people whose first pagan experience was with these people, because they had a really twisted view of what paganism was and were presenting it as being the one true way.
My one piece of advice to people is there is no one true way. Look around, shop around; if people are telling you that their way is "the Way," run as fast as you can. Don't take people for what they say they are, but check them out long enough to see if their actions bear up. Keep one eye open.
H: Take your time. On the average, it takes approximately two years for a person to integrate change. Good change or bad change, that is how we are physically and emotionally wired. When you come into the pagan community, it is still a good rule of thumb: Take a couple of years to go to everything public, talk to people, before you make a decision that commits your energy, perhaps for the rest of your life.
W: What do you think is the biggest positive thing in the community now?
CW: I think it's the general tolerance toward individual differences among groups. I was on a panel a couple of years back that met up at Crossroads, meeting with I'd say 10, 12 people. I knew most everyone on the panel, and you assume that you're all doing the same thing and following the same sort of path.
Part of what we did was to explain what our path was and how we did it. I came away from it realizing we're all greatly different from one another. We're doing radically different styles of the same thing. You don't know until you actually get down to it and compare.
H: The fact that a ton of people didn't show up to take sides at that meeting (the community meeting) was a real plus. I think another generation has realized that there's no point in doing that. It detracts from the work we're really doing.
W: What most surprises you about the pagan community now, compared to the past?
H: That some people still revel in bad news about somebody. I figured that we'd all outgrown that. But that's a part of human nature.
But most of the people I connect with have been able to go into a space where they're supportive without taking sides and are able to become passionate without incessantly seeking a place to put blame.
CW: The fact that there are so many different groups and that it's developed into so many specialized areas. There are groups that specialize in healing, groups that specialize in Tantra, groups that specialize in traditional systems, groups that are practicing particular styles, Native American styles or Eastern styles. And the fact that they all usually can work together.
W: What would you most like to change about the Seattle pagan community now, if anything?
PP: There isn't a whole lot I'd like to change about it now. I think it's maturing very nicely. I'd like to do whatever I and other people I know could do to promote that maturation process. That's one of the reasons Wicca is seen as a danger by outside religions, is because we encourage people to think for themselves. I'm all for that.
At the present time, there's a strong desire for the creation of community. But a lot of pagans have a proclivity to exclude people. They need to feel special. They make themselves feel special by not allowing others to join their group. We need someone to exclude. We don't understand how community forms. We stop the formation of community, because people are left out.
CW: I'd like to see people being more compassionate and more tolerant of one another. I think they've got a good start, but I'd like to see fewer personal disagreements among pagans being aired publicly. I'd like to see people work out their differences through good communication skills with one another or through neutral parties without it adversely affecting the community. No witch wars.
It's disgraceful to all of us when the press picks up on things like that. It makes all of us look bad.
S: I think a course in manners and etiquette should be required before you call yourself a witch. I know that's terrible, but that's the source of 90 percent of the garbage, lack of manners. I'm not the most socially correct person myself, but I make an effort.
B: You may be socially incorrect because you are bizarre from a certain social standpoint, but you have a great deal of manners.
I think if I were to just wiggle my nose, and suddenly it worked, what I would love to see most is the people who are in the Wiccan and neo-pagan culture immerse themselves more in the Wiccan and neo-pagan religion.
S: Our religion should not be an excuse. It infuriates me when I see this. It should not be an excuse for laziness, slovenliness.
This is a point I'm probably going to be very unpopular about, and my high priestess will take me by the hair and ask, "Why did you say this?" But you take a typical ritual. In most Christian traditions, and in Judaic traditions, and in Moslem traditions, people get dressed to go to church.
B: We get undressed.
S: If you get undressed, that's okay. But showing up in dirty jeans and a T-shirt is not. I'm sorry, folks. Take a bath, comb your hair, put on clean clothes. You're going to church. While services are going on, sit down, shut up, pay attention to the ritual in progress. Don't use it as an opportunity to gossip, like the little biddies do in the back of the church.
If you can't participate, at least pay attention and give some reverence to what's going on. I've seen a lot of very sloppy practices over the years. Unfortunately, it is a trend I have seen becoming more common. You're not there to talk bullshit and pass the time of day. You're there to worship.
H: This is going to sound somewhat naive, but as we're going into the winter months, it's always a great time to connect with people. (I would like it if) people would connect with somebody who they haven't talked to in a while. Just to connect with them. No agenda, no battle lines. No gimme. Just to say hi. Maybe just by a letter. To get those lines meeting again, not to lose the energy.
There's a concept called lending grace to a situation. That is when the way you choose to be in a situation may not be something that other people can agree with, but it's not something that's operating out of a place of anger, that you try to operate in some kind of giving way. Not necessarily a showy giving way, but from someplace that communicates, as close to your true feelings as you can get.
I think a lot of people are striving for that. It's like a chain reaction.
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