Drawing Down the Moon (71 page)

Reaction to the festivals was explosive. In 1985, there were at least fifty annual regional or national gatherings with a Pagan or Wiccan focus. In 1995 there were almost 350. Groups like the Covenant of the Goddess even published a booklet giving details on how to organize a successful festival. Why did festivals catch on? Probably most critical was the fact that outdoor festivals established a sacred time and space—a place apart from the mundane world, where Pagans could be themselves and meet other people who, although from a variety of traditions, shared many of the same values. Many festival organizers have told me that the most frequent feedback they receive is the comment “I never knew there were other people who believed what I believe, let alone several hundred at one place. I never knew that I could come totally out of the closet and be what I am openly.” This feeling of being at home among one's true family for the first time was probably the fundamental reason that festivals spread throughout the country. As one organizer told me, “It's a trip to the land of faery, where for a couple of days you can exist without worrying about the ‘real' world. It seems absolutely logical that people would come to a festival and see all this and say, ‘Let's go home and make one ourselves.' ”

Some things are more possible in a small group, other things in a larger one. The small coven has an intimacy that no large tribal village will ever share. But large gatherings have their own special energy. Certain things can happen at festivals. I remember at Pan-Pagan 1980, witnessing for the first time, although people told me it had occurred the year before, the beginning of spontaneous group ritual processes: the leaping over bonfires, the rising and falling of ecstatic chanting and dancing, lasting until the early morning hours. For those of us whose previous ritual experience had been running around a small circle while Carmina Burana played on the living room stereo, this was heady stuff.

“I remember,” Ginny Brubaker told me, “I was working in a Wiccan group where you weren't even supposed to talk to people in other groups. Going to festivals changed everything. The kind of gurudom that tries to censor sources of information is totally destroyed by this kind of event. You ain't going to keep 'em down on whatever your farm is after they've seen all the possibilities. Even if you snicker at 80 percent of the workshops and rituals, there's going to be that other 20 percent that makes you say, ‘I wonder why we don't do that.'”

Within a few years, a body of chants, songs, and techniques for working large group rituals was known to thousands of people from coast to coast. This knowledge has affected the conduct of small groups. “Our coven changed,” Ginny Brubaker told me. “We started using more songs and chants in ritual. We had only done a few before and they were very boring. Suddenly we had all this music.” Since the Erisians and Discordians were making their presence known at festivals (see Chapter 11), there was a lot more humor. “Meetings became more fun, there was more playfulness. And our group got exposed to new psychic techniques like the Bach Flower remedies. Our ritual style loosened up. Our ritual garb changed.”

Festival organizers had to learn new methods. When ten people are chanting in your living room and you want a moment of silence, it's very easy to make that suggestion known; when there's a group of two hundred dancing in the open air, you suddenly understand the usefulness of drums. Organizers became skilled at facilitating large rituals and at running large community meetings, adapting techniques from tribal gatherings. As years went by, the festivals developed a feeling of their own. At first people would bring a simple sign or draw a pentagram on their tent. Now the campsites often have the flavor of a country fair, with poles and banners and hand-designed flags. There was also an explosion of crafts and music, now that there was a large audience with which to share these things. At the first festivals, only the local occult bookstore sold its wares. Within a few years there were scores of jewelers, robe makers, sellers of incense, T-shirts, herbs, Pagan buttons and bumper stickers, and beautiful arts and crafts. Tapes of original music, and later CDs, proliferated. Festival concerts and variety shows got better and better.

Many people were really not prepared for the results of Pagan ecumenism and community building. At Pan-Pagan '80, groups confronted each other that had never conceived the possibility of working or being together. Sometimes there were political fireworks. For example, at the time of Pan-Pagan '80, the movement of Radical Faeries was just beginning. Several gay men came to the gathering to share their perspective. There were several gay workshops at a festival that only two years before had been unwilling to even mention a gay workshop in its brochure.

Many of the people in the Midwest Pagan Council were uncomfortable with the large and growing feminist segment of the Craft and many firmly believed that there should never be separate male and female events at a public festival. Yet at Pan-Pagan '80, Z Budapest led more than sixty women in a skyclad ritual. Many of these women came from more conservative traditions that stressed the duality of deity and the polarity of male and female energy. Many of these women were forever changed by their experience. Z Budapest changed as well. She had not only used men to guard the perimeter of the circle (the first time men had ever had a role in her rituals), but, as she observed later, she had spoken to more men in that weekend than she had in her entire life. In the years following, more feminist and Dianic Witches came to large ecumenical Pagan gatherings and women from the British traditions have made appearances at all-women events. During the 1980s and 1990s there was a flowering of women's and men's separate mysteries.

Some people could not accept these kinds of changes in the Pagan community. Deep differences in philosophy, politics, attitudes toward sexuality and lifestyle, even differences in class, surfaced as the festival ended and a number of groups left the Midwest Pagan Council. The next year, three different Midwest festivals occurred, one put on by the Circle, another by those remaining in the Midwest Pagan Council, and a third by a group called Epiphanes. The Pan-Pagan Festival continues today and there are many large gatherings. The Pagan Spirit Gathering, organized by Circle and held in Wisconsin during the week of the Summer Solstice, has close to one thousand people. Starwood, Heartland, and PantheaCon are as big or bigger.

After the Pagan Spirit Gathering of 1980 and 1982, Circle published a booklet of reflections, essays, and poems written by some of the hundreds who had participated. Many of the things that were written could well be said about most current festivals; the booklets provide a window into the special festival realm.

The organizers spoke of creating a magical village, a special place where songs, dreams, meditations, rituals, food, ideas, work, fun, and future visions would be shared. And many who came did indeed speak of living those few days in a dream. “Each one passed through a portal, and was transformed,” wrote a woman from Milwaukee. “Each one gave their quest a name, and in the fires, nightly searched. Like the grasses we were nourished there. Like the trees, learning the wind's dance, we sought our earth-bound fruition, rooted and reaching, drinking in the sweet rain.”
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Another woman wrote: “To go out walking and not have the fear of ravenous glances, cat-calls, come-ons, and other unasked for responses. To feel the sun, wind, fire, and water on my naked body without feeling vulnerable to physical or psychological attack. To be able to chant and sing loudly with the power of my lungs. To dance and move with the strength of all the muscles in my body. To feel that I can be whoever I am with total acceptance and unselfconsciousness—and to have that feel as natural as breathing.”
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A man from Chicago wrote these words: “It was twilight and there was a gentleness in the air. As I heard the distant sounds of flutes and drums, I felt a thrill of recognition, as if something I had felt fleetingly in rare moments of my life, something beautiful beyond words to describe, something I had sought for, was beckoning to me. . . . I felt the music flow throughout my body and felt grounded in the earth. . . . But it was not the music, but some feeling or energy behind it, a communion of consciousness that infused it. It was the same feeling I've had whenever I've felt closest to a vision of spiritual and social wholeness.”
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These festivals, like many others, have certain guidelines. All participants are expected to put in work shifts at childcare, firewood gathering, gatekeeping, health care, and security. Many of the rituals are cooperatively planned. “Who could have imagined,” wrote Dierdre Arthen of EarthSpirit, “that a group of 250 strangers camping together for a long weekend in the wilderness of Wisconsin could have formed a community with such a strong sense of group identity. It seemed like such an ideal. You think, ‘People can't come together for such a short period and really become a unit.' What happened over that weekend was magick. From the moment we arrived, we were drawn into the feeling of it.”
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Many people wrote about how difficult it was to return to their ordinary life. “it felt hard to adjust . . . upon my return home. I still felt so open and free. The festival has the effect of opening the doors inside me that I keep closed most of the time.”
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“I carry that Magick Village home with me in my heart,” wrote another. “With the Cree Indians I sing, ‘There is only beauty behind me. Only beauty is before me.' Carrying this vision of beauty in my heart changes my life. There is a new depth of my being; a new primal dimension of spirit which allows me to shake off the sophistication of the twentieth century American and to hark back.”
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In the 1985 questionnaire, I asked Neo-Pagans about their thoughts on the impact of festivals on the community. It's only fair to say that the 195 people who answered the questionnaire are a biased sample. Most of the questionnaires were handed out at large festivals. Perhaps only 10 percent of the community goes to festivals, but over 85 percent of those who responded to the questions had been to at least one large gathering. Still, there were a number of criticisms. Some people said the festivals were elitist and that many people with nine-to-five jobs found it impossible to go. If you have a family or must travel great distances, the expenses can be high. Time is another precious commodity. Most people with regular jobs can't take five days off to commune in the woods.

One person argued that festivals give people a false sense of security and acceptance. Another said that festivals foster a certain commercialism, a concern with pretty robes and jewelry. “They focus on the socially extroverted,” one complained. “There's too much lust in the dust,” said another. “It's hard for the elderly and the disabled to go camping,” said a third. And today some festivals are taking place in hotels and retreat centers as the Pagan population ages.

But twenty years ago the most serious critique of the festival phenomenon was that it was changing the basic structure of Pagan and Craft groups. “The coven is losing its magic,” a priestess wrote to me. Covens and groves are no longer as central as the festivals and large networking organizations. Since people could enter the Pagan community through festivals and never feel the need to commit themselves to a group, festivals tended to break down the authority of coven leaders. Some of this was good, but there was a price. “At one time covens were given time and the required space to develop their own identity. They had time to seed. But now, with organized groups waiting for members, a temporarily dissatisfied student never takes the time to sort things out. They just split. The easy availability of networking prevents a student from staying and working things out.” In addition, this priestess wrote, “There is a tendency to replace one hierarchy with another. The new celebrities are the authors, the musicians and the leaders of large networking organizations.”

“You know,” Ginny Brubaker said to me thoughtfully, “in the long run, the festival movement will be held responsible for destroying the uniqueness of traditions. Nobody is as isolated or as ‘pure' as they were ten years ago. Everybody is stealing from everybody else. That's real good for the survival of our religion as a
whole,
but in another ten years no one's going to know what a Gardnerian was.” Others disagreed with that prediction. The British traditions are flourishing, they said, and staying very much intact.

Most of the people who answered the questionnaire said that festivals were important because they exposed participants to new ideas, challenged assumptions, ended isolation and loneliness, reduced divisiveness among traditions and groups, renewed people's energy, provided stunning proof that unity can be achieved amid diversity, and beyond all, proved that an alternative culture was possible—even if it lasted for only a weekend or a week. As one respondent wrote: “It is absolutely crucial for our identity that we can be a part of something larger than a coven. Festivals disempower the idea, just lurking below the surface of our consciousness, that we and our goals and our visions are somehow deviant.”

Haragano, a traditional Wiccan priestess, put it this way: