(Late August/ Early September 2003)
It's been a while, hasn't it? This site first made its appearance in the search engines in 1999, and the Lupercalia article seems to be the only major addition (and an unfinished one at that). Are we planning on moving a little more? The answer is - it's all up to you.
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This is a much larger site than it may appear to be at first glance. When you look at "Constructing God", that's not a simple rant about the value of personal experience. It's a step-by-step philosophical argument starting in the extraction of foundational assumptions from an observation of human behavior leading to a position regarding man's relationship with the Divine and thence to a discussion of how an understanding of that relationship informs our decisions regarding the practical aspects of worship, leading us in the direction of what the ancients themselves did, intriguingly often. What we are doing is not merely an attempt to repeat what the ancients did, but to understand it - and then build on that understanding.
To say that this is a lot of ground to cover would seem almost trite. Yes, it's a great deal of ground to cover, and a lot of work. Before that work even begins, though, one has to ask - is anybody reading this or are we just talking to ourselves? There is little point to writing for a non-existent audience, so the real question we have to ask is how much interest there is in what we're doing here. Not being psychic, we can only guess, but we do have a simple but reasonable guide to how much interest is being shown. It's as easy to apply as taking a trip to Altavista or AllTheWeb and typing
and then doing a search. Not a lot comes up, especially if you exclude pages from our own sites and homepage links left behind on the Witches' Voice, not to mention ranting by both Christian and Pagan fundamentalists. One might also notice that hardly anybody has used our guestbook for its intended purpose, or even bothered to misuse it, lately.
We certainly value the link from the Northern Gnostic but so far that's one man who thinks our site is worth reading and is willing to say so in public. Are there more than a handful of others? Possibly, but lacking any evidence for their existence, we find that Ockham's razor compels us to assume that they aren't there, and so we've been assuming just that, which is why you've been seeing so few new articles added.
If you're unhappy with that state of affairs, you know what you need to do. Show your appreciation for the efforts we've already made by linking to one or more articles you like. If we start seeing more people doing that, we might consider writing a few more articles, because we're going to have some real reason to believe that they're going to be read and not just blindly stumbled into during a keyword search. Until then, we've got other things to do.
Question : "Does this mean that the Shrine is calling it quits?"
Answer : Hardly. But, as we've pointed out online, only to be greeted by the willful incomprehension of the Politically Correct, in the United States most of the interest in Hellenism and religions derived from it will be found among the non-assimilated and, even more, among the semi-assimilated Southern European ethnics out there. When one speaks of Classical Paganism on a deeper level than that favored by those who slap Greek deity names on top of the charge of the goddess, torch a little baklava and think they're set, one finds oneself confronted with the reality that it is a culturally specific religion, whose proponents showed an interest in exporting it precisely during those eras when they were trying to export their culture to the "Barbarians". How many Anglo-Saxons or Germans are seriously prepared to abandon their own customs and adopt any sort of Mediterranean ones? When one sees fanatical ranting from the moderator of an allegedly "Hellenic" list because one has questioned his adoption of Emily Post standards as a guide to moderation, one is confronted with the reality that the answer to that question is "not too many".
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Which leaves us with the question : "Who have we been writing to, and why?" And the why doesn't really flatter any of us, me least of all. (Antistoicus) As we keep saying, Mediterranean European cultures tend to be festive ones, even the relatively sober ones one tends to find among the Greeks. Nowhere in that region will one traditionally find anything like the social isolationism and soul shattering anomie that drove "mainstream Americans" to the Net by the tens of millions. Our ethnics, having brought much of their culture with them - and retained it - would have little reason to be online. They have friendlier, more satisfying places to be, already.
And so have we. I have to admit that I was feeling a little crushed when I looked over the site stats reports and saw that most of our traffic consisted of things like, say, somebody searching under the words "mason jar" and pulling up a page one which we just happened to use that phrase when explaining how amaretto was made. (OK, noisette, but why quibble?) People were stumbling in by the thousands, and (as I said in my goodbye letter to the update list) probably swearing a blue streak, because the evidence is faily strong that they were looking for something very much different from this site. But, after going to bed praying to Aphrodite and asking her "wasn't writing this site what you wanted me to do" and getting a badly needed good night's sleep, I realised that I should not have been surprised and that this should have been blindingly obvious to me.
Go into Tri-Taylor or Greektown, drop by a Church picnic and I
guarantee that you're not going to find too many people with websites.
And, well, duh! Looking back at my real life offline, how much trouble had
I had explaining to most of the people I was meeting what the Internet
even was, and why people bothered with it? The only real question is what
made me implicitly assume that the ethnics I didn't know would be so much
different than the ones I did. The answer : because sitting on one's
backside is so darned easy, and in response to my question - no, of course
this isn't what Aphrodite wants me to do, least of all during the summer.
She wants me to get off my ever broadening posterior and meet people. The
goddess of family and community, right? What was on my mind? 
Question : "That's kind of a blue collar crowd for this kind of thing, don't you think?"
Answer : Not really, and the question betrays assumptions which are
radically out of date in a major way. It assumes that the unassimilated
and semi-assimilated are the uneducated and unwashed masses, fresh off the
boat and dreaming of becoming fake Anglo-Saxons real unhyphenated
Americans. But let's consider the real life situation. Drop by a hospital
and check the names of the attending physicians and then talk with them. Or visit a grad
school and take a good look at the faculty. Or an engineering lab. Or ...
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The reality is that you're going to find a lot of immigrants and a lot of ethnics, and you're going to have to look really, really hard to find anybody from a "white bread background". Nor can this be attributed to affirmative action - "white" ethnics are on the losing end of that in the United States with the Sephardim wondering how it is that they ever became "white" . Now, if your experience of the so-called "mainstream American culture" is that it is mostly associated with people far less educated than you are, who treat you like dirt with the force of government and corporate power backing them up, and that the culture is a drab and dismal one - how likely are you to be, to want to become part of that? Why seek out a place that offers you nothing but a bad time?
This is the point that some will close their mind to, covering their ears and yelling "no, no, no", figuratively speaking. That there is more than one modernity, and that the "colorful" ethnics (*) with their "backward" ways have, by and large, a far stronger claim to being "modern" than do the neo-nativists of all races who pressure them to conform and assimilate. The (preposterously overcompensated) man who orders the cafeteria napkins dictating culture to the (relatively undercompensated) PhD who designs the computer chips his company sells? Not likely.
Not that those church picnics are devoid of the working class, either. But without Calvinism being part of our background, we've never had the idea (in living memory) that wealth is a sign of God's grace, and see poverty as what it so often is, especially when the government intrudes in the market in such a heavy-handed way - as a misfortune, not as a personal failing. We'll honor the poor but honest craftsman far more than the well-to-do greenmailer and if those "ethnic" events introduce us to more of the former than the latter, what can we say? Please pass the cannoli.
Did that answer your question?
Question : Are you saying that your cultures are better than our culture?
Answer : Am I saying that Vernet is a better artist than Peter Max,
that the music of Rossini is better than that of Britney Spears, or that
Sophocles is a greater playwrite than Beau O'Reilly of the Curious Theatre
branch? Yes,
pretty much. 
If you want to discuss the
relative merits of the Hudson river school vs. the Impressionists, or of
Calderon vs. Miller, reasonable people can differ. But these individuals
seem almost completely unknown to our "nonhyphenated Americans", whose
cultural memory seems to stretch back a year, if even that far. I'm
already getting blank stares when I mention Kurt Cobain. I'm not even
going to try to mention The Doors, much less Howlin' Wolf.
Question : "Isn't that kind of narrowminded?
Answer : Spare me, I've played this game before. Every "hyphenated" American probably has. The mainstream crowd will barge its way into one of our festivals. ("Sure, this Sara Lee Pound Cake a la Mode is French - it's got French Vanilla icecream on the side") Infinite whining and wheedling and guilting will follow when they find themselves and their contributions unwelcome. But let one of us show up at one of their events with some pickled octopus - and "oh, that's different". No, it's not.
You know what we thinking of the idea of granting special privileges (see : limited egalitarianism). The argument does not cease to apply when the people asking for them happen to be wearing t-shirts from the GAP. And that is all there is to be said about that.
Question : "What's all that stuff about us linking to this site if we want to see more articles posted here, if you hate Americans and their culture so much?
Answer : Which Americans and which culture? There's more than one to choose from.
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Somehow, I suspect that were Copeland to return from beyond and be greeted with "Are you ready for the sex, girls?", his first thought would not be "and my musical legacy lives on". When I set an American flag flying over the listpage for Conservative Midwestern Pagans, that was not an act of sarcasm. But there is more than one vision of what America ought to be, and mine just happens to resemble Thomas Jefferson's a lot more than it does either Bill Clinton's, or Theodore Roosevelt's. A place you say you're proud of because you have a reason to be, not because a frat boy will crack a beer bottle over your head or a neo-hippy will file a speech code complaint against you if you don't. A place where the credo "moderation in all things" is not at all out of place, but a living reality existing before one's very eyes, in which pluralism is encouraged within reason.
If you need an explanation of that last disclaimer, odds are that you won't understand it. I have seen such an America, and I maintain it's still out there, just driven a little underground. It is a strange definition of "patriotism" that holds that I should approve of those who have done so to every traditional culture to be found in this land, on the basis that they've enjoyed a few temporary ill-gotten political gains. Before they get too cocky and start predicting an eternal reign for Political Correctness, I would remind them that the Neoconservative movement was in the same Triumphalist mood during the Bush administration of the early 1990s. It's amazing how fleeting eternity can be.
Traditions are traditional for a reason. While fads quickly pass,
traditions have the capacity to endure, and so it is in the latter that we
shall put our faith and trust, doing so without apology. If you see hatred
in that, drop by the Asatruar and ask one of them to give you a mead,
because you badly need to loosen up and "a little tipsy" just isn't going
to do it. 
No offense.
Question : "Whatever. You said that you aren't updating this site because nobody's linking to it?
Answer : That, and the fact that when we do searches under the name of the site, the group and anything else relevant we can think of, barely anything comes up at all, and what does come up is mostly character assassination. Remember what we wrote on the front page?
So, our fondest hope, as you read this, is that you will drop by to tell us "here is where you went wrong and here is how you could have done better", backing that up with a solid argument and not just an assertion. At that moment, the discussion has begun.
That dialogue never happened, and let us be realistic. If inserting "<a href="http://demipagan.freeyellow.com"> into one's page is too much work for somebody, how likely is it that he is going to find the time and energy to write an essay? Notice that we've even inserted links for the reader's bookmarking convenience and that even after offering this consideration, we've found that cut and paste exceeded the ambitions of our audience, assuming that one exists. Which we doubt.
Question : "Is it reasonable to assume that your audience isn't there, just because you aren't hearing from them? Have you stopped to think that maybe if you'd just" (fill in the blank) or maybe (fill in the blank) that people would like your site so much that they'd want to link to it, and then you'd start hearing from them?
Answer : Haven't we all been here before? And really not so long ago at that?
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Remember the bad old days of hiring, when kids fresh out of college would be told "all you have to do is take this one course more, or pay for this one additional service and you'll find work" ... and having done so, they found that there was another concession expected of them beyond that. And another. And another. And it just never stopped until, one day, the kids balked and said "forget it". And it never would have. When one side in a negotiation keeps being given concessions without consideration in return, very often the side getting the concessions gets drunk with the sheer power of having something that the other wants and not giving it. Until you take that power away from them, their intoxication from it will not pass. You want content and eye candy, and we've given you more than a taste of both. What have we seen in return?
The web, in many ways, has offered you, the reader, the deal of the century. People have worked many long hours on their sites. You have been exposed to things that the free market, in the days before the Internet, would probably have not offered you and what has been asked of you in return? Payment in exchange for these books people have essentially been writing for you? No. All that we have asked for, in exchange, is a little recognition of our work. But, like personnel during the bad old days of the last decade, having been handed an insanely good deal, some of you seem to want to have a test of wills to see if you can get a better one.
As I'm writing this last passage (2:00 pm, September 4, 2003), the sun is shining through my window and all I see between the slats of my blinds is the deep blue of a clear late summertime sky. Where do you think I'd rather be right now? Even when the inevitable bad weather comes - and this being Chicago, it's going to be wretched - I'll still be in the middle of a major city, surrounded by things to do. Which is as gentle a way I can think of, of saying "gentlefolk, if this is where you're coming from, you're overplaying your hand". I feel very strongly that I can speak not only for myself and those I have associated with, but for almost everybody who has written seriously on this subject when I say "offer me a better deal than that, or I'll find somebody who can". As I wrote at the end of May last year
"Yesterday, I went out into a lovely, warm, summer-like evening, watching North Pond shimmer in the diffuse sunset light, as I listened to the sound of a jazz band playing behind the Historical Society, distant but still clear. In that moment, I noticed how beautiful a perfectly ordinary day could be. From the reading I began my morning with, through my tutoring of a young lady whose test I hope goes well, and all that passed in between, I couldn't help but see that everything I did and experienced on that nearly Internet-free day meant more to me, and brought me more pleasure, than anything that I've ever done online, or in the Pagan community. That's what normal, real life is, and you know what? I deserve that.
And I still do. A key part of negotiation, kids, is knowing what the words "deal breaker" mean, and if you want your Pagan reading to be anything other than a rehash of Scott Cunningham everwhere you look online, you'd better give those words some thought. This is not the only site going on hiatus, not by a long shot, and the good deal you've been getting is just about gone. Make the most of what you're being offered, or you're going to lose even that.
I'll be back in 2009, to see if anything has changed. Until then, I'll be posting files in Shutterbug West but that will be about it. As for what Sannion and the rest will be doing, I wouldn't presume to offer any promises.
