The rant was offensively dishonest. Wicca had not been bashed, and the lady knew it. "How", Antistoicus started to retort, beginning to write a rebuttal, "do you seriously argue that something is "Wicca-bashing", when most of the Wiccans are saying the same thing? Is Fritz Jung of the Witches' Voice being "anti-Wiccan", when he devotes an entire section of his site to a discussion of how to deal with the "Witch Wars"? Are the vast majority of the Wiccan groups that I listed, when working on the Agora, being anti-Wiccan, when they are never seen at a general Pagan event?"

Hmmm. That was something to think about, wasn't it?

He couldn't help but be struck by the self-defeating defensiveness, of the attitude that any attempt to diagnose the ills of a community, constituted an attack upon said community. How does one even begin to write a Philosophical analysis without acknowledging the possibility that some approaches to a problem are ill-advised, or begin to even tell the story of what went wrong without letting flaws be seen ... and then it hit him. Just by starting to reply to this person, it struck him where the things that were needed (and absent) had been all along.

Looking for wisdom in a community that has closed itself off to outside thoughts is like looking for fresh air, while trapped in a sealed box. Eventually, you run out. The Pagan groups that were obtrusively visible had never been places for open and intelligent discussion, and that is what we needed to share with those who would come to us, as we got to know them. He kept looking, but it was the wrong direction to look in. The atmosphere had gone stale a long time ago.

If you look at the accounts of the histories of the groups in "Drawing Down the Moon" (Margot Adler), they didn't get going by entering the old incestuous circuit, and offering something new. They formed on college campuses, in literary discussion groups, and the like. It was so simple. We'd been working too hard at this, when the answer was to not work at it at all. The right people aren't to be found at events they endure just to meet others. They're to be found at events that intelligent, sensible people attend for their own sake.

He mentioned the cowardice of the list owners. That trait ran through a lot of what he saw. For example, one of the moderators, after listing the constitutional procedure that was to keep the local chapters of Hellas safe from a similar takeover attempt, decided to then declare the debate closed, before he could be rebutted. Kind of unethical, wouldn't you say? This pattern of declare and run turned out to be his usual style.

The moment the tantrum came, the discussion was declared to be over. We can't, it seems, risking alientating the Wiccan members of an allegedly Hellenic Reconstructionist group. His explanation, after a lot of evasion, was to argue that he was going to do what he had to, to keep the membership rolls full. We believe that's known as "selling out", and it defeats the whole purpose of starting an organization.

There was more and more of this. The use of nicknames and pseudonyms, while dealing with strangers, was unacceptable to him, because people might make fun of his group. But, one might ask, if one has offered some perfectly sensible reasons, rooted in very real problems, for doing so, and the person one is speaking to doesn't care, just how reasonable is he, and how much of a respectful "listening to" can one hope for out of him, regardless of what one does? One might, but one wasn't allowed to. The discussion was declared closed.

The fact that the list was there to discuss the creation of the national organization which, after all, existed only as a proposal at that point, was brought up. It was pointed out that the discussion of the creation and maintenance of semi-orders was very much on topic, because such creations were, as we have argued here, a necessary part of the creation and maintenance of more structured organizations, and a part of the structure of the organization itself. The first moderator, essentially, just covered his ears, and said "no, no, no, ...". His partner didn't understand a word of what we were writing.

The final, simple, realization that we needed to accept, is that the "leading members" of the Pagan community, were anything but. The "leaders" of this "national organization" turned out to be a pair of poorly educated "teeny boppers" with a membership list, a desperate desire to be noticed, and little else. Aside from a variation in age, that's about all that we had been finding, all along.

We can check out, and read books on our own. It's not like we're meeting any real philosophers, or artists, or teachers in the "community". By being in it, we exposed ourselves to a wide variety of possible hassles, which the community then indignantly refused to help us out with. We were losing our peace of mind in exchange for absolutely nothing. Most of the other Pagans came to this conclusion a long time ago. The only sensible response is to build a new community and forget that the old one ever existed.

It was time, as we said, to leave the Pagan ghetto, and enter the wider world outside. It's a little embarassing that we needed to witness the antics of fools like these, to see what fools we had been.

Click here to return.