Pagan John Roesch of Wheat Ridge conducts a ritual. (Evan Semon, Special to The Denver Post)
Posted on 06/27/2008 1:15:16 PM PDT by NYer
Pagan John Roesch of Wheat Ridge conducts a ritual. (Evan Semon, Special to The Denver Post)
Give them that old-time religion — ancient religion — and then watch an exploding population of modern pagans give it contemporary twists.
Their numbers roughly double about every 18 months in the United States, Canada and Europe, according to the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance.
Neopaganism, whether a careful reconstruction of ancient practice or a completely modern interpretation of ancient lore, is now among the country's fastest-growing religions.
People, especially teens, are rejecting what they see as the "autocracy, paternalism, sexism, homophobia and insensitivity to the environment" of some more traditional religions, the Canadian group concludes.
Denverite Jesse Walter describes himself
Walter, 33, who became a druid at age 18, first took a literal approach and bought land near the Wyoming state line where he could hunt. Then he and his wife, Kantis, who calls herself a generic pagan, were inspired to open a community center/coffee shop, Witches Brew, across the street from Berkeley Lake Park in north Denver.
Walter picks up litter and watches over the park. In a part of the grove sacred to him, he leaves spiritual offerings, sometimes a bottle of whiskey, to ward off wee-folk mischief.
The park, for its part, provides a stream of patrons to support the coffee shop. The Walters' regular customers, however, come from Denver's vibrant and diverse neo pagan community.
"It's my modern twist on druidry," Walter said.
Druids were the priests of the ancient Celts. The essence of Walter's modern druid faith, he said, is that "people's perception of reality is what makes reality." He said he religiously avoids negative thoughts.
No consensus, even on history
Walter's friend, 28-year-old J.J. Steelman, teases him about his grove and remarks that no one really knows what ancient druids did.
Steelman is also a druid. He was born into a family, he said, that "has never been Christian."
"Being a pagan means I'm free," said Steelman, who roundly rejects Walter's rituals.
Whether organized or disorganized, the pagan revival is stronger than ever since its blossoming in the 1960s hippie counterculture and its cross-pollination by the New Age movement in the 1980s.
The forms neopaganism takes are so varied, they almost defy description, said Carridwen Brennan, a 62-year-old Wiccan.
There is no ultimate leader and no one sacred text, according to Carl McColman, author of several books on witchcraft and paganism.
The Wiccans, one variety of witch and the largest single group of neopagans, took flight in the 1950s when the religion and craft were popularized by Englishman Gerald Gardner. The number of U.S. practitioners grew from 8,000 in 1990 to 134,000 in 2001, according to the American Religious Identification Survey conducted by the City University of New York.
The Ontario group and other researchers now estimate American Wiccans number between 750,000 and 1 million.
"We don't really know the numbers," Brennan said. "Most witches and pagans are semi-closeted, or so deeply closeted because of prejudice we don't even know they're there."
The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life's 2007 survey found less than 0.4 percent of the U.S population to be practicing pagans. Even so, their numbers are quickly approaching those of U.S. Muslims, at 0.6 percent, and Buddhists, 0.7 percent.
Thriving in Colorado
In Colorado, Pew estimated the percentage of Wiccans, pagans, Unitarians and those espousing other New Age faiths to be about twice the national figure, which could mean a statewide neopagan figure in the tens of thousands.
Brennan, a credentialed Wiccan minister with the Denver-based Alexandria Temple & Academy, sees a strong local trend in people self-identifying as generic pagan.
Brennan said neopagans generally prefer to experience spirituality firsthand rather than adhere to authoritarian dogma. She describes a typical neopagan as having reverence for nature, seeing it as a manifestation of the divine.
Many neopagans are polytheistic, worshiping gods and goddesses.
They generally believe worship of God as father without worship of Goddess as mother is a serious imbalance in the natural order of things. Yet generalizing can be dangerous, even within sects.
"You'll get no agreement on how Wiccans see God — or Goddess," Brennan said. "In Wicca, there is no 'you have to' and 'you can't.' There is no orthodoxy."
Yet it was the focus on goddess worship that drew Brennan's husband, 52-year-old Martin Anthony, into a Wiccan coven.
Neopagans observe rituals for healing, divination, marriage, lunar and solar cycles and the passage of time. Christian holidays, the timing and customs, have roots in pagan tradition.
As for neopagan ethics, the Wiccan Rede, a commonly quoted saying, is simply: "As long as it harms none, do what you will."
What has kept many Wiccans and other neopagans in the broom closet, a common quip, is the stereotype of them as practitioners of such dark arts as Satan worship and blood sacrifices.
"Pagans are not devil worshipers," McColman wrote in "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Paganism."
"Why would the members of one religion worship the bad guy of another religion?"
Still perceived as spooky or kooky
Ritual animal sacrifice, although practiced by the ancients, including Hebrews in biblical times, is not a mainstream practice of neopagans, Jews or Christians, McCol man said.
Nevertheless, a city inspector recently came by Witches Brew to inquire whether the shop boiled any animal parts on the premises, Kantis Walter said.
"We don't do that," Kantis said as she mixed up an almond-flavored Italian soda.
It is the nonjudgmental nature of pagans that drew her to them, Kantis said, yet she is aware other religious Americans still perceive them as either spooky or kooky.
"We're pretty normal people," Kantis said, "but my grandmother still hands me a rosary every time she sees me."
Brennan and Anthony also serve as state prison chaplains. Their services are in demand by 500 self-identified pagans who account for 2 percent of the state prison population. Inmate neopagans include Wiccans, druids and the Asatru, who worship Odin and other Norse gods. In prisons especially, the Asatru can be identified with Nazis, skinheads, patriarchy and racism, yet there are pure forms, Brennan said, which focus on positives — self-empowerment and tribal loyalty — rather than white supremacy.
Every movement has its mainstream and its deviant elements, Brennan said.
The Walters' community center is wholesome family entertainment most of the time, Jesse and Kantis say.
The center hosts Tarot card and astrology readings, pagan meet-ups that typically attract 20 or more, role-playing card games, Fetish Fridays, a book club, Wicca Knitting Moms, Witches' Sewing Circle, mead- and jewelry-making classes, drumming circles and more.
"It's important to have a spiritual path that's working for you," Brennan said. "We all need a connection to something greater than ourselves."
Witches practice magic, Brennan said, "but the only thing you can really change is yourself."
“Pagan” was the Roman’s word for “country bumpkin” or “redneck”.........
Let’s start referring to enviro-wackos as “neo-pagans”.
““Pagan” was the Roman’s word for “country bumpkin” or “redneck”.........”
This-is-not-a-biker-thread ping.
:)
Designer, Have It YOUR Way, “religions” have become chic this millennium.
Believing in anything without evidence is foolishness. One man’s magic is as good as another’s.
You heathen!...............
Watch out for the Paleopagans! They’re always accusing the the Neopagans of being the same old Christians in a different guise.
Outlaw chariot rider?
Buy some vestments at Almay's and invent your own religion.
I know a number of pagans, in three different groves or covens, and they all have a few things in common --
1. They make it up as they go along. They take bits and pieces from Egyptian, Norse, Greek and Roman mythology and just mix it all together. The basic framework was invented in the 1920s by an Englishman named Gardiner.
2. They tend to be countercultural or anticultural and live pretty much hand to mouth. Of all the pagans I know, only one has what you would call a regular job. The rest tend to be rather well educated (some with advanced degrees) but they work at marginal jobs if they work at all.
3. Their religion is quite convenient in that it doesn't interfere with anything they want to do. They claim to be peaceful, but way too many of them put curses on other people and they quarrel an awful lot among themselves. You ask them about the 'rule of three' (i.e. that anything bad they do to somebody else will come back on them threefold) and they just say, 'well, I'm willing to accept the karma.'
Unfortunately they con starry-eyed young things (especially girls) into the whole racket.
I hope somebody will tell me this isn't typical of pagans, but my sample leans pretty hard in that direction.
It sure seems like time to become a Catholic.
Founded by Harlius Son of David............
Been there, done that, eventually realized I looked and acted like a giddy retard.
Slapped myself back into reality and returned to that “old repressive, patriarchal” dude YHWH’s flock.
[eh...everybody’s entitled to be young and stupid...but most people grow out of it]
The upshot is that most people *still* think I’m “weird/spooky/scary”.
Maybe it’s just *me*.....:))
I was a monopolypantheisticanimistic pagan.
[Sing that to the Mary Poppin’s tune]....:)
Gerald Gardiner is invoked here but the main man was Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) who can be filed in the same drawer as Jim Jones and Anton LaVey in that he was basically a nutcase cult leader who saw this as a cool way to make money and bang a lot of chicks.
As stated, nobody knows how the ancient druids practised. Such descriptions as there are come from the ancient romans and early christian missionaries, neither of which can be considered unprejudiced observers.
Just more new-agey, madonna-style, cafeteria/smorgasbord religion. Certainly not the kind that makes any demands on the practicioner.
You nailed it.
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