Tag: Heathen

Cults and Paganism: Risk Factors

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When I got into researching cults and trying to develop a working idea of what that looks like in a pagan context, I found very few anecdotes that confirmed my suspicion, but the number was not zero. The podcast Was I In a Cult? had an episode involving a Heathen-flavored, witchy cult, for one, and Storm Faerywulf has also written on this issue in The Wild Hunt.

And yet, even with that confirmation, I still felt that most of the people who understood (or claimed to understand) the general mechanisms of cults didn’t seem to be able to apply them to the specifics of the pagan experience, and this gulf made it difficult for those familiar with the specifics of the pagan experience to apply those generalities. I was left with the impression that the anti-cult movements are not equipped for the reality of specifically neopagan cults because of biases, ignorance, and bad scholarly habits.

That said, I think the neopagan community isn’t well-equipped for the reality of cults at all because of various factors common across our subcultures.

We think it can’t happen here (and we’re wrong)

I feel comfortable asserting that one of the key draws to pagan practices, as practitioners are overwhelmingly converts, is an implicit promise of freedom. Most pagans are raised in a different religion and then leave because they’ve already suffered excessive control and constraint. They end up becoming pagans after seeking something that satisfies their individual need for faith while being (or at least, seeming) less structured and hierarchical, and therefore emotionally safer. This isn’t nothing! I still believe that this tendency in pagan traditions is a benefit, and not a detriment, as it addresses a very real need.

The peril is in the assumption that this is not a simple tendency but rather an essential and fixed quality of paganism. It’s understandable, even logical, to have that association with a sense of freedom if that’s been your experience.

And, yet, while many are able to correctly recognize that “love and light” mentalities are often just a shield for secretly vicious beliefs and actions, that starry-eyed surrender to an unaccountable Universe is spiritual bypassing and a refusal to push for a better here-and-now…I feel that we fail to recognize the same mechanisms at play in other forms and other contexts, as in the tyranny of structurelessness I have continually seen crop up time and time again across multiple group settings geared towards pagans—cults or otherwise. The phrase “tyranny of structurelessness” originates from an essay by Joreen, and while she initially applies the analysis to consciousness-raising groups, her point stands in reference to paganism: In the absence of a formal structure, the unspoken attribution of authority will fall along lines of bias and prejudice, and of personal alliances. This comes at the expense of granting credibility on merit grounds (such as based on verifiable wisdom or achievement) or those which are more conducive to achieving stated goals.

In other words, it’s a ripe environment for the charismatic authority that is often so central to the development of high-control and high-demand groups. And when it is difficult to clearly identify what has gone wrong and why, it is harder to combat it.

Charismatic authority is our default (and we like it that way)

I should note that “charismatic” in this sense is a label arrived at by process of elimination when you are using Max Weber’s tripartite model, the other two options being traditional authority (inherited through lineage) and rational-legal authority (bestowed by a government). It does not inherently imply that leaders possess charism (though many pagans claim to have it) let alone rizz to make up for a lack of intellectual rigor or actual expertise. A leader can be blockheaded and charmless but will get away with it by virtue of just getting there first.

This makes it all the more easy to be believed if you happen to be peddling absolute bullshit, because in this scenario you’ve got a head start of years, if not decades. This is a key part of why the newness of a religious movement influences the vulnerability for it to develop into a cult.

As you might also find time and time again while researching cults within other traditions, lay-leadership is also not a protective factor against the development of cults.

Discernment is for assholes

I can say for my part that there are several times where I have made the decision to simply accept what a trusted person tells me, probably as a matter of what I’ll call Discernment Fatigue. I like to think that I value discernment, and, when you are exposed to an idea by people you trust and there isn’t accessible information to counter it or lend it nuance, it is easier to simply accept that idea as presented. Many of these ideas have, by their nature, been difficult-to-impossible to apply the skill of discernment to.

There are other barriers to applying the skill of discernment which I’ve noticed: Because we so often only have one another, because many of us have experienced religions with a more obvious top-down structure, because we often have higher rates of trauma (getting to that), we are more likely to feel as though our spiritual reality is under attack and particularly vulnerable when confronted by disbelief or lack of validation within our communities.

People who insist on outsourcing the responsibility for a sense of control and who depend on compliance from others to protect their feelings tend to be excitable assholes. Pushing back on someone with this mindset, even when justified, tends to trigger efforts to shut down and pile on.

If all experiences are valid (or else), or if the social norm is to assume validity of experience as a default (or else) and we allow lashing out at those who don’t fall in line, then we are not in an environment where the safeguards that protect against indoctrination are even allowed to function. If we are hostile to disagreement or any kind of (detectable) structure, we are more vulnerable to subtler, or more superficially appealing, forms of control.

Higher rates of trauma

As my therapist continually reminds me when I vent about pagan drama in their office: There is a lot of trauma in the pagan community.

People who become involved with cults are seeking to have very real needs met and see what is offered to them as a viable means to do it.

Often a sense of community is a massive factor in tolerating unhealthy groups. You develop a sense of solidarity and even genuine emotional connection by being in the company of people who require very little explanation to understand what you have to say. A social group, however dysfunctional, still provides some sense of emotional and material support. Being left without these things by removing yourself can be terrifying. We are social beings and we belong to a social species.

The other half of the trauma component is that trauma inflicted through more obvious harm still creates this openness—yes, the openness to ecstatic experience; yes, the drive to seek relevant truths that lie outside of measurable and concrete reality…but also vulnerability to further harm. Humans are a social species, but we are also a highly adaptable species. If we are forced to survive and adapt in an environment where we are subjected to abnormal and inhumane treatment over a prolonged period—for example, parental abuse, bullying, social rejection or IPV—then we are forced to adapt to an environment where we cannot afford to recognize and react to mistreatment, or we become unable to recognize mistreatment and control exerted in ways that are unfamiliar to us, as we were not forced to attune to it.

For as long as it feels plausible that it could be worse elsewhere, there is motivation to linger where you shouldn’t.

Small population size

Going by the 2013 Heathen census (pains me to cite Seigfried, but he’s the one who has any data to offer), Heathens number at an optimistic upper estimate of a little over 40 thousand worldwide. (I think this number is wildly unrealistic, though.) Wikipedia says there’s probably around 60 thousand druids, but that this number is probably too low to reflect the actual number of practitioners, as many censuses don’t offer this as a listed option. Wikipedia’s article on Wicca says the median estimate of adherents worldwide is 800 thousand. It depends on the region, but in America, which is fertile ground for the development of religious movements, the cumulative practicing population of all pagan traditions is an estimated 1.5 million—0.004% of the country’s population. Four out of every one-thousand. Wicca, despite being one of the more populous pagan traditions, and the one that is the most likely to have dedicated resources, is still small enough to fall under the radar.

These numbers also don’t tell us about regional density; generally pagans are going to find themselves pretty geographically scattered.

Pagans, then, have fewer options for group worship available to them from the start, with many operating solitarily offline due to that absence, or from recognizing that available options are not up to par. Those opting against a solitary practice are then more vulnerable if the settings for group education and ceremony are operated or occupied by high-control groups, who use these settings for promotion and recruitment.

Additionally, because newer and smaller religions are going to have to make do with limited resources and places to practice any kind of worship or ritual, things that would ordinarily serve as warning signs might be harder to spot. Things like obsessing over expansion and growth, gathering resources, or using volunteer labor to get things done, is going to either be less obvious or just be unavoidable. Many pagan organizations genuinely don’t have the means to operate otherwise, but it makes it easier to overuse those resources. Tighter control of information is easily waved away by the fact that there’s a limited number of people with the skill and motivation to adapt scholarship to something usable for a religious practice (for more historically grounded traditions), or the fact that a new religion by necessity will have to build its lore just like it builds its following. Unfortunately, this also makes it much easier to outright lie to recruits and adherents.

Fewer potential members to start with also translates to fewer defectors, because defection is that much more inherently costly. Those whose only options are solitary practice or a dysfunctional community, and who value community access highly enough to tolerate bullshit, are forced to settle. This is a simple numbers thing but it’s also a matter of lacking other options. Even if the concentration of defectors is comparatively high, there’s still not a strength in numbers. Smaller groups mean that those who speak out about their experience are much easier to identify and target for mistreatment. When leaving these groups, there is the immediate threat of isolation, and the lingering threat of harassment and dead-agenting to try and ensure the isolation continues, and it is that much easier to achieve.

Paganism is already pre-emptively stigmatized by the anti-cult movements

One of the frustrations I had when I first got “cult vibes” from a group and was trying to assess the situation was that one of the lists I looked at had this fuckery:

Mind-numbing techniques (such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, debilitating work routines) are used to suppress doubts about the group and its leader(s).

I remember being on a voice chat and saying, “no, meditation or chanting is just normal fucking ritual!” While I’ve since reached the conclusion that the group in question was a cult after all, I stand by my initial reaction. These aren’t comparable activities to struggle sessions, or the Synanon Game, or exhausting labor. Context matters. Excessive use would fit the bill, but that’s not what’s being said.

For my part, I think rune intonations are dumb as hell, but every Heathen group I’ve done ritual with in North America does it. Yes, it was for trying to induce a change in mental state in preparation for ritual. It was also normal. Doing ritual and intentionally cultivating a specific headspace for it is, honest to goodness, normal.

But it’s not recognized as normal because “normal” is usually a concept that structurally excludes pagans by design.

The anti-cult movement first originated in Christian concerns with keeping heterodoxy and eclecticism contained. The focus is not on the authoritarianism that we now recognize that defines a cult, but on deviance from a permitted norm. Even ostensibly non-Christian viewpoints on what defines a cult often bypass concerns about power and mistreatment and focus on what they just think is weird. When I peeked at Steven Hassan’s site out of curiosity (because I do not like this dude) and saw he had an open study, I peeked at it out of curiosity and discovered that in the dropdown list of several NRMs with highly specific names, many of them much smaller in membership size even than most neo-pagan traditions, “paganism” was one singular option. The entire umbrella, just shoved in there with 3HO and the Unification Church.

In short, we’re usually forced into a position where we are viewed with enough suspicion, by enough of the population, that we have to reassure people that we’re not inherently in cults solely on the grounds of having “weird” beliefs. I’ve noticed that we often appeal to respectability in response to this, but I wish we didn’t. We have the right to believe weird things, and to do weird things, so long as we are ethical about it. But public perception insists on conflating Weird with unethical. It’s religious stranger danger.

Because of all of this, speaking to the reality that cults do actually develop within neopagan traditions is threatening in a society that is already hostile to us, and which is ignorant of what actually defines these groups in opposition to viable religious movements.

The anti-cult movements and pop-wisdom about cults have issues completely unrelated to paganism

The secular anti-cult movement has also been kind of a shitshow, and much of the public objection to cults, when they are not focused on the weirdness, are largely focused on the idea that you’d have to be stupid to end up in one, or that only certain kinds of people join them.

Trustworthy and compassionate research on cults (to the extent that it does exist) doesn’t support this perception. Per ICSA:

There is no “personality profile” of people who become involved in cults. All kinds of people become involved for all kinds of reasons. Although some cult members may have had psychological problems before joining their groups, the majority were psychologically normal before becoming affiliated with a cultic group.

Media on cults are often reductive, focused on presenting a simplistic typology or creating a spectacle. Followers are dehumanized all over again by being turned into zoo animals for the true crime demographic that’s bored of serial killers. The How To Become a Cult Leader series on Netflix was guilty of this, which disappointed me greatly because it provided a lot more historical background than I would have found on my own. The more visible cult “experts” seem more like opportunistic grifters peddling tiresome “dark triad” pseudopsychology. It does not help my impression of them that they, themselves, often have an outsized sense of authority, expensive consulting and speaking fees, and a disconcertingly invested and uncritical following.

In both the Christian and secular anti-cult movements, and in the popular perception of cults, the language is intense, dramatic, almost cartoonish: Lovebombing, brainwashing, thought reform, mind control, deprogramming, etc., characterizing the experience of cult involvement (and departure from that involvement) as a tactical onslaught, an act of psychological warfare, rather than an extreme end result of what are actually very normal, natural human tendencies. Given the right motivations, any person can believe or do just about anything.

There have been multiple attempts to redefine and rehabilitate “brainwashing” as a concept, but no amount of semantic drift will remedy the fact that “brainwashing” as a theory suffers from a simultaneous absence of evidence and evidence of absence.

Most troubling of all to me, the theory really only serves to try and relieve the anxiety of witnessing outlandish behavior and struggling to reconcile it with the assumption of sanity we grant other people. It serves to neutralize the threat of having to acknowledge that they, too, could fall into something like this organically, without a conscious scheme, and without external force. It reflects, and protects, an ignorance of how people actually work.

The willful ignorance of this reality is load bearing: It allows uninvolved people to pat themselves on the back and tell themselves they’d never be the kind of person to wind up in a cult, and further entrenches people who are involved and insults people who have successfully ended their involvement.

I think this also further explains the popularity of “dark triad” pop-psych in the anti-cult movement, which provides an efficient shorthand with which to label leaders and recruiters as abnormally powerful and/or abnormally evil, while relying on ableism. It creates an Other with an aura of academic structure to justify it.

All of this also ignores that most manipulation is quite mundane. Boring, even. I doubt that most cult leaders are consciously scheming to overtake someone to the degree they’re assumed to, given how little insight I have observed in people given to manipulative behavior in general. Manipulation and control are not the observable symptoms of some inhuman, bone-deep evil, but rather very human behaviors that get results at the expense of the target’s better interests, and the intensification and escalation of control is the result of a feedback loop when those behaviors are still rewarded.

This doesn’t make it any less awful. But cult leaders, recruiters, and committed adherents are quite often acting out of sincere belief in the value of their cause, and when they are successful it registers as confirmation of that perceived righteousness. When they are unsuccessful, it strengthens their sense of solidarity with their group.

None of this is to place blame on those who find themselves in a cult situation and realize they need to get out, but rather to examine various factors that create or increase vulnerability. Usually, those who engage in manipulation will shop for prospects and abandon the ones who are too difficult. The recruitment process of high control groups is one of filtering, as is testing the waters and escalating control. (Check out the linked paper by Corvaglia below.) Those who stay after this process, who are the most available, most willing, most trusting, are the ones who are the easiest to control, and they become the people who are the most at risk if a cult takes a darker turn. There is no humane way to pull someone out before they’re ready, and people’s tolerances for bullshit are wildly diverse. Some people may never be ready.

I don’t think the solution is to place hard restrictions on what is acceptable in religious groups, or to introduce standardized controls about how religious groups ought to operate. Any time those restrictions come into play, it is religious minorities who are harmed first, and operating humanely isn’t enough to protect them. Additionally, I find myself doubting that it would do much good for the pagan community to join or create our own anti-cult movement, for basically the same reasons.

The closest thing to a solution that I can suggest is education, inoculation, and cultivating resilience. How, I’m not sure, because there’s a fear lurking in the back of my mind that a trend in offering guidance on that may in itself become a tactic that increases vulnerability. Anyone showing up claiming to have all the answers warrants suspicion. That’s the point.

And I don’t have the answers—I don’t claim to be an expert, nor do I ever want to be viewed as one. I’m just a guy who sees shit and thinks really hard about it.

Some stuff I found useful, which you might find interesting:

Cults and Persuasion: Submission as Preference Shifting, by Luigi Corvaglia

A list of vulnerable characteristics, by Robert Fellows

Common myths and misconceptions about cults and coercive groups, from ICSA

INFORM, or the Information Network Focus on Religious Movements, which aims to provide balanced information on various movements, some of which are generally recognized as cults, and to act as mediators between members of these movements and concerned outsiders

Cults and Paganism: Warning Signs

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The defining features of a cult are very much earthly—the nature of the interpersonal dynamics, the presence of hierarchy, and observable traits of totalism or authoritarianism, entitlement, and intrusions on the participant’s ability to interact with broader society. (e.g. isolation, elitism, etc.)

This list is based on various other checklists that already exist, but modified for the pagan context. You will not find, for example, “meditation and chanting” anywhere on this list even though it often appears on others, because those are literally just normal religious practices. Frustratingly, the judgement of whether a group is a cult cannot be called objectively except in really flagrant instances.

The presence of one or two traits listed here does not inherently mean a group is a cult, nor does the absence of listed traits absolve a group from that designation if others are present.

The group has a focus on gaining membership

What this can look like:

  • The group may make a point to show up at every event they can get into
  • The group may find ways to insert itself into the broader community to secure respectability or gain recruitment opportunities
  • Leaders or members leverage social contexts in which they have influence and authority to promote their group
  • The group’s obsession with growth may result in social pressure to have children to raise in the religion, despite the fact that pagan religions primarily grow through voluntary conversions by adolescents and adults

The group is weird about work and money.

What this can look like:

  • The group has a focus on making money that is not justified by normal operating expenses
  • There is no clarity about income or expenditures, OR,
  • There are clear sources of income, but no transparency about how the money is spent
  • The group claims to be a non-profit while failing to adhere to legal and tax requirements for this status
  • Members of the group may be expected to work to generate income for the group, without compensation
  • Members may be expected to volunteer excessively

Pagan groups, as a rule, tend to be small and under-resourced and therefore rely on volunteering and donations to function, so this one is harder to suss out. Volunteering responsibility may also be unevenly distributed, meaning the workload is not equally obvious between two different members.

The demands of the group are unreasonable and unsustainable, or becoming so.

What this can look like:

  • The number of events or holidays increases, while demanding the same effort as established ones
  • “New” gods show up, who suddenly require equivalent ceremony and worship as ones already established in the practice
  • Leadership starts a huge amount of projects, and expects members to make them happen
  • Leadership weaponizes their membership in personal conflicts and grievances
  • Commitments to the group result in intrusions upon basic self care, like adequate food or sleep
  • Members who have commitments that keep them from the group (e.g. childcare, health issues, work) are deprioritized or abandoned
  • Rituals may take all day and even run late into the night, outside of a multi-day festival setting
  • Events are scheduled so close together or require so much much prep work that there isn’t sufficient time to sleep
  • Leadership may try to dictate what members wear to demonstrate group identity, in the absence of a legitimate cultural or historical basis for even suggesting a dress code

Even if there is no explicit or clearly intentional restriction on self care or bodily autonomy, a pattern of intrusion is a problem.

Authority is not based on actual relevant skills, experience, or qualifications.

What this can look like:

  • Authority tends to be decided by who gets there first, instead of actual knowledge
  • Authority seems to consistently emerge from the perception of authority
  • If a leader does have other, worldly qualifications they may be weaponized, or misrepresented if they’re irrelevant; e.g. a title from a degree in an unrelated field, or an ordination from an undisclosed organization
  • Authority figures become extremely defensive when their qualifications are questioned, responding with anger or punishment instead of providing proof

Remember, anyone can fill out a form with an organization like the ULC or Church of Gnome. I would know, I’m ordained by both. (Even my dead dog is posthumously ordained through Church of Gnome.)

Information provided for the practice of the religion is restricted, specious or false.

What this can look like:

  • Sources of information are opaque and narrow
  • Legitimacy of claims originates from the claimant, and not from the content of the claim
  • Efforts to verify claims against the sources supposedly cited may lead to dead ends or contradictory information
  • Real sources have been misinterpreted, misrepresented, or woozled to make them suitable for the group’s use
  • Poor sources are excused or defended, while higher quality sources that undermine the group’s message and goals are dismissed
  • There is more fakelore than folklore or mythology
  • Questions about sources or citations are met with defensiveness, and justifications for the lack of transparency are dubious
  • Novel interpretations may be ret-conned as always having been true, so that information seems internally consistent when it isn’t
  • Leadership may often “discover” new information that cannot be checked against other sources, while denying it is UPG or simply a new idea
  • Information is loaded with jargon to create the illusion of deeper knowledge, really serving to hide lack of actual knowledge; this also sorts members into in-group and out-group categories based on their ability to use it

Cutting off access to external information entirely is difficult in neopaganism, as many of us interact through pan-pagan events and groups, and through the internet. However, poisoning contradictory information is much more doable.

Nonbelievers, critics and former members are treated with hostility.

What this can look like:

  • Members who leave voluntarily, without being ejected, are not considered to have valid, legitimate reasons for doing so
  • Those who leave the group voluntarily may be described as “looking for problems,” “persecuting” the group, uncommitted, etc. or retroactively labeled as having been “removed.”
  • Departures from the group tend to be abrupt or explosive, as a symptom of the impossibility of leaving on good terms. Members who want to leave but feel they cannot do so, due to a lack of a “legitimate” way out, may try to force themselves to stay until they hit a breaking point
  • Oaths or pledges taken with the group, if they are a requirement for membership, are not voided when the member leaves, allowing for labeling them as oathbreakers
  • Contact with defectors from the group may or may not be explicitly disallowed, but there is at least an observable, common attitude that they are not worth maintaining contact with. Remaining members may proactively avoid, shun or block those who leave
  • Defectors and detractors may be subjected to surveillance, stalking, harassment, targeted reputational harm, brigading, etc. to ensure they do not speak about the group in unapproved ways, or to punish them for doing so

There is no functioning accountability structure.

What this can look like:

  • Leadership is not accountable to membership
  • When an accountability structure does exist, it is used frivolously or vexatiously as a way to control membership or detractors, rather than disciplining actual misbehavior
  • External accountability structures such as the law or public opinion may also be weaponized, e.g. SLAPP suits, smear campaigns
  • Members who are favored by leadership may be spared from any accountability structure that exists, at the expense of concerned but disfavored members
  • Active members who still hold a favorable opinion of the group may also be expected to agree to some form of monitoring, or the group has a snitch culture

The group is elitist.

What this can look like:

  • The group considers it normal and acceptable for someone to make claims on behalf of a deity, in a way that imposes on another person. E.g. “Loki wants you to do this.”
  • Similarly, claims of deity or spirit communication lead to attribution of authority that do not consider the claimant’s human qualifications or skills
  • The group considers it normal and acceptable for major prophetic claims to be made, which imply a greater need for reverence or obedience, or that the group is favored
  • The group views itself as the primary, if not sole, legitimate representative of a deity or pantheon
  • Practice of the tradition by former members or outsiders not currently being recruited, without the permission of the core group, is frowned upon or disallowed
  • The group has an inner circle, official or unofficial, whose responsibilities do not reflect legitimate needs for running an organization
  • The inner circle may be granted privileges and some degree of authority not available to general membership
  • The inner circle may also be assigned the groups’s dirty work, e.g. monitoring those who have left, attacking perceived enemies of the group, etc.

What’s the difference between a shitty pagan group and a pagan cult?

In a shitty pagan group that is just a shitty pagan group, you will obviously have a ton of dysfunction to contend with, but:

  • Shitty groups that are just shitty groups do not aggressively self-promote
  • Bad information gets debunked, if rudely
  • You still have some expectation of privacy
  • Harassment, when it happens, is not perpetrated for the perceived benefit of the group
  • If you’re suffering reputational harm because of the group, it’s from staying, not leaving
  • If you’re losing sleep, it’s because of conflict stressing you out, not from people keeping sleep from you
  • Anything resembling an “inner circle” is probably something like a useless moderation team or organizational board
  • The shittiness primarily stays in the group
  • It’s over when you leave

Cults and Paganism: We Need to Talk About It, Actually

FalkabarnLeave a comment

This bugbear starts with Mother God.

I first learned about Love Has Won while watching Hospice Nurse Julie’s channel, which then led me over to Ask a Mortician’s video on the discovery of Amy Carlson’s remains, which led me over to watching the entire Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God docuseries in one sitting.

One thing that kept coming to mind as I watched was how ordinary the thought process of Amy’s adherents seemed. Some of their beliefs are bog standard in the New Age movements (even the unhinged ones, especially the unhinged ones), but more importantly their methods of arriving at a conclusion struck me as something that wouldn’t have seemed even slightly out of place in the average pagan group. One example that stuck out to me was Archaiea Hope describing herself praying to the angels for guidance on how to assist Mom, and receiving her confirmation in the form of a phone notification—not the content of the notification, but the timing. The “ding-ding” was enough.

There’s a lot I could say about errors in discernment here, but it’s not really the core point. It got me wondering about the likelihood of cults as a phenomenon within neo-paganism, considering its proximity and extensive overlap with New Age, especially having witnessed a handful of groups’ dynamics decaying into something that would be better described as a cult than an ordinary religious group.

Of course, when the topic of cults does come up in a pagan social setting it’s a touchy subject at best, and the response is often (honestly earned) defensiveness because of the stigma around pagan religions in general, often employing a well-ackshully response of splitting hairs over the modern usage of the word “cult” and the academic, English derivation of the Latin cultus. The attitude often seems to be that cult accusations shouldn’t be granted any real seriousness.

Granted, cult vs. cultus is not a minor distinction to want to make. People looking for historical precedent to guide a modern practice would very much want to find a cult of [insert deity here]. A historical cult of Odin certainly wouldn’t imply a social environment that leads to shit like inoculating takeout salads with e. coli to swing a local election, or the cops finding your goði’s emaciated corpse in some back room wrapped in string lights. Hopefully.

I think it’s also worth mentioning here that death is actually a very rare outcome of cult activity and it tends to happen in rather specific circumstances. The downfalls of the People’s Temple, Heaven’s Gate, and Aum Shinrikyo became public sensations because they were abnormal. The great majority of groups who meet the criteria of cults get by without anybody dying an unnatural death.

While raising these concerns, though, I am not referring to the historical cultus. We are modern people, semantic drift happens, connotational meanings of words influence everyday usage more often than denotational meanings, and at the end of the day I just really didn’t want to type “high-control/high-demand group” or “HCHDG” over and over while I was drafting a post on my phone. Also, I have noticed—though anecdotal observation can only count for so much—that people who like to quibble over historical-“cultus” vs. modern-pejorative-“cult” are prone to being kinda modern-pejorative-culty themselves. I’m not interested in humoring that crowd.

So, for the purpose of this series, “cult” should be taken to mean “high-control and/or high-demand group, where belief or ideology are the primary draw.” This borrows from Zablocki’s definition, but drops his prerequisite for unquestioning obedience as a feature, as obedience can still very easily happen in tandem with doubt. Ask anyone who thinks their parents, teachers or bosses are full of shit but still demonstrates obedience or loyalty. It sidesteps various other definitions entirely because the anti-cult movements are rife with moral entrepreneurs whose judgement I do not trust. I also don’t find the idea of unquestioning obedience to be truthful or useful even when specifically describing an ideology-centric, high control, high demand group. Many people who leave cults describe being in a stage where they were mentally checked out from the group but had not yet left—this doesn’t mean the group is not a cult, or that members on their way out cease to experience harmful influence. You can very much be influenced by false information that you don’t actually believe in, and solidifying disbelief into something actionable can take significant time and effort.

This is also to maintain a distinction between cults-as-in-HCHDGs and New Religious Movements in general, which many writers in both the self-described “anti-cult” camp and those who would be written off by the former as “cult apologists” insist on conflating—the former dismissing all NRMs as cults, the latter overcorrecting in response to otherwise valid concerns about “cult” as a snarl word.

I think this conflation is harmful, and honestly I consider it downright violent when it comes from the “anti-cult” camp, because it reflects motivations more tied up in constraining heterodoxy and punishing deviance than it does in analyzing the workings of these groups, and discovering solutions for people harmed by cults. Neopaganisms are new religious movements, even despite being historically inspired. The great majority of pagan groups are also not cults.

But, because no belief system is safe from the development of systems of extreme control, some are. We need practical language to discuss them, and we need to discuss them. I have scrounged extensively and only found a small handful of people publicly talking about having been in ideolgically-pagan cults, but the number is not zero. One would hope that this means the incidence is rather low, but another observation that I’ve made while looking at online spaces geared towards cult survivors of all stripes is that far fewer people explicitly identify which groups they were part of than I expected, or sometimes even the belief systems of these cults.

I have been a Heathen since late 2012, and in that time I have observed social norms in pagan circles that lend themselves to the development of a high-control dynamic, and which increase the risk of these developments going unnoticed.

I’ve also been alive for 30+ years and I’ve seen how common it is for people to scramble for control irrespective of ideology. Further, the impact left by the early days of the anti-cult movements (plural), and pop-wisdom about cults, is such that pagans are more likely to be unfairly accused of cult involvement even when they aren’t. Information meant to be educational also isn’t tailored to pagan norms and needs. Even the more generalized educational material on cults is written in a way that basically treats pagans like they don’t exist, and that’s when it manages not to be intentionally hostile to us, or doesn’t treat Christianity or culturally-Christian secularism as an aspirational default. 

The core idea to remember is that it is not beliefs that make a cult—being weird is not some moral failure and doesn’t inherently lead to being controlling, and the norms of the overculture should not be used as a measure of the validity of the belief systems of  those who fall outside of it.

And anyway, you might find that most cults’ actual theologies are shockingly boring and are not sufficient on their own to explain the degree of control exerted within. Aliens in the architecture do not a cult make—although a study by Asbjørn Dyrendal and Leif Kennair does suggest that believing in aliens does tend to correlate just a bit with conspiracy-mindedness, which also in turn tends to correlate with authoritarianism. Thankfully the study also does seem to confirm the common belief that pagans are overall more egalitarian.

So, maybe, like, squint a little if aliens are involved, I guess.

Posts:

Warning Signs (goes live July 31st)

Subcultural Risk Factors (goes live Aug 1st)

Comment settings on the blog were adjusted a few months ago, and comments will require review if they contain certain filtered words. I still see filtered comments.

Do not openly speculate about which pagan groups are cults in my comment section. Comments that do so will be deleted on sight, as some of these groups reportedly monitor discussion about them and harass critics.

Pledging: Five Years In

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This past weekend marks five years since I made my five-year pledge, which means the time limit on the pledge has closed.

I didn’t satisfy the requirements in full, though I did satisfy it partially, and the partial stuff I did, I feel like I did reasonably well. There was no agreed-upon consequences for incomplete compliance. I don’t know what happens next.

To review, as was mentioned in the one-year post, these were the terms I was supposed to adhere to. Italicized are the ones I feel I did well:

  • Oath ring must be worn during waking hours, (leading up to Trothmoot 2019, this became “any time I don’t have a compelling reason to remove it,” and I wore it basically 24/7 after that.)
  • Religious jewelry should also be worn under similar circumstances.
  • Altars must be cleaned properly at least once per month.
  • Celebrate all major heathen holidays with a proven historical basis, plus Lokabrenna.
  • I must make a concerted effort to pursue ordination.
  • I must participate in and contribute to my local Heathen community, to the best of my ability.
  • I must continue studying the lore and language, and do any further research that will improve my service to my gods and my religious community.
  • No cutting hair until ordination. (This was added later.)

I did not get ordained through—my own words—”concerted effort.” I did get ordained through the ULC. Case law has since changed, making my ordination actually worth something in the state of Pennsylvania. Hooray. But I have been ordained neither through the Troth, nor through my kindred, which were the other two avenues available to me.

(I could have also gotten ordained through TAC but lol, lmao, fuck that.)

Did I assist my community to the best of my ability? Maybe? Yes. I should probably say “yes,” because in that time frame was when Seasons of Transition and Jarðarblót (and then later the version that hybridizes it with Sigrblót) came about. But, “my community” and “the best of my ability” are constantly shifting targets, even locally. I think it’s safe to say that the local community was well tended to, at least, though it’s hard to measure that by any metric beyond vibes.

Did I keep studying the lore and language? Uh. No. Yes, but no. I did not keep my nose stuck in books like I had planned and hoped. I did not read starter guides to Heathenry with any real commitment. I dragged my feet so hard with Heathen Essentials that the curriculum was completely rewritten by the time I’d finished unit one. I attempted to read some of those guides, even the ones by people I knew (or assumed) I agreed with based on our everyday conversations, and ended up really…kind of hating them. A lot. So much.

Basically, nobody has any business bitching about recons if they insist on defining reconstructionism as fundamentalism.

What I ended up doing, what has ended up feeling vastly more relevant, was getting into capital-T-theory. You can tell me all you like about what the lore says about Frigg. And you should, because I always need the refresher. (Especially now, trying to incorporate her into my Sigrblót ritual for this year.) But nothing has ever described her, and her function, and her meaning and her relevance to humanity, anywhere near as well as Angela Davis did in chapter 13 of Women, Race and Class. And Angela Davis never mentioned her by name. Angela Davis literally was not thinking of her. The Secret Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben spoke to how human trees are, or perhaps to how tree-like humans are, or were, or have forgotten how to be, in a way that put the breath and the blood and the color back into the metaphor of Ask and Embla. This was not lore and language research, but at least it was research that helped me try and serve the community.

Right now, my collar and oath ring are sitting on the altar. The collar came off first, admittedly just for the practical reason that the maille was trapping mineral wool and cotton fluff that fell on me while I was helping friends rip out their old ceiling, and it itched. The cuff came off on the 26th of March, because I realized I had hit the five-year mark and it just…felt like time. Its initial purpose has been served. Soon, I guess I’ll just have to have something resembling an actual conversation with Loki about where we’re at. Even with the pledge, even with trying to maintain compliance, I’ve been distant. I just haven’t felt super motivated to Be Heathen.

I feel very tempted to blame how fucking riddled with influencers the Heathen scene has always been, and how it seems to be constantly getting worse. I feel very justified in this temptation. I basically cannot tolerate interacting with other Heathens online anymore and it’s not a denominational thing. I hate feeling like my practice is a product. Even when I do have things to report, I like to believe that I tend to keep them to myself until I’ve properly processed the sequence of events and have something genuinely helpful for the potential audience to hear.

(“Try it sometime!” I want to passive-aggressively screech, every fucking day.)

That’s not the only reason, though. I’m realizing something while hanging out over in the Tumblr Moomin fandom, in a niche where we are metaphorically gripping each other by the shoulders and somewhat more literally frothing at the mouth about how much of a dad Snufkin is. (Just…read Moominsummer Madness and you’ll understand.)

Talking about Loki simply doesn’t excite me the way it used to. The novelty is gone. The commentary is exhausting. The discourse is repetitive. I have lost my interest in hearing others express their perspective and experience of the divine. (With a notable, loving exception for Lea Svendsen’s Loki and Sigyn, which was a very enjoyable read literally from the first sentence.) I am tired of watching the same arguments continually play out, hearing the same stock phrases used in lieu of ever actually engaging with anything being said. Tired of expressing how fucking tired I am of these things.

The limerence has faded. I have settled in, and I have not learned to settle in as an appreciative lover might—though my dynamic with Loki is emphatically not romantic, and I have insisted from the start that it never will be.

More than once I have contemplated something resembling monasticism, but I think that I have the responsibility to be very much in the world. And what I am craving in that desire for something like operating as a nun or religious sibling is not an outward expression of deep devotion and duty, but rather something far less charming and far more selfish: Structure, importance, absolution from having to make decisions for myself.

Awful.

Over and over and over what I write in my prayer journal, which I do with less and less frequency, is that I wish I was doing more. I then proceed to never act on it. I am sitting on my ass demanding proof while seeking out fewer and fewer opportunities to have anything proven to me. I am functionally agnostic most days. It doesn’t feel like a tragedy, though I often feel like it should feel that way.

The goal of the pledge was to light a fire under my ass, and it certainly did for at least the first few years. I have gotten a lot done. I don’t know what it all means. I don’t know how much of it counts towards the goals that were set five years ago. I don’t know what happens as a result of what doesn’t count or what didn’t make the cut.

It feels like this ought to be sad. Seeing my bare wrist does feel sad, because I remember how uncomfortably full of love and energy I was when I bought it in an airport in Austin, Texas, back when the only other things I cared about were the loons in the Colorado river and the feral parakeets in the grass and the big, shiny grackles fighting over scraps of food on the sidewalk outside some overpriced cafe, where the only thing I remembered was the sweet potato fries and the complicated trash categories. Feeling the absence of the heavy weight of my collar that Goat made for me does feel sad.

I don’t know where we’re going from here. I feel like it must be standard to express excitement or anticipation for what happens next. But I have so little concept for what it will be, and admittedly, not as much interest as I wish I did. I don’t even know what to expect next. It all feels very formless.

Wealthy in Each Other’s Company

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For three years now, I’ve been hosting a ritual to Jörð on the Saturday before Earth Day.

Photo by Robert L. Schreiwer

At first, the motivation behind these rituals was a bit selfish. Finally realizing the severity of the climate crisis was crushing, which should be unsurprising given that it is literally the biggest threat ever posed to living things on this planet. I vividly remember laying face-down in the dry clay, alternately crying when lucid, and dissociating when not. Even a few minutes earlier I would have still found the phrase “dirt-worshipping Heathen” obnoxious, but I couldn’t exactly act like this wasn’t a fair accusation now.

The thing is, this existential fear isn’t new. It was only new to me. And the reason it was new to me was because whiteness and my family’s class status had insulated me from having to actually confront it. I can buy my life off the shelf if I so choose, enabled by colonial government and exploitative industry. This crisis has been ongoing for literally everyone else, for hundreds of years.

This sense of interconnection that the looming threat of climate change brought me should have been intuitive. But the world built on my behalf requires being separated from the earth. The comparatively new sense of a sprawling, tangled web of fate under my feet filled me with cold-muscled fear.

Like most people who crack under the strain of pretending to cooperate with absolute bullshit and feeling like everyone else knows something you don’t, I brought it to therapy. My therapist tried his damndest to instill some hope in me for life on earth—namely Lif and Lifthrasir as a metaphor for plastic-eating, thermophilic microbes, should they evolve in our absence. But none of this took away from the core fear that the world is ending for real.

In part because I already associated the events in ragnarök with the carbon cycle, I decided that the way to cope with my eco-anxiety would be through designing rituals again. This time, something heavily inspired by Völuspá.

Initially, what I had in mind had zero resemblance to the way I do Jarðarblót now. I had originally contemplated something theatrical, angry, and involving fake blood and scorn poles. I still have the unfinished papier-mâché horse head on a shelf in my closet. But eventually, something clicked.

Continue reading “Wealthy in Each Other’s Company” →

Why I Schedule Devotional Work

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Executive dysfunction sucks.

You can spend the entire day working and yet get nothing done. Either you work doggedly with no progress on a singular thing you keep drifting away from, or you get literally everything else done, but with nothing crossed off your actual to-do list to make you feel accomplished despite your clean house.

Case in point, while writing this post I made dinner, emptied the dish rack, painted my nails and then saw my post outline and kicked myself.

And then kept painting my nails, while being upset with myself, as if this was going to change anything.

I was diagnosed pretty early in the game with ADHD. If not much else, it helped me sit with that information long enough that I’m able to be at least a little self-compassionate about it.

However, this doesn’t stop me from getting frustrated if I’ve taken the steps to prevent getting sidetracked, and if I’ve tried to be disciplined (though I’ve got some contrarian ideas about discipline), and I still haven’t achieved what seems like it should be a simple task. Or, if I’ve wasted time trying to finish that task at the expense of other things I could have done.

If left to my own devices, I am not very good at figuring out how the Important/Urgent/Not Important/Not Urgent matrix looks with my life neatly sorted into it. I know perfectly well that “I don’t have to write that down, I’ll remember it” is a ridiculous lie, and I do it anyway. I spend more time overthinking how to optimize daily tasks instead of just getting them done.

Overthinking, for the record, is neither important nor urgent. But my anxiety doesn’t agree, and my ADHD means I don’t catch it and redirect like I ideally would.

The overlapping brain problems are definitely a factor in my struggle to get things done.

I have a limited tolerance for things being out of place in communal areas, I am constantly forgetful and easily sidetracked, and I have to strike a balance between compensating for that forgetfulness and learning to just leave things alone so I don’t start developing new compulsions. Everything from remembering to put lip balm in my pockets before leaving the house to keeping up with dishes to somehow singlehandedly halting the climate crisis (…well) feels equally pressing without a set schedule.

Overwhelm is immanent without structure. It’s also immanent if there’s too much of it.

When I see people share what their devotional practice looks like, the visible and easy to spot examples are often on a spontaneous basis, spurred by ecstatic experience or spiritual contact, or scheduled daily devotionals.

Logically, there’s a quiet spectrum between these two. A blend of spontaneous and regimented. Something more frequent than getting god-poked, and less frequent than a daily task.

But I don’t hear about them very often. Again, an abundance of logical explanations exist. Whatever is more common kind of goes without saying. We don’t announce every trip to the grocery store, or every time we hit the ATM, or every trip to go fetch the mail. They don’t stand out. So what isn’t typical is going to stand out when we talk about it online.

But that does have an effect on people. Media, which absolutely includes social media, influences and helps shape our concepts of what is normal.

As someone who ended up being a lot more blockheaded than I initially thought when I started doing the whole Heathenry thing, and as someone who has never considered myself particularly good at getting things done, sometimes it does get to me. Hitting the 5-year mark of starting to work with Loki back in September 2017, I felt like I wasn’t doing enough. That absolutely influenced the decision to formally create an obligation, because when asked about my motivations, my answer is almost always, “to light a fire under my ass.”

Which was true! I had these big lofty goals of turning my religious values and practices towards making the world suck less, like ritual protest and prison ministry. I had sat down and laid out all of the steps involved in making this happen. And then I proceeded to get nothing but networking done.

And while projects are often a weak spot, I also really just can not do daily devotionals considering how often I forget very basic things like eating something, anything, before dinner. So daily or weekly tasks were out of the question. I touched on this, though not in great detail, in my post on things to consider before making sworn agreements with gods.

So when I made my pledge, I agreed to both projects and a few regular tasks. One of them was altar cleaning at least once a month. Didn’t matter when in the month. Didn’t matter how many times in the month. The frequency just had to be greater than zero. In practice, that often means moot day is altar-cleaning day, or during months I don’t go to moot it ends up being the very last day of the month.

I do, very often, put it off and then scramble. Just like with writing fortnightly blog posts.

But, having something where the obligation only exists once every few weeks means I have predictable boundaries around when I actually have to do something, and therefore have an easier time prioritizing. I am not constantly carrying a running list of tasks in my head, or spewing it into Workflowy and then trying to figure out how to sort tasks into their larger projects, or what to pull for my daily to-do list.

Rather, it becomes “this is the task, this is the deadline.” There is much less room for overwhelm.

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The “Godbothered” Hairshirt

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I’m seven years into this whole Heathenry thing, so I’ve encountered the “godbothered” phenomenon. I have also sat through the discernment discourse, through the admonitions to never, ever invalidate which quickly turned into never, ever express any semblance of doubt about the things people tell you…

And I’m tired. I am tired of the idea that we can’t call people out on blatant, self-serving lies–with the added veneer of helplessness and nobility. A high-fashion Heathen Hairshirt constructed of piety and narcissism.

When people go on and on and on about “the gods want this, that, these, those, and it’s so much work you guys” it almost always is finished with an unspoken, “look how special I am! The gods like me! I’m chosen and special!”

The gods want plenty of things. It doesn’t mean you have to hand them over. You’re not helpless.

I catch myself still kind of doing this, more than I would care to admit. I strolled through the same bookshop near my work, where I special-ordered an Edda translation simply because I felt like it, and then impulse-bought an ornament because it had feathers on it and a cutesy quote about “adventure!” that read to me as a wry joke, and, clearly, “Loki wants this.”

I wanted it, to go put it on Loki’s shrine. I balked a little at the fact that it was $6. I bargained with myself to justify getting it. I have zero indication that Loki was involved in this purchase at all. No weird bird sightings. No weird dreams. No suspicious inconveniences.

Just…feathers and a cute quote.

And, the fact that a quote about making every day an adventure read to me as a wry joke kind of illustrates the point. Like, yeah, Loki can and will do weird shit. The mythology is chock full of that. I am pulled out of my comfort zone on a fairly regular basis because of situations I suspect he had hand in.

It’s unhealthy, and honestly kind of ridiculous, for me to parse this as some kind of hardship. At worst, I am very inconvenienced. Usually, I benefit.

And also, anyway, Loki didn’t make me buy the damn ornament.

A lot of people in the pagan community seem to struggle with the idea that they can simply want things. And as someone who struggles with the idea that I can simply want things, I get it. As someone who has absolutely projected my own desires onto the gods, I get it.

But hanging it on the gods is when it’s time to stop.

Your willfulness, your ability to exert that willfulness, and your right to do so in the form of having even the simplest boundaries, doesn’t magically disappear just because you had some kind of godly contact. If you even had godly contact. Because in this woe-is-me-the-gods-want-something bullshit, there’s a failure to admit that maybe, just maybe, the gods aren’t that fixated on us.

They have other things to do than pester you.

This almost always boils down to simple human behavior. Wanting to be special, and happening upon a way to do it that our social groups allow. Lacking, or refusing to develop, the self-awareness that would make us stop doing this. Accountability issues, combined with an awareness that a human can be made to answer for their behavior, but a deity is an awful lot harder to pin down.

And so we get a situation where a human is very obviously out of line, but countering that behavior opens oneself up to questions of piety, ideological purity, rightness of thought and action. All of which are threatening. Nobody wants to be at the mercy of a wrathful god or kindred.

And people eager to manipulate are very aware of how many people buy into that.

When I was at Trothmoot, listening to Mindless Self Indulgence and getting drunk in the Loki ve because I didn’t want to go to the possessory rite, a dude with blatant boundary issues tried to pull “Loki wants you to go to this,” with a straight face.

“Sucks to be him, then,” I said. “Because I don’t feel like it.”

He didn’t seem like he knew what to do with that answer. He paced around the ve grumbling angrily and drinking wine for several more minutes. Eventually he went to the rite by himself, did a hilariously bad job faking possession by Loki, picked a fight because ~Loki made him do it~, I guess, and then got thrown out.

None of which surprised me.

You really can just tell a god “no,” or to come back later, or to leave you alone. There’s no guarantee they’ll respect any boundary you set. But humans aren’t any different, and we still give that advice for interpersonal issues all the time. You’re not a hapless victim of all the stupid little whims of a noncorporeal being just because they’re bigger than you. And the godbothered humblebrag doesn’t impress anyone whose opinion is actually going to matter.

Turn your hairshirt right side in.

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What Heathens can (Indirectly) do About Climate Change

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An estimated four million people participated in the climate strike. September 20th was the first day in months I didn’t get hit with eco-anxiety and I actually felt a certain amount of hope. Maybe Ragnarök won’t actually come yet, you know?

But there’s no getting around that even the very best case scenario is going to be rough. Beats the frighteningly likely alternative by a long shot. But where we are now is not great. And where we will be in ten years will not be an improvement.

I don’t know if there’s anything we, as common people, can concretely do for Jörð beyond giving her the love she’s entitled to, and continuing to raise the alarm on her behalf, but there’s plenty we can do for each other.

Heathenry is about the people as much as it is about the gods–if not more so. That was the idea behind the rituals we’ve been writing for trans empowerment. We identified the aspects of ritual that had psychological benefits (with some help from a trained professional who prefers to be anonymous in this whole thing), and then provided an avenue for them to help a vulnerable population.

Therapeutic ritual can honor Jörð (or Nerthus, or Erde–whatever name she has in your tradition) while providing space for humans to share their love and grief. We can hold vigils. We can collectively plant and consecrate trees. Publicly scold and raise scorn poles against oil execs.

These do not change the actual physics or economics of the situation. But those of us aware of the problem, desperate to solve it and not equipped to make massive change, are constantly carrying rage and grief and terror inside of us. It’s rendering us less able to do anything for ourselves and for each other.

Competently crafted ritual provides a safe setting in which to experience emotions that are frightening–because the situation is objectively terrifying. And the community aspect of Heathen ritual, in particular, allows us to seek and give support while we push through these feelings.

The benefit of outright feeling your feelings is that tolerance can only be built through exposure. And while adjusting is usually cautioned against, I think that’s unsound advice. This is a situation that we cannot opt out of, and constant distress means burnout. And burnout means fewer resources to improve the situation.

My therapist, when I came in asking how best to manage the anxiety, had to remind me that buying Oreos is not going to single-handedly end the world–nor is avoiding them going to save it. Even if there is a lot of non-recyclable plastic in the packaging.

Energy spent on trying to minimize impact entirely, rather than letting myself settle for informed compromises once in a while, is energy that can’t be spent on activism.

And there’s a lot of energy in a package of Oreos.

So you do what keeps you sane, you muster strength in numbers. You direct those numbers where it can work some magic.

Literally, in the case of scorn poles.

When we have this emotional need met, we’re more able to focus on one another. We can develop groups and systems of mutual material support, or get on board with existing ones. We really don’t need a specialized, purpose-built and specifically Heathen approach to this.

That second step isn’t about us, but rather about our values. It’s not about being seen as Heathens, not about the P.R., not about the reclaimed symbolism and the patching up of our reputations–all of which, frankly, I’m tired of and I think is overemphasized.

It is about half a loaf and a tipped cup. It’s about displaced people taking their chances and hoping for your hospitality. It’s about whether we believe in the things we say, or if we’re just a bunch of pretentious dicks who mistake drinking mead for a personality trait.

I am not going to tell you to find clever ways to reduce your consumption and resource footprint. These are things I do because they help me, the individual, feel better. They are legitimate choices as coping skills, because they provide both a healthy outlet and distracting challenge. As long as they’re approached sanely, they’ll keep you sane.

Rather, I will point you towards resources that cover what I’ve touched on here–how we can adapt emotionally and materially while we scramble to slow the world going headlong.

The best thing you can do for the environment is to prioritize and support Indigenous environmental causes. I would urge anyone capable to donate money for camp supplies and/or legal fees for Water and Land Protectors, to fundraisers for Indigenous land buy-backs, or various fundraisers you can find under the Twitter hashtag #SettlerSaturday.

Coping With Climate Change: A walkthrough for managing the fear and uncertainty of humanity’s greatest crisis, by Ben Sayler

Mental Health and our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance from the American Psychological Association. (PDF)

Mutual Aid Disaster Relief is a national organization for providing direct aid to communities affected by disaster. See if an organization near you works with MADR.

Food Not Bombs is an obvious choice, when our goal is to assist vulnerable people and build partnerships that allow for survival. Not all chapters are known to the people maintaining this site, you may have to ask around locally. Check your local anarchist bookshops or community spaces, they’ll probably know.

The Troth’s Red Hammer program provides financial support to those affected by disaster, violence and hate crimes–direct aid is a future goal of Red Hammer. Currently, they’re fundraising for people affected by Hurricane Dorian.

After writing this post I started developing an annual Earth Day ritual in honor of Jörð. Designing these rituals takes a lot of time and any costs come out of my own pocket. If you are in a position to give, any donation you can offer would be helpful in offsetting those costs. That said, please prioritize fundraisers that will benefit Indigenous causes before putting anything in my tip jar.

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“Inclusive” Isn’t Enough

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I refuse to be friendly with people who think Heathenry is only open to the “right” kind of people. I refuse to be civil with people who advocate for harm to marginalized racial, ethnic and religious groups. I will not tolerate anyone supporting an ideology that endangers LGBT+ people, or who think gender roles are a rigid and non-negotiable truth. (Because they’re not.) I have absolutely no patience for people who cannot accept that disability is going to be something they’ll just have to deal with seeing in their lives. They’re in the wrong faith anyway, with our one-eyed and one-handed gods.

But it’s not enough to just say so. An inclusive stance is a reflection of your ethics, and any ethical stance without a standard of behavior and action to back it up loses its legitimacy. This is literally a fundamental rule of ethics. A non-prescriptive philosophy is an inactionable philosophy, and therefore useless.

Which is to say, you don’t simply make that announcement of inclusivity, or sign Declaration 127, and call it a day. Any kind of real change takes more time and work than just saying you’re safe. It’s a start. But you have to prove that. If you want to be trusted, you have to accept that people will distrust you until their concerns are satisfactorily addressed.

And I’m not saying you have to go physically fight people–diversity of tactics has a vital place. The point is, do what you are capable of, but do something.

We have a responsibility, as inclusivist Heathens, to vet people carefully. And then keep paying attention. It’s tiring. It takes time and effort. I keep an eye on people for several days or dig through months worth of their content before I reach out to them. I’m more obsessive about it, because I didn’t trust my judgement before. But it’s not unreasonable to spend 10 minutes skimming someone’s online trail to see what turns up. It really does need to be done.

It’s not just the Asatru Folk Assembly and Odinic Rite contributing to the problem, because not every racist or hateful Heathen is affiliated with them. Some of them are still hanging on in organizations that would love to think they’re progressive. And not all contributions to a problem are morally equivalent, either. Idealogical Puritanism is a destructive mentality that shuts out imperfect but promising allies, and misguided people who could be easily redirected. But it behooves us to know what’s going on, and what people’s concerns are, so we can address them effectively.

And the big thing is white supremacy. If we don’t learn to recognize it, we let them network unchecked and continue to use Heathenry as a weapon. And it’s vital to remember that white supremacy is a value of the dominant culture and we all get trained to participate–if we don’t examine our own selves, and each other, we will end up perpetuating it. If we unwittingly broadcast that message, not knowing the underlying meaning, we help the more obviously aggressive and dangerous white supremacists do this. If we do not take the time to consider the source of our information, and we repeat standard white supremacist rhetoric, we become an active participant.

And people cannot trust us, though that’s among the lesser of our problems.

People won’t want to be part of our supposedly inclusive faith if we don’t work to make sure they feel welcome. If we boost messages from the racist contingent, intentionally or not, people won’t be able to tell who can actually be approached. If we let racists into the same spaces and events as marginalized people who are curious about, or already practicing our faith, we are enabling the former and endangering the latter. If we don’t make the effort to prove that we don’t tolerate that behavior, we can only blame ourselves if people don’t trust us. If we make it about ourselves, we’re failing to walk our talk.

When we create Heathen spaces, we take on the role of hosts. Our job is to set a nice table and give visitors somewhere comfortable to settle in.

Inviting people in without meeting their needs does not include them. It ultimately imposes upon them. And that’s bad hospitality.

Do better.

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So, Your Pagan Event Is Getting Picketed – Here’s What You Can Do

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Pagan pride season is coming up again. There are, as you may already know, certain groups who will go out of their way to try and crash your events.  It helps to know how these groups operate and how to get rid of them–without legally jeopardizing your own event. Mass gatherings like pagan pride require the organizers–and the attendees, by extension–to remain in the good graces of the powers that be.

Not the gods, but the people issuing your permit to gather. Or the people you called to alert that an event too small for permits was happening.

Picketers can throw off the energy and momentum of your event, and they often attract a crowd. The gathering of a crowd means that picketers now have an audience, and having access to more people means that they’ll stick around for longer because they like the attention and have more people to target.

Drawing a crowd also presents two possible dangers for your event: one, that it will drag attendees away from your event to go yell at the picketers, and two, increase the likelihood of someone doing something dangerous or illegal because they’re pissed off.

Which can result in forceful legal intervention, a horrendous lawsuit, and will create issues with organizing the next event. We don’t want that.

So we’ve established that debate, argument and heckling don’t work. Fighting and forcing picketers away also doesn’t work, for slightly different reasons. Provocative groups are often, as a rule, lawyer happy.

So what does work?

Cut off their attention supply, and bore them to tears.

warning - live trolls do not feed

You usually can’t force them to leave unless they encroach on the area you have a permit for–and even then, public property can’t be monopolized, and free speech is a demo derby. That can make picketers virtually untouchable.

Don’t touch them, by the way–because again, these people are prone to filing lawsuits.

Before you Start:

Step zero, which has to happen before any response can be planned, is to have the permission of the event organizers. In the case of Philly Pagan Pride, the idea was from the organizers, so we didn’t have to worry about this. With Seasons of Transition Pt II, we had volunteers from within the community who approached me first and ran tactics they had in mind by me.

But it is absolutely necessary that you are working with the event, to prevent any possibility of accidentally working against the interests of the event. Make sure you understand what the event permit allows–or what’s allowed when you hold an event sans permit.

Once this is sorted out, you’re free to proceed to step one.

Continue reading “So, Your Pagan Event Is Getting Picketed – Here’s What You Can Do” →