(c) 1994 SIRS, Inc. -- SIRS Researcher Volume : SIRS 1992 Religion, Volume Number 4, Article 30 Subject: Paganism Title : The Return of the Pagans Author : Beth Wolfensberger Source : Boston Magazine Publication Date : May 1992 Page Number(s) : 60+ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ BOSTON MAGAZINE May 1992, pp. 60+ Copyright (c) 1992 by Boston Magazine, Inc., a subsidiary of Metrocorp. All rights reserved. ________________________________________________________________________ THE RETURN OF THE PAGANS Looking to the past, they're building a religion for the future. by Beth Wolfensberger I am staring at the largest pentagram I have ever seen. It must be 10 feet in diameter, and someone carefully laid it out, weeks or months or years ago, in thick black tape on the hardwood living-room floor of this modest Somerville apartment: a perfect circle enclosing a star. Women who call themselves Pagans or witches move in and out of this room, preparing for tonight's full-moon ritual, a gentle, self-affirming ceremony. Within the next hour we will sing, greet one another formally ("I welcome the goddess who is Beth," one witch will say to me), and sip colored sugar water (red for strengths, purple for goals) from a little black iron caldron passed clockwise ("sunwise") around the circle. We will imagine ourselves as priestesses on silver thrones, divine and serene, our backs to the sea. Now the women are arriving, all but one of them dressed in street clothes. The witch who will lead the ritual bustles about in a long and simple red robe that she made herself. As she passes me, she catches my eye. "I'm so excited," she says. "This is going to be great!" At every full moon, Pagan circles like this one gather in dozens of homes around Boston. While this ceremony will be part improvised, stitched together with quiet laughter, rituals in other homes will be as formal and sober as a Catholic Mass. Some Pagans meet as witches, some as Goddess worshipers, some as shamans. Some bring their children to the circles. Some worship naked, "sky-clad," as they say. Some scream at the top of their lungs; some sing soft, folksy hymns. Most mark off a circle and invite into it the gods and goddesses of north, south, east and west. And each spring, on the first day of May, Pagans dance around homemade maypoles to celebrate the historically orgiastic Pagan holiday Beltane. Most Pagans have come to their religion in the last 5 or 10 years, usually after a period of lonely atheism or agnosticism. When the witch in red moves on, I look again at the pentagram, a symbol I have seen cast in silver, small as an aspirin, strung on a thin chain around the necks of many of the witches I have met. It is a symbol few of them would wear to work or the grocery store, for fear they might be mistaken for Satanists. Here, they pass over it with bare feet and settle around its perimeter, taking one another's hands. A boxed Entenmann's chocolate pound cake and a big pot of vegetable soup wait in the kitchen. Here, the pentagram is home. For the past few months, I have been spending time with people who call themselves Pagan. Unlike Native American traditionalists, these women and men didn't inherit a Pagan culture. Many of them grew up decorating Christmas trees or lighting menorahs. But Paganism appealed so strongly to them that they are now willing to risk being viewed as devil worshipers, animal sacrificers, or godless heathens, none of which they are. These men and women worship in the traditions of the pre- Christian, nature-based religions of ancient Europe. Although pagan is a dangerous word--the p word, some Pagans say--it isn't difficult, around Boston, to find people who privately use it to describe themselves. J. Gordon Melton, the director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the editor of THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN RELIGION, told me that there is no accurate national Pagan head count (50,000? 200,000?) but that almost every urban area outside the South has a large Pagan community, and that Boston's is one of the more visible. "Since the turn of the century, religion has been radically diversifying in this country," Melton says. Paganism's "slow growth," he believes, is "just part of that radical diversity," which includes the faster expansion of Hinduism and Buddhism here. As diverse as Paganism's practices are, however, its participants are almost exclusively white and middle-class. In the last 10 years, Melton points out, the number of Pagan publications has held steady at about 150. The strongest indication that adult Pagans are not falling away from their beliefs is that Paganism is now entering its second generation in the United States. Children are being raised Pagan, with Pagan rituals that correspond to christening and confirmation. By the time they are grown, schools for training Pagan clergy, now being established, will have stood or failed the test of time. Unitarians have long admitted Pagans to their seminaries. The EarthSpirit Community, a national Pagan organization with 3,000 members, is headquartered at a home in Medford. The Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans (CUUPS), recognized as an affiliate organization of the Unitarian Universalist Association, is based in Cambridge. Although their posters are often torn down, official Pagan student groups meet at UMass- Amherst, where members plan de-stressing rituals, and at MIT, where they bless their volt meters and hold an open Paganism 101 meeting each semester. BNN-TV, a public-access cable station in Boston, airs a Pagan program called "Real Witches," designed to portray "the witch on the street." The Tufts station WMFO broadcasts a weekly Pagan radio show, "Between the Worlds"; listening to it, I heard that the first New England Pagan Yellow Pages is being compiled. Paganspeak takes some getting used to. Where most people say "Thank God," Pagans say "Thank Goddess." They are polytheists. "Different gods for different bods," they say, meaning that Pagans can choose their own pantheon--Greek, Roman, Norse, anything. Pagans do things that, to outsiders, can look and sound ridiculous. One group of witches (none of them flaky) told me that the most popular spell in Boston is the spell to locate a parking space. Hearing this, I blinked expectantly, waiting for someone to admit they were kidding. No one did. One of them said: "Of course, that spell doesn't work so well in Harvard Square. Too many spells going on there at once." A pause. Then laughter-- about the Harvard Square part. They were serious about the spell. This combination--the exotic applied to the mundane, often with a sense of humor--can make Paganism seem less than serious. But it also demonstrates that Paganism is a practical religion, drawn on daily. Paganism is not a hobby. "It's a very delicate process to present this stuff in a way that does not say cult, that does not say weirdo," one Pagan told me. "Because it is not mainstream. And part of the reason it is not mainstream is because it's not known. It's like segregation: Who you do not meet, you do not understand. You do not have sympathy for the people you do not know." Andras Corban Arthen--A witch who knows more pagans than I could meet in years of research--pulls a chair up in front of me and sits down, spreading his hands out on his knees, ready for questions. We are sitting in the sparsely furnished library of the EarthSpirit Community, an organization that was founded 12 years ago by Arthen and his wife, Deirdre Pulgram Arthen, also a witch. Arthen is a big man, with a dark beard and a friendly gaze. On his fingers, eight silver rings, one of them the pentagram, glint at me like multiple eyes. "What I always tell people," he says, before saying much else, "is that there is so much diversity in this [Paganism] that no one person in the entire country has a sense of just how diverse we are." This is something that I have heard elsewhere. Pagans dislike hierarchy. There is no Pagan bible, no fixed source of guidance. Pagans have grouped and disbanded, unintentionally imitating the birth-to-death cycles they admire in nature. They acknowledge no leader. But in the Boston area, Arthen, 42, is an authority. He has taught ritual, magic (exercises to develop psychic awareness), and the history of witchcraft to many of the newer, more open witches. Photos of him in a 1990 Time-Life book on witchcraft show him, yellow in the glow of an outdoor fire, a wolfskin draped along his head and back, standing in a ring of robed witches. His friends and acquaintances include "underground" Pagans and witches who never dip a toe in mainstream society, never plan to. He knows of Pagans in the military, Reagan-Bush Republican Pagans, gay and lesbian Pagans, and teenage Pagans. Arthen realizes how Pagans and witches are viewed, and he works with the police in several states to decipher crimes committed in the name of the occult. He owns a reminder of the price of fear and misperceptions: a 1602 Malleus Maleficarum, the medieval witch-hunters' guide, allegedly bound in the skin of an accused witch. "What has been happening in this country since the twenties, and very much so since the sixties," he says, "is that people looking for a spiritual practice that was Western but not Judeo- Christian have adopted and revived and reconstructed [western European] Pagan traditions." These traditions--how widespread, no one knows--were based on celebrations of nature's seasonal cycles, and were all but stamped out by missionaries and the Inquisition. Pagans, Arthen explains, worship the Earth, often represented as the Mother Goddess, and occasionally her male aspect, the Horned God. They believe that Nature, and everything in it, is sacred and connected. "I'm sacred," Arthen tells me, "and you are sacred and this carpet is sacred. It's a very egalitarian-type approach." He smiles a little, checking to see if I take offense at being equated with the carpet. Because the European pre-Christian Pagans were predominantly farming people, they enacted rituals to celebrate the Earth's fertility. Contemporary Pagans value similar rituals for their ancient history and because the rituals connect them with the natural universe. Some Pagans still perform the Great Rite--ritual sex-- symbolic of the union of the male and female aspects of the Mother Goddess. To the Pagan mind, sex is sacred. Arthen knows Pagan circles that are so close-knit and long-held that they practice "nonexclusive marriages." He also knows that many Pagans in this area would probably cringe reading about this; most Pagans observe the Great Rite symbolically, by dipping a knife into a chalice. Weary of generalizations and caveats, I ask Arthen what Paganism means to him. "It means that I am as much a part of the Earth as a tree is, or a river, or a volcano, or the atmosphere," he says. "And that my son, who's four, gets very upset if we don't link hands and make a circle around the table before we eat, and sing this little song about Thank you, Mother Gaia; thank you, Father Sun." When he was very young, Arthen wanted someday to become a Catholic priest, but an adolescence in the sixties bleached his faith. When he was 19, he met two anthropology students trained in witchcraft by witches in Edinburgh. Through them, he eventually did become a priest--a Wiccan one, versed in "magick" (which he describes as a kind of harnessed mental or psychic energy) and authorized to perform handfastings (Pagan marriages), which are legal in Massachusetts. Arthen's family celebrates the eight seasonal Pagan holidays, which include Yule instead of Christmas and Samhain instead of Halloween. His wife gave birth in a consecrated circle, with chanting and candles and a ritual cutting of the umbilical cord. In recent years, Arthen has watched feminists take up Paganism for its matriarchal origins, gays and lesbians adopt it for the acceptance it affords them, and environmentalists embrace it for its reverence for the Earth. New Agers (derided as shallow and flighty by many of the Pagans I met) have borrowed from it, as have forms of ritual therapy. As for the Robert Bly-inspired men's movement, Arthen is not impressed: "Pagan men," he says, "have been doing those things for a lot longer than those people have." Some obviously competent, visible Pagans, like National Public Radio New York bureau chief Margot Adler, witch and author of the definitive book on American Paganism, DRAWING DOWN THE MOON, are open about their religion. Yet the acceptance isn't there. At the big 1990 Earth Day festival held on Boston's Esplanade, people of all religions carried banners printed with pictures of the Earth (essentially, the main Pagan deity). The interfaith service that day, during which a tree was planted, was largely written and officiated by Pagans, though this wasn't publicly acknowledged at the time. "People just loved it," Arthen says. "They said, `Gee, if my church did that, I'd go to church every Sunday.' "At the same time, we had this booth set up to disseminate literature. And this guy came up to it and said: `Pagans? You mean there are people in this world who call themselves Pagans?'" Arthen imitates the disgusted voice. He has seen Pagans lose their jobs, lose children in custody cases. He knows Pagan parents who visit their kids' teachers to explain, once again, "`No, we do not worship Satan...'" I'd like to show you something that I show very few people," Louise Cloutier says to me as we drink cranberry tea in her home. "It's my altar." Cloutier, 37, is a clear-eyed, articulate woman, a feminist with a rolling, musical laugh. She is a songwriter, a voice instructor, and the musical director of Goddess Gospel, a jazzy seven-woman a cappella group she founded in 1989 to give praise and form to "the wisdom of the Sacred Feminine." Her singing voice is strong enough to shake a room, but about the term Pagan, she is timid. Goddess Gospel performs feminist spirituals; not all of its members are Pagan. In allowing her name to be used in this article, Cloutier has publicly identified herself as a Pagan for the first time. Her parents and siblings do not know that she considers herself to be one. She leads me into another room, where the altar sits on the ground, under a window. It is a low box lined with velvet and decorated with "female shapes": chalices, stone eggs, water- polished shells, flowers. I try to imagine her sitting there. Like Arthen, Cloutier was raised a Catholic. She found the Judeo-Christian Yahweh frightening, a "warlord." We return to the tea and she says: "I remember when I sang in folk masses, my mother would complain that I smiled too much. No passion was allowed. No peaks of any kind." Everything sacred, it seemed to her, was kept behind the altar rail. Everything sacred, she couldn't touch. Cloutier came across Paganism while reading anthologies of feminist theology. She had already abandoned Catholicism. The essays that grabbed her were written by women like Starhawk, a well-known feminist activist witch whose book THE SPIRAL DANCE is a Pagan favorite. Cloutier shows me one of her Starhawk books. Its pages are tattooed over with stars, exclamation points, and underlinings. In Starhawk's writings, she read: "The Goddess is not separate from the world--she is the world, and all things in it." And, "The image of God as outside of nature has...justified our plunder of the Earth's natural resources." "It was finally integrating spirituality and politics. And that's what I've been straining to do all along," she says. In Paganism she found a religion whose moral authority was not patriarchal (thou shalt not, or else) but matriarchal, nurturing (we are all connected--hurt someone and you hurt yourself). She imagines goddesses, archetypes, who are strong, fierce; they help her understand the darker side of herself, the "warrior skills" she has had to acquire in order to survive a rough childhood. She imagines goddesses who are old, knowledgeable. When she reaches menopause, she will most likely undergo a Pagan "croning" ritual, marking her passage into wisdom. I see Cloutier again about a week later. She is one of the many women (although there are some men) filling all 380 seats and much of the aisles of the Remis Auditorium, at the Museum of Fine Arts, at 5:30 on a Friday afternoon. Two Canadian films are to be shown: Goddess Remembered, documenting evidence of peaceful prehistoric Goddess-worshiping matriarchies, and The Burning Times, convincingly portraying the European witch-hunts of 1350 to 1750 as "the woman's holocaust," a male subversion of feminine power with up to 9 million victims. When a museum staffer announces extra screenings of the films, the audience cheers and applauds, just as it does all through the credits and several times during the films. Listening, I can make out Cloutier's voice among the many. Three years ago, Sherrian Lea, an MIT freshman from Columbus, Ohio, a young woman with perfect enunciation, attended the school's activities fair. "I saw the Pagan Students Group table, and there was one woman at the table looking pretty harassed," she told me in her tiny dorm room. "I walked up to her and said: `Hello. I'm already an initiate. Why don't I help you?' And I sat down and started to answer questions." This sensible approach seems to characterize everything that Lea, now 21 and a junior, does. Fellow students refer to her as a walking encyclopedia. She refers to herself as a highly political feminist, a technical journalism major, and a witch. Lea looks young for a junior. When I met her she was dressed very conservatively: sweater, skirt, dark headband pulling her hair from her face. She had been accepted at every college she applied to, including Harvard. When she was deciding between MIT and Cornell, the Pagan Students Group was a strong factor in breaking the tie. Lea said, as many Pagans do, that she had always been a Pagan; it just took her a while to learn there was a word for it. "I read Latin," she explained, "and I learned Greek when I was 14. I had a pretty clear idea of how I thought the world should work. I looked at Christianity and I realized that if I was going to accept it, I would have to throw out all the scholarly work and start with the Old and New Testaments. But then I read those and found problems with them, and I realized I would have to read them in the Hebrew. And I didn't feel like learning a new alphabet to learn Hebrew." It was at that point that she discovered The Spiral Dance and, through it, her religion. She found other Pagan students in her high school. Lea's parents ("white-collar, college-educated people with graduate degrees," a Christian mother, a "scientific atheist" father) know she is a Pagan and accept it, if somewhat reluctantly. She is very much "out of the broom closet," as the expression goes, about her religion. She said that she, personally, has never been harassed for her beliefs. (Other young Pagans tell me that the under-30 crowd is much more likely to be "out" with their friends and parents.) When I asked Lea what Paganism offers her, she gave me an answer I did not expect. Although she is a feminist, she doesn't buy the prehistorical matriarchal golden age: "I've had enough sociology and anthropology to know solid theory from bushwah." What Paganism has given her, as a white woman, is a heritage. A heritage at a time when other students her age are reclaiming theirs. A heritage with ritual. The physical ritual, she said, is as important to her as what she believes. "My ancestors, or at least a subset of them, were Pagans who believed in elves and fairies, and lit fires on the solstices and equinoxes," she said. "I chose Paganism as opposed to the Eastern religions partly because I'm British and German. This is how I might have worshiped if I lived 2,000 years ago." Lea and three other women gather at the new moons and full moons in a room in her dorm. They consecrate a sacred circle just as she believes some of her ancestors did. They light a big candle. They talk about the Goddess. They do a Goddess chant or two. "Sometimes we make something up, sometimes we dance. We read poems or stories to each other. Then we sit down and have some cookies and juice, then go our separate ways and go back to work." The moon is full, a bright silver disk. In a private home in the Bridgewater area, three men and four women, dressed in simple robes of cotton or velour, file downstairs to a dim room consecrated as the group's temple. Its walls and ceiling are painted a warm purple. Candles and incense burn on the four elaborately decorated tables, one at each wall, that serve as altars to the gods of north, south, east, and west. These are thoughtful people in their twenties and thirties who came to Paganism gradually, reading about it, sampling different circles. They work in offices and labs at Boston University, Harvard, and MIT, and at least one of them works in medicine. They do not want their names printed. One woman, her baby sleeping upstairs, says she can't hire the neighborhood teens to baby-sit. Three hundred years have passed since the Salem witch trials, but she fears the sitters might look too closely at the books on her shelves. A former Lutheran acts as priestess. She faces the north altar, altar of the goddess Rhea, preparing the implements of the Esbat, a full-moon ritual. The other men and women stand in a wide circle, with eyes lowered and hands crossed over their chests, slowly breathing. Theirs is the Alexandrian branch of witchcraft, very formal, with little unscripted talk. Singing, four of them consecrate the unmarked circle by walking its perimeter with a dish of soil (earth), burning incense (air), a candle (fire), and a dish of water. The gods are invited, one at a time, with a pointing of the ritual knives: "We bid thee come!" The witches, taking my hand, form a circle. A slow, simple circle dance begins. They are chanting. The dance moves faster and faster, "raising energy." When we are about to trip, we raise our clasped hands to a point in the center of the circle, "directing the energy," which I have been told to picture as blue and flowing, curving around us. Some of this energy will be sent to one of the witches for transferral to his mother, who is in the hospital with breast cancer. Some of it will be used for worship. And the rest of it, the surplus energy that clings to us, we will imagine flowing down through the floor from the soles of our bare feet. We will picture it burrowing through the home's foundation into the earth's hot core--back where it came from, back where the Pagans of old stored it, back where Pagans not yet born will find it and raise it again.