Drawing Down the Moon (67 page)

This was the first time fundamentalists had launched an attack on the legitimacy of Wiccan organizations. The Secretary of the Treasury at the time, James Baker III, wrote in a letter to Helms, “Several organizations have been recognized as tax-exempt that espouse a system of beliefs, rituals, and practices, derived in part from pre-Christian Celtic and Welsh traditions, which they label as ‘witchcraft.' We have no evidence that any of the organizations have either engaged in or promoted any illegal activity.”
²⁶
There are plenty of laws on the books to deal with crimes—and murderers should be prosecuted. But we should remember that some of the worst cult abuses—Children of God, Jim Jones, Sun Myung Moon—have been the excesses of people who considered themselves Christians, not Witches.

The Helms amendment actually tried to set out definitions of “Witchcraft” and “Satanism,” and one of the definitions of “Witchcraft” was simply “the practice of sorcery.” Since sorcery is defined by many as “the practice of magic,” a law that would deny legitimate religious status to groups that practice sorcery could include most traditional, tribal religions as well as Voudoun and Santeria. Are healing groups practicing sorcery? Even Christian ones? It's a real black hole and it quickly makes you realize the wisdom of this country's founders when they took these kinds of issues out of the hands of the state.

Pagans were also worried for more practical reasons. The tax-exempt status given to religious groups has allowed lower postage rates so Pagan periodicals can flourish (most of them, however, are already operating at a loss). Legal recognition has also allowed a Wiccan or Pagan priest or priestess to perform legal marriages and be accepted as pastoral counselors in many states. These laws also make it easier to establish nature sanctuaries.

One very significant trend in the last twenty-five years is the growth of legally recognized Pagan religious groups—groups that have all the tax-exempt privileges and other rights of religious organizations. One has only to look at the resource section of this book under “groups” to see how true this is. Whether we are talking about COG or Circle or the Aquarian Tabernacle Church, we are often talking about groups that have made a decision to be incorporated as tax-exempt religious bodies. While the vast majority of Pagan organizations are tiny, with extremely low budgets, tax-exempt status eases the fight to obtain legal Pagan marriages, allows reduced postal rates, and makes it easier to establish nature sanctuaries.

The movement to establish Pagan/Craft sanctuaries comes out of several needs: the desire to have land where rituals can take place in privacy, the desire to have access to wilderness settings, and the desire to protect wild areas. Circle Sanctuary, Wysteria, Lothlorien, Annwfn, Camelot of the Wood, and Diana's Grove are but a few of the names of Pagan nature sanctuaries.

Most Pagan and Wiccan groups still meet in living rooms or in public parks, and in most covens you still bring food or wine, rather than give a donation. But the number of correspondence courses, Wiccan businesses, attempts to buy land, and attempts to set up a temple or seminary have increased exponentially. While much of this seems positive—the victory of Pagans to attain the rights given to all bona fide religious groups in this country—a few things seem worrisome.

One of the things that has distinguished Neo-Paganism from the many religious cults has been the strict separation of the religion from profit. In fact, one of the things that attracts many people to Neo-Paganism is that it is not primarily a religion of temples or paid clergy. “Money seldom passes from hand to hand,” I wrote in one of the first paragraphs of this book. But by the late 1980s there was a raging debate within Paganism on the “money issue” and at this point there are many Pagan groups that are businesses as well as religious organizations.

In many traditions of Wicca, teaching the Craft for money has always been strictly forbidden—a violation of Craft Law. There have always been exceptions to this, from Maxine Sanders' ritual groups in England to the many correspondence courses on Witchcraft that are advertised. But these were never considered the norm, and many people looked at them askance. But now, the number of people teaching and charging for workshops on ritual and magic has increased tenfold. There is a funny saying in the Pagan movement: “The difference between Pagan and ‘new age' is one decimal point.” In other words, a two-day workshop in meditation by a “new age” practitioner might cost $500, while the same course given by a Pagan might cost $50. While Pagan workshops still cost only a fraction of similar “new age” seminars, there's no telling what could happen if, Goddess forbid, Paganism became really popular.

While the “Craft Laws”—writings which some argue are probably only sixty years old—forbid the taking of money, other more indigenous Pagan religions charge large fees for initiations: Santeria and Voudoun, for example. There are beginning to be priests and priestesses within Neo-Paganism who firmly believe that a clergy should be supported, that if Paganism ever wants to develop a truly skilled clergy, there will have to be people who work at their religion all day and who do not spend most of their hours programming computers, waiting on tables, or selling books. Z Budapest asks for a tithe from women to support her work. Isaac Bonewits also believes that a clergy can function only if there is community support and funding. Often the division on this issue comes between those who work in the Craft full time and therefore need some means of livelihood and those, like myself, who work at other paying jobs in the “real world.”

The greatest challenge in the next years will be defining how to walk the very fine and problematic line between the beneficial and negative aspects of institutionalization. The question comes down to: Can you support yourself through the Craft without being corrupted? The history of religions in this society doesn't offer too many good examples. The growing institutionalization of Paganism is, at this point, a fact, and there are many blessings that come with it. But it is important to remember many people come to Paganism precisely because it is fundamentally anarchistic and uninstitutionalized and because most celebrations are free of charge—just as they would be if they were happening within your own family, or tribe.

Meanwhile, many Neo-Pagans are not thinking deeply about these issues. They are fighting the more practical battles to achieve legitimacy, without exploring what that might mean farther down the road.

Although the resource guide for
Drawing Down the Moon
was last revised in 1996–97, there has not been a serious revision of the body of the book for twenty years. During this time the Pagan movement has exploded in the United States, around the world, and on the Internet. It is still impossible to give “real” figures for the size of the Pagan and Wiccan movements in the United States. This is partly because Neo-Paganism is a decentralized movement or subculture, and there is no overarching authority that would collect such data. In addition, the U.S. census does not ask for a person's religion as, for example, the Canadian census does, so there are no government figures to work with.

There have been many attempts to estimate the size of the movement by looking at Pagan journal subscriptions, festival attendance, and census attempts by a number of Pagan groups; there have also been various estimates by scholars and writers. Danny and Lin Jorgensen and Scott Russell estimated that there were 200,000 Neo-Pagans in 1999. Helen Berger and Sarah Pike gave similar estimates in 1999 and 2001. The Covenant of the Goddess (COG) conducted an Internet poll and received more than 32,000 responses. Assuming a return of 4 percent, the Covenant of the Goddess estimated there were 768,400 Neo-Pagans.

Some people argue (see, for example,
The Encyclopedia of Modern Witchcraft and Neo-Paganism,
edited by Shelley Rabinovich and James Lewis, 2002) that the differences in those numbers can be explained by a new phenomenon: “Internet Pagans”: people who have no affiliation with a specific group or coven, but have become Pagans online and associate by means of chat rooms and Internet networking organizations. James Lewis, writing an appendix in that encyclopedia, says that at the time (March 2002) there were five thousand Pagan Web sites. Having spent much too much time on the Internet during the months before this book went to press, in the winter of 2005, I can say only that there are now so many Pagan sites that there is no easy way to analyze them. Lewis has a chart in his appendix listing the Web hits and unique visitors at
The
Witches' Voice (see Resources) between 1997 and 2001. The increase has been steady and steep. In 2001, there were almost four million unique visitors, leading Lewis to believe the COG figures may even be conservative, and that most Neo-Pagans today are solitaries. If you go to the Web site
www.adherents.com
, which gives figures for thousands of religious groups, Paganism is listed as the nineteenth largest religion, with one million adherents worldwide. Whatever the truth of the numbers, the movement is growing larger.

Between 1982 and 1999, Larry Cornett published an
International Calendar of Pagan Events.
Between 1982 and 1996, Cornett kept precise charts of the number of Neo-Pagan festivals in the United States, and he entered them on a spreadsheet. For example, he listed 23 Neo-Pagan events lasting more than two days in 1983; and 347 such events in 1995, with a steady upward trend, a doubling about every 4.5 years. There are not only more festivals; many of the gatherings are larger. Pagan Spirit Gathering had about five hundred people attending some of its festivals in the early 1980s. When I last attended in 2005, there were almost one thousand people registered. A similar situation holds for a number of other festivals.

Why do numbers matter? Because it gives a partial answer to the question whether or not the Neo-Pagan religious movement should be taken seriously by the world. In my own view, Paganism is important because of its ideas, but if we are talking about a religion that has more members in the United States than Unitarian Universalists, Quakers, or Baha'is, that's something worth noting and studying.

Before we look at some of the other changes that are taking place in Paganism, Wicca, Heathenism, and Goddess Spirituality, I want to go back to the past for a moment.

In 1985, about six years after
Drawing Down the Moon
was published, I conducted a survey at three festivals, and published the questionnaire in one Pagan journal. Four hundred fifty questionnaires were distributed and one hundred ninety-five were returned. This was not the kind of extensive questionnaire I had used at the beginning of my research; it was mainly designed to get Pagans and Wiccans to answer a series of questions about changes in the movement that were taking place, and to weigh in on several controversies then raging. You can read the entire survey in the last two editions of
Drawing Down the Moon,
but I want to summarize the findings here as a sort of baseline before going on to what has changed over the last two decades.

Among the findings: The religious background of Pagans and Wiccans pretty much mirrored that of most Americans, with about 23 percent Catholic, 48 percent Protestant, 9 percent Jewish (somewhat bigger than the American average), 14 percent non-religious, and the rest a mix of other categories. The 1985 survey also asked what had brought them into the religion. The top categories—in order—were feminism, occultism and magic, reading interesting books, an interest in science fiction or fantasy, a feeling for nature, the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), the result of a religious or philosophical search, an interest in psychology, and an interest in mythology.

The survey asked about occupation. In my first survey in the 1970s, the top professions were housewife, farmer, salesperson, nurse, writer, student, and psychologist. In 1985, the top professions were, in order: (1) some kind of computer programmer, systems analyst, or software developer; (2) student; (3) secretary or clerical; (4) psychotherapist or counselor; (5) teacher or professor; (6) writer; (7) housewife.

Because of the huge number of computer professionals in contemporary Paganism at that time (16 percent of the respondents), the survey asked what relationship if any exists between a Pagan or Wiccan philosophy and an interest in computers. And because the answers were so fascinating, I am putting this part in the new edition in full.

1. Computers are like magic.

2. Paganism is a pragmatic and practical religion.

3. Computers are simply where the jobs are these days. A number of people noted that many people who delayed their careers because of sixties activism or countercultural activities, found that when they did decide to go to work, computers were one of the few possibilities.