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https://shaunaaura.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/how-do-we-pay-for-all-this-memberships-tithing-and-pagans/

Very, very good post abour community building. I've read it three times since I found it last night.

The stuff about money itself isn't super salient to me right now; instead I'm more interested in what she says about community. This isn't just a post about paying your tarot reader, it's about the deeper problem of trying to create community from people who have busy lives, and some of the cultural factors going on there.

This in turn leads to a money problem. But I think she's right that creating a sense of "emotional buy in" to "our community" is essential. But difficult to get started and maintain. I've been doing a lot of Outreach/Orientation work for the Rebellion over the last few weeks, and reading Shauna's blog -about venue hire and facilitation and running events - strikes very true to my experience. And similarly what I see from Rebellion participants is absolutrly that sense of buy in -hundreds of volunteers doing insane quantities of volunteer work and setting up their own parts of the organisation, the kind of effort and buy in which would make a Pagan community hum in no time. Greenies also have no money; but we never struggle to make room hire.

But what the Rebellion have is a "hook", a thing people are interested enough in. Right? Even though a lot of people are interested in Pagan community, I'm not quite sure that hook is there. It is in theory, but in practice...another factor is the interpersonal. This volunteer-work structure works when there's trust and affinity between individuals, rather than individuals interfacing with an organisational front. Like, if I asked my friends to come over and help me bake, it's a different dynamic than putting a request on Facebook. Strong organisations perhaps have to start from a group of friends or family, who already work together well and have that trust.

(We've been watching Sons of Anarchy, which is about a biker gang. A lot of the original biker gangs came out of WW2 or Vietnam, groups of men with a shared experience of war and who wanted something similar to army life, and who had a shared experience of not fitting back into society well and wanting an alternative structure for that. I think that provides a lot of commonality for community to form around. Especially if members fought together.)

Part of the problem is, the infrastructure is simply not there to get started. I have a group of Christian friends who started their own church, but they were already in a congregation together. I think a sufficiently large or established coven, or a network of covens, or the organisers of pagan festivals and foundations who have a network of friends, are the right people to do this work - building on the people they can already draw from, and their experiences of what works and doesn't work.

Part of the problem is distance. The idea od a local church is that it's local. If I run a Pagan community hall or organisation, in practice it's going to have a catchment area and lack appeal to people outside of that. I'm super housebound, so there's limits to how far I can travel.

But for the Rebellion, I make it out the house and hours away several times a week, so again it's - how do we cultivate that sense of Pagan community being very important? Perhaps it just *isn't* important. Or its important in a vague and holistic way, but never the most urgent or top priority thing.

The final thing is community-training. My Orientation talk contains a lot of stuff about training new Rebels to behave as part of the organisation. We have hand signals, for example, and we need to explain to them how our groups organise and work together. I think aspiring Pagan community groups could really benefit from this. Shauna writes about trying to get away from a capitalist mode of exchange. In the Rebellion, we use decentralised organising, training members how to avoid hierarchy, take personal responsibility for their parts of the protest, and take steps to act and feel empowered to do so. Rather than being passengers or audience, training them to have direct stake in the group. I think this would be essential to make Shauna's model work. You would have to ensure eyour membership did not think they were "paying for something I will be provided", because then you think in terms of value gained ("do I like their courses?") Rather than building soketjibt they are a part of. The question we ask in Orientation is "Do yoy want to be a part of realising the vision?" - and those words are chosen carefully, I think.

Repeat Your Rituals

I'm thinking today about the benefit of repeated rituals.

I've always even bad at planning ritual. I usually end up doing an observance on the day which is totally off the cuff and DIY.

In some ways, this is very powerful. It's intuitive, responds to the energy of the day and where I'm at. In others, it's pants: rites lack structure & momentum, key steps get missed, and by the time ive worked out what im supposed to be doing its too late. It always lacks oomph.

Somewhere in my head is the idea that the Lammas rite (ie) ought to be performed once, and once only. As if, that's your one shot or one moment with the divine, But im not sure where that idea has come from.

And certainly in ceremonial magic, it is very common to repeat and repeat the same rite over and over to enneagram it in your head, to understand it better, and to make its actions so habitual your mind can better complete the work.

So I'm thinking, perhaps, I ought to begin using a new approach. When I do ritual, it feels like sketching - I start with gestures and materials and ideas, and slowly draw them together. In the course of the rite, I understand what I'm doing and why.

I ought to take that first ritual as a starting point. And then, repeat it. Maybe later in the day, maybe later in the tide

(I've already baked into Fencraft the idea that sabbats are energy tides, not days, and therefore some flexibility is permissable: one ought to be responding to the sense of the season over several weeks, not a one and done holiday. This fits my energy pattern better; it's more forgiving if I'm too ill to work on a key day; and it's a more Solar way of working too, the idea that the festival becomes part of your daily life and experience rather the more Lunar approach of it being confined to ritual space, and a single degree of astrologic time)

The first ritual, I wing. I might have  some ideas about the season or my own goals, but I speak from the heart and kinda see what happens.

The second repetition, I take what I did first time and hone it. I might now add props, and call in the energy properly. I've got a sense of structure: what does it mean? Where does the energy start, where does it end. Who am I calling? What, if anything, is the goal? I might be getting a sense back off the land or the spirits which guides me this way or that. Do I need to shield, cast a circle, offer sacrifice,  balance my energy, cleanse or any other specific technique essential to the rite - and when does this need doing?

Perhaps a third or fourth time is in order. I should by now be calling in the spirits for real, staying until they come, and making sure the energy is there and listening for their response. By now, it should be real. It shouldn't be dress up.

This is a new ideas so I'm not sure yet how many repetitions work, or when they ought to begin (on or ahead of the ritual date?), and when I should know to end.

But I do think it's a fantastic new way of working for me, to think of ritual 1 as a kind of practice run. I'm more of a "learn by doing" than a thinking through or reading person, so it might also help others with a hands on learning style.