Pagan Homelands

The Need For Pagan Homelands

Firstly, unavoidably, that's a very uncomfortable choice of phrasing; it chimes with nationalist concepts of desiring a fatherland. i wouldnt have phrased it like that.

In my experience, 'we need pagan lands' or 'we need queer farms' is just a lot of fancy words for buying somebody else a house.

Everyone thinks their own need for a house is very important, and if you're internally unscrupulous you can elevate that to a sense you are doing it for other people, like your home ownership puts out vibrations into the ether & you're not just some guy with a deed, you're ~building community~. I began feeling sour about this as a teen, a queer house in south London which talked about the importance of what they were doing given the high homelessness and danger rates q people face, but like...to join the house you still needed to stump up 1/8th of a London mortgage. The house wasn't providing event space, or a spare room for emergency guests. It was a flatshare with a gender studies degree. & this sucked for the people who were staying there but couldnt get the cash together.

& that instinct has never been wrong since, and I'm still muttering to myself about the beautiful pagan land project my friend volunteered at which charges like £1000 to go on the volunteer training course, which enables you to work at events. & that project talks a lot about a soul tribe coming together (but only above a certain income bracket)

If you want it to be collectively cared for, you need to take the plunge and make it collectively owned. And that's very frightening, especially for the people putting in the most work or the most money. That is: you set it up with shares, shares are cheap and entitle you to a vote, and the project facilitates services. I need to get something more than warmfuzzies from what I put in - for sure, not replicating capitalist provider/consumer dynamics where possible, but if I'm paying £5 a year for the benefit of a Pagan Land Project, I want services and a priest on call and the ability to walk in the woods whenever I choose. I'm not subsidising someone else's home-ownership, hobby or pagan lifestyle fantasy

Certainly when I imagine getting money together for land - and I do, I do, I do, in my imagination it's a little village out of the way with a pub and a post office - when I search my heart for, do the gods desire this? How would this make religion better, would it get us closer to the work? And in my heart I think the answer is no: I want a little village because I'm a milennial renter/aspiring cult leader, and wouldn't it be lovely? and it's all wrapped up in these other fantasies - I mention the fascist undertones of 'we need homelands'; certainly for me there's stuff about safety, disliking technology, wanting quiet, wanting to be a long way from anyone else, wanting a sense of control through this imagined dolls house of a pagan village where I get to play Lord Summerisle's dad. & like, a desire to run away and live within the fantasy (I can't fault anyone for that, but it isn't a business plan) - I perceive that everyone proposing such projects imagines they will be the one to drift around it with employment and a vague sense of wellbeing.

But the gods are not in the wallpaper. Would our works for the gods really be stronger in such an environment? I'm not sure I could list off for you now what the gods Want, or what good ritual/religion/magic Looks Like in a clear way. But whatever it is, do we actually need property taxes to do it? I don't think mine do, I don't think the gods will be happier for knowing I have the deeds to this field than me just rambling through it. If your plan includes homesteading - will you actually have time for pagan pursuits after that work is done?

So I think a lot of these desires about more pagan real-world structures are a thing people are doing for themselves and for other people. & even then, what need are these projects fulfilling? If its about creating spaces for ritual, they need not be pagan specific if your town already has a function room the protest groups, knitting circle and band rehersal use. Or, if it's a nature thing, your money goes a lot further in some kind of Woodland Trust style fund to preserve nature for all.

I feel like there's some world-oriented ego at play, like you want to demonstrate you are a Grown Up Religion With The Others, and so you need a charitable organisation and you need buildings and a council and a summer camp for the kids...without considering if this too is one of the many places our movement can and should diverge from Christianity. Do we really need these things? "a Pagan-majority school board, a Pagan police precinct, a Pagan branch librarian, a Pagan shopping strip, maybe even someday a Pagan on the zoning board.". Icky.

These plans are made by people who can see buildings more easily than people - because community can be made anywhere and anyhow, it's just about who turns up and the bonds between you. When you consider a Pagan Meeting House as a fantasy to be aspired to - independent of your actual community situation, as if the building comes first and then it will be filled, rather than the building flowing naturally from community - it's an antisocial dreaming, as if your emotional attachment to an impersonal set of stones can stand in for a warmth you wish to feel, & imagine you can displace onto a property title; you have the relationship with the infrastructure object as a substitute for the people, who will fall into your lap without effort.

I think it gets us further to ask ourselves: what needs (personal, interpersonal, spiritual, emotional, practical) are we trying to fill here, and is owning infrastructure the right way to meet it?

Best of the comments:

Why do Pagan infrastructure plans fail? From what I have seen, they fail because they are usually not organically grown from any real need that the local Pagan community buys into. They don’t fail from too much concern about consensus. They fail because they invariably do not have any solid business plan or sustainable funding mechanism and no real constituency. They were typically launched by a tiny core group – about 2-5, who overextended themselves financially and personally on the theory that if you build it, they will come. It has never worked. There is wisdom in not trying to pander to people with no commitment to a project, but if your new intentional community wants or needs more than you and your four friends to remain viable, you better learn to care about other’s feelings. Nobody is going to come and invest money and labor in your commune if they don’t get a real voice in how its run.

(no subject)

Holloways are lower than the surrounding field levels because they have been created by movement of people – not deliberately, but over thousands of years"

England's Mysterious Sunken Roads