WitchVox helped me start countless book clubs, three college Pagan groups, launch two websites, and form my own coven, once I was ready. It made me feel less alone, and came with the added benefit of my parents, bosses, and school bullies not knowing it existed, which meant that it felt private and safe in a way that Facebook never will. It was an archive—a testament to the weird, wonderfulness of the community I was just getting to know, and would come to devote my life to.
I admit that I made only modest use of The Witches’ Voice, answering occasional emails from people trying to make connections in Colorado.
The new Pagan Space logo.
Meanwhile, Pagan Space is back, with a slogan “Be You, Be Pagan!” and this pitch: “Would you consider inviting your Facebook friends to a community just for Pagans that does not censor your speech or sell your private data?” They have chat rooms, a marketplace, pages (in the Facebook sense), and so on. Not all the links are working, and some just lead to placeholder text (“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet”), but some people seem to be using it.
Everyone bitches about Facebook, but can anything else do the same job?
Some of the links that I saved that never turned into blog posts . . .
• The Internet loves quizes, so “What Kind of Witch Would You Be?” (answer: hearth witch). I always suspect that the answer is based on just one question, while the others are there just for fluff and decoration.
This is, indeed, one of the roots of many problems in modern polytheism – people being unwilling to wait and let things naturally evolve. My biggest concern here isn’t the specific examples of mis-assignment (though they do exist, and are indicative of a serious lack of understanding in some cases). It is the fact that these folks are sitting around trying to artificially assign gods to places and things as if it’s just a game, or at best an intellectual exercise.
What if witches hadn’t changed that much since medieval times and were still fairly close to the popular imagery conveyed by their early enemies during the classical witchhunts?
He speaks of Hellenismos mainly, but what he says — as the commenters note — is broadly applicable.
Briefly, his thesis is that the Internet privileges communicators — the “chattering classes” — over doers.
Now I am a card-carrying member of the scribal class — somewhere in the house there should be an old Colorado Press Association ID card, and even rarer, in my desk is my Universal Life Church press pass — so should I be offended.
Not at all. Sannion makes some interesting points.There is more to Paganism(s) than the blogosphere and Twitter. But often you wouldn’t know it. Read the whole thing.
