Pagan Pride Project Inc

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/3000-year-old-goddess-statuette-lake-bolsena-2525426

A 3,000-Year-Old Goddess Statuette Emerges From Italian Waters A goddess statuette that was likely used in ancient rituals has emerged from dives into Italy's storied Lake Bolsena.

We seem to have a new webmaster. We'll see what he comes up with. I'm not sure how fast this is going to happen. There is still an old website.

Duke Egbert (Dagonet Dewr), one of the founders of the Pagan Pride Project, has died. Everything Pagan Pride has become, all the events that have popped up around the country and the world, follow a model he dreamed up. For our community, that is how he will be remembered, relentless efforts to build an activist movement geared towards acceptance of our faith. But he was involved in other "communities" and his contributions are still felt in many places. He worked tirelessly even while battling cancer multiple times.

He used to compile lists of prominent Pagans who had passed over the year (I think Oberon Zell tries to do it now), now he is on that list. He fought like hell against this thing, and prevailed before, but not this time. I will always remember him and wish I had met him in person. What is remembered lives.

Here is a memorium I have seen.
http://www.dailyvault.com/article.php5?id=598&fbclid=IwY2xjawC5pXhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHReRPm4k5ibnW_myCmQIoW7K9nEIWC_vZQstUy_92Bup0bpHq_rKNWpB8g_aem_AXSo77uYYfZc-R5TkM2Kird5oSwa_JNR5LeCHGoKwsEvvizmOJwLmIYJOKHcySloOi3h0-Edcp9pmLF42UF-XPbb

The Daily Vault Music Reviews Over 5,000 music reviews covering albums from over 2,500 artists. All genres: rock, pop, indie, prog, jazz, country, blues, hip-hop, plus interviews, concert and DVD reviews.

I take a lot of pride in being a good teacher and ritual leader. People who have taken workshops from me know that I tend to show up with more notes than I’ll actually be able to use. I generally include an experiential or integrative piece in every class I teach. I’m good at weaving questions into the flow of a class without losing the thread. I’m pretty good (and getting better at) reining people in when their question or thread is tugging us in the wrong direction. I am a skilled teacher.

Rituals are similarly well-considered and prepared. I try to build the best container possible for people to have a transcendental experience. This means every sense is considered, the structure is deliberate, and although the exact words may not be memorized, their underlying meaning is known and can be articulated clearly and correctly. After each large group ritual I run with a team, I conduct a post-mortem: what worked? What can be improved? How can we become more effective?

I take my work seriously. I am skillful, and seek to become more so.

The upshot of these skills is that sometimes when someone has a big experience at a workshop or ritual I’m running, they mistake their experience for the person who created the container. I’ve heard a few different varieties of “I would follow you anywhere.” I have been offered money, expensive goods, and more influence than I am comfortable accepting among many other things. This pattern happened often enough that I recently contacted a trusted and more advanced colleague to have the “how do I keep from having a cult of personality around me?” conversation. I’m not one of the big fish in the Pagan pond, yet even at my level, this has still been my experience.

Additionally, here in the United States, we have been fed a lot of programming that those who serve as clergy are morally or ethically superior. Despite countless examples of abuse of power within Christianity, this concept that priests are superior and infallible (or that when they fail it’s a Great Lesson of some sort) is everywhere.

It’s a dangerous lie. Yes, the overwhelming majority of the priests I know (and I include myself in this) strive to be ethical and honorable. We know that we are holding a container for incredibly tender, vulnerable, and sometimes-broken pieces in our community. We strive to be worthy of that. And, also, we are human. So very, very human.

To this day, I am a person who screws up. I drop balls, get overwhelmed and overextended, forget to schedule things, misschedule others, double-book myself, communicate ineffectively or just not at all, and routinely and regularly do not live up to my own expectations or those of others. My past also includes some really questionable behavior. In my young adult years, I was given a choice of the brig (military jail) or anger management counseling because my most recent fistfight was so violent, resulting in so much injury to my opponent, that it was concerning even by Marine Corps standards. As an adult, I was married to an abuser for over a decade and my behavior mimicked his in harmful ways for many years. I used my command of the language to say cruel, cutting, catty things to people who did not deserve it. I internalized a toxic message and subjected others to it. These pieces of my past are as much a part of me as the skill set I’m using and developing now.

And I wrote all of this out to illustrate one incredibly important point: *skill does not equate to superiority. It only equates to skill.*

I find two parallels useful for holding this in mind when we’re considering spiritual leaders. The first is sports.

We do not expect moral superiority from a top-of-the-line multi-million-dollar-contract football player. We understand that the athlete’s prowess is a combination of natural ability and the honing of skill. When yet another top athlete is discovered to be an abuser/gambler/criminal/what-have-you, we’re not surprised. We know that the incredible skill set of the athlete does not mean any form of moral superiority - it just means that the athlete in question honed a skill to a razor-fine point.

The second example is music, and it may be more useful as a parallel to spirituality simply because the creation of music includes a mystical aspect. Most songwriters talk about the way lyrics and melodies come to us from a numinous source. Music is a powerful force: good songwriters create music that is every bit as transcendental as the best ritual. And, also, some of the best songwriters and composers in the world are/were…well…terrible people. Mozart was a spoiled, entitled, drunken, womanizing letch. Wagner was an anti-semite (who published a paper on his hateful prejudice) and to this day he is associated with aryanism. Moving forward in time, Jim Morrison was an abuser who literally set a room on fire his then-partner was hiding from him in. I could list dozens here. And, despite the incredible music that these people made, we’re able to understand that their skill and connection to that numinous quality did not, and does not, mean superiority.

We need to bring this understanding to our spiritual leaders, writers, and teachers, both to prevent abuse and out of mercy to them. Writer, performer, and thought-leader Alok Vaid-Menon said something in an interview that really stuck with me. I’m paraphrasing here, but Alok’s message was that pedestaling someone - placing them above us as perfect or infallible - is an act of violence. It is an act of violence to deny someone their humanity, imperfection, and fallibility. It is also an act of violence to the person who does the placing: eventually, all pedestals crumble, and we must then face a reckoning with disappointment and hard reality. It’s a self-inflicted wound that hurts everyone involved.

By allowing our leaders, priests, teachers, and guides their humanity, we’re also better situated when someone strays from “normal” human flaws into something more sinister or antisocial. The magical world has a long history of visionaries and ground-breakers who are seriously problematic (looking at you, Crowley and Gardner). With older texts, most of us have learned how to take useful material from an imperfect source. We need to bring this way of approaching spiritual and magical skill into the present moment as well. A writer, teacher, or leader can contribute to their field, impact practitioners in a positive way, and also cast a deep shadow when their flaws or extreme behaviors and perspectives are revealed.

So how do we do this? How do we hold useful material in one hand and absolutely gods-awful behavior or words from the same source in the other?

I can only tell you what I do, and it’s to point directly at it.

“This is a beautiful, impactful ritual that can really help you. Also, it was created by a person who is now a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist, or TERF. Please remember that material from them needs to be evaluated for bias and gender essentialism.”

“This text contains many useful approaches and techniques for magic, and it was also written by a dude who wanted a good excuse to get in the pants of anyone young, female, and gullible, so you need to filter for some deep-rooted misogyny and patriarchal nonsense.”

“This course of study is a useful way to learn this magical system. It was also designed by a racist, so before you begin, you need to read up on dog whistles and how white supremacist messages can get implanted in a concept.”

“These books contributed greatly to our field. Also, they were written by someone who knowingly harbored, enabled, and was an apologist for the worst kinds of child-abusers and groomers.”

Does this suck? Absolutely. I wish our spiritual leaders were perfect, too. I wish anyone whose calling included the mantle of priest or teacher also had an infallible ethical compass embedded in that calling. But that’s not how it works. Our priests, teachers, leaders and visionaries are *skillful*, not superior. They are *knowledgeable*, not perfect.

They are human in all the helpful and harmful ways that humans can be.

We must break the pedestal. We must learn not to place people on them to begin with. And we must be willing to sit with the hard truth of complexity and nuance: skill and terrible judgment. Skill and lack of compassion or empathy. Skill and antisocial or sociopathic tendencies.

And, as practitioners, we need to be unequivocal when we’re calling out those shadows even when we’ve had good experiences with the material a teacher generated. When a living teacher or spiritual leader is credibly revealed to be harmful, the response must be completely clear: this person is a problem. We do not work with them directly, we do not platform their message, we are not apologists for their brokenness. And, we do not throw out their contributions to the field immediately. We return to them for a second (or fourteenth) and more careful look. We filter for bias. We take the wisdom that’s truly valuable and carry it forward, and we protect the vulnerable with clear language around the red flags in the work.

Our spiritual leaders are map-makers for the Pagan path, and going somewhere worthwhile using the map a flawed creator built doesn’t invalidate your experience. The magic lives within *you*. The connection to the gods, ancestors, spirits, and guides is *yours*. *You* are the power, the gateway to the transcendent, and the beloved of the gods and spirits. A teacher or spiritual leader can be skilled in building a map, but the one using it is *you*.

The cycle of a skilled teacher or spiritual leader revealing a dark shadow will repeat. It is the nature of humans to be a mix of benevolent and harmful traits, sometimes in the extreme. Now the question is, can we adjust our perspective so that when it happens, we are quick to recalibrate and add caveats to their work? Can we become more resilient to the disappointment we feel when a human is revealed to be all too human?

Can we break the pedestal?
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A newly discovered statue of Apollo marks continuity in Phillipi Archeologists have uncovered the marble head of a figure believed to be Apollo in Phillipi, a find that shows how Roman statuary continued to be used and appreciated in the Christian Byzantine era.

We are looking for a new webmaster, maybe even a web team eventually. But one webmaster will have to be recruited to decide how to divide the tasks up. There is a pared down website up there right now which is obviously not adequate, and I am trying to update event listings by hand just to have something. A new webmaster might initially help with this, especially by creating a better main page for the event listings (there's left side navigation to the individual events, but no content on the main event listing pages, for example, "united states.")

The way the website used to work and should work, and these are probably the basic requirements: there is a front end (obviously) with the HTML content and the cool graphics, there is a back end with the LC data that provides the information for the event listing pages on the front end, local coordinators must be able to log in and update their own public event information and private contact information, using a template format (but LCs were able to disable the template format and personalize their page somewhat), there is a private local coordinator section with resources, and there are application, monthly reporting and "contact us" web submission forms. There are other minor features like local coordinators being able to post their media exposure in a news section of the site. The website is currently on Google Sites but we are not requiring that it stay there, in fact Johnson and I believe it probably should move to WordPress. PPP can only probably have a limited budget to pay for hosting but we'll discuss this. Johnson should be able to get most of the former graphics, resources, and textual content to you.

Rebuilding this type of site will be the major first step, and you are not required to use the former design. Afterward we are open to ideas to improve it, but I think it will be most beneficial to the local coordinators for the website that I described above to be established first.

This is a volunteer position, and ideally the new webmaster, at least the head person, will be someone familiar to the board to be trusted with admin level access.

If your experience matches these requirements, send a resume (nothing fancy, just tell me what you have done, with links, and what you can do to create the above described website), and send it to [email protected] with the subject "new PPP webmaster."

Thank you.

People have been stating they are locked out of the website. Yes, you are. At this point, don't even try. I asked for your information changes and updates in a different post on this page, please go there (or here is fine) to comment with your changes, and as soon as Johnson and I work out some kinks, I will enter them by hand.

Basically the back end data does not appear on the website anymore. Believe me, me updating by hand is a temporary solution. I can't do this. My next post soon will be about getting a new webmaster, and there will be a new website.

By way of explanation, if I understand things right, Google Sites, which our site is on, for hopefully only a few more weeks, has stopped supporting either Google sites in general, or the particular type of site we created. This leads to security concerns, and problems like not being able to log in. That's what happened. Yes, some of the problems have been going on for years, and maybe we tried to solve it for too long instead of simply moving platforms. But that will happen now.

People have been saying things on this list that leads me to believe that they just aren't getting my emails about the 501(c)3c status and what to do next, or emails about anything really. I think there are two problems: (1) we don't have a working email list, (2) there's been years of neglect of the website.

There are three solutions, and I think you can help: (1) we need help identifying the current LCs of every event (you can comment here please to let us know your name and event email), (2) we need a new webmaster (email [email protected] if interested), (3) when we know who the LCs are, we'll create a new email list (probably on .io) and you'll be much more in touch with us, and each other.

Communication is a two way street. National has taken responsibility for some of these issues but blame is useless. Working together, however, we can solve it.

The Future of Paganism What we thought Paganism would become 10 years ago isn’t happening, and the future of Paganism is very much undetermined. It will grow out of what we do. It will be what we make it. What do you want to make it?

A 200-year-old tradition kicks off Mardi Gras in New Orleans Before the sun even rose on Tuesday, the North Side Skull and Bone Gang took to the streets in the city's Tremé neighborhood.

Covid part 2. Some of you (I have heard) have already canceled your live events and are planning a virtual event just like last year. This might be coz of existing covid rules not relaxed yet, or too many restrictions with the park (like attendance caps), or whatever. Some of you are able to hold a live event because of the dynamics with your city or reopenings or whatever. For example, Los Angeles is holding its event live in Long Beach, California because the state of California reopened and relaxed almost every covid related rule it had (we don't even have to wear masks, although many still are). But I know a lot of States have not done that yet. And I know that even if your state has reopened, it might be hard to find a location because the location might not be open yet

For all of these reasons, No event will get in trouble for canceling their live event and holding an online event this year. We're not like that anyway. I expect a much greater percentage of events to be live than last year, but we'll see. Just do what you need to do, do what's possible, and have a great event in whatever format you are having it. But strive for a live event if possible. And have fun! All I ask is that whatever you do, tell your RC's what you're doing. Use the monthly report form or whatever forum the RC has created for you.

I can try to answer questions below but I don't know the regs in 49 states.

Pagan Pride Season is not quite over yet!
Check out our events in North Carolina and Rio de Janiero this weekend!

Pagan Pride Project Inc - Events 4,314 followers

Indy Pagan Pride Day celebrates earth religions The event is being held from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the Marion County Fairgrounds.

York Pagan Pride Day Festival celebrates many beliefs What people might not know, Strum said, is many groups associated with paganism are positive, such as Heathens Against Hate.

Heathens Against Hate is a Pennsylvania based group which was represented at both Philly Pagan Pride and South Jersey Pagan Pride days. ❤💕 Rob Schreiwer is a former Philly LC and still very involved in both events, as well as leading Distelfink Sippschaff Kindred.

Pagans battling Neo-Nazis on stolen symbols Heathens Against Hate is a nonprofit based in Bristol, which seeks to educate the public about ancient pre-Christian symbols and their true origins in the

Please support your local Pagan Pride Day Festivals!

Pagan Pride Project Inc - Events 4,314 followers

Upcoming Pagan Pride Days! Check paganpride.org for a full listing and to find your local events.

Pagan Pride Project Inc - Events 4,314 followers

Great work by our Philadelphia PPD chapter. ❤💕 They had Westboro-wannabe types show up to protest again this year... but this year they were ready for them. 😊

The Best Banishing I Saw This Week It really sucks that not only do people waste energy spreading hate, but we have to spend our time dealing with it. But there is magic in taking that hate, drowning it out, and transforming that energy into something that elevates the spirit.

Duke Egbert (Dag) is one of Pagan Pride's founders and spent a lot of time building up the movement we know today. He's faced a lot of challenges recently (more than a good person should) and has resisted asking for help, but now he's forced to do so. If you are so inclined, check out the fundraiser below, and give.

Click here to support Help Duke Kick Cancer in the Ass organised by leo sandhu Duke Egbert is a man who has touched many hearts and saved many lives. He has done so selflessly, at the price of his own material gain. Recently Duke has been diagnosed with re**al cancer. We don't know how far it has spread, how bad the prognosis but we do know that the journey ahead for...

Sailors Hold Heathen Religious Services Aboard Deployed Aircraft Carrier Deployed at sea since October, Heathens aboard the Stennis pray to Njord, the god of seafarers.

Number of Americans practicing witchcraft estimated to be 1.5 MILLION The United States has seen a sharp increase in the number of those who identify as witches or practice witchcraft, according to recent studies.

Events in YOUR TOWN this weekend!

Pagan Pride Project Inc - Events 4,314 followers

Local Events this weekend! Support your PPD!

Pagan Pride Project Inc - Events 4,314 followers

Pagan Pride Project Inc added a button to help you learn more about them.

Pagan Pride Events happening THIS WEEKEND in your neighborhood! Check it out!

Pagan Pride Project Inc - Events 4,314 followers

Upcoming Pagan Pride events THIS WEEKEND!
Support your local events!

Pagan Pride Project Inc - Events 4,314 followers

IN THE NEWS: Coven Le Corbeau Noir, hosting South Eastern N.C. Pagan Pride Day in Jacksonville, NC, were the subject of a very positive article in the local newspaper, including a prominent mention of Pagan Pride Day.

http://www.jdnews.com/news/20180904/local-coven-offers-different-path-of-spirituality

Local coven offers a different path of spirituality Members of an Onslow County Pagan coven, called the Coven Le Corbeau Noir, speak out about their beliefs and explain their personal spiritual paths.

Pagan Pride Project Inc updated their business hours.

Pagan Pride Project Inc updated their phone number.

San Antonio Pagan Pride Day

A station for the San Antonio Food Bank will be set up at San Antonio Pagan Pride Day, as well as a virtual food bank link on the website closer to the event. I'm sure they will be depleted by Hurricane Harvey, so please help where you can. Goddess bless all those who are dealing with the aftermath, and protect the first responders.

SAPPD 2017 Committee
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