Another Druid Fracas

[ecosophia]

(With thanks to reader Lady Cutekitten for the title)

I've been asked by several readers over on the blog about the recent blowup in the Druid organization ADF (that's Ar nDraiocht Fein if you're wondering, Irish for "Our Own Druidry") and, since that's not relevant to the theme of this week's blog post, I figured I'd take the discussion over here. 

What I know about the matter is this. In a book published several years ago, a woman accused the late Neopagan leader and ADF founder Isaac Bonewits of molesting her when she was a child of six. Two weeks ago, five senior ADF members abruptly resigned, citing the lack of responsiveness to that accusation as one of a long list of reasons for their resignation. Last week the Mother Grove -- the board of directors of the organization -- announced that they were formally repudiating Bonewits, dismissing him from his posthumous role of "Beloved Ancestor." The Mother Grove claimed that they had received other accusations of misbehavior on Bonewits' part and cited these as reasons for their actions. The result has been a great deal of anger and bad feeling on all sides, with one side arguing that concern for victims of sexual abuse should be paramount,  while the other argues that condemning him without a trial on the basis of mere accusation is exactly the modality of the "Satanic ritual abuse" fraud of the 1980s, which destroyed so many innocent people's lives. 

Myself, I have no dog in this fight. I joined ADF just after the turn of the millennium, and quit shaking my head a few years later; I thought the ritual and religious aspects of the organization had a great deal of promise but the organizational structure was the most dysfunctional I'd ever seen in action -- it's no exaggeration to say that Bonewits and the other founding members came up with a scheme that combines all the downsides of hierarchy and democracy, while providing none of the advantages of either. I had several interactions with Isaac Bonewits later on, when I was head of AODA, and we were civil to each other but I won't claim that I liked the man; it was kind of hard to forget that he spent much of his career spewing insults at the kind of Druidry I love and practice.

With regard to the accusations against him, that's not something I'm qualified to assess. I do know that quite literally every time I was around him for more than a minute or so, I got to watch him trying to put the moves on some woman, and I don't recall ever seeing him take a simple "no" for an answer. The guy was frankly a creep. On the other hand, I never saw him make a play for anyone who wasn't obviously adult.

Whatever the truth of that issue, though, on a magical level ADF has probably signed its own death certificate. You don't turn somebody into a "Beloved Ancestor" and spend a decade making offerings to his spirit, then suddenly turn around and give him the bum's rush -- especially when you've made him a central figure in the ritual for ADF's attempt to create an initiatory tradition. (That's a flustered cluck all its own, but we can leave it aside for now.) That's perhaps the most effective way I can think of to create a wrathful spirit: empowered by a decade of offerings, linked closely to the egregor of your organization, and now enraged by the organization's 180-degree turn...oog. Whatever ADF's principal fissures are -- I have my guesses, but we'll see -- I'd expect to see the organization splitting wide open along those in the very near future. 

It's unfortunate. As I noted above, the ritual and religious aspects of the organization were quite good, and if they hadn't been saddled with a great deal of unhelpful organizational baggage, ADF might have been around for the long haul. As it is, with the Neopagan movement generally in a state of accelerating decline, I expect to see it added to the long list of defunct American alternative spiritual movements in the not too distant future. 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for the commentary, Archdruid.

Is there in your opinion any hope for potential offshoots of ADF that maintain the ritual but utterly overhaul the organizational aspects? I’ve seen plans for several such movements in the Druidism subreddit, but I’m wondering whether the egregore is too far gone.

I don’t know how the loss of ADF will ultimately affect our Reconstructionist nieces and nephews, it might be quite a blow to them.

Kind regards,
Brigyn

[ecosophia]

Oh, it could certainly be done. New name, new symbol, completely different organizational structure, and a formal founding ritual in which offerings were made to the Three Kindreds, past faults acknowledged and renounced, and a new start made -- that would do it. To put icing on the cake, get the core members ordained in the Reformed Druids of North America -- the tradition ADF spun off of -- so the new organization does an end run around what occultists call the "tainted sphere" of ADF and has a fair chance at a good start.

[ecosophia]

One crucial thing, though -- any group that wants to avoid ADF's fate needs to get rid of the logo of the stump with the single shoot going out of it. That logo was ADF's destiny and its curse. How many times during its lifespan did ADF create a training program, or set up some other thing, and then chop it down and start over again? Some variant of the Druid sigil below would be a far better emblem.

[(Anonymous)]

Didn't they publish your A World Full of Gods long ago? I noticed it dropped out of their site for some time; it is still available, but only in the used book market (perhaps there is some new old stock floating around).

[ecosophia]

Yes -- they were in the process of bringing out a new edition. It'll be interesting to see if that goes through, or if I have to place it with a new publisher.

BONEwits

[(Anonymous)]

JMG,

I mean, come on, the guy's name was BONEwits. So that's what he did. Nomen est omen, the name speak for itself. :)

That reminds me of one particular joke...

Q: How many Druids does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: They don't screw in light bulbs, they screw in Stone Circles.

I think it's about the ADF druids.

On a more serious note, what surprises me about the Neopagan movement as a whole is their unstoppable seething hatred of Christianity. They won't even spell the word properly, they spell it as "xtianity" (and "xtians").

Q: How many Pagans does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Six. One to change it, and five to sit around complaining that light bulbs never burned out before those damned Christians came along.

In my teen years I was drawn into this hatred, but I grew out of it, I understood that it's the people who are fallible and corrupt, not the gods the represent. Perhaps ADF imploded because they refused to admit their own human imperfection?

- Polytropos

Re: BONEwits

[ecosophia]

Yeah, the whole "Xtian" business always struck me as childish. Since you imitate whatever you contemplate, the fixation on the evils of Christianity also guaranteed that the Neopagan scene would copy Christianity's bad habits.

[booklover1973]

My first thought when I read about the Bonewits affair and the woes of ADF was that the organization maybe had too close associations with the Neopagan scene to avoid the toxic egregor of the Neopagan scene. I wonder if the causes for the abuse of power are similar to those in the Catholic Church or of these are two entirely different issues, origin-wise.

[ecosophia]

Bonewits grew up Catholic and seems to have envisioned ADF as the One True Holy Apostolic Church of Paganism -- one of ADF's crippling problems was that it was set up from the beginning with the kind of bureaucracy you only need if you're a big denomination, and it wasn't. Still, the organizational cultures of the ADF and the Catholic Church don't have that much in common. Most of ADF's problems as I saw them came out of too much bureaucracy and too much politics; most of the Catholic church's problems come from a culture of institutionalized cruelty and a total lack of accountability.

[(Anonymous)]

How toxic IS Neopaganism, and how did it come to be that way in less than a century?

[(Anonymous)]

P.S. I'm sorry if I sent the same message several times, my internet connection kept dying on me. Mercury must be in retrograde.

I really should make an account here.

- Polytropos

[ecosophia]

Got it in one -- Mercury has been retrograde since the end of October.

[(Anonymous)]

I wasn't that familiar with the ADF until coming across here a few times previously, and then I discovered there was an ADF grove here in my area in Nova Scotia (https://www.novascotiadruid.com/blog). I had thought about getting in touch with them, but thanks to your warning I did not, and this news makes me even more cautious about it. It's too bad, because the local grove seems OK, I like their website and they seem to be fairly active.

[ecosophia]

Some local ADF groves can be worth your time -- it depends very much on who's in them and how tied into the overall organization they are. Divination might not be a bad approach!

[jjensenii]

Hmm. I had expected you would say it was appropriate to remove him as Blessed Ancestor but that the attempt to memory-hole him would be their undoing.

Now I'm curious: assuming the allegations are true, what steps could ADF have taken to salvage the situation?

[ecosophia]

It would have been just as bad to memory-hole it. The useful thing to my mind would have been to accept him warts and all, and then use his birthday as an annual date, organization-wide, to educate people about consent and to donate money and labor collectively to organizations that help victims of sexual abuse.

The ADF logo...

[(Anonymous)]

Is it intentional that the tree looks like a middle finger?

Re: The ADF logo...

[ecosophia]

Hah! I don't think so, but you're right, of course.

[(Anonymous)]

"Last week the Mother Grove -- the board of directors of the organization -- announced that they were formally repudiating Bonewits, dismissing him from his posthumous role of "Beloved Ancestor."

The bigger question is why they took so long to repudiate the man. It seems that his creepy behaviour must have been obvious to virtually everyone if you noticed despite not being around him much. He should have been ousted early on and then they wouldn't have the 'wrathful spirit' or the tainted egregore to deal with.

I've noticed in another neopagan cult that most people will stand by a very flawed founder as superhuman qualities tend to be projected on to them. Plus they don't want to be outcasts or victims of smear campaigns..

[ecosophia]

I'm fairly sure that the only reason they've done it now is that his behavior has become a political liability to them. His serial harassment of women was unfortunately close to normal in some Neopagan circles.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, unlike my (Roman Catholic) Church, at least they did try to unfrock the guy, however belatedly, so I’ll give them points for that.

[ecosophia]

Duly noted!

Getting through this

[esingletary]

This whole situation has been hitting horrifically close to home for me... I am the tenant at CedarLight Grove, one of the older, larger groves in ADF, and I have been watching the growing discord in the broader organization with a nervous eye for a few years. I haven’t followed the doings of the mother grove or participated in any conferences or events since around 2017 when a mob of members and a few leaders viciously turned on me, my friends, and my family in a wildly public and cruel way and made it very clear that I was no longer welcome or safe there, or really in most of the neopagan world.

However, I’ve retained my membership mainly because of my grove. My entire world right now outside of work consists of the grove and the Masonic lodge (and the two worlds have been combining more and more lately with friends who are interested in the esoteric side of Masonry expressing interest in visiting the grove, and some grove members joining up with local lodges). And the one thing the grove offers that the lodge doesn’t is a place where I can relax and fully be myself away from the constant striving for perfection that defines lodge culture (it’s enormously beneficial as far as personal growth but also anxiety inducing sometimes).

So, when I hear about threats to ADF, even though my personal practice or belief system really has virtually nothing to do with ADF and I’ve always been known as the token OBODie and Hermeticist... It very often comes down to pretty much all of my friends, most of the world that I know, and the literal place that I live.

I sat down with our senior Druid and Priest a few weeks ago (I... felt something like this coming), and had a conversation with her about what would happen to Cedarlight if ADF collapsed as an organization. She said there would be some legal hoops and paperwork mostly to get some of the federal statuses we currently have through the National organization but it’d be fairly easy to do. For mostly legal reasons relating to our articles of incorporation, it would probably require a collapse on an organizational level for us to actually take those steps.

Regarding Isaac, Cedarlight along with several other groves are continuing to honor him for similar reasons to the ones you outlined here, I used almost your exact words Sunday... and the general attitude is that, in an ancestor venerating tradition it’s a really -really- bad idea to desecrate the dead. The mother grove did give autonomy in that decision to groves, and several will continue that veneration including ours.

So... questions:

1: What steps would you recommend for a group like Cedarlight trying to navigate this mess? We’ve always been a little different in terms of ADF, and the even back when ADF was first created we had a reputation for being an oddball grove. We’re part of ADF, but aside from the colorful stories Caryn has about the things that go on in the obligatory clergy council and Senior Druids Council boards that she has to sit in on, we don’t have much involvement in the broader organization. Most of the regular members think of themselves as Cedarlight Grove members rather than ADF members and our regular Sunday Ritual isn’t even done in ADF’s core order but rather a modified ritual the grove’s been doing since the ‘90s. So we have our own egregore that remains independent of ADF’s egregore.

2: What would you recommend someone in my situation doing on an individual level? Leaving is... not an option since that would involve losing virtually everything including my home... and all of my friends are there... but I’m also pretty terrified about all of this. As far as spiritual practices, I’ve been working on LRM for the past few years so daily LBRP, daily Tarot divination (and occasional consultation of Ogham just to keep it fresh), and Meditation plus a few hours of study a day are my primary spiritual practices for the last year and a half... (I have a Magic Monday question I’m sitting on for when I finish the course in another two months) the only things I do spiritually other than that are devotional offerings and prayers to my personal gods (mostly Manannan and Jesus) and ancestors and if it counts, relentless study and practice with blue lodge and red lodge rituals... As for natural magic, I use the red bag amulet you recommend and change it every two months and take a hoodoo bath on the last Sunday of every month. I’ve read your natural magic handbook several times and have read several Cat Yronwood books but I’ve never actually done anything in that department beyond those basic protective spells...

Is there anything that needs to be added to my spiritual toolbox if I’m going to try to weather this mess?

Re: Getting through this

[ecosophia]

1) Cedarlight Grove is probably in good shape. Caryn and the other senior members will want to have all the paperwork in place so they can become independent at the drop of a hat, and if ADF becomes more toxic, going independent would be the best option anyway. As the grove is still making appropriate offerings to Bonewits, his spirit will also help you.

2) You should be fine, too. Keep up your banishings and meditate regularly, and that ought to keep you in good shape.

[ecosophia]

Delighted to hear it. That's likely to be the way that anything healthy survives from the ADF tradition.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for this. Your holding to your standards like this "With regard to the accusations against him, that's not something I'm qualified to assess." is something I expected and appreciate. I was very interested in your comments regarding the probable magical level impact.

I only ran into various writings of Mr. Bonewits online. I was underwhelmed with what I read. Early in my moving toward a Druidlike path, I investigated joining ADF. I was quickly scared off by its very organized hierarchical structure, which for me was (and is) a red flag. (But my dad got us involved in the Shepherding Movement when I was in my mid teens, and I drank that koolaid, and getting out of the cult was difficult, so my radar for that type of thing is overactive.) Seeing some of the things he said about the Druid Revival was also disconcerting. More recently, a lot was made clear when reading about his attempts to turn RDNA into what became ADF after the big schism.

It will be interesting to see what happens to the ADF. I do have a lot of sympathy for anybody whose lives have been ruined by this, and for those who now have some difficult decisions to make. I've been in esingletary's position and it is NOT a pleasant place to be.



DJSpo

[ecosophia]

"Interesting" in the sense of the apocryphal Chinese curse, no doubt!

"Satanic ritual abuse" fraud of the 1980s

[(Anonymous)]

This has been posted on various blogs on the dissident right recently:

https://operationdisclosure1.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-finders-fbi-document-dump-from.html

I'm not familiar with all the details of this story by any means, but I figured you'd want to be aware of the FBI doc if you're not already:

https://vault.fbi.gov/the-finders

Re: "Satanic ritual abuse" fraud of the 1980s

[ecosophia]

I'm familiar with it. The Satanic ritual abuse fraud, like most such frauds, based itself on a mixture of deliberate falsehoods and exaggerated facts, and the "Finders" cult was one of the facts that got exaggerated.

Bonewits and ADF

[ritaer]

First comment--I knew Isaac and circled with him during several periods in which he lived in California--in addition to the ADF he was an initiate of New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn (NeoPagan witchcraft order in Bay Area) and a Gardnarian (not sure which line). I _never_ saw him behave inappropriately with a child or preteen.


As for ADF not acting on the allegations by MZB's daughter--she didn't even have the courage to make an actual accusation--just vague hints in a book that seemed to extrapolate the crimes within her family to the entire Pagan community. What exactly was ADF supposed to do? Attacking your Founder for accusations made by a mentally ill person years after the event, and years after the Founder's death doesn't seem right. Were they supposed to hold a tribunal of some sort? How? no way to compel witnesses to appear, or to ensure their truthfulness. I have seen in discussions on line that everyone who has challenged the allegations has been accused of being a collaborator. Diana Paxson, for example said that Isaac was not living in her home at the same time as Moira was, leading to remarks to the effect that "she was part of that whole crowd too." Did we not learn from the Satanic Panic and the Recovered Memory movement that not all testimony is reliable? Unfortunately there are still people out there pushing the 'victims never lie' story and demanding mob action instead of fair adjudication.

As for the adult women--well, it was the 60s and 70s and a lot of people who were quite happily celebrating free love and "all acts of love and pleasure are Her rites" back then seem to be suffering from "frackers remorse" these days.

While I read the ADF publications I never joined--just didn't appeal. I did respect the re-constructionist idea of basing practice on history and knowledge of original languages. However, I am not sure how well a scholar's path mixes with building an effective religion. Isaac's ambitions for the organization were completely unrealistic. I remember an early document laying out training for the clergy of something like 7 levels in 13 paths or something like that. It would have been the equivalent of earning a dozen PhD degrees to reach the highest level. Ironically one of the first requirements was to have one's ordinary life and livelihood in order--something that Isaac seemed to have a great deal of trouble with. (this was before the illness from the contaminated tryptophan struck him).

Preoccupation with Christianity: Isaac seemed convinced that Christianity was exclusively a religion of gloom and doom, hell fire preaching, looking forward to or even actively promoting a nuclear war for the End Times. Not to mention the whole Burning Times myth of the Inquisition dragging the village's beloved herbalist off to execution. While there were Christian right wingers who were preoccupied with the End Times, a day of listening to a Christian radio station would be instructive to anyone who holds such views. You know, songs about love and hope and support from Jesus and talks about being guided through the hard times. Isaac was also preoccupied with Satanists and IMO wasted a lot of time attacking the few Satanists who wanted to hang out with Neopagans--energy that could have been used to actually publish the ADF newsletter on time. Sigh.

I don't know how much it influenced the structure or actions of ADF, but Isaac was also, in my experience, consumed with the idea that the Pagan world needed full time paid clergy. He wasn't the only one--many people were given to saying things like --real cultures support their shamans, artists, poets, etc. IMO trying to create an organization that requires full time leaders is putting the cart before the horse--like the dot.com startups who rented office space and hired people based on their optimistic projections of what they would need when business got rolling, only to go belly up when the projections didn't pan out. Not to mention that if you don't like the results of the Christian clergy model imitating it seems like a bad idea.

ADF is not the only Pagan organization flailing around for effective organization and leadership. I suspect it will also not be the only one to fall to the "OMB our early leaders lived by the mores of their time, not by ours" syndrome.

Rita

Re: Bonewits and ADF

[ecosophia]

Thanks for this. The thing I noted all along about the whole push for paid Pagan clergy is that the only people who wanted it were the ones who wanted to be paid Pagan clergy -- I don't recall ever meeting anyone who wanted to be one of the parishioners! What it came down to is that some people wanted to be paid to be Pagan, but they weren't willing to do it the honest way -- the way that shamans, artists, poets, and priests have done for millennia -- by providing people with services for which the people are willing to pay. That's a workable model -- it's the one that pays my bills, for example -- but it requires you to find out what people want and then provide them with that, rather than just doing whatever you want and having people flock around adoringly for undefined reasons...

[avalterra]

I met Isaac Bonewits at a pagan festival, I'm going to guess about 1986. He was *exactly* as you describe him. Hugely inflated ego, always had his arm around the waist of some young woman, or two, or even three.

But as you pointed out they all looked quite happy to be there.

He was one of the (as we used to call them) "BNPs" - Big Name Pagans, who was insistent that pagans of all persuasions must have a paid clergy. I was all of about 22 and I could see that wasn't going to happen.

[ecosophia]

I've more often seen that acronym translated "Big Nose Pagans," for what it's worth... ;-)

ADF Org Chart

[filthywaffle]

I happened upon an ADF org chart by one of the members who did a write up the situation.

The chart is an amazing piece of work. I've even saved it to my desktop in case I ever need a perfect example of dysfunctional organizational design. It looks like a ridiculous parody of an org chart to an outsider like me, but it would seem that people who have had contact with the ADF wouldn't find it surprising at all.

Re: ADF Org Chart

[(Anonymous)]

That’s like those crazy charts they used to give out where I worked whenever there was a Process Improvement! I didn’t know anyone else used them!

Since it took about a year to get approval and funding for computer reprogrammings, by which time we’d be 5 or 6 PIs down the road, we would have Work Arounds, for which charts might have been useful, but since WAs officially didn’t exist we didn’t get those.

[(Anonymous)]

"when you've made him a central figure in the ritual for ADF's attempt to create an initiatory tradition. (That's a flustered cluck all its own, but we can leave it aside for now.)"

I'd be curious to hear why it's such a flustered cluck. The initiatory program was one of the things that pinged my interest when I gave renewing my membership a go a few years back (finally, something that isn't purely academic or Christian-esque minister of the people). I'm not so well versed in these things to spot less obvious red flags, how glad should I be I didn't get involved?

I find this depressing, but not surprising. ADF was the first organization I joined more than ten years ago, and I had some good times in it (I'm another former Cedarlight Grove member, that really was one of their better groups) before letting my membership lapse. Looking for a sense of community again, I tried rejoining, only all I saw anymore, was politics - the exact same toxic politics you talk about on your other blog, and ADF's leadership caving to their demands way too often. I backed right off, like I've been doing since this insanity started.

I suspect, from everything I've read about this latest blow up, amid genuine (and longstanding) accusations about dysfunctional leadership, politics is a big part of what this is really all about. A few of the more vocal members of the activist wing leaving in disgust because ADF won't be as political as they want it to be, throwing buzzwords over their shoulders as they flounce away (racism! sexism! how so? don't ask). The Mother Grove needs a sacrifice to appease the activist crowd, why not a man who's been dead near ten years? Must look much easier to some people than fixing their leadership problems, or I don't know, letting the activists do whatever they want while you focus on providing religious service to people, since that's what you are, a religious organization. That the people pushing for this move don't see (or have even considered) the magical implications of what they're doing, wouldn't surprise me much at all.

This is my first time commenting here, though I've been reading both your blogs for a while now, so I just want to say thank you so much for providing an online haven of sanity NeoPagan refugees like myself can come to. Your writing has really been a huge help to me.

[ecosophia]

You're welcome and thank you! The ADF Initiate program had an amusing origin. Quite a few years ago I wrote a piece comparing ADF and OBOD, explaining that ADF is a church while OBOD is an initiatory order. With utter predictability, the ADF leadership decided that they were going to have an initiatory dimension too -- they've got a real fixation on being the One True Holy Apostolic Church of Neopaganism, and so can't stand the thought that any other group has something they don't -- and with utter predictability, they didn't take the time to find out much about what magical initiation is or how it works before cobbling together a ritual and launching the thing with much fanfare.

The ritual was published -- one of many signs that they had no idea what they were doing -- and I know of rather a number of people with backgrounds in initiatory orders who had great fun chuckling over it. Have you ever read a fictional sex scene written by a teenage virgin who has only the most abstract notion of what actually happens when two people make love? That's how it compares to an actual ritual of initiation. That's why it didn't surprise me a bit that they did their 180 turn on Bonewits with no thought of the magical and spiritual consequences; it really was par for the course.