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Another Druid Fracas
(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.
Re: Bonewits and ADF
I have some happy memories of sitting at Isaac's kitchen table, having heated discussions and intellectual arguments about matters relating to Neopaganism. He was a worthy opponent, very bright and sometimes pointing out things I hadn't considered. I really valued these discussions, which were always friendly. I was no raving beauty in those days but I was a fairly handsome woman. Isaac never touched me or hit on me or treated me disrespectfully.
As Rita says, Isaac and his then wife became initiates of the NROOGD, a San Francisco Bay Area-based witchcraft tradition in which I was also active. We were members of different covens and I never circled with him in a private setting, but NROOGD regularly did large, formal, well rehearsed sabbat rituals that were open to the public. Most of the local NROOGD initiates and various other interested people attended these. Isaac and his wife and members of their coven wrote a Samhain ritual and invited me to represent the Morrigan in it, which I did. It was an excellent ritual, poetically beautiful and magically effective.
I lost touch with him when he moved to New York.
The fact that Isaac did not hit on me when I first knew him proves nothing either way. A couple of years after that, I attended a Neopagan festival in the South and was privately warned by several people to watch out for a BNP there who was notoriously handsy. At that gathering, I was one of the priestesses in a pickup ritual in which I wore an outfit that showed a lot of skin. When I was introduced to the man I had been warned about, he was a perfect gentleman. He probably thought I was a lesbian, but that doesn't stop determined lechers.
The one thing from Bonewits' early writing which I think has stood the test of time and recommend to all and sundry is the ABCDEF (Advanced Bonewits Cult Danger Evaluation Frame). This is a list of criteria to score any organization or group a person is thinking about joining. The ABCDEF will help you determine, just from the information you can glean from initial contacts with their members and from reading their public literature, whether the group has characteristics of being controlling, a scam, exploitative, etc. He came up with this before he founded the ADF.