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

[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.

[booklover1973]

In one book about Druidry edited by Philipp Carr-Gomm, I read abput the program of ADF. What was obvious to me then, was that ADF seemed to have firm ideas about what is the right belief and what is the wrong belief. So it makes sense that Isaac Bonewits brought a Catholic background to the character of the ruling principles of ADF.

[(Anonymous)]

“Institutionalized cruelty,” do you mean past as in centuries past or today?

[ecosophia]

Right up to the present. During my time as head of AODA, I got to talk to a lot of people who left the religion they were born into, and many of them told he how that happened. The former Protestants and Jews had a galaxy of different reasons for having left -- but every single former Catholic who shared their reasons for leaving the Roman church told me a story of really egregious abuse on the part of clergy or religious -- and in most cases the abuse was enabled and even encouraged by the Catholic hierarchy. Some of the stories were absolutely horrific, and a thread of cruelty ran through them all.

RC cruelty

[ritaer]

One of my college roommates had attended parochial schools. When she was about 8 or 9 she was in the school hall when she saw a nun slip and fall. My roomie said that she thought about helping the nun to her feet, as a decent person would, but she panicked and ran the other way because she was not sure that you were allowed to touch a nun, even to help. Tale from another friend about being shamed in front of the whole class when her menstrual period started without warning and visibly stained her clothing. This is leaving out the physical cruelty of beings struck across the hand with wooden rulers, etc. This same friend left the Church for good after a priest refused to baptize her child because his father was Jewish--which I might note, isn't even Church doctrine. They had married in church with the usual agreement on the non-Catholic's part to allow the children to be raised in the Church, so the priest was undermining his own institution's policy out of some personal prejudice.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for the reply. As a young child I suffered a lot from institutionalized cruelty at a notionally protestant private school. I know almost nothing about the Catholic Church, but I feel real sympathy for those Catholics who have suffered perhaps much worse than I did, specially because when this happened to them they believed in a merciful god and perhaps also believed that it was good that they experienced real suffering at the hands of the clergy and the religious, as you say.
My only question to this would be: in your opinion is this a fundamental fault within Catholicism in particular or does all Christianity necessarily lend itself to this kind of abuse?

[ecosophia]

I don't think it's inherent to Christianity, as I know of quite a few Christian denominations that don't seem to have that problem. I think it's the celibacy that does it -- the Orthodox and Anglican/Episcopalian priesthoods, which allow priests ot marry, seem to escape most of those difficulties.

[(Anonymous)]

Why would celibacy cause this problem?

[ecosophia]

The psychology of sexual frustration has been tolerably well studied, and one of the common results -- to put things in Jungian terms -- is that people in that position very often project their own sexual feelings onto other people, then punish the other people for being "bad."

[(Anonymous)]

How do monastics get around the issue then?

[happypanda]

From a Chi cultivation perspective the reason one decides to become celibate is that - combined with other complimentary yogic practices - it helps clear out blockages in the subtle body. It's a way to aid the unwinding of the sanskaras one gained coming down the Planes. As the kundalini energy starts to rise - self-sustained bliss and increased capacity for higher intelligence to deal with inner and outer-world problems becomes available for your daily life (IQ jumps by approximately 100 points if one can maintain and hold this chi-energy rise for approximately 24 hours according to Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev).

From a Yogic standpoint sex is not really a problem in-and-of-itself. The problem for many spiritual cultivators is that sex - like any desire - can keep one identified with the body sensations thus making it more difficult and slower to re-ascend the Planes. The same could easily said of industrialized civilizations rise of "foodie culture" and the resulting "always eating" culture and rising obesity rates worldwide and the spiritual consequence is similar in terms of the subtle spiritual body and slower unwinding back up the Planes to infinite knowledge, power and bliss.

You can't just get away with telling yourself "I know I'm not this body or mind enjoying sex or food". The Chi energy has to be aware of it too. That's why most Left-Hand Tantric Path people are not as far along using Left-Hand sex-techniques as they might think. Most people are really using it as a spiritually-sanctified reason for knocking boots and are fooling themselves. Again, having and enjoying sex itself (or food) is not the problem. It's only a problem if one wants to rise back up the Planes in a conscious, self-directed way via sex-techniques and one is deluding oneself about how far along one is at it. Sexual misconduct is a pretty good indicator that that Celibate (usually called Right-Hand Path) is not ready for such a spiritual practice.

On another point people who can't do one (celibacy) often fall into the opposite trap (indulgence). Real Left-Hand Path people from what I can tell are rare. Probably on par with the people who's will is so strong they can hold their breath until they actually die. Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev says the force we call Desire and the force we call Life are the same thing. So for example, the force of desire for your next breath and the force of desire for sex is the same Life impulse so that's why real sex-tantra and/or celibacy as spiritual practices is rather difficult for most people. It's an advanced spiritual technique which is why I think it was originally reserved for Catholic Priests. Ideally, said Priest was much further along in consciously self-directing himself back up the Planes than the Laity he guided.

Sadly from my experience Abrahamaic clergy (Catholic, Protestant, Rabbi, Imam) are as clueless about the real reasons for celibacy as any average Jane or Joe you'd pull off the street impromptu and ask them about why do it. For that matter an astonishing number of Dharmic religion followers are just as ignorant about why it's done.

"Christian" cruelty

[(Anonymous)]

I think the doctrine of Original Sin may be part of it, because there are plenty of stories about other denominations running boarding schools, orphanages, etc that acted just like the Catholics. A lot of those stories are from Indian Country, so that may not be a fair sample; or, it could be that any institution that has a captive population if prone to that. Especially if the inmates are predefined as sinful.

Re: "Christian" cruelty

[ecosophia]

Interesting. I wonder if it's a product of culture clash -- I've also read a lot of stories of Americans who adopted older children from Africa or Asia and ended up abusing them pretty horribly.

[(Anonymous)]

Sometime, in person (maybe I'll make it to a potluck one of these summers!) I'd love to talk about that. The Plain world I grew up in could be incredibly kind, but there was an astoundingly brutal side to it--both in raising children and in dealing with people like me who joined but didn't fit.

But it didn't have celibacy.

SamChevre

[ecosophia]

I'd be interested in hearing that. I know very little about that world.

[(Anonymous)]

I wonder also about the symbolism. Catholics concentrate strongly on the suffering of Christ and focus on the crucifix. Protestant crosses tend not to have the figure of Christ on them, just a plain cross. It strikes me that if you focus on pain and suffering then you’re likely to witness or experience a lot more of it yourself.

[ecosophia]

No argument there. The crucifix is so much a part of our cultural background that I had to read a discussion of the way it appears to people in Japan to realize that there's something really rather odd about praying to a statue of a man being tortured to death.

[(Anonymous)]

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

[ecosophia]

It's not so much toxic as empty, and so liable to be filled by whatever is closest to the spiritual level of the people who participate in it. That's very common for alternative religious movements that draw too heavily on the pop culture of their time -- the second wave of Christian fundamentalism that rose to popularity around the same time has the same problem, and so do plenty of older pop-spiritual movements. If what drives your movement is a set of emotional states rather than an orientation toward spiritual realities, that's pretty much what you can count on.

[(Anonymous)]

That would also explain religiously motivated meanness, everything from religious terrorism down to the mean nun hated by the whole class.

[ecosophia]

That's one of the causes, certainly.

Emotion vs spiritual reality

[(Anonymous)]

Is there anyway to know before you get too deep into a movement or organization if it is oriented toward emotional states or toward spiritual realities?

Re: Emotion vs spiritual reality

[ecosophia]

Look for connections to pop culture. The more thoroughly it echoes whatever the latest pop-culture fads happen to be, the more sure you can be that it's about emotional states. Spiritual realities are always a little off-putting, a little dowdy, a little unfashionable.

[ill_made_knight]

in my humble experience (40 or so years) social politics is what made it toxic. One of the outcomes being a loss of institutional memory, rendering it empty as the Archdruid mentions.