Alferian's · Journal

Good Lord, it's October 1st already!  This hardly seems like a "journal" and more like a "lunal".  But what have I to report from the Underground headquarters of Avalon Center?  Yesterday I attended Pagan Pride, our local event celebrating pagan ways.  There was rather a pronounced druid presence there and I organized a panel on Druidry where I gave a powerpoint presentation on "Druidry Today" and spoke a bit about OBOD.  I'm afraid that I ended up curtailing my presentation on OBOD in order to let the other panel members talk and then felt that time was running short and the audience was restless. The metal folding chairs in our room were mind-bendingly uncomfortable.

In the morning session, I gave a presentation on Avalon Center which was attended by only two people other than my family. Still, it went well and everyone seemed quite stimulated by it.  My impression is that the Minneapolis/St.Paul pagan community, as we call it, is interested in the idea of pulling together to create some permanent institutions, and especially a place. Earth House is an organization that has been around for five years attempting to raise money to fund a "community center" for pagans.  John Stitely, who I hope will be joining our faculty soon, is one of the people involved in that group.  They seem to have established an annual fundraising gathering, which I think is actually held in Wisconsin, but I do not get the impression that they have done much other fund raising, or accumulated anything like the money needed to purchase a house, much less a larger building.

I stopped in at the open house of the little house on the next block which I think could make a good in-town home for Avalon Center.  It has a lot of rooms, a fireplace, a kitchen, and the added feature that its kitchen layout is terrible, so that any family buying it would have to remodel the kitchen immediately.  For our purposes, this doesn't matter.  The trick is finding a patron who will donate enough money to allow us to buy the house outright.  Then any income we make off of renting the facility to others can be applied to paying the taxes and upkeep.  I need to discuss with my lawyer the matter of a non-profit tax-exempt organization owning property because I believe we should be exempt from state taxes as well, but have to file some paperwork.  Anyway, that's a big step.  We need to make it, but at the same time I really want more staff in place to manage it.  We would need a Seneschal along with the property.

However, there is hope.  I met a few people and introduced myself to a few on Sunday at Pagan Pride.  Unfortunately my health intervened to prevent me from attendingon Saturday as I had intended to meet people and hand out brochures.  I must say, Andrew Jacobs, who I finally met, is doing a good job of promoting Temple of the River, handing out leaflets and such.  I was glad he could participate in the Druid panel, particularly as he represents a sort of druidry that is quite different from traditional British druidry.

Now that Pagan Pride is over, I must write my November presentation to the Royal Arch Chapter on Oghams.  I'm rather enjoying creating these powerpoint presentations and delivering them.  I have to overcome my fear of standing up in front of a crowd and introducing myself.  Wearing purple robes will, I hope, permit people to remember me.

I am wishing now that I could indeed get my classes together to offer locally in a face-to-face setting.  It would require much patience as we advertised and recruited students and I would have to require at least three students to make it worth my time.  And, of course, it remains to be seen whether pagans will pay for instruction.  They will pay for books and shiny things and robes and such, but as long as there are self-appointed priests and teachers around offering free instruction, a lot of people are  likely to opt for that.  I think that some of my audience found my presentation on druidry informative, but it is hard to say.

Besides all this, the weekend also held the Feast of Tishri at the Scottish Rite Temple.  We took Linnea and she was good even though it was like slow torture.  The brethren dragged out dinner and the ceremony much longer than necessary.  The logistics of people getting up and sitting back down was handled badly, so that it became like a game of musical chairs.  For some reason (probably traditional) they inserted half an hour of entertainment by a very fine pianist between dinner and the ring presentations.  I think this was a mistake.  I would have been much better to have music as a processional for the Elus and the 50-year S.R. recipients and seat them all in the semicircle.  Then have music played throughout the process of cycling everyone and their spouses through the line to receive rings and take pictures and sit down again.  And, gracious!  They should have thought it would be better to have everyone sit down in the seat they had vacated, rather than on the other end of the circle.  Oh well.  If I criticize too much, I'll find myself master of ceremonies!

Despite the terrible length of the evening, receiving my 14th degree ring was a marvelous feeling.  They gave us a scroll with a little thing written on it called "If your Ring could talk" and it tells about what it signifies.  I think I may enchant mine so that it does talk.  I need that sort of positive reinforcement.  However, there is not denying that it is a good boost for my self-esteem to receive such an honor and congatulations and handshakes and all that.  The plain gold band bears a Latin inscription inside that says "Joined by Virtue, Death cannot separate [us]"  Which can be taken a number of ways:  Joined to our Scottish Rite brethren by the bonds of our pursuit of virtue; or as I prefer, Virtue transcends death and binds us intrinsically to the Supreme Being and Grand Architect symbolised by the equilateral triangle and the Yod on the outside of the ring.  Yod is the first letter of YHVH, of course, but it is also the number 1, which is the name of Deity for the Elves, Olan, meaning The One.  It is part of the Hermetic traditon also, of course.  And Kabbalistically, 1 is the number of Kether, the first emanation from the supernal mystery of Creation, essentially the creative force in the Cosmos.

It is very hard to make the point in a single presentation that drudiry or masonry are equally not bound to any single religion and partake of the perennial philosophy.  I get up in front of an audience of strangers at Pagan Pride, for example, and am troubled by not knowing where to begin.  I don't know how much or how little they may know.  They may have read a great deal, may have studied Hermeticism, but chances are, if they are Wiccan, they have mostly studied their own Craft.  This is a bit like addressing any religious audience that has only received a religious education and probably never gone any further.  No matter how much school they have had, they aren't very likely to have studied philosophy, much less Hermetics.  Moreover, the level of historical knowledge in America is so dismally small that filling people in on the history of druidry is rather daunting.  I'm still reading Hutton's book "The Druids" and enjoying it very much, but a 20 minute presentation can hardly convey the complex and detailed social and cultural history he presents.  Even ten units may not be enough!

Well, must go get Linnea off to school.

More anon.

/|\  Alferian