One Hundred and One Pagans
Once upon a time, one hundred and one Pagans came together. So far as anyone knows, none of them were at any risk of being turned into fur coats, although some of them were indeed resplendent with fine facial hair. Actually, anyone who has ever tried to organise anything Pagan will know that allusions to puppies are way off the mark. It’s like herding cats. It is therefore worth acknowledging the heroic scale of the feat in which Trevor Greenfield organised one hundred other Pagans to write a book.
My role in that book seemed small at the time – although I felt deeply honoured to have been included. I wrote a piece on prayer and meditation within Paganism. Then, as is so often the way of it, everything went quiet. A lot of time in the process from writing to publishing does not involve the author at all. Even when there are hoards of them. I didn’t interact with the people who were commenting on my bit, and it wasn’t until I came to read the book that I found out how they’d undertaken to extend and explore those ideas.
For me, slowly reading the entire book has been a much more exciting process than writing my bit of it. I know what I think, no great surprises there! Seeing the diversity of opinion and practice, the freedom from dogma, and at the same time the innate coherence is a powerful experience in its own right. Paganism is incredibly rich, reflective and creative and within it all kinds of traditions are establishing and flourishing. While no book could ever do justice to the full diversity – because you’d never get all of us into one book – in that range of one hundred and one Pagans from around the world, I think a real sense of us as a religious group comes through. It’s a group I am very proud to be a part of.
Reading the book also had me wondering to what extent this is an artefact of our times, a moment of our history. Twenty years ago no one could have pulled this together, Pagans were secretive and relied far too much on the post. We didn’t have that flow of open and international communication. What will this book look like in fifty years time, or a hundred? I feel we’ve created a record, a snapshot that future Pagans might find useful in charting our progress.
I rather hope those Pagans will look back at Paganism 101 and find it touching, and see in it all the early signs of the great things that followed, and shake their heads at all the things we did not have and were not doing, and had yet to imagine. And then find 101 voices for their own moment in time, and do it all again.
