Mirenithil
Yeah, it did. *wry laugh* I was young, and it took me a long time to first realize that it wasn't that I was having bad luck with groups. At first, I firmly believed that I'd happened to become involved with a group that happened to have a lot of egotism and intolerance and self-congratulatoriness (if that isn't a word it is now. XD) When I moved to the next group and found the same thing, I chalked it up as another fluke. It took years of experience for it to really sink in that this kind of behavior was pandemic in the entire movement. Another major factor in that was massive denial. I didn't WANT this earth-centered nature religion that had so attracted me to have these kinds of problems and I had to get to a point where I was utterly fed up with it before I could admit to myself that there really was a problem and leave.
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And, since most Pagans are teens, cultural sea changes can happen very very quickly among people who are so young. I hope that you are right and I am wrong about this.
My experience with pagan teens is that very few of them are in it for the long haul as it were.
Where did you get the sense that this was the case?
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That's a very interesting point and one very worthy of discussion in its own thread to give it the room it deserves, I think.
So- when addressing the break down in the pagan scene and it's ties to individual's sense of entitlement- where would you like to begin?
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Bah. *laugh* I can only report based on my own experiences but also what I have heard on the various newsgroups and message boards over a decade. The stories of problems with egotism and grandiosity within groups were consistent, despite the fact that I desperately didn't want them to be. Reports of positive coven experiences -did- occur, but they were rare, and there were so few solidly functioning covens that nobody really had truly solid advice to offer members of covens that were having problems. Now that I'm older I think a lot of these problems were a function of the collision of the ego-stroking nature of most varieties of this religious path and the fact that most Wiccans were and are teens and young twentysomethings.
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Wicca attracts many many many of a certain type of teen/young twentysomething who seem to be especially in need of ego strokes, which is a set-up for rage if anything percieved as a threat to the ego occurs. The way the path was set up, it provides a feedback loop for self-aggrandizement that then spirals out of control if allowed to run wild, especially as HPS or HP or if they believe themselves to be well-read/educated. I think that it's tremendously likely the overwhelming majority of private covens were and likely still are teen-founded and teen-run, hence the extra liability to problems due to the natural developmental constraints of that age group.
Wica has standards for what it means to be a proper person after all.
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A digression:
These days, there's a 'new' emphasis that Wicca is Wicca only if it's a lineaged official Britwitch tradition. That emphasis is relatively new to mass Wiccan-Pagan consciousness within the last several years. In the early days of the internet, you could call yourself Wiccan after reading just, say, Cunningham or Stepanich. Perhaps things have changed; I read The Triumph of the Moon a couple years back with gusto, wishing only it had been printed in the early nineties. This kind of quality educational material was utterly absent for many years.
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Then that is a new development in the years since I left the movement, because many of them used to be extremely vocal about it. They knew that eclectic neowicca ISN'T wicca, and in their rage (and smug superiority) they categorically condemned the whole thing.