Mark Green's Atheopaganism Blog

I’m in an odd space right now.

On the one hand, excitement about The Book and the newness of all the Author Stuff like promoting it, doing interviews, etc. is really thrilling.

But on the other, beloved things are coming to an end, and I’m sad about that.

Pantheacon, which has been the largest gathering of Pagans in North America, has announced that 2020 will be its last year. The owner of the event is retiring and no one else has been willing to take it over.

Now, I’m skeptical that this will come to pass. There is enough of a population of people who love the event—and enough money to be made from it—that some person or group will come along and keep it going in some form. I hope that is the case.

Meanwhile, a ritual group that I have practiced with for many years, The Spark Collective, appears to be on its last legs. Attendance has plunged, and we are hemorrhaging money. We had conducted monthly ritual circles, but the Core Group, of which I am a part, has decided to cut back to quarterly gatherings in 2020 to see if we can succeed at that scale.

As I said, I’m sad about these changes. To me, they signal even fewer opportunities to spend time with people who share, by and large, in my values and worldview.

I led last night’s Spark ritual. The theme was Autumn: the Coming of Darkness, and the four directions I called corresponded to the phases of grief: Cherishing, Mourning, Surrendering, Remembering. As it turned out, what I ended up grieving in the tiny, less-than-critical-mass ritual was Spark itself, as it had been, with robust attendance and palpable energy in the room.

Things end. Even things that have existed for a long while. I just hope that new things then spring up to replace them which provide something like the context and experiential flavor of what has gone before.

All that said, I’m willing to do work to make it happen, too. I went onto the Spark Core group because I wanted to serve the community with those events and that space. If Spark is going away, I will have more time and energy available for other things. if Pantheacon is to rise again in a new form, I’m up for helping to make that happen.

Unlike members of major religions, we can’t just expect that religious community will be available to us simply by joining an existing church, temple or mosque. We have to create it. And—as with all human endeavors—that is often a process of two steps forward, one step back.