• If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. Carl Sagan
    Cosmos

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Paganism and Fandom

I’ve been thinking about the interconnections between various subcultural things a lot lately, partly because of the research I was doing for my summary of pagan movement history.

Which of course leads to contemplating festival culture, pagan retreats, and so on, with convention fandom, which I am moderately more familiar with than most of the pagan variants (though as pagans have started organising pagan gatherings that are modelled on convention fandom rather than on other sorts of events, I’ve gotten occasionally more involved). (Though not so much so lately, due to being covered in children.)

But most particularly, right now, it has me pondering the relationship between models of authority in pagan community and models of authority in convention fandom. I’m not actually up to thoughts that are anything more than inchoate yet, but I’m contemplating who gets looked up to as a Worthy Person, who gets invited to the parties, who gets noticed, and who does not; what sorts of things get people noticed; who actually winds up doing the work.

Who can get away with things, too. What makes people shield someone.

But the same cultural stew, to a large amount, gave rise to both of these groupings, and it’s interesting to see what grows there. Not all of which is the good mold.

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