Our Way of Being

The ideas about the ancient civilisation which it has left loose in the public mind are certainly extraordinary enough. The term "pagan" is continually used in fiction and light literature as meaning a man without any religion, whereas a pagan was generally a man with about half a dozen. The pagans, according to this notion, were continually crowning themselves with flowers and dancing about in an irresponsible state, whereas, if there were two things that the best pagan civilisation did honestly believe in, they were a rather too rigid dignity and a much too rigid responsibility. Pagans are depicted as above all things inebriate and lawless, whereas they were above all things reasonable and respectable. They are praised as disobedient when they had only one great virtue - civic obedience. They are envied and admired as shamelessly happy when they had only one great sin - despair.

Heretics
G. K. Chesterton 1919

The Hedge School likes Chesterton's take on Paganism. At times we may expect too much but we believe this is less insulting than expecting too little of you.

We aim to be respectable and reasonable, meaning that we can communicate with people, including Christians and other non-Pagans, as friends, and don’t feel the need to shock and thrill ourselves or anyone else. We’re content to be human beings rather than believing ourselves to be somehow different, special (and secretly therefore better than other people.) All of us struggle with life, with not feeling really very good at it, and that’s highly respectable work. It may be the purpose of our existence, and is certainly central to that most human of feelings, empathy.

Civic obedience for us means that we eat well at the right time, that we’re all warm and safe and that workshops and other events happen on time. Living outdoors can be tough and tiring as well as joyful and inspiring; planning ahead, chopping carrots, working together is more important than going down the pub, not eating and letting the fire go out. Illegal drugs, being drunk when no one else is or demanding a whole group meeting are unwelcome. Being happy is not our aim. No one seems to know what happiness actually is, often confusing it with some kind of pseudo-peak experience. Personal contentment via satisfying meetings, increased knowledge and verifiable, consequential service is certainly one of our aims.

We recognise that unhappiness can be a spur to action and so we welcome people who feel despair. But we also expect you to be in control of yourself. If you start behaving in a manner that we believe is out of your control we will stop you and help you return to a place of safety. We won’t encourage you by calling you a shaman. Neither will we become scared and reject you. We aim to have balanced interactions with the Apparent and Otherworld’s so that we can function well in both. A little liminality will be disorientating but being able to take care of ourselves seems a good basis from which to help others. This attitude is expected from everyone, which means that offering pearls of wisdom and comfort when someone is in the middle of struggling with themselves is seldom appropriate. More often than not that urge is a signal to ourselves that we have reached a place of discomfort in ourselves and need to shut the distress down.

Paganism has taken on distasteful aspects of the New Age which are very close to Evangelical Christianity. When someone becomes even mildly unhappy someone else will pop up to tell them the equivalent of ‘It’s your own fault, if only you would listen to the song of the tree (or Jesus) and realise that you are not who you are, you are stardust and we are One (in the Spirit) and I am better than you, because you are unhappy and I am constantly on a high.’

Psychobabble is not acceptable at Hedgeschool. Sharing circles and communal living bring up many difficult feelings; the formal nature of sharing circles and the routine of communal living contain them. Sharing circles offer an opportunity to carefully and in our own time explore the tender places in ourselves, places of dishonesty, shame, weakness as well as celebrating the genuine wonder of who we are. For that to happen we need to feel we can trust each other, that confidentiality is understood, that our honourable and frightening struggle will be respected. We have to be trustworthy ourselves, in a fundamental sense, before we can offer that to each other. Psychobabble is the antithesis of being trustworthy. We are very alert to how power is used, an absolute fundamental of Paganism.

The Hedge School is not a democracy. People who take responsibility for the Hedge School have the final say in how it is run, it’s best to be clear about that from the beginning. We aim to be collaborative and cooperative, to welcome and share talents so that we can all learn from each other. But Hedgeschool isn’t a permanent community, in plain terms there isn’t the time to work in a genuinely democratic manner and to promise anything else might make us sound more wonderful but it would be a lie. Working through the feelings this brings up for us all is part of the purpose of a sharing circle, exploring our relationships with authority: our own and others.

We function on the understanding that Paganism is a religion, just as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism which also manage to hold any number of practices, are also religions. We spell it with a capital because it’s a proper noun.

There are any number of Pagan groups, workshops, camps and gatherings where hanging out, spending much of your time pleasurably drunk and being a Mage or an Elf is entirely proper, good fun and possible. Hedge School is for people who want and can offer something more. We know that not everyone wants to be like this all the time but when you feel the need for this kind of experience, here we are.