ecosophia | Why You Joined, Why You Left

Neptune's Dolphins here.

I was a member for ten years, and for five of them was the leader of the Roman kin. We did work to add the Roman religion to the mix. My takeaway was that the kins notably the less popular ones were window dressing.

I noticed an orthodoxy of thought. They had one lay person who read a lot and became an expert on proto IndoEuropeans. He and I butted heads over various theories of settlement. Since he was entrenched and thought to be an expert, no one questioned him or his authority but instead followed his lead.

The window dressing involving sexual misconduct drove me out. There was little introspection, and a lot of tap dancing.

Also, the old guard hung to power and forced others to confirm or leave.

Once thing I noticed was that there were a lot of new people and old timers, but no middle people like me. That tells me that the organization was a personal club, and not a functional group.
T

Neptune's Dolphins, again
I wanted a group of serious Polytheists and not a group who was play acting. I was looking for fellow Romans.

Since I've been there and done that, I might as well join the conversation.

I joined ADF in 2001, shortly after completing all three grades of the Order of Bards Ovates and Druids (OBOD) correspondence course. I was still in the first flush of my enthusiasm for Druidry, and wanted to find out what other Druid organizations had to offer; the idea of polytheist devotional religion intrigued me, ADF's purported commitment to excellence and scholarship pleased me, and the parts of the ADF website open to non-members made ADF look thriving and well-organized, so I signed up.

I'd already worked out what I wanted to do: since ADF was open to any Indo-European pantheon, I was planning on working from the Iguvine Tablets, the longest surviving religious text from the preclassical ancient world, written in the Umbrian language (an old Italic language related to Latin) and worshiping a set of deities who closely correspond to the old Roman deities -- Iove, Marte, Vesuna, etc., the Umbrian equivalents of Jupiter, Mars, Pomona, and so on. It would have been a lot of fun, as well as pleasantly weird; my intention was to translate the entire ADF liturgy into Umbrian, and go from there.

I found out as soon as I joined that the public part of the website wasn't exactly truthful in its claims. ADF had scrapped one general training program without having another to put in its place; the guilds that interested me, particularly the Magicians Guild, had little or no training available either. The scholarship I saw in practice was good in places and very weak in others. I figured that this was a temporary affair and volunteered to put in some work in the Magicians Guild, and the offer was accepted -- and that's when I started to discover what was wrong with ADF.

I've been a member of many organizations of many different kinds, old and new, informal and formal, spanning the spectrum from tradition-laden fraternal orders with their own law codes and jurisprudence, all the way to freeform gatherings with temporary informal leadership at most. I have never belonged to any group that had had a more dysfunctional structure than ADF's. It combines all the worst features of democracy and autocracy without providing any of the benefits of either. The fantastically complex framework of groves, guilds, kindreds, councils, and so on was so ramified that there were quite literally more official titles than there were active members to fill them.

It was efficient at one thing, which was stopping any attempt at improvement. What happened, over and over again, was this: someone made an effort to develop an instructional program or what have you; maybe it was put into place, maybe it wasn't, but after a while things dissolved in bickering and whatever it was got shelved. I made some inquiries, and found out that this had been going on throughout the history of the organization. I realized after a while that the main ADF logo, which shows a stump with a single branch growing up from it, was prophetic: every time the tree tried to grow again, out came the axe.

I might have continued as a member for years, but two things intervened. The first was that I was still a member of OBOD and so I could see what a functional Druid organization looked like. The second was that a long-shot inquiry I'd been pursuing for some years, into an apparently defunct organization called the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), suddenly landed me in contact with its remaining members, and I became a member of its Grand Grove in a matter of weeks and its Grand Archdruid three months after that.

So I let my ADF membership lapse. During the 12 years that followed, as I helped get AODA back on its feet, I had one ironclad rule: whatever ADF does, don't do it. That rule never once failed me.

Edited 2020-06-23 18:42 (UTC)

I joined because it offered a sense of direction on my spiritual path. What to read? Here's a list to start with. What to do on high days? Here's a ritual structure to build off of. Since I left, I've been feeling much more adrift, and that's been a challenge.

Leaving was definitely the correct choice, though. My main reason was that I observed repeatedly that the more involved people got in ADF, the more miserable they got. This was based on my own experience as well as watching people I knew in the organization.

That reason was sufficient on its own. However, I was also getting tired of constant calls from members of a certain ideological orientation for the organization to issue statements on random event X, group Y, or thing Z. If the Obscure Assembly of Noisy Pagans does something blatently racist or whatever, that's on them, not ADF. Issuing all these statements condemning other people/groups -- and arguments over whether a statement was needed in each case -- was a divisive distraction and the members demanding them never seemed satisfied. (To be clear, the Bonewits allegations were directly relevant to ADF and thus merited some kind of a response.)

I had gotten interested in druidry through following along with the Archdruid Report and looked into druid organizations in my area. I had started working through The Druidry Handbook, but really wanted a local group. ADF was the only druid organization that had a group in driving distance. I was also very attracted to the idea of a more church-like setting, as I feel very lonely in my religious practice.

I joined the organization but went to one group ritual and got a really bad vibe. The ritual was several hours late to start and we felt very awkward there. No one really talked to us. But there was just an "off" quality about the atmosphere, it is hard to describe. I was disappointed, but the training and such the organization offered sounded good. Unfortunately I couldn't make headway through their website, couldn't really connect with any actual people, and I got daily digests of the email list that seemed mostly connected with dramas I didn't have any context for. So I didn't renew my membership. This was several years before the controversy about Bonewits and all that. I was glad to not be part of it when I heard about that.

I think you mentioned ADF is handling a new edition of your "A World Full of Gods" book, and that it was kind of stuck (not your words, that's what I remember from it). Any news?

I joined ADF chiefly because I was interested in the training program and the Guilds.

I left for a lot of reasons. It turned out the training program didn’t exist (it was in a poerpetual state of revision) and the guilds were mostly underpopulated and under- or inactive. The insistence on historical authenticity and scholarly excellence didn’t extend to the core ritual template, which invokes the fire, the well, and the holy tree --- a combination that no Indo-European culture anywhere in the history of ever has actually used, but if you mention that prepare to be shot down with extreme prejudice.

Then there was the utter contempt for the members displayed by many officers of the Mother Grove; the list of books which ADF members were not only not supposed to own but were not supposed to even read (one Mother Grove officer actually wanted to eject any members who turned out to have read any of the listed books); the perpetual bitter in-fighting among members of the Mother Grove; the lies routinely spread about other Druid orders, especially OBOD; and the utter inability of the Mother Grove to make a decision and STICK TO IT.

Also, some of the deities I worship are non-Indo-European, which got me treated approximately like Typhoid Mary, even though I didn’t try to make offerings to, or pray to, any non-IE deity during an ADF ritual. (I do have manners, after all.)

I was raised Catholic, so the idea of staying in an organization which had done the Catholic Church one better (or perhaps half a dozen better) in dysfuntionality appealed to me about as much as the prospect of chewing on a rat’s toenails, so I dropped my membership and have never looked back.

I was a member for 2 years. I was initially drawn by the religious/clergy elements. I struggled to relate to a lot of the stuff I read. I didn't really feel like I was progressing with a serious lack of any real training and I didn't feel much of a sense of community. It also struck me as odd that they placed such an importance on historical accuracy and how it set them apart from other orders, but adopted plenty of things that are not historic which no one seemed to talk or worry about.

What led to me eagerly letting my membership expire was the politics and attitude of a lot of people in ADF. By politics I'm referring to the ADF leadership and system. There seemed to be a lot of bickering and drama. The final nail in the coffin was when I was able to interact more with members. So many were very hostile towards any ideas or religions that they didn't agree with and even the "higher ups" participated in this attacking. If you weren't "in" with the group think, you were attacked and ridiculed. I thought the level of hostility towards anything Christian was strange for a group that very blatantly took their model from something they apparently hate so much.

Overall, it just never seemed like a healthy environment for growth, spiritual or otherwise.

Edited 2020-06-23 21:54 (UTC)

I'm getting such a Weird of Hali: Providence vibe from what everyone is saying about the ADF!

Fuchsia Radiant Puppy.

I first met Isaac when he was still a member of Reformed Druids of North America--which had started at Carlton College as an out for students who didn't want to attend required Christian Chapel on Sunday mornings. Some people found something of value and kept it going. As I recall the requirement for membership was to affirm 3 times that "Nature is good." I told Isaac that Nature is beyond human definitions of good and evil, he shrugged, granted my point and let me in.

Isaac was always interested in getting a Druid organization going that would be based on the best scholarship; attempt rituals in original languages; and hold its members to high standards. That was the intention in founding ADF. Unfortunately, Isaac was also easily distractible, had a messy personal life and, later, a severe health problem. The distractibility included a tendency to spend what was IMO, way too much time ranting at and about Satanists. We, NeoPagans, Wiccans et al. are not Satanists in the classic sense. The type of Christians who regards all non-Christian deities as demons will say "yes you are." There is no point discussing the matter. Isaac also spent a lot of time ranting against the Christians--that evil, joyless religion that just wants to start WWIII to pressure God into the End Times. Whatever. My concern was that all of this energy would have been put to better use actually building ADF, putting out newsletters on time, training people, etc. ADF put out some really nice magazines for a while, but the publications schedule was so irregular that when I reviewed them for the New Wiccan Church newsletter, I could not recommend that anyone subscribe.

ADF's initial plan of circles and areas of study was so complex that completing it as written would have equaled earning two or three PhDs. Impossible for anyone who wasn't independently wealthy. I pretty much lost track of ADF in the early 90s, so have no direct knowledge of later developments or the directions it took after ill health forced Isaac to step down from ArchDruid. (Isaac was one of those people who got the bad batch of tryptophan and developed a chronic disease as a result).

As for the sex scandal--I circled with Isaac on occasion and socialized at large events. I never saw him act inappropriately with a child.

Growing curiosity to see the list of forbidden books---how many have I read? how damaged am I?

Rita

So, I actually joined ADF twice, and left it twice.

The first time I was a newbie Pagan, this would've been in the early-mid 2000s. I liked that they were focused on polytheism and worship; I liked the focus on scholarship (at the time I was running into a lot of bad revisionist history in the broader online NeoPagan community, this was one of the first groups I came across that acknowledged that and rejected it), being a newbie I liked that they had a training program (which I never finished, when I got right down to it it was lacking something, but right now I can't articulate what it is; if I figure it out, I'll get back to you).

I also had the fortune of being involved with one of the better ADF groves, during that go around. They had done exactly what someone talked about on an earlier post here: bought a house in the inner city, turned it into a temple with a yard for ritual work, they held weekly services in addition to the high day festivals. Yeah, there were a lot of flakes and scene people there playing at spirituality, but there was also a core of serious people keeping everything going.

My ultimate reason for leaving the first time is I was feeling called to a more mystical path, I started looking for esoteric training and ADF doesn't offer that. It thought it did, but no. Even as ill informed as I was, I could look at the Magician's Guild and be unimpressed with it. The Initiate's Program (that I paid more attention to during round two) looked identical to the priesthood training minus some things like training in counseling; if there was any more to it than being able to say you completed yet another round of book reports to win a merit badge, as in some sort of actual inner work, I couldn't see it, something about that seemed off. Like someone else said above me, the organization is designed to produce two things, clergy and lay people (holiday Pagans), there is no third way.

The second time I joined, I was coming off a couple rough years, looking to kick start my religious practice again; ADF was familiar. I'd also found a few local people that were looking to start a proto-grove and needed another member in order to make it official, so it looked like a good idea, try to find some stability again while helping a few people out.

The proto-grove went nowhere fast, and I suppose I should've seen that coming; they seemed more interested in showing up some other local group. My every other experience with an ADF grove, barring the first, was fairly awful. People were unfriendly, ignoring any newcomers (or anyone outside their little clique) the rituals were slapped together and performed by people who had no idea what they were doing and just wanted to get to the potluck and return to conversations about the game last night that this pageantry was interrupting.

ADF had also moved everything over to Facebook, and while the old mailing lists I remember were still around, there was a strong resistance toward using them. I have never joined Facebook and nor shall I ever, and any alternatives to FB discussed seemed to be whatever the next shiny new mass social media movement there is. I never understood why they couldn't just have their own forum, bypass the baggage that comes with FB, but what do I know, I'm clearly the one out of step here. This would've driven me away sooner or later, even without anything else; why belong to an organization I can't communicate with without letting Mark Zuckerberg make money off my privacy.

It was the politics the second time. Public statement after public statement, sticking their nose in every world event even though it has nothing to do with them, every conversation online is about identity politics, fascism around every corner and what do we need to do about it. I didn't like the response to the first Bonewits scandal; I'm not sure what should've been done, or even if anything really needed to be. Even if you believe the accusation (and for the record, I don't - yeah, I know Isaac was a creep, I'd heard as much for years, not a pedophile), he's been dead for near ten years, and when this incident happened, if indeed it ever did, ADF wasn't around yet (or was just coming into being), so we're not talking about any cover up comparable to the Catholic church the way people were saying. But the mob wanted blood as it always does, and it was loud and unruly so it got what it wanted. And the answer was more politics, greater commitment to social justice, funneling our priesthood into one of those social justice seminars the elites on the left love so much right now even though they accomplish nothing.

The last straw for me was the election, candidates running on social justice platforms, promising to bring even more politics into the organization. And it seemed to be met with applause. The writing was on the wall, and like I said in my previous comment, I didn't want to be along for the ride.

I had less direct experience with the lack of leadership, but there was never any end of stories people told among themselves: incompetence, spitefulness, endless endless bickering. I saw many, many times that leadership and the Mother Grove would do anything to avoid having to deal with conflict. Drama ran wild and unchecked.

... but I'm reading this oral history as anthropology, and to know what behavioral warning signs I should watch out for within my own, very conventional, Christian congregation. Thanks.

However, I was a regular attendee at the Michigan State University "Zen Druids" Saturday night "meetings" in the Student Union. They had nothing to do with either Zen or Druidry, but they were a safe space for all kinds of people to drop in, hang out, socialize, and play board games. "All kinds of people", that is, who weren't interested in getting dressed up to hit the bar and party scene, or do drugs in the shadows. The organizers had to have SOME kind of student organization just to reserve the room, and "Zen Druid" it was.

Lathechuck

I was a member for 5 years. My membership officially expired 4 months ago, although I decided to leave about 3 months before that.

Why I joined:

I wanted serious religious polytheism. Taking polytheism seriously and taking religion seriously were things I hadn't seen much in the Neopagan scene, and the promise of a relatively large group that did this without pushing specific beliefs (orthopraxy vs orthodoxy) was exciting. I also wanted the mid-ground of being able to have relationships with deities in multiple pantheons while respecting that this doesn't mean you can just pick a bunch of gods that look cool and then rewrite their personalities and associations to suite your fancy, as I had seen elsewhere.

Why I left:

Not long before I left, there was some discussion over the issue that the same people were doing multiple jobs. There are quite literally more named positions than members who are active in the national organization, so this is pretty much inevitable, and the obvious solution is to eliminate positions. Instead, the vocal part of the membership interpreted it as "clear evidence of corruption by entrenched elites" and decided to add a position--someone whose job was to try to prevent that "corruption" somehow.

The only solution proposed on the email lists* to the problem of having more jobs than people was to make more jobs.

Here's the thing with the issues with ADF: There's only one side to every argument. There aren't actually two opposing groups vying for control. ADF's egregore circles around the same points:

Constant suspicion of corruption.
Constantly attempting to solve problems of bureaucracy by adding more bureaucracy.

I'll respectfully disagree with some of my fellow ex-ADFers here and say that I do not believe the problem is the "old boys club" or "entrenched establishment" or anything of the sort. While I didn't meet the entire Mother Grove and can't say what the people I did meet think deep down, every single one of the leaders I met said exactly the same things as all of the members criticizing the leadership. (Ironically enough, a couple of the members who are most prone to drumming up resentment against the "establishment" are some of the most established and influential.)

The spirit of the group just keeps leading people in the same repeating patterns, trying to solve bureaucracy by adding more bureaucracy.

I'm not saying there aren't issues with the bureaucracy. There are. But every position added while I was a member was some kind of watchdog position. Every major policy change was for "transparency" and actually amounted to adding a new job to suspiciously watch all of the old jobs.

At this point, ADF has also been just as subsumed by the current issues of the political left as the rest of the Neopagan scene, which is also prone to circular firing squad behavior, as JMG has discussed. I mentioned this more in my post at the other Ecosophia, and it's relevant, but the issue I mentioned above is more unique to ADF.

---

*Yes, I could have spoken up, but I had decided to leave at this point.

Edited 2020-06-24 02:02 (UTC)

I don't know if you're interested in why I never joined, as it's not quite the same as leaving, but the forbidden books list turned me off. I will not join any organization which says you can't read something...

Former ADF Senior Druid here.

My first introduction to Druidry was around 1972 or 73, when I purchased a small cache of booklets published by Brotherhood of the Universal Bond. While I wrote to them concerning instruction and membership, at that time the reply I received indicated that they were not accepting anyone who was not physically located in Britain, and did not offer a correspondence course. As by the time I received their reply, I had made contact with a Wiccan group where I lived, it wasn't a big deal. I'm not certain what happened to those booklets, they disappeared on me several years ago, likely in one of the seven moves we've had around the Seattle area.

I resisted joining ADF for several years; I had followed it's creation, and knew many of the original members, either directly or by the 6-degrees of separation thing. Of course, back then, it was pretty easy to be able to literally "know everyone" in the Pagan world.

I first met Isaac at either a NROOGD Sabbat in the Bay Area circa 74 5 75, or at DunDraCon III, in 1976, shortly after he had ported his Real magic book to gaming as Authentic Thaumaturgy.

Ian Corrigan (ADF's former Chief Liturgist, and Vice-Arch-druid at the time) and I shared a Witchcraft lineage. I've finally managed to forget who most of the others were.

A few years after we moved to the Seattle area, a local ADF Grove formed, and we began going to it, as we were not at that time actively leading a coven. The leader of the grove was the then-Preceptor for ADF. During this time, the initial training program was being written. And rewritten. and rewritten. About the time the initial program was approved, the Sr Druid dot divorced, and moved back across the country. By this time, I had paid ADF for membership and entered the training program myself, and wound up becoming the next Senior Druid of the Grove. We stayed with it for about three years, while also attending the "Other" Druid group at times, an RDNA Grove that had been in existence since the 1970s.

Isaac's real dream was to make ADF into a source of income for "Pagan Clergy". He never quite succeeded, largely because the prevailing pagan culture still held that you shouldn't make money from The Arte. (Some of us still hold that practice, which sometimes make it difficult.) He was a womanizer, indeed, but the emphasis was on woman, and I don't mean in the "Old enough to bleed, old enough to breed" context. Even so, he had enough questionable acts in his makeup that the Mother Grove did remove him as Arch-druid, around the time his health once again nose-dived.

Why did we leave? Dissatisfaction with the training program, which was constantly under rewrite, internal stressors of having a Grove of "party pagans" and not people who were actually interested in development of much of anything, and we moved about an hour north into a place that didn't have space for Grove meetings.I'm still friends with several members and exmembers, but we rarely talk about ADF.

A few years ago, I joined AODA, after many discussions with one of my oldest friends, who was a member. I've not done much with it, in part due to my health, and moreso because it seems to be floundering for direction. But, it, like ADF, seems to meet the needs/desires of some, and for them, it's probably a good thing. Me? I'm staying more with my Witchraft rootes, where I'm more confortable.

Hi Everybody,

This is Steve Thomas (Steve T from the Ecosophia blog.) I wanted to jump in and say thank you very much to everybody who's contributed to the discussion so far!

Here is what I have gleaned so far.

Why did people join?

This is fairly straightforward. People were interested in ADF because they wanted to worship the gods in a religious setting. ADF offered a formal structure, fellowship with others, and a system of training for priests.

Why did they leave?

Here, a medley of reasons:

--The organizational structure was the sort that relies on cliques and the sort of "old boys network" that everyone pretends doesn't exist. (I saw this all the time when I was part of the radical Left in my 20s, for what it's worth, and I utterly loathe this sort of thing. You can always tell who the leader of an anarchist group is-- it's the guy that's standing in front of everyone else proclaiming "We have no leaders!" Humans being humans, there may be no way to prevent the development of an "inner ring" in CS Lewis's phrase, but it's my view that to the greatest extent possible, an organization's formal structure should be its actual structure.)

--The training system was either nonexistent or "under perpetual revision," or else it required some sort of access to the "old boys' network" to access it.

--They had a list of prohibited books. (This is not a red flag. It's a gigantic red banner waving over a red army under a red sunrise.)

--The founder... Good Gods. "Look what I've got"? Really?

--They put politics, and an increasingly narrow and authoritarian politics, before piety.

--Constant infighting.

--Some people describe simply getting a bad vibe at their ceremonies. To my way of thinking, this is an important sign that something is wrong.

--Members are prohibited or strongly discouraged from pursuing other interests, from the Druid Revival to non-Indo-European deities.

--Really, they seem to go to great lengths to police their members minds, and their spirits.

--Someone made the interesting observation that there seemed to be only old-timers and new people. This is definitely a red flag, and fwiw it's also something I used to see in radical left groups--Three or four white-headed old timers who'd been there since 1968 surrounded by several dozen 22 year olds.

Based on all of this, the notes I'm making regarding the as-yet-unnamed new church include:

--Simplify organizational structure. I have some ideas about what this could look like.
--There should be a straightforward and accessible training program for priests, with ordination the end result for everyone who successfully completes the work.
--"Piety, not politics" to be branded on the backside of every prospective member. Or, more simply:
--Unity of Purpose. The purpose of this organization is to worship the gods through group and individual ritual. Nothing else. The church takes no stance on any outside issues whatsoever. Discussion of politics and other outside issues to be prohibited on whatever online forums exist and during all church events.
--Freedom of thought and freedom of conscience. The church does not in any way regulate what its members may read, to what political party they may or may not belong, or what spiritual beings they may interact with.
--No Facebook.

***

...Well, all of that is just a start. It's now much later than I'm used to staying up and I'm becoming a bit delerious, so I'm going to stop here for tonight. To all those reading-- again, thank you. Looking over this post, do you see anything important I've missed?

I joined ADF because I wanted a polytheistic church that was serious about bringing Paganism/Polytheism to the world and growing the faith.

During my time it seemed no one took it seriously and it was more about small cliques than the gods.

I remember many an election in the group that just had one candidate, a member of the clique running. Why didn't I run? Well, you couldn't declare candidacy, you had to be nominated without asking for it (at least where the clique could here you. I got nominated once and got asked for bank account information and other finance info I wasn't comfortable sharing. Didn't see any requirement for that information either. )

A few other tidbits.

During elections if you asked a candidate about the office they ran for you'd get "from our website [Discription of office]" even if you asked, "in your own words, what does this office mean to you."

When we did video chats a few times a member used it to promote a product called "green smoke." Yes promoting a tobacco product during a religious chat.

One female member was to found of threatening violence on men if you disagreed with her.

I had a member cuss out a friend on Social Media as a racist for... Having opinions on her OWN race, she's Purto Rican / Lebanese and her father immigrated to the US but she doesn't follow the left's views on immigration.

When said members attacks got too much, the member is clergy, I contact ADF and nothing happened, follow-ups they claim a report was never made.

Another member called Samhain cultural appropriation even when done BY Irish members born and raised in Ireland. When she was asked to explain mods threatened to ban anyone questioning it for harassment.

The attacks on anything not 'historic' even though their Earth Mother cult isn't historic.

With one training program, I wrote about how the seasons affected my area, at the time I lived on the Jersey shore in a VERY suburban area. I was told it didn't focus enough on 'nature' i.e. an agrarian area. I figured if I'm writing about my environment it should be the place I live and practice 99.9% of the time NOT someplace I could rarely get to without a car, I didn't have a car at the time, or paying a lot of cash for an Uber.

It was finally around the time Trump started running I left as the group became more and more political and less and less about the gods.

Why I joined

After my final split with Christianity (I agreed to go to church one last time with my grandmother and sat in the pew wearing jeans listening to a sermon about how people who wear jeans to church have no business coming and took it as a sign), I started investigating nature based religions. I started reading various books and stumbled onto ADF.

ADF ended up the logical choice because there was a grove in a physical building located in my neighborhood less than a mile from my house and they held weekly services each Sunday. My (now) wife and I enjoyed ourselves there, we even ended up getting married by an ADF priestess. ADF gave some direction for study with the dedicant program and I think it was a valuable experience in my spiritual journey.

Why I left

I think my membership has finally lapsed at this point. The crowd at our grove ended up leaving and that combined with personal work responsibilities resulted in us losing touch. My experience was more associated with the local grove than the larger ADF organization and my favorite part was those weekly Sunday services. Regardless of what happens with ADF as a whole I think it would be a shame to lose that local grove and I hope they're still going strong despite everything.

Neptune's Dolphins here.

People seem to agree that the organization was stifling and unable to move beyond its original founding.

Is there a way to have an organization that is healthy without becoming entrenched

I do know one thing, I taught Robert's Rules and parliamentary procedure to groups. That seems to be a help for a functioning group. ADF didn't seem to understand that the Rules balanced the needs of the majority and minority.

I never had anything to do with the ADF but reading the comments it seems to be the very definition of an organisation with a tainted egregore.

I looked at the website, "We've been going strong for 36 years, so take a look at what we've been doing for so long and consider joining us on our path!"

Why has it lasted so long? It seems there is a need for this kind of organisation but it needs to be disbanded and a new one needs to be built without any of the old guard allowed to join.

I joined because, as a previous poster said, I was drawn to the promise of training, guidance and structure. I was previously involved with Wicca, but materials all varied so widely, with no good way for a newbie to evaluate its usefulness. I wasn’t really comfortable with the sense of “anything goes”. ADF offered guidelines, and the promise of scholarly materials – info not just made up on the fly.

In many ways my leaving wasn’t due to any fault with ADF: I like beginning things a lot, and finishing them not so much. I’m easily distracted by the next interesting thing once I’ve satisfied most of my curiosity in any given area. I’m a dilettante and a generalist, which is my issue, not theirs!

However, the experience was very dry. Lots of “must do things this way because scholarly science says so” but I never felt like I’d touched a live current. Actual experience with the gods was only allowed to be discussed as ‘UPG’ – unverified personal gnosis. It was ‘fine’ (spoken with curled lip) to engage in those experiences on your own time, but they certainly shouldn’t be given the same weight as verifiable scholarship. In many ways, it seemed as if the research was more important (certainly more valued) than actual experience of the gods. It felt more like a research institution than a religion.

Also the expectation that a grove would hold seasonal rituals in public spaces really put me off. I was fairly quiet about my spiritual path at the time, and the thought of showing up in a public park to perform pagan ritual quite frankly freaked me out.

They seemed to want the benefits of a church (paid clergy) without placing any internal emphasis on the kind of support any good church offers to its community. Their focus was outward toward the general public (Prove We’re Not a Cult and We Deserve to be a Church) rather than on building up and supporting the actual community and spiritual needs of the people who were already part of ADF. It felt sort of like being drawn into an outwardly beautiful historic building only to find nothing but empty rooms and new drywall inside, with a few awkward circles of strangers making uncomfortable small talk in the middle of an echoing space.

Is there going to be a space here or somewhere else where we can discuss what sorts of things we would like to build in a Druid church, since this is primarily the space for dissecting one really excellent example of "what not to do"?

Squirrelly Jen

Never joined but have been to several of their public rituals. The group that is from around here
seemed very organized and experienced, and it didn't seem any more difficult to associate with people
at the potluck afterwards than would be expected. Some of the rituals I attended were quite potent.
Two things that I did notice that put me off a bit:One ritual they decided to honor their PIE roots and
have Agni be the focus when I don't think anyone there was a devotee, much less one of his priests.
It didn't seem to go anywhere. Also, they talk a lot about their spirit 'allies' and I found myself wondering
if the spirits they were addressing would agree if given the chance to say something. I was a guest so I
definately thought it a bit presumptious for me to assume the spirits would view themselves as 'my' allies.

But then I'm quite literal...

The picture in this post is not the ADF logo, though. It looks more like the Reformed Druids of North America (RDNA) logo.

Am I the only one who's seeing this?

Edit: no apparently it is The 'Druid Sigil' of reform Druidry, as expressed by ADF.

Which looks nothing like the ADF's main logo and looks a lot like RDNA logo. Duh!

Edited 2020-06-24 18:24 (UTC)

ADF sounds like a weird mixture of an authoritarian leftist group and a chaotic anarchist subculture. The obsession with having an official position on X, Y and Z, and the constant condemnations of others, remind me of Trotskyists! The Byzantine bureaucracy in a small group also strikes me as familiar. The anarchic element is the only thing that stopped them from becoming a cult! TIDLÖSA

Why did I join?
-I'm a seeker and wanted to try something new. ADF seemed more organized and scholarly than most neopagan groups I was aware of at the time (not that that was saying much ...)
-I also knew a handful of ADF people in real life, and they seemed nice, at least to my face.

Why did a I leave a few years later?
- I began to find the ritual structure unwieldy and not to my liking. Mostly, I didn't feel the need to have gates or a gatekeeper for ritual.
- while local ADF people may be nice in person, the ones that haunt the national online forums are not nearly as charming.
- the organization seemed to exist by, for, and of the priesthood. I felt sometimes the laity was in large measure an afterthought.
- ADF is (or at least was) overwhelmingly Celtic; the other kins seemed liked window dressing. I simply didn't feel especially Celtic. For that matter, I had interests in non-IE beings, an interest which ADF couldn't support.
- I became a lot more interested in the occult, and ADF is not really the place to learn the occult.
- The bureaucracy is ludicrous.

I can't comment on Bonewits's alleged sexual malfeasance. I didn't know him. I will say at most of the ADF festivals I attended, it seemed like a majority of people were there more to find carnal relations for a night or pass around interesting substances to smoke than for any honest-to-gods religious sentiment or desire to do a ritual. But I suppose this last is true of most neopagan religions.....

I was the Roman kin leader

Why I joined

no subject

Member for a Few Years Here

no subject

A World Full of Gods

no subject

no subject

no subject

ADF the early days

no subject

I never had any contact with ADF...

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Pondering future

no subject

no subject

never a member...

no subject

no subject

My response?