Why You Joined, Why You Left
Jun. 23rd, 2020 01:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
In the course of the ongoing conversation over on my blog, the Druid organization Ar nDraiocht Fein (ADF) came up for discussion. Quite a few people mentioned that they had been members of ADF but left the organization, most of them recently -- and one of my longtime readers and students mentioned that he's long been interested in the religious dimension of Druidry and is looking to set up an organization for people who share that interest. That got a lively response from the former ADF members, and the questions that came up immediately were: Why did each person join ADF in the first place?
Why did they leave?
That's what this post is for: a frank discussion of what attracted people to ADF and what convinced them to quit. Full disclosure here: I'm also a former ADF member, though I left quite a while ago, and I'll be adding my own reflections to the conversation.
I'm well aware that this is a topic about which some people -- notably those who are still members of ADF -- may have strong feelings, and may not express those with the courtesy and thoughtfulness I expect from my commentariat. For that reason, any attempt at trolling, concern trolling, derailing, flamebaiting, or other bits of online gamesmanship will be deleted. This post is a place for those of us who have had experiences with a troubled Druid organization to talk about those experiences, so that a different organization can learn from them. Those who don't want to participate in that conversation are welcome to go somewhere else -- and those who might want to interfere with that conversation are welcome to go shinny up a stump. 'Nuf said.
Re: Member for a Few Years Here
Date: 2020-06-23 11:06 pm (UTC)I went through the book carefully, looking very hard for real contributions to the theory and practice of magic, and found very, very little worth taking seriously. His chapter on the laws of magic struck me as particularly vapid, almost as if it were meant as a private joke on his readers. (There were a few other jokes, too, that he played on his readers in his book.) He seemed like a small boy on a playground, yelling, "Look at Me! See What I Can Do! Now, Watch Me Do This!"
And then there was the photograph of his UC Berkeley diploma in thaumaturgy (signed by Ronald Reagan as governor of the state) that he put on the back cover of the book!
There used to be an independent studies program at UC Berkeley where you could get a degree with a major of your own devising. Isaac used it to get a degree in magic. And then he talked his degree in magic up so much, and got so much publicity for it, that the University decicided that controversial fields of study, and especially topics that touched on magic or magical religion, were to be forever off-limits for independent majors. So his overblown ego closed that path of study for anyone else who might have come after him. "Nice work, Isaac, you jerk! Ever hear of the Fourth power of the Sphinx?"
The one thing that I found most useful of all in the entire book was Isaac's brief discussion of the famous "Conjuring Up Philip" experiment carried out by a group of pasrapsychologists in Toronto. That opened up fascinating lines of speculation connected with my family's old notion that no fully adult human has just a single self, but that alsolutely everyone contains a multitude of different selves; and the shifts and interplay between these selves can be well worth studying and learning how to control the process for one's own advantage,.
Re: Member for a Few Years Here
Date: 2020-06-24 02:34 am (UTC)Did your studies bear fruit? If so, what did you learn?
Re: Member for a Few Years Here
Date: 2020-06-24 03:20 pm (UTC)