A Working Class Invitation to Fellow Animists
By Valerian Snow Flower-Power
Also available as a Downloadable/printable PDF (A4)
Culture and History Growing from a Stump
Here, I’m stretching my roots down to show a connection I believe is inevitable between a pagan wilderness life-stage of maturation, the psycho-spiritual magic space opened for this in the Catholic Worker Movement, and how the common ground between Marxism and Animism are fertile ground for something new to emerge in the late capitalist ashes of Western society. I also am proposing the material strategy of the Catholic Worker Movement be taken up by the Pagan Indigenous Anti-Capitalist movement promoted here at Gods & Radicals Press. I would like to present this through gifting a dreamlike poetic text following a few introductions. First, let’s meet Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin.
But I must speak from my own experiences. My radical associates were the ones who were in the forefront of the struggle for a better social order where there would not be so many poor. What if we do not agree with the means taken to achieve this goal, nor with their fundamental philosophy? We do believe in “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” We believe in the “withering away of the State.” We believe in the communal aspect of property, as stressed by early Christians and since then by religious orders. We believe in the constructive activity of the people, “the masses,” and the mutual aid which existed during medieval times, worked out from below. We believe in loving our brothers, regardless of race, color, or creed and we believe in showing this love by working, immediately, for better conditions, and ultimately, for the ownership by the workers of the means of production. We believe in an economy based on human needs, rather than on the profit motive.
-Dorothy Day
Dorothy Day (born 124 years ago; crossed over 41 years ago) was a journalist, a diarist, an editor, a writer, a mother and grandmother, at times a syndicalist, at times an anarchist, at times a communist, at times a distributist, always a revolutionary, a radical. Always a proud member of the working class, a peer and contemporary of Peter Kropotkin, she worked at The Liberator, The Masses, The Commonweal and The New York Call around 1916-1932; and was a suffragist arrested at the White House with Alice Paul. Plumbing the depths of what she called the “long loneliness,” she was a woman of prayer and adopted the Roman Catholic faith around 1929. She met a radical Catholic accomplice, Peter Maurin in 1932 and began to conspire.
Around May Day (the cross-quarter of Beltane) 1933, Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, and comrades launched The Catholic Worker (CW) newspaper with the aims of demonstrating a religious interest not only in the spiritual needs of the working class, but also direct action for the material needs—the relation between the transformative power of one’s labour and the land from which the means of this creativity arises. Personalism, the concept of taking personal responsibility for social ills, played a central role in the paper’s proposals since its conception. They began to organize Round Table Discussions for the clarification of thought, Houses of Hospitality in the city, and Farm Communes; and now CW Houses and Farms are sprinkled around the globe from Chicago to Kampala, Uganda; from Seoul, South Korea to Hertfordshire, England; from Yankton, South Dakota to the Netherlands.
The Catholic Worker Movement draws deeply upon a spirit of hospitality which actively resisted the land enclosures throughout the Middle Ages in Europe. One of the few binaries I carry is indigenous vs. empire (be that America, England, Spain, Rome, Greece, Akkadia, Old Babylon, or Mesopatamia, etc.). The 5,000 years of debt Graeber talks about begins with the first patterns of empire in Sumer. The alternative to debt (which leads to privatization) is radical free hospitality (which empowers the commons). I draw a strong connection between this hospitality and the hospitality of Celtic culture before the colonization of Roman civilization and Catholicism. Brigid, Cúchulainn, Tailtiu and several Celtic gods engage with sacred vows to involve themselves in communal hospitality as giver and receiver. This is still alive, I would argue, throughout Europe just as paganism and witchcraft can be said to remain through folk tradition, art, astrology and sexuality in Western Culture. A long list of scholars and poets like Camille Paglia take up the Paganism-Never-Died thesis with social-imagination.
The historical materialism that Marx implies within capitalism’s bearing of the seeds of its own destruction can be said also of colonization and in particular the force of the Roman Catholic Church. As the Catholic Church took over Europe it had to adopt the local pagan wheel of the year into its calendar and (at least pretend) to venerate the local land spirits, ancestors and deities. Brig is amongst the most obvious, a goddess I learned first about around the hearth fires of a woman living on traditional Lenape land, in Waterfront South of Camden, NJ, in an old monastery of the local Roman Catholic parish Sacred Heart. She has renamed the house Brigid’s House and keeps a guest room for the traveler, sharing bread and healing art and poetry, as a gift… for free. Across the street are large stones seated in a circle organized by Sacred Heart’s priest Michael Doyle, an Irishman who immigrated in 1959 to Camden to accept diocesan scholarship for graduate school at Villanova after growing up with Ernmas’ lore taught him by the elders of his Longford village. Within Sacred Heart’s liturgical year are intentionally themes of pre-Christian traditions, especially of Ireland.
As a young New-Monastic (an emergent Jesus-centric intentional-community movement), I attended the ceremonies which prefaced Lammas Mass of 2013 in the community gardens tended by the Center for Environmental Transformation with Sacred Heart who engage working-class children in the neighborhood with a summer garden program. A large boulder is placed intentionally in a circle on one end of a garden, and the people on the first Sunday after August 2nd sprinkle salt from the Himalayas mixed with salt from the Irish Sea (as above, so below). This happens after the priest sprinkles holy water with the sprig of an herb in the four directions. After gathering our focus to begin the ritual, Father Doyle came over to me and asked me take up the sprig and lead the casting of the circle. My own path simultaneously took up the gods who have embroiled me in Paganism ever since. Lugh and Tailtiu have my shere devotion.
Peter Maurin was an immigrant from the traditional soils of Gaulish tribes in France living on the deeply colonized soils of the Lenape Tribe (aka NYC) known also as Lenapehoking. He was happy to give anti-capitalist speeches to anyone who’s attention he could get for however long. He had many ideas rolling around in his head that few really understood. His short works would later be translated into several languages including Irish and Italian. I think Maurin could sense these pagan seeds beneath the yet unfertilized surface; taste the social difference between the soil in Europe and the soil in America. This lack of fertilization he, Day and the CW took as an imperative to address the lack of culture in America. They upheld the then extremely active Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW)’s aim to create a “new world in the shell of the old,” one in which “it is easier to be good.” They were recognizing the imminent demise of America and any capitalist economy. Maurin could see an opportunity here for revolution, which he spelled out in part two of his three part program:
The [second] step in the program is houses of hospitality. In the Middle Ages it was an obligation of the bishops to provide houses of hospitality or hospices for the wayfarer. They are especially necessary now, and necessary to my program as half-way houses. I am hoping that some one will donate a house, rent free, for six months so that a start may be made. A priest will be at the head of it and men gathered through our round table discussions will be recruited to work in the houses cooperatively and eventually be sent out to farm colonies or agronomic universities. Which comes to the third step in my program. People will have to go back to the land. The machine has displaced labor, the cities are overcrowded. The land will have to take care of them.
Day and Maurin faced the same anti-theist dilemma many Pagans face when engaging in anti-capitalist and anarchist dialogue. When we’re lucky, it’s anarchist strategy and organizing and, rarest of all in these isolated times of social media, direct action. While many of the early CW Houses were co-founded by Catholic priests and laity, over the years those that were headed by their founders have adopted more democratic decision-processes, such as the commitment/longevity weighted decision process held by the Open Door CW, and the indigenous-originated consensus process of the Karen House. Many have become ecumenical and inter-faith. Day challenges anti-theism plainly from her experiences organizing as a communist early in her life:
It’s time there was a Catholic paper printed for the unemployed. The fundamental aim of most radical sheets is the conversion of its readers to Radicalism and Atheism.
Is it not possible to be radical and not atheist?
Is it not possible to protest, to expose, to complain, to point out abuses and demand reforms without desiring the overthrow of religion?
With more and more masses of working-class folks and indigenous peoples asserting traditions of animistic cultures to be celebrated as inextricably centered in their physical landscape of the Earth without the lines of real estate, I fiercely believe this enshrined sense of place is required for the art and passion which is underwritten in what truly pulses the drum of the people, the drum which is an expression of the land, the drum which calls us to be traitors to our borders. After a wilderness journey in the growing pantheon of my heart, Jesus entranced in adoration for the Moon, left on a journey of his own inviting me to empower myself; “I need not your heart, what you need is in the bog,” his benediction. The prayers he taught composted and my self-determination ignited in the flame of Brigit. I believe in Christopher Scott Thompson’s vision of sacred trees and shrines sprinkled throughout a post-revolution anarcho-socialist city with a gift-economy. And while I am not a Catholic, and see Catholicism’s structure falling as the empire crumbles, I feel that a pluralistic culture which makes space for whatever post-revolution Catholicism still remains is going to be part of society. I know several Catholic Workers who will likely be practicing such a religion. In Starhawk’s Fifth Sacred Thing and City of Refuge she details how she sees nuns participating fully and integral within a city founded upon an animistic Declaration of the Four Sacred Things.
In traveling to a dozen or more Catholic Worker Houses and Farms in my early twenties I met several Catholic Workers who weren’t Catholic, and quite a few who aren’t Christian, who are Muslim, Pagans and a few witches. Six years ago when I visited the ancestral lands of the Puyallup Tribe (so-called Tacoma, WA). There was a courtyard where people who were coming for the big kitchen’s community meal (a meal which feeds numerous homeless people every week) could voluntarily engage in a pre-meal spiritual devotion. When I was present for this devotion it was the day before a Lunar Eclipse. The rising almost full Moon was acknowledged along with the pagan practices of some of those gathered. The devotion then went on to recognize other upcoming religious holidays, particularly Sukkot; then invited participants to reflect in smaller groups on a question relevant to anyone’s tradition. One of the Catholic Workers living there heard that my lover and I were pagans and later she made energy to share that she was too and to especially welcome us.
A few years before that in Cahokia land (modern-day St. Louis), the Karen House CW welcomed a group of traveling friends and I into their multi-story house of hospitality for houseless single mothers. The delegated task of hosting us was taken by a person who seemed to take quite a bit of responsibility within their consensus oriented power-sharing structure. When we asked them about their spiritual connection with the commune, they shared with us briefly about their Pagan practice. I encountered this a few other places. Why such a draw amongst pagans to something which bears the name Catholic?
Each locality of the Catholic Worker Movement is completely autonomous and loosely federated through regional retreats, conferences and anti-nuclear actions. Each house creates its own agreements, structures, vision etc. There are unifying texts such as The Aims and Means of the [CW] Movement re-published each May Day in the NY’s continuation of the original CW paper (still $0.01). The two most commonly referenced to my view are the Sermon on the Mt., Matthew Chapter 5 and the Works of Mercy in Matt. Ch. 25; however no declarative statement nor authority does a Catholic Workers community need embrace to consider themselves Catholic Workers, and no statement claims to speak for the whole movement.
Day heavily resisted in her own locality the pressure put on the Catholic Workers house in which she lived to become incorporated as a non-profit. They wouldn’t think of being so officially married to the State so much so they were almost forced by the NYPD to close their soup kitchen and house of hospitality. They also felt tax-breaks for donors wasn’t a good reason for donors not to give (if it extinguished their incentive, then their incentive was impure), and believed if they could resist by faith with expression and living of CW position, they would survive, “no matter what steps were taken against [them] by the government.” It was at the last minute that through the NY Times an ally to the CW published an article shaming the city, which led to a silent lying down of the eviction.
Although Day spoke strongly about abortion, there is no official CW consensus on this issue. When I was on Puyallup land in Tacoma, we went two blocks down the road with Catholic Workers to an abortion clinic of Planned Parenthood and counter-protested those shaming the people going in for procedure. We held a sign made on the spot, “Pussy Power!”
We met another CW there, an author working on a book which would focus on the lack of culture within Western Society and in particular the U.S. In our conversations he shared that he felt this was explicitly why Dorothy Day, the Catholic Worker Movement, and Thomas Merton (a writer/poet from the Abbey of Gethsemane) are so captivating. He argues they are examples of culture where colonization and displacement had given a sense of finality to any sign of life for art and the wisdom of the poor and working class. While I would add to his list of examples things like the Blues, Vodune, Indigenous traditions and the Maypole, we know what he’s talking about. What he’s pointing to is something emanating from Day and the poetry of Merton which American society is devoid of under a harsh mechanistic industrial capitalism: animism, culture, the commons and the hospitality which comes with it.
Witches Conjuring a Rain-Storm
The International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers first met seventeen years ago to “represent a global alliance of prayer, education and healing for our Mother Earth, all Her inhabitants, all the children, and for the next seven generations to come.” They share that they:
are deeply concerned with the unprecedented destruction of our Mother Earth and the destruction of indigenous ways of life. We believe the teachings of our ancestors will light our way through an uncertain future. We look to further our vision through the realization of projects that protect our diverse cultures: lands, medicines, language and ceremonial ways of prayer and through projects that educate and nurture our children.
As they began to meet around at each Grandmother’s locality, the encounter of indigenous healing ceremony at one Grandmother’s Catholic sanctuary brought up conversation about the Papal Bulls which includes decree by the Pope to commit the following: “We trust as long as you are on earth, you will compel and with all zeal cause the barbarian nations to come to the knowledge of God, the maker and founder of all things, not only by edicts and admonitions, but also by force and arms, if needful, in order that their souls may partake of the heavenly kingdom.”
They requested an audience with the pope and received no answer. One of the Grandmothers asked the Dalai Lama about his perspective on this when he met with them, just after meeting with the Pope. He encouraged them to keep writing back. Which they did to no avail. So the 13 indigenous Grandmothers went in 2008 to the Vatican with their ceremonies of prayer “to hand-deliver a statement to Pope Benedict XVI, asking him to rescind several controversial papal bulls that played a part in the colonization of indigenous lands.” Despite having a permit to pray there, they experienced the Vatican police urge them to move on, accusing them of “idolatry.” The Grandmothers didn’t back down.
“Finally, the police brought back a law official who assessed the situation. Upon seeing 13 indigenous elder women and hearing one of their songs, the official concluded there was no problem with the ceremony. The official also ultimately invited the grandmothers to enter St. Peter's Basilica to rest and pray.”
Their statement was never delivered and the Bulls are still on the books even after the change of Pope and a direct request of the same rescindment from him by Jay Winter Nightwolf. In Autumn of 1965, Dorothy Day also went to the Vatican during its Council II with a 20 woman group to Rome to fast, pray and to issue statements to the Pope. She decried people looking to the Pope to condemn oppression asserting they already have every reason to personally take action without his decree. I don’t know if she ever stated anything about the bulls; and there is much discussion, conference and redress today within the Catholic Worker movement in reconsidering unintentional racist material conditions mirrored in CW history. Day went to the Vatican in solidarity with the victims of war, the working class. I dare say, in 2008, she joined the prayers of the 13 Grandmothers as an ancestor and sat on land between the police and the ceremonies the same way she joined the Caesar Chavez in the United Farm Workers’ strike.
A ll of this is not to say Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin were actually Pagans and they didn’t know it. I respect their personal choice to self-identify as Roman Catholics and the same to many of the Catholic Workers throughout the movement. This is a way they connect with ancestors, with the land, and with their own soul. Heavy criticism upon the Church is sustained among them. From the viewpoint of the Paganism-Never-Died thesis, what Day’s and Maurin’s souls yearned for, had faith to believe was alive and accessible to humanity, calling from our collective memory, was a passionate act of the Earth as a living entity, was of the imperative of animism. As Starhawk reminds us, “religion is the soil of culture.” This is the soil, a soil swimming with myths and images of our pagan past, into which Day and Maurin had their hands and, I believe, still do.
Their devotion to non-violence may seem foreign among some pagans and witches for good reason. As Grey puts it in his Manifesto of Apocalyptic Witchcraft: “12. We will not disarm ourselves. 13. The war is upon us.” Maria Kvilhaug (aka Lady of the Labyrinth) details the ways in which people of a fragile pile of revenge amongst Norse clans associated post-colonization by Roman Catholicism with a kind of peace, a unity in Christian fellowship. This unity is the false sense of peace we know as Pax Romana and Pax Americana, a peace upheld by the empire’s sword. Peace indeed has been a controversial consideration within the declarative statements of pagan collectives. It seems to mean different things to different people.
Decolonizing Actions in Reclaiming Communities (DARC) organized with the Imbolc 2021 agenda of the annual global meeting Broad Intra-Reclaiming Councils Hub (BIRCH) to add to and amend the tradition’s Principles of Unity (POU) in excluding the word peace and to implement several direct actions of inclusion within each local Reclaiming Cell especially the inclusion of BIPOC, the gender non-conforming and people living with disabilities. I was honored to Co-Facilitate one of these meetings with a wonderful team. One of the origins of the amendments and additions came out of a ritual to bind a local police force at which the cell made conversation about whether cursing was in conflict with the value of “peace” within the community and “non-violence.” Cursing is clearly implicit in the landscape of witchcraft. This conversation and the amendments were incredibly needed. and preparing for the upcoming Ostara 2022 BIRCH. This is only a start.
In Consensus, there are three voting options: Yes, in this case “I Consent” was borrowed instead for the day from sociocracy meaning “I can live with this proposal;” “Stand Aside” meaning “I can’t say one way or the other” and/or “it may not be how I’d go it solo but I feel it’s the best decision for the collective;” and “Block” meaning “no, not we can’t move forward with this, it’s against these specific common values, (or would destroy the group) here’s why I think so.” The changes to the POU were adopted with all Reclaiming Cells’ representatives Consenting, one Stand Aside (because that cell hadn’t had enough conversation on the matter) and no Blocks. A Cell or two had piped up a little on the asynchronous Loomio meeting (over the course of a few days online) about reservations within their locality about peace being a core value to their traditional anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, and anti-racist resistance to Nazism. These concerns were addressed and conversation was made.
These changes are about a specific layer of the body of witchcraft and indigenous traditions. In Towards Scarring Our Collective Soul Wound (2019), Cash Ahenakew, of the Ahtahkakoop Cree Nation, notes that within the Sundance Community, with which he is a dancer, a community which welcomes anyone regardless of heritage (a highly controversial decision), there simultaneously exists among everyone a spiritual familiarity, a common struggle, and a recognition of the need to “prioritize the access of indigenous people.”
5. Learn not to weaponize the gifts you receive. At some point, you may be told that we are all one. And maybe on the same day, you will be told by the same people or by different people that we are divided by our experiences of history, trauma, and privilege. Each statement speaks to one of many different layers that need to be addressed in respectful engagements… This is extremely important in order to keep the practices alive and held by the communities themselves. When non-Indigenous people are asked to give up their place (at the drum circle with limited seats, for example) for an Indigenous person, unfortunately we still hear, “Aren’t we all one?” as a response. This is an example of the community’s own generosity being weaponized against itself.
DARC’s proposal speaks to the implicit work of the witch, that of cursing the empire. With Aradia our wands blast the homes of landlords. Dorothy Day had no problem with joining Dr. King’s Beyond Vietnam prophecy of God saying he will “break the backbone of [America’s] power, and [he] will place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know [his] name,” the Tower card pulled for America’s destiny. She denounced the empire saying “our problems stem from this filthy rotten system.”Maurin stated in one of his famous Easy Essays, Municipal Lodgings “2. There are guest rooms in the homes of the rich but they are not for those who need them.” If one cannot abide the idea that the above contested quote is actually Dorothy Day’s, Day calls for Catholic Workers to fight with striking workers in July of 1936:
Let us concede that the conditions at the RCA Victor plant down in Camden, where a strike involving 13,000 men started last month, are not bad conditions, and that wages and hours are not bad. There is probably a company union which is supposed to take care of such conditions and complaints, but it perpetuates the enslavement of the worker
Let us concede that the conditions of the seamen are not so atrocious as the “Daily Worker” contends. Let us get down to the fundamental point that the seamen are striking for: the right to be considered partners, sharers in responsibility, the right to be treated as men and not as chattels.
Is it not a cause worth fighting for? Is it not a cause which demands all the courage and all the integrity of the men involved? Let us be frank and make this our issue.
Let us be honest and confess that it is the social order which we wish to change. The workers are never going to be satisfied, no matter how much pay they get, no matter what their hours are. And it is to reconstruct the social order that we are throwing ourselves in with the workers, whether in factories or shipyards or on the sea.
Doyle whom I mentioned above is a peace activist and the “non-violent” tactics he took with the Camden 28 would be quickly decried by the same non-violent activists who chose to waste the resource of the gathered witches by raising the question of whether or not cursing was appropriate as a non-violent tactic. He broke and entered into a public building to light ablaze public property, draft cards, in a direct action. On one layer there is a “peace”; another layer is of violent interruption.
What I’m proposing is that Day and Maurin were touching a part of human culture which held and hold sindigenous animist seeds of a deeper ecological consciousness. Seeds within which one matures and grows into the giant elder cedars. Seeds within which the evolving cultural landscape can already have established roots of eco-centric and gift based economies as the global capitalist colonialist society completely falls apart.
Cocoon
There are many coming of age ceremonies within indigenous traditions around the world. Bill Plotkin, eco-psychologist and retreat guide, writes in Nature and the Human Soul his account of how after coming of age there are 5 more life-stages common to indigenous cultures including 3 in adult-hood and 2 in elder-hood. These, he asserts, are what industrial civilization has colonized from our relations. The Cocoon, he recognizes as the second stage after coming of age, a vital dissolving of the ego into the imagios in the inner-wrappings and a merging with a deeper personal soul purpose (to then be lived in two more stages of adulthood).
The Cocoon requires something we have struggled to re-ignite since the land enclosures (the establishment of police protected artificial borders of private land), the ability to go far from the village into the wilderness. That is, the ability to go away with elders and non-familial adults into ordeal. I suggest the hospitality of the CW Movement has been part of this struggle. Employers do not need workers who have a place to explore our inner psyche, the terrain of our soul, the truth of our bodies moving far through space and time; creating relationship with the land, sky and sea. While we may or may not find an indigenous definition of elderhood at CWs, we do encounter the task of receiving hospitality, that is, as Steven Jenkinson says in an interview with Patrick Farnsworth on elderhood, “the skill of knowing how to have elders in [our] midst.”
In our physical common presence. Communes (by which I mean those still offering free hospitality to guests and free avenues to membership for prospective communards) create space for anyone’s desire we thankfully still have in the world for elders to be sought. I believe this desire is growing by the second. I see this form of hospitality growing by the minute; this form of communal membership growing by the day.
In my experience I encountered a place for my soul to breathe in oneness with the land and I believe pagans can and are beginning to organize such spaces like CW’s, rent free. We could find ourselves igniting the commons once again, and perhaps joining an animist dream for which we’ve yet to find the courage.
A Call from Ancestral Mounds
Where will Cúchulainn, Pan, The Morrígan, and Brig live? How can Cúchulainn follow his vow to receive hospitality when the commons have been privatized? How will Oshun have a place to remain with Earth, when our rivers of hospitality are drying out? The Catholic Worker Movement hinges on the idea that when one has given bread to someone, they’ve given it to Jesus. I believe this understanding of deity in those we give aid carries a strong call over (and especially) into paganism. We can think about our co-creation with the gods as being worlded through acts of solidarity, whether through picketing in a solidarity network, planting indigenous river bank soil stabilizers, or making space for the traveler to rest on their way. Will we give Five of Pentacles or Ten of Pentacles? If we cannot organize to make such possible as a framework for our vision, where indeed will dream live?
What is possible? I imagine what it was like for Dorothy Day and the early CWs to consider the cost of their passions being poured out and nothing happening with the cost of not engaging their passion. They had no clue, not logically, what way their acts of radical hospitality, of the considerable work of producing written work to report and invite new CWs to join in the solidarity and of the deeper resource of people’s energy in meeting and discussing and deciding on steps forward would lead to. They couldn’t have known the blossoming like wildflowers everywhere their movement would bring of Houses of Hospitality, soup kitchens, picket lines, farm communes and the great glimmer of stoking the cultural memory of connected living commons to which their work would give birth. The shining Tuatha Dé, ancient descendents of Ireland, came home to face the Fir Bolg, and the Formorians, and the Milesians in the Battles of Mag Tuired. How could they have known their sacred spear, stone, cauldron and sword of light would be safe? That they would drink from the The Morrígan’s cup of sovereignty and be led by Manannán mac Lir, the Son of the Sea himself, into mounds of the underworld plains of flowers and honey? And yet, by faith, when they arrived, they burned their own ships so they would have no retreat and they trusted.
Day mused in May of the last year of her life in The Catholic Worker 1980, pp 4:
We were just sitting there talking when Peter Maurin came in.We were just sitting there talking when lines of people began to form, saying, “We need bread.” We could not say, “Go, be thou filled.” If there were six small loaves and a few fishes, we had to divide them. There was always bread.
We were just sitting there talking and people moved in on us. Let those who can take it, take it. Some moved out and that made room for more. And somehow the walls expanded.
We were just sitting there talking and someone said, “Let’s all go live on a farm.”
It was as casual as all that, I often think. It just came about. It just happened….
We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.
It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.
The Catholic Worker Movement will go on and my wife and I have often said that it may be the only organization which survives the revolution and/or the implosion of society, as it is autonomous and unincorporated into the body of the State which will inevitably be shattered. I am a Pagan Catholic Worker and I am co-founding an Indigenous and Animism-Centric Catholic Worker Commune with my wife and a new villager. On site is a community center where the local solidarity-network we co-founded organizes agitation, a food pantry, outreach events, medical supplies/basic needs, presentations about worker-owned coops and community gardens. In many ways CWs live as if the empire has already fallen, yet endure in the face of the worst social ills. We push the buck and have employed only one thing, the strategy of exposing the evil in the bones of the American Empire.
When I came out as gender-queer to my liberal-led church in Fayetteville, AR I was evicted. I organized my material well-being with the solidarity of my union, the IWW, then I traveled houseless with my lover in our car for 3 months to an array of CWs. A trans-gender Reclaiming witch gave us a place to breathe for a moon on traditional Kadohadacho land (aka Mena, AR). She instructed permaculture and had parked a travel trailer for student garden-farmers. My partner had lived here before and it was the first place I lived as an overt pagan witch. Three years later we came back here when we found out she has Alzheimer’s Disease to be her caregivers and to tend the land. This is where we sustain Snake Village Forge of Brigit CW. We are friends with a pagan-founded commune on the traditional lands of the Tsalaguwetiyi and Shawandasse Tula (aka Hurricane, WV). These are examples of animists adopting radical hospitality and farm communes. I know we and our friends aren’t the only witches sharing their means CW style. Why not organize, network and strengthen our commons?
When I first embraced life as a Pagan I was shocked at how privileged I’d been as a Christian. I could call churches anywhere I went and usually find a Sunday school room to make a personal retreat, to stop along my travels or a place in solitude to call a friend for emotional support; almost always food. I found this kind of affirmation of pagan faith isn’t around as much. I could still find a place at the CW houses. But I yearn for a movement of radical hospitality which centers indigenous traditions and paganism. I considered that the resources often available to Christians aren’t to animists. Maybe this was why there wasn’t a movement in this direction. This is a power-under I claimed for years: Christians alone are responsible for reclaiming the commons, animists are exempt. We can ask, though, is it possible for animists to organize these basic needs? Are we responsible too? What, in fact, are we doing as animists if we don’t take this responsibility? Might we have a unique creative gift to offer in a way no other part of society can?
There is a story I heard from a CW with the house in LA. They say that one way Day raised money with the early CWs was by requesting donations from local parishes in Manhattan. If the churches denied the donations, the CWs wanted them accountable to the poor and so they picketed until the churches donated. This is seizing the means.
I propose we claim responsibility for being among the working class and to organize this material solidarity. When there is so much pagan money going into renting private campgrounds, we have a duty to the land wights to pressure pagan organizations to do what People Against Poverty and Apathy Fest did, to find someone who owns real estate with which we would be allowed to host our Witch Camps and Beltane Festivals for free. We can then raise funds to allocate land. Another theatre for direct action is Pagan and metaphysical shops. We can organize for them to transition to worker-owned cooperatives and to find some way to donate to the cause. The more commercial, the more we picket for the working class.
Paganism is a broad term, so is indigenous and animist. I see us at the center of a network of anti-capitalist Houses of Hospitality with the pluralism of Christopher Scott Thompson’s and Starhawk’s vision of the post-revolution city. We can organize something more radical than the liberal interfaith dialogues between witches and their oppressors; so let’s organize interfaith solidarity with the working class. Robert Bly, D. H. Lawrence, and Angie Speaks remind pagans of our treasure in reclaiming masculinity from the anemia of the soft-male who grew up under industrial capitalism and didn’t see his father growing up. Angie suggests where there is a shadow there is passion to be directed, and that we can gather it into the movement. Bly asserts that Christ-gurus aren’t going to give us this back, but that faerie tales will. We have something special as pagans that the CW movement can’t supply on its own.
And the CW movement has to offer us what Grey presents as true witch-craft: “Seeing ourselves in dream requires that we see ourselves in life, in specific place and at specific time.” The gods become real with the CW. One doesn’t only read the books and newspapers of the movement, one digs potatoes with the authors, builds friendships, gets to know the tree outside Day’s window on Lenapehoking. One schedules a trip, or at some CW houses, drops in for coffee, or for a weeklong stay. Scrubs the grease caked on the top of the kitchen ceiling fan. Eats next to someone who’s just there for the toast and ham. Paints that one room we’ve finally got the funds to save so we can curate a nursery again. I’d imagine myself pretty special to eat with any pagan writer I’ve ever read from and I know they wouldn’t have time to build a relationship. Once a year at a witch-camp I can hardly afford? Nor would they be able to point me to the people with whom I could build a deep coven bond. There are exceptions among some Reclaiming Cells in the city. I’m at least acquainted and know how to contact and visit CWs who are published or who are written about, sometimes in free publications. Deep inside, I know they are real. I’ve smelled them. Cornell West gave a speech commemorating Day about how she challenged liberals and civilization saying she reminded us that human is born between feces and urine. This cannot be smelled from the journal you’re reading. It can be smelled right after I’ve used our composting toilet. Animism needs this. Any culture Gods & Radicals is working to braid needs this to be real.
Let’s meet for Round Table Discussions, every one of us who have a dream of the commons restored, every one of us who is pagan, every one of us who is living. Let us meet and let us find a way for it all to come together. Let us agitate and create Solidarity Networks and at the same time let us find home bases for the traveler, for the children of Gaia who have no home. Let us take a line from the book of the American Indian Movement and occupy abandoned buildings until we can begin our centers for culture, hospitality and the commons, and let us appeal to Reclaiming Witchcamps and Pagan Festivals who pour their money into rental retreat centers to find ways to save those funds for the allocation of Farm Communes. In a pre-figurative gift-economy—for those who need compensation and/or funding within our animist and indigenous traditions—instead of pricing our products, labour and presence, let’s use the escalation tactics of the IWW, finding the people in our Cell who are either employers or landlords and start by asking them to donate the money and if they ignore us, picketing their source of income. If our Reclaiming Cells are made of working-class folks, then we picket the owners of the closest commercial witch and new age stores. Let us let go of land we are renting out, find other means of income and donate the land to Houses of Hospitality, simultaneously joining the working class! Let us appeal to our local pagan shops to transition to be worker-owned co-ops and worker-directed if they are non-profits! Let us join not only with pagans and holders of indigenous ceremony and animists, let’s form a pluralist movement and organize across faith-lines! Let us find ways to allocate native land and give the so-called deed back to the indigenous people who have prophecies and dreams of a tribal culture reborn! Now is the time! Alone, there are many chains and I sure know we all feel them and come up to their limitations daily BUT together we are strong and the only limit to what we can do is what we choose! When we have power-together we are the spiraling oaks thousands of years old in the old growth Sherwood Forests whispering to descendants who will live free as we shall live free.
If you have ideas, let’s get together and talk about them. I invite us to have meetings with an experienced facilitator, in the ways of Starhawk, where everyone can have a turn to speak without interruption and give their thoughts on one agenda item: a CW style commons movement which centers indigenous and animist tradition. We can have meetings with local accomplices and comrades, and we could meet using an online video platform. As much as I have reservations about meeting online, I feel we need to correspond and organize. Please reach out and let’s get started. Solidarity is in the air.
How to center the work? We have ancient myths and tales we could draw from. Maybe Robin Hood? Or the Osh Otura? Maybe the Iron John whom Bly introduces? Maybe Ned Ludd, whom Rhyd Wildermuth tells of? What about the Hopi prophecy stone’s Man with the Staff and the Flower whom the Thirteen Grandmothers say represents the alternative path toward “life and happiness”? Or how about Apocalyptic Witchcraft Peter Grey dreamed in response to John’s Book of Revelation? Maybe the ocean of ceremonies of our animist ancestors? Maybe the Tree of Life holding our prayers in the Lakota Sundance. Oooo! Perhaps the beloved spiral dance which draws again and again the double spiral of Pictish art. There will be many ideas and all of them are good because there are infinite centers. Personally, I say Burial Mounds. The burial mounds we find around the planet all from animists. From The Hill of Tailte in Ireland to so-called Bluffton Mounds of the Kadohadacho not 60 miles from where I live. From the bear skulls of the Okhotsk Moyoro Shell Mounds in Japan to the pottery marked burials of the Dowayo People in Cameroon. Our passion is calling out to us from the bones of our indigenous ancestors. They are the source of the wisdom of the commons. Their bones teach us how to stretch branches into shelters for our villages. Their skulls call the tumble of the Sabbat dance. We are dancing because of their dance. They call us into many deeper dances of the stages of life. They call us into a world we’ve already felt the draw and networked. They call us to sustain our webs through to the 7th generation after capitalism and centralized control lie in ruins. We have deeper places to go because they have gone before into the realm indeed of flowers and honey.
The material needs of the working class for which Day, Maurin and the Catholic Worker advocate is to restore a material connection of autonomy with the means of production. Day goes on to say in the Nov. 1949 passage I quoted from at the beginning of this piece,
Certainly we disagree with the Communist Party, but so do we disagree with the other political parties, dedicated to maintaining the status quo. We don’t think the present system is worth maintaining. We and the Communists have a common idea that something else is necessary, some other vision of society must be held up and worked toward... We must cry out against the injustice or by our silence consent to it. If we keep silent, the very stones of the street will cry out.
This is dedicated to the Golden Mabon and to Colleen Cook, an ancestor in the Reclaiming Tradition. May she continue to teach us to collaborate!
Valerian Snow Flower-Power
(ve, they, or any pronouns really) is a witch with roots of sabotaging the plans of employers and landlords. Ve loves with the land of which the Kadohadacho people have blood and passion, whispering life in the caring tongue of the Caddo language. Ve is androgynous and encourages everyone to be who they choose personally to be. Animists, Anarchists and Autonomist Marxists vis wife Suzanne Snow and ver are cofounding a commune called Snake Village in the Ouachita Mts. Ve is organizing a basic needs pantry, a community center from an old motorcycle shop, mutual-aid gardens and direct action with a year old solidarity network called Ouachita Collaborative Cultivators. Ve is connected with the Reclaiming tradition of the craft and one can find ver at a local metaphysical apothecary giving free tarot readings and going door to door asking for pennies for the commune.