The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

Do you mean one where everyone can lead, or one with no levels or markers of advancement?

(This is why consensus-lead groups often fail in misery, because most people? They do not know how to do consensus well. Unless they were raised as Quakers in reasonably active Meetings, in my experience. Everyone else needs to learn or relearn a bunch of skills. Which is possible, but people need to be okay with that first.)

Second, you really want to take a look at two books: Starhawk's _Dreaming the Dark_ (which is, in large part, about power and interaction) and then Nick Farrell's _Gathering the Magic_ (the first edition has a sort of off-putting cover, but the content is great.)

First, I agree with you that any self-respecting teacher should also be learning. That said, I do think that the roles of teacher and student in a given setting do have some uses: it makes it clear who is responsible for figuring out what material *needs* to get covered, that that material fits together without bad gaps, and that (if you're working in a system where certain stuff has to be mastered or experienced or whatever prior to initiation or making a decision to join a group as a full member or whatever else) that all of that stuff has been covered.

I think a good teacher will *also* learn from their student, and will also do what they can (when it's appropriate and there's available time/energy beyond the stuff that has to get covered) to do stuff that's appropriate to the student's interests. But it's the teacher's job to make sure the necessary stuff gets done, because they're the one who knows the whole picture and the student doesn't yet.

So, second, the tyranny of structurelessness - which is the title of an excellent essay by Jo Freeman, and also worthy of your attention - she's talking about the 70s and 80s feminist movement in specific, but a huge amount of it is applicable to Pagan and magical groups.

Also, this process takes a *lot* of time. I have at least four rounds of group stories where groups crashed and burned because they had a fixed-term sort of project, and it got bogged down in process and "how do we make a decision about this" without resolution for several months.

One of these was a 'blocking consensus' problem where one person in a group of thirty had an issue with something, and wanted to argue about it (to the tune of a session and a half of a monthly group meeting) rather than either bowing out or letting it go.

[...]

There are definitely ways to rotate responsibilities, but you lose something else in the process - which is someone who's job it is to look at the larger picture. If, say, you have people rotating who plans which ritual, you can get a lot of really great individual rituals. But it's a lot harder to get a chain of rituals that all build on each other over the course of a year or more.

(It's possible, if *everyone* does their part, and no one has an awesome idea but then gets sick or people don't have to punt and find something last minute, or whatever. If you have someone coordinating the arc, whatever they fill with will better fit - or at least not run counter to - the larger arc. But the chances of everyone doing their part consistently for a long period of time together is sort of counter to human nature.)

There's also pragmatic things: if the same person usually provides the *space* for whatever you do (which is reasonably common in small groups, since some people don't have room, some people have partners/roommates who would be put out if there was group stuff, some people have pets or smoking habits that other group members can't deal with easily.)

But does the person whose home it is get priority on scheduling? Or who can be invited? Or how late stuff can run? Or what the house rules are about what foods people bring, or who provides what, or who does the cleanup? Those things are all a degree of non-egalitarian decision making that is *totally* reasonable if you're opening up your home on a regular basis for group work - but if they're not overt and agreed to and out in the open, they can get really messy really fast. Or cause a lot of resentment.

And so on and so forth. it's not that these things can't be worked out. But they take a huge amount of time and attention to do well, and that's time and attention that you can't then spend on doing the stuff the group really wants to together.

So one solution is that you have people who have specific duties in the group, you do what you can to spread those out and shake them up periodically as needed (but ideally at predictable intervals, so people have time to get comfy in old jobs, and not always be doing something new), and you make all the duties as overt as possible, so people can ask about them, ask for changes, whatever.

But then, y'know, you have titles and roles and such, and some degree of heirarchy, even if it's very flat.

I also think of the way my workplace works - I'm in an academic library, and there's technically three levels of heirarchy: the library director, the MLIS degreed librarians (that includes me) and the classified staff. In practice, we have a pretty flat structure for a lot of internal decisions (because our director likes it like that): anyone can be on almost any committee, anyone can *lead* almost any committee with two exceptions).

But at the same time, it is our library director's job to deal with our overall budget, and to go to certain kinds of campus meetings. (Just like it's my job to wrangle computers, and someone else's job to make sure all the student workers get trained and do their work) and so on. And if we weren't clear about all of that, it'd be chaos. And because those jobs are different, we have different titles (and different requirements for being able to do them) - and y'know, I'm okay with that, because it's pretty clear what those are. And there are jobs in my library I really would not want *ever* - but I know that because I know what those descriptions are. In my previous job, where some things were much less well defined, I turned out to be pretty miserable, because I was trying (and being asked to do) everything, and that turns out not to fit in a work day as well as some people might like.

Which is to say, for some people, egalitarian settings lead to a lot of "But I must do ALL THE THINGS ALL THE TIME", which is not actually healthy, where limited job duties make it much easier to say "That thing? I can let that go this month because it is NOT MY THING."

Right. I think I am done rambling. For the moment.

As someone who was raised like that, it should be noted that Quaker business meetings can take a staggering amount of time to produce results.  More importantly, Quakers are generally coming from a position where most of the people involved in the Meeting have similar core values and ways of doing things.  That ability to achieve consensus isn't necessarily going to help a liberal Friend who finds themselves in a Meeting made up largely of Gurneyite Friends.  (And I've certainly seen experienced Quakers struggle to work on a consensus basis when dealing with people outside Quakerism in things like the peace movement).

The shared values thing is vital and it's probably necessary for any consensus based group to last.  I have seen it work, but mostly with radical political "affinity" groups.  Who are mostly self-selecting and come to it from a position of basic agreement.

Some specific things to watch out for in groups that claim to be egalitarian.

Are all important decisions being taken informally by a small group of people who then present the idea to the rest of the group as a fait accompli?

Is the group unofficially led by the people with the loudest voices?  This is so common that the UK anarchist movement coined a phrase for it.  "Dictatorship of the big mouths".

Is everyone genuinely able to do their own thing, but without any concept of accountability to the rest of the group?  As an extreme example, I know of a case where this particular structure led to someone sending out highly controversial national press releases without even telling the other group what they were doing.  They only realised after making the national tabloids.

Are there proper procedures in place to deal with interpersonal complaints?  This is vital.  I've seen groups that seemed to be working okay quickly collapse because they didn't know how to deal with things like complaints of harassment.  

Aside from the last one, there isn't necessarily something wrong with groups that operate in any of these ways.  As long as you're aware of that and want to be in the group on that basis.

Personally, I tend to balance my natural anti-authoritarian tendencies with the need to function properly by sticking to groups that work on a OMOV basis, with recognition of the right of minorities to dissent.  That doesn't avoid the dictatorship of the big mouths problem at all, but I'm actually happy with the kind of chaotic freewheeling structure that tends to lead to.  It's not for everyone.

I don't know about organizations that do. I know, from experience, it is possible for at least a small group to work together in an egalitarian manner -- if they love, trust, and respect each other -- and know each other really, really well.

But I'm talking in the context of a small family working together occasionally on their spiritual paths, a family that has rules in place due the nature of the relationships involved -- rules that almost always carry over to ritual and magical work.

Generally speaking, I wouldn't recommend it.

From the perspective of spirituality, one of the reasons why I joined the Druid order that I did is because there is a specific, publicly know hierarchy in place. Most people in the Order are solitary, but there's no sense of "Who's running this thing?". There are people who know more than others, who have more training than others, and I'm mightily glad of it. As a connected reason, it takes years to set up a grove in that order. Again, I'm glad. I'd like to see more groves and study groups (and I hope to start one one day, provided I become qualified enough), but not at the expense of wondering if the person in charge is really capable of leading.

From an activism standpoint (bear with me, it applies), at a bare minimum, and off the top of my head, you need:

• Everyone to know the rules.
• Someone to enforce the rules.
• Someone to babysit the permit/s and tangle/wrangle on issues pertining to them.
• Someone capable of looking out for the general safety and well-being of those involved and those not involved.
• Someone to organize and plan it.
• Ideally, someone capable of dispensing food/ drinks (especially in freezing/searing temperatures).
• Someone who knows the issues and can clearly explain them.

It's also obviously something where 'we have a group of 5 people of roughly equivalent knowledge/experience' is *vastly* different from 'we have 2 people with extensive experience and 2 people who are brand new to Paganism and 2 people somewhere in the middle' or whatever. The best egalitarian group experiences I've had have been people of roughly similar experience and goals - but many of the places I've seen it have broken down entirely when they've had to add someone new to the topic. Even if that someone is intelligent and hard-working and willing to learn, there's a lot of ground to cover to get them up to speed with everyone else.

But I have also seen - and as you might have guessed - been personally far more hurt by supposedly egalitarian settings that turned out to be anything but. (those stories I told in my previous post.)

I have to say that, while I understand that it's rare for an egalitarian approach to succeed in magical groups, it works with my OBOD grove. I suspect a number of positive factors come into play there, including the personalities of the group members and the informal 'family' feel they've managed to cultivate. But I've only seen benefit from the non-hierarchical approach that many OBOD groves take. An example is our rotating priestly duties that means even newbies can lead ritual as soon as they're initiated members. I've learned so much through that experience. But I'm not naive enough to think it would work often. I just do believe we've* achieved it.

In OBOD, training happens through the course rather than in groves, and we have a policy that all grove members must be OBOD members, so that's covered there.

I am surprised by that, especially if you're meeting in peoples' homes. Does everyone just work banker's hours or something? I have a hard enough time meeting up with two or three friends because I work evenings and my wife works mornings, M's kids have sports on the weekends sometimes, G sometimes has to work Saturdays... I'm a little envious and I would love to know your secret!