No, I'm actually not going to give a course in pre-masonry
architecture like adobe or strip and lathe. I might post a couple links
to it. No, you can just lease a large open covered space, with your
donations gathered for Services rendered to your different clients using
the Space for their Rituals or Gatherings.
What I would like to
outline, is how you can go about creating spaces to gather and have
celebrations with the same level of comfort and security as other more
established spiritual belief systems.
I just realized that I have created a new TLA.
An MPT (Multi-faith Pagan Temple). How about ESC (Eclectic Spirituality Coven).
That is so excellent.
Having a good TLA is the first step towards mass penetration of your Temple Marketing Strategies.
They work better than free T-Shirts with Temple branding.
Churches
and their Pagan equivalents, the Temples, Covens, Blots, Kindreds,
Feast Halls can operate as a non-profit, requiring a board of directors,
or as a Single Owner Proprietorship.
I suggest that a Single
Owner Proprietership of a Temple or Coven space makes it easier to
maintain control over membership, which is necessary to limit and
mitigate the damages caused by independent agents of disruption. There
are always a few of those. Using the membership and assessment processes
of a Temple allows the identification and exclusion of disruptive
entities. A limited partnership or society also works, but it is
important that a Temple is not defined as a Society, because then it is
not considered a Primary Spiritual Space for tax purposes and is then
relegated to a sub-set of religious support services. The christian
administrations love to tell you that a pagan temple is not a church but
a religious support service organization. You may need to give them a
letter of self definition prepared by a lawyer or Notary Public. Along
with your business fees.
It is, of course, a Business. This business of Spirituality and the the Right to Gather for expressions of it.
Myself,
personally, I prefer Temple or Gathering Place as a Title, but really,
you can call it anything as long as your Mission Statement clarifies
that you and our people refer to your equivalent of a christian church
or temple by this particular name. You do not have to use the christian
term church, even for tax purposes as long as you are clear in your
description of the main gathering place as a place for spiritual
gatherings of people engaged in common spiritual practices.
By sub
leasing or renting the space to different pagan groups for dances,
feasts, and gatherings, you can easily maintain a functioning
multi-faith pagan temple in almost any large space, and you can even sub
lease from another temple yourselves at first until you have enough
donations to get a dedicated space.
Another way to supplement the
income of a pagan temple is to offer some form of external service
organization sponsored by your temple for poverty or outreach services
within your area. It has been very lucrative for the christians.
Keep
in mind as you slog away against an unmoveable pyramid of
administrative hurdles, that it is your right, your very basic Human
Right, to establish a place for you and others you trust to gather and
celebrate your beliefs and spirituality.
The very fact that there
are no significant multifaith pagan temples is not an indication of an
absence of these belief systems, it is an indication of the inherent
suppression of these belief systems within the social structure of the
country. Otherwise these spaces would already exist, except that
equality and human rights are only concepts on paper and television
broadcasts. Finding them in the real world is impossible sometimes.
In
China, many christian churches and Falun Gong gather in private homes,
or you can even consider renting a coffeeshop, yoga space, hall, or
community centre for your first gatherings and meetings as you prepare
to find a suitable space to lease with enough washrooms a food services
facilities to match your membership. Many christian churches exist
legally for years while practicing in different spaces that become
available.
Services rendered to members can also increase the
profitability of the Temple, allowing it to expand much more quickly.
Temples that offer childcare can easily supplement the income from
member fees.
Keep in mind, you do not have to be free or take
donations. You are allowed to have a set fee for services. Every church
sells coffee or something downstairs afterwards. Workshops, seminars,
T-shirts, books, and other merchandise, can all help build the size of
your temple by increasing its solvency.
Keep in mind the general
nature of people. They are ignorant and superstitious. It may be better
to find some other set of marketable images for your Temple or Coven
than the ones you actually use in your Rituals or Gatherings. Seriously.
It may be in your interests NOT to put a 20 foot tall pentacle on the
front of the building. It also would limit your membership, as people
who are not aligned with the pentacle may find it offensive or
indicative of a bias toward people that dig pentacles.
Since
paganism and eclectic shamanism are quite broad and varied practices
that encompass groups from almost every ethnicity, it is probably useful
to your organization to discuss amongst its members and create a list
of the Gods that your particular Pagan Temple is aligned with. Almost
all Pagan Temples have a certain set of Dominant Deities unless they are
an APT (Atheist Pagan Temple). Which is common as well. The Deistic
pagans will almost always have to create a master list of the Deities
whose contemplation is embraced within that Temple.
Many pagan
groups do not actually get along very well, and their practices or
beliefs may strongly oppose each other. There is a reason you don't see a
lot of Celtic imagery mixed with Egyptian. These god sets are opposed
to each other for the most part. It is not discriminatory to define the
gods who your temple is dedicated to support and exclude those of
another faith, unless you have opened your doors to a "public ceremony",
and even then your presentation staff or priests/priestesses or Mentors
should be direct ceremonies towards your common stated spiritual goals.
APT's
have a special problem in Canadian law in that the current christian
administration doesn't accept atheist Pagan practice to be considered
spiritual. Which is a denial of the basic rights of atheist pagans.
Myself,
I am not a Wiccan, but I believe that Dianics are perfectly within
their rights to limit their membership to females, and it should be up
to individual covens whether they wish to accept queer people, just like
the christians. The same with all pagan orders. Although I would prefer
people were more inclusive, 2000 years of christian hegemony that
methodically controls the human sexual impulse is pretty hard to unravel
from our consciousness, and many paths have very set and ordered sexual
interactions.
Laws in each province vary, but there are always
instances where alchohol might be served in a christian church hall,
like at a wedding, so there is no reason that your pagan temple cannot
have a Feast night for some spiritual reason, like to simply gather and
be together.
By creating a Pagan Temple or Eclectic Coven as a
Business entity and keeping books, other group benefits may be able to
be passed onto members, such as group insurance, or group healthcare
with a trusted set of doctors, group legal aid, childcare, group
purchases of bus passes, and many more useful benefits that the
organizational and accounting structure of a properly run business is
allowed to write off or subsidize.
Probably the most compelling
reason that an eclectic witch or pagan might consider joining and
becoming a visible Temple, Coven, or Gather Place, is the group
protection that these spaces provide. Having a network of like minded
people is necessary for survival, and of course, this is the number one
reason that there are almost none in existence in our "religiously
tolerant" country.
Be warned though. The entrenched hegemony got
its power through murder and coercion and robbery. They'll do it to you
over and over again. There are a number of high profile scholars in the
occult who lived in Canada. They wrote some excellent groundbreaking
work in the field. And every one of them died penniless with
unbelievable things written about them.
You don't see Covens or
Pagan Temple because the people who try to build them don't set out with
the concept in their mind that they must be warriors building a
fortress for their belief. Get it straight. They'll kill you, so build
security, have entrance cameras, be prepared to follow people that
follow your members, have an investigative services team once you are
big enough.
That's where the Temple and the Coven and the
Gathering Place can help you most, is making a refuge where you can't be
singled out. Unless the Temple itself becomes infected with politics,
which it will if you are not careful. Then you have rival temples of non
conducive gods and beliefs, but that's not much different now, just
we're gonna add a few thousand more.
Really, it would be bad if we
had rival Temple Wars, but with properly designed Temple security and
proactive protective services, you congregation can gather and celebrate
happily. Especially if everyone has their own ceremonial sword or axe
or something.
Divided, you will be conquered.
So Gather.
And
keep in mind, there is no specific Pagan Deity or Belief, other than
what you define for yourselves in your charter. So you are not bound to
any particular bias of peacefulness unless you so define it. It is more
important that your charter stress the importance of its members
survival and protection, and follow through with that protective
service. Dead or bled dry members can't pay membership fees.
It
might even help you to clearly define your enemies. Enemy cults, enemy
gods, what to do to them. The christians do that to an extreme amount,
so it is a perfectly legitimate practice.
If you make your Temples
strong enough as a business entity you may be able to use business
techniques to absorb a former church that becomes for sale.
(wip)
