I first heard a rumor when I came back from Beltane, but Tuesday night I learned for a fact that this year’s Heartland Pagan Festival is to be the last. I am … deeply conflicted by this knowledge. For half my life, that festival was the axis around which my year revolved. I first attended in 1999: fresh out of high school, new to the pagan community, innocent and naïve. I only went for a single day. Twenty-four years later, the memories are hazy – the awkwardness of coming and going to the remote location, buying my first sarong, meeting people from the townie community in a very different context – but that first daypass changed my life.
I went back the next year for the full weekend, and about every other year from then until 2006, just before I moved to St. Louis. I came back in 2008 and didn’t miss another year until 2014, which May I spent studying abroad in Greece with my Classics program. I met new friends and lovers there, some of whom I know to this day. I brought old friends from Lawrence whenever I could. I was sexually assaulted there in 2008 – an experience I now know to be frighteningly common – by a man I wanted to fuck but who didn’t want to take “later” for an answer; he was later arrested for being too disruptively high around the bonfire, and all my food was confiscated with his because we were camped too close together, and lived off the generosity of my friends for the rest of the festival. I brought my partner to HPF 2009 as a field test before we moved in together. I had profound and powerful magical experiences as a part of public rituals, there, both good and bad. One bad experience, in 2012, set off a massive public shit-fight between me and the sacred experience committee that ended up in face-to-face mediated meetings and, ultimately, an invitation to put my money where my mouth was and join the ritual crew. I was just starting college, and couldn’t commit, then, but when I came back in 2015 it was as a staff member.
My partner and I skidded in to the June 2014 post-festival staff meeting not two days after our epic road trip celebrating my graduation and her escape from her corporate hell job. We signed up to work with the Sacred Experience Committee, the same crew that we’d had our blowout with in 2012, expecting to cut wood and carry water. By January 2015, we were hosting meetings and more of our ideas were going into the rituals than theirs. Two months later, we learned that none of them had any intention of performing the rituals we were writing – all of which required four or five ritualists – and Aradia and I were left scrambling to recruit bodies. We reached out to everyone we knew worth their salt, rebuilding bridges we’d burned to get competent witches and magicians to help us put on the festival.
I have tried before to write about those years in detail. Getting involved with the organization, getting swept up into leadership positions and being lauded for our efforts and ideas … only to have those efforts and ideas undermined at every turn. Ultimately being chased out for trying to improve the safety and experience of the attendees, and for refusing to submit to the corporate culture of “naming the problem is always worse than the problem”. It still hurts too much to go into detail, and the trauma makes some of it incredibly difficult to remember.
The short version is that we wrote and performed a series of initiatory rituals, each year sending attendees back into the world with the charge of doing more magic. Our first opening ritual was nonverbal, every action a dance, with shills among the participants to help cue their responses. Our final closing ritual was a bonfire ritual where, through enchanted masks finished at festival, we dropped almost fifty gods into various ecstatic dancers. Masks and coordinated costumes were our signature style. Prometheus featured prominently every year. None of it was perfect, but we did our very best to make our rituals as participatory and experiential as we could.
At the end of HPF 2015, I was informed that I was being nominated for chair of the committee. We had had designs on that, of course, but we’d anticipated years of work, and for Aradia to wear the title. By HPF 2016, we had found ourselves stuffed into gaps on the Board of Directors. We proposed and passed a five year plan to get the festival back on track to growth and sustainability, and to work on repairing its reputation as a drunken rape fest by fixing those problems. By 2017, I was chair of the board and she was Vice President.
But things were never quite right. I was on the edge of transitioning to gender neutral pronouns when I came back from college. The clear and abundant transphobia of entrenched leadership made me put that off, something that hurt me far more deeply than I realized at the time. As chair of the board of directors, I got to hear the then-president joke at an informal meeting about covering up the assault of a transwoman because she “had brought it on herself”. When Aradia shut down after outbursts by the malignant narcissists in the group, and I tried to reiterate her points, I was accused (in back channel discussions) of speaking over and abusing her … but no one ever tried to help her.
After 2017, though, the measures of the five year plan that the members had voted to implement were too radical, too real, and we were chased out. In particular, our desire to change security and safety policy so that records were kept of every incident and accusation, so that patterns could be tracked over time and so that the whole of leadership knew what was happening, not just the chair of the security committee, was taken as a personal threat by entrenched leadership. People were furious at our suggestion that everyone come to meetings sober. Strangely threatening was our proposal that, every few years, all staff be required to take a sabbatical year to prevent burn out, and be admitted to the festival for free as attendees. The final straw for me was in mid-2017, when I learned that both our not-for-profit status and insurance had been allowed to lapse. Chirotus had already left, as had half my crew. Aradia stuck on till November. The members of my crew that stayed on past that all repudiated me publicly.
We learned through the grapevine that new rules had been passed to prevent our return. That people believed (or said they did) that we had cursed the president and caused him to fall through a faulty ceiling. That we formed the Lunar Shenanigans Crew for the express purpose of cursing entrenched leadership. (We were not cursing anyone. We were ritualists, we wanted to ritual. The only magic we did about them was some cursebreaking and some “return to sender” work against the Evil Eye. In retrospect, I may have been flinging some Evil Eye of my own [I have an astounding capacity for hate], but I promise you, if Aradia, Chirotus, and I – let alone the three of us plus a half dozen compatriots – had been flinging curses, not a one of them would still have had a job or home.)
We were exhausted. We were hurt. We felt betrayed.
We were literally traumatized by the cult-tactics employed by senior leadership, starting with love bombing and moving immediately to trying to control the information we had available to us and trying to force us to either recruit or cut off our friends who were not a part of the organization, to ostracizing us when we could not be made to submit. I ran into one of the committee heads at the store a few months later and they literally fled from the sight of me.
To this day, I do not trust my judgment about people anymore. I am afraid to go to public events, lest I run into people who I sincerely believe want me dead. Chirotus will no longer set foot on the grounds of Gaea Retreat Center.
And yet, though I kept it to myself, I always wanted to go back. I had attended the festival since I was a literal child. I didn’t want to cede the territory forever. To my surprise, it was Aradia who brought up going back toward the beginning of April. She wanted to go bonfire dancing. We were talking about getting day passes, joking about wearing masks and claiming a vow of silence if we ran into anyone we didn’t like. I was excited to finally be able to bring Kraken to something that had always been such a huge part of my life, and whose shadow darkened the first years of our friendship.
Hearing that it’s ending has hit me hard. I got drunk and went off on twitter last night. I was already in a bad mood when tree-trimming in the neighborhood woke me up and chased me out of the house. (I’m writing this on my laptop in a park, though I’ll have to go home soon to refill my coffee.)
I don’t know who, if anyone, of the people who hurt me are still involved. I know that some of them have left because I know that someone else holds their positions. I know that one of them – the one who betrayed me most personally, and who took my place as head of the sacred experience committee – has moved on to leadership at the organization that maintains the Gaea Retreat, and runs their public rituals as badly as anyone ever has.
I find myself wishing I had the money for a whole weekend. If it’s going out, I want to be there with it. For good and ill, it made me what I am.
Some of my crew are saying “good riddance”. I can’t blame them. None of them ever loved the festival the way that I did. Maybe I should feel that way, too. But I’m not there, yet. I might not ever be.
If the end of Heartland Pagan Festival is what it takes to get those people out of power, fine.
If the end of Heartland Pagan Festival is what it takes to kill the drunken predatory culture that developed around it, fine.
Those things need to go, and I would drive the stake home, myself, if I thought I had the reach.
But, for now, I am just … sad.
Prepare yourself for some waves of Heartland memories on my various socials, and probably here, as well.
