Money & Pagan Clergy: Shall The Two Ever Meet?
 
Isaac Bonewits, as you know, was one of the Berkeley Grove’s Archdruids in the the 1970s, a prolific and well-known writer on Neo-pagan topics. In the 80’s, he schismed off and formed ADF with the help of a few friends. Recently he has retired from active leadership. Recently, his www.neopagan.com website was closed with this message:
 
This website usually contains materials by and about Isaac Bonewits and his
topics of expertise: Druidism, Paganism, Witchcraft, magic(k), liturgical
design, polytheology, and polyamory. It includes updated versions of many of
his writings now floating about the Net, excerpts from current and upcoming
books, song lyrics (serious, silly, bawdy, and invocatory), curmudgeonly
rants about Satanists and other Christian Fundamentalists, and other items
to educate, enlighten, annoy and/or amuse.
 
(P. E.) Isaac Bonewits, Adr.Em./ADF
Email: <ibonewits@neopagan.net>
Snailmail: PO Box 372, Warwick, NY, USA 10990-0372
This webpage is copyright ｩ 2001 c.e., Isaac Bonewits
Most recently updated: July 16, 2001 c.e.
 
 Was having access to this material worth a few dollars, punts, pounds, or
euros to you? Click either donation graphic to make a fast and secure
donation to Isaac Bonewits, so he can afford to bring this website back and
keep it going and growing.
 
Those of you who are confused by this turn of events may wish to read
Freedom of Information (see below) and Supporting Pagan Creators. I am
keeping the Errata Sheet for the First Edition of Witchcraft: A Concise
History here until the Second Edition is thoroughly out on the market.
 
Freedom of Information
and Supporting Pagan Creators 1.9
Copyright ｩ 2000, 2001 c.e., Isaac Bonewits
 
Many of you who have visited my website a few times will have noticed that
my web pages, as well as the workshops and interviews I do, contain many
references or "plugs" for other authors of whom I approve, and some folks
have wondered why I would recommend "competitors."
 
Granted, I do get small referral fees from Amazon.com for books purchased
because buyers went to Amazon from my site, but this doesn't add up to much,
and I get nothing from books purchased on my recommendation from other
stores.
 
I recommend good books by other authors because there are so few of them,
because I feel that authors deserve support from their colleagues as well as
from their readers, and because it is important to every subculture (which
Neopaganism still is) to support its own "economy."
 
Most readers have only the vaguest ideas of how authors earn their livings,
often assuming that published ones are all wealthy. They get these ideas in
part from news stories about "best selling" authors getting huge book
advances and/or selling movie rights for millions of dollars
(pounds/euros/etc.); unaware that only one writer in ten-thousand ever sees
more from her or his writing than the original book advance of a few hundred
or a few thousand dollars (pounds/euros/etc.).
 
My best known book, Real Magic, has been in and out of print for almost
thirty years, generating a trickle of royalties three years out of five. Yet
with roughly 250,000 copies sold around the world, in three languages that I
know of (English, Dutch & Russian), my total direct income from the book
during those thirty years has been less than US$25,000 - or about ten cents
per copy. How many of you could live on US$800 per year?
 
Another source of the myth that published authors are rich is the fact that,
for centuries, only those who were wealthy (or subsidized in some fashion)
could afford to spend their time writing. This has been true even throughout
the last several decades. I remember being told often during the 1970's by
my friend Randall Garrett, author of the wonderful Lord Darcy novels, that
the three things a writer most needed were, "a tweed suit, a briar pipe, and
a spouse with a steady income!" The situation has not changed. <G>
 
"Ah, but what about those huge speaking fees authors get?" I hear someone
asking. Steven King, Danielle Steele, or New Age superstars may receive
thousands of dollars (pounds/euros/etc.) for speeches or seminars, but
lesser known authors receive much smaller fees (for mine, see my
Presentations page). The reason you see so many Pagan and other authors
dragging books to festivals, or hawking psychic readings there, is because
the usual Neopagan festival or speaking event pays far less than the author
would have earned staying home and cranking out a few more pages. At the end
of most festival seasons, Neopagan authors and speakers usually find
ourselves having spent or otherwise lost far more money than we've received.
 
Some of the reasons for these results have to do with the "poverty
consciousness" so popular in the Neopagan community, which I've discussed at
length elsewhere. But many have to do with the basic anti-intellectualism of
American (and I suspect, Australian) culture. After all, a speaker is "just
talking," and "anybody" can do that! The idea that printed or spoken words
could have any real monetary value is alien to most people, in large part
because they do not perceive the years of effort that go into learning the
craft of writing and speaking well, or the hours of painful sweat that can
go into writing a single chapter or one-hour speech.
 
So why do Neopagan creators keep writing and speaking? For most of us, it's
because we love our deities, our planet, and our communities enough to live
at a "lifestyle" far lower than we could earn otherwise if we were, for
example, holding down the kinds of well-paying "blue-collar" and
"white-collar" jobs that most Neopagans have. Many Neopagan clergy who aren'
t writers, teachers or musicians make the same decisions, literally
sacrificing comfort and financial security for their vocation.
 
(Members of most mainstream religious communities, whether rich or poor,
would be deeply ashamed if their clergy lived at standards significantly
lower than that of the average member of their congregations. I can't
imagine the average Baptist, Lutheran, Jew, Catholic, or Buddhist going to
their minister's/rabbi's/priest's house to find an empty pantry, children
wearing sweaters because the heat has been turned off, or a dead vehicle in
the driveway, shrugging their shoulders and going home without taking action
of some sort. Yet I've seen Neopagans do just that.)
 
In recent months, I've been reading articles in magazines and online about
the "freeware" and "shareware" movements among computer software writers, as
well as the arguments pro-and-con concerning the downloading of music and
video files on the Net. There are now major controversies over the very
concepts of "copyrights" and "intellectual property," with creative artists,
consumers, and corporations taking diverse and often strident positions.
 
"Shareware," for those of you new to the Net, refers to computer programs
that one can download and try out before buying. The assumption is that
users who like the software will be willing to pay what they, or the
software authors, consider "a fair price" (or a small donation to a worthy
nonprofit cause), which is usually much lower than equivalent commercially
produced and distributed software would cost. Shareware originally worked on
an "honor system," and some still does. "Freeware" refers to programs that
are put out on the Net with no return expected, other than perhaps
postcards, user feedback, and opportunities for programmers to improve their
skills and earn reputations with which they can later build professional
careers.
 
Freeware authors generally had and have no complaints about a lack of money
for their efforts, and I suspect that most were and are subsidized in some
fashion, by their parents, schools or employers. Shareware authors, however,
quickly learned that honor systems didn't generate much income, perhaps
because individuals have such varying ways to define "honor." So they
gradually began to offer multiple versions of their shareware, with
additional functions, documentation, or technical support requiring users to
pay varying fees (I don't know if they got this idea from commercial
software publishers or vice versa).
 
Based on the concepts of freeware and shareware, as well as political and
philosophical theories (such as those of Richard Stallman) of free
information exchange, some people on the Net began to say that all
information should be freely available, including digitized audio and video
information - hence the controversies over the online trading of copyrighted
music and video files. These mirrored in many ways the arguments about
photocopying of books and periodicals in the 1980's and 1990's. Publishers
weren't too thrilled about the invention of the photocopy machine back then,
while students, researchers and collectors were delighted. Similarly,
cassette and video taping technology were controversial, at least until the
music and film industries figured out how to make money through using them.
It's been suggested that the music industry and its big name performers will
stop fighting audio file sharing technology as soon as they find a way to
make significant money from it.
 
Left out of most of these controversies, at least once they were "settled,"
were the non-superstar creators whose books, songs, and performances were
copied by individuals, without a penny going to those creators. Some
creators weren't bothered at all, considering unpaid copies to be free
advertising and promotion that could build a following. Others felt that
while they weren't making any money, at least their out-of-print works were
still reaching an audience (as I did during the years when Authentic
Thaumaturgy was available only in photocopies). I strongly suspect, however,
that most of us felt just a little bit "ripped-off" each time someone copied
our work because they were simply too stingy to buy it (as distinct from
being genuinely poor). That quarter-dollar/pound/euro of income lost per
book, or half that per tape, isn't much perhaps, but multiply it by hundreds
or thousands of readers/users and it begins to have a real impact on his or
her life. That missing money could have paid for new research materials, new
instruments, classes to gain new skills, travel to gain new insights, or
simply blessed time to think and create. For us "minor" authors, artists,
speakers, and performers, tiny losses add up over time to big setbacks, some
of which kill careers and all of which limit the amount of work we
accomplish over the course of our lifetimes.
 
Getting back to philosophy for a moment (away from that messy "real world"
stuff), it seems to me that many of the ideas now being discussed about
freedom of information contain some (deliberate?) confusion between the
different kinds of information that exist, some of which (a) should be
openly available to all, and some of which (b) needn't be or even (c)
shouldn't be. As examples of just these three categories (of the dozen or so
categories that could be delineated), I would offer (a) basic scientific or
historical information, or evidence of corporate or governmental or military
crimes, (b) medical techniques, poetry, fiction, or personal memoirs, and
(c) instructions on making weapons of mass destruction. Remember, "all or
nothing" arguments are rooted in Christian Dualism, not the real world. The
fact that subtle distinctions may need to be made between differing kinds of
information and audience does not justify tossing those distinctions out of
your philosophy because they'd require work to define and teach, or worse
yet might cost you some money.
 
At one point, a reader and I were discussing the Freenet and its system of
decentralized, distributed file storage on the Net. That system essentially
makes it impossible to ever suppress information once it's been uploaded.
Unfortunately, it also makes it impossible to ever enforce a copyright or
patent anywhere in the world. As an author, this means that any of my work
on the Freenet would never go "out-of-print," and I would never again have
to deal with a publisher's commercial judgements in order to get my thoughts
shared with the world. It also means that anyone could impersonate me and
publish items under my name, or plagiarize me, and I would have no recourse.
And, oh yes, I would probably never see a penny of payment for my works, no
matter how many people downloaded and used them, and no matter how much
effort it had taken me to produce them.
 
As I told the reader I mentioned earlier, "Letting the authors get ripped
off by readers instead of by publishers isn't much of an improvement. From
what I know of the Freenet idea so far, it provides no financial incentive
at all for writers to write, and thus is a backward step to the days when
only the idle wealthy could afford to write."
 
To which he replied, "I have optimism and faith in humanity. People will
give you $1 when they read an essay (I would). Of course, it's my faith in
humanity that gets me in trouble." So I decided to take his suggestions and
give them a try. In early October of 2000 c.e., I gave visitors to my
website the option to click a graphic and donate small sums of money to me,
assuming that they had found something on my site that they thought was
worth that amount to them. This required them to have an account with
PayPal.com, but the account set-up process takes very little time and they
could always snailmail me a small sum if they preferred. In April of 2001, I
added the alternate option of using Amazon.com's Honor System. With over
1,500 visitors to my site daily in October (200+ visitors daily after
Halloween), even a one percent response rate would generate more than enough
income to justify setting the system up.
 
How well did it work? Since I put the donation boxes up last October, my
website has received over 110,000 visitors. As of July 15, 2001, the overall
response ratio has been something like 0.05% (that is, five-hundreths of one
percent) or one in every 2000+ visitors; that since the Halloween rush
finished has been around 0.10% (one-tenth of one percent), or one in every
1000+ visitors. The total income from the experiment (not counting
transaction fees) has been $900+ from 70+ people on 90+ occasions. This
averages around one donation every 3 days or so, both before and after
Halloween. However, 20+ of those donations and over a third of the money
received has been from just two generous donors who have given repeated
donations. The bottom line is that my website has been generating a little
over a hundred dollars per month of income to me, which is about enough to
pay my hosting and net access costs, but is certainly not enough to let me
spend the many hours I would like to devote (and have in the past) to adding
new material and keeping the older contents current and legible. Since I
have no other job, and my self-employment efforts yield less than $8000 per
year, you can see how this is less than satisfactory.
 
I say this not to whine, nor to embarrass anyone, but to point out that
there are some unseen holes in anti-copyright theory. Most modern people now
use money as the rock-bottom measure of all value. Things that are a high
priority in our lives are the things we spend money on, or give money to;
things that aren't, we don't. I've often suggested that we could build or
buy Neopagan temples in every city in the U.S. and Canada, for example, if
we simply collected one piece of silver jewelry from every Neopagan at every
festival for one year. Yet, the very same people who "can't afford" to
donate to a Neopagan temple, community center, website, or other
organization on a regular basis, have no problem finding the money to buy
science fiction books, videos, comics, beer, pizza, jewelry, fancy ritual
tools, robes, etc. This is not a pattern unique to Neopaganism - almost
every nonprofit organization or movement tells the same tale. People
generally have money for those things that bring comfort, pleasure and
ego-gratification. Everything else has to wait in line and hope for the
best.
 
I suspect that most people on the Net, whether Neopagan or not, if given a
choice between giving small sums of money to deserving strangers they will
never meet, just because it's the right thing to do, or else keeping the
money to buy toys or gifts for themselves or their friends, will do the
latter. This pattern will become even more evident on the Net as going
online becomes ever easier for the foolish, uneducated and shortsighted -
after all, most Western people intelligent and wise enough to understand
long term consequences have already been on the Net for a few years. Yes, I
know that's terribly un-P.C. of me to say, and no, I'm not thinking of those
of you who are genuinely poor and were only able to get a computer, and
hence online, recently because you had to wait for them to get cheap, or who
visit here from your public library.
 
We Neopagans like to think of ourselves as smarter, more creative and more
complex than those who belong to more conservative religions, and by and
large most of us are (another un-P.C. fact). Multi-model theories,
pluralism, ambiguity, and polytheology are not easy for most Westerners to
grasp, which is yet another reason why we frighten fundamentalists of all
persuasions. But the dualism which underlies mainstream Western culture
still influences our daily thinking and feeling patterns. We still fall into
habits based on the fantasy that matter and spirit are separate, and that
artistic, creative, and spiritual activities happen in a different universe
than rent checks, car payments, and grocery bills.
 
I'm not the only Neopagan leader or author to notice all this. Fritz Jung,
who with his partner Wren runs witchvox.com, spoke about this in an essay
called, "Community Support, Does it Exist?" a couple of years ago. As he
said in last year's update, "Not much has changed. We all still struggle to
find the cash to do this kind of work. As predicted, several good folks that
used to do this work, simply went away." Also on the witchvox.com site is an
essay by author Maggie (Benson) Shayne called, "Writers, Farmers, Witches
and Copyright", in which she focusses on the casual plagiarism that so many
Neopagans engage in, saying, "I would like to see the Pagan community take a
stand against the wanton abuse of its own best and brightest."
 
Prolific Neopagan author Patricia Telesco wrote me:
 
"It amazes me that people forget we work for every cent we get in royalties.
They don't see us in front of our computers or scouring over research books
for upward of 500 hours to write just 200 pages of text. They're not in our
kitchen when we blurily make coffee after being up late so we can write when
the little ones don't want fruit snacks or a story. Our families, friends,
and co-workers often give up a great deal of time with us just so we can
persue this passion - and give something lasting to the community. .The
bottom line comes down to serving those that serve before we loose our
teachers, our leaders and our elders to burn out. If we value their wisdom
and insights, we will begin to share the load."
 
Sisters and brothers, your authors, musicians, speakers, webmasters,
organizers and clergy can not live on blessings and goodwill alone. Please
buy our books, tapes, CDs and videos instead of stealing copies. Donate to
those groups and websites who provide valuable services. Go to your high
priestess' house and do her dishes once in a while, mow her lawn, buy her
some groceries, watch her kids for an evening, or in some other fashion give
her the gift of free time. And please, stop criticizing authors or teachers
for the "crime" of reaching out to "newbies" and "Baby Pagans" - it's a lot
more work than it seems, and we were all beginners, once upon a time.
 
 
 
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As a special updating note, you probably got here from the opening page at
my website that announced the temporary closing of my site. Except for the
Errata Sheet page for the first edition of my Witchcraft eBook, which will
remain accessible until the Second Edition has been out for a while, I'm
closing everything down here, at least for now. I just can't afford the time
and effort that keeping this site updated, easy to read and fed with a
constant stream of new writing has required. If donations at PayPal and
Amazon Honor System pick up enough to put food on my table and pay my
electrical bill, I'll go back online. But it may take a few weeks.
 
 
 Copyright ｩ 2001 c.e., Isaac Bonewits. This text file may be freely
distributed on the Net, provided that no editing is done, the version number
is retained, and everything in this notice box is included. If you would
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euros to you? Click either graphic to make a fast and secure donation to
Isaac Bonewits, so he can afford to keep his website going and growing! Or
you can refer a website design client to him at his secular eddress of
<bonewits@warwick.net>, or suggest to your local Occult/New Age bookstore
that they bring him out for one of his colorful presentations, or you could
just send money to him at PO Box 372, Warwick, NY, USA 10990-0372.
 
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(P. E.) Isaac Bonewits, Adr.Em./ADF
Email: ibonewits@neopagan.net
Snailmail: PO Box 372, Warwick, NY, USA 10990-0372
This webpage is copyright ｩ 2001 c.e., Isaac Bonewits
Most recently updated: July 17, 2001 c.e.
This page's URL is http://www.neopagan.net/FOIandSPC.HTML
My Homepage URL is http://www.neopagan.net
. .  . . !