AUSTRALIA – As with much of the rest of the world, Australia began to feel the effects of COVID-19 in early 2020. Rolling lockdowns and social distancing laws meant that in person public Pagan events had to cease, and organisers were forced to think outside the box in order to provide meaningful, relevant community events and services.
Now that the country is virtually COVID-free – as of today 221 cases with only one of those infected listed as critical or severe – public Pagan events and groups are testing the waters with in-person gatherings once more, albeit with some “COVID normal” changes.
Leaving the Public Sphere
“Pre-COVID we held quarterly Equinox/Solstice rituals and occasional social gatherings, mostly in Boonwurrung country (southeast of Melbourne, Victoria), and sometimes online,” Dorian Manticore, founder of the Sovereigns of the Golden Path (SGP), a queer magical tradition rooted in animism and chaos magic, told TWH.
Sovereigns of the Golden Path logo
At the height of the pandemic in Australia, Melbourne and surrounding areas went into one of the strictest lockdowns in the world.
“We had to cancel our offline events,” Manticore said. “although we’re able to stay connected via our discord server. ‘Zoom fatigue’ and social burnout hit many of our members pretty hard, so we’ve been mostly on hiatus.”
“For much of last year we simply couldn’t legally meet at all, and even once lockdown was lifted, there was a real wariness about gathering in public.” Explains Sarah, the facilitator of the Monthly Hills Pagan Coffee Meets in Belgrave, a leafy outer suburb of Melbourne, nestled in the Dandenong Ranges.
“While the meets were shut down, the core members who were within the legal travelling distance (we’ve got folk who drive 150km to join us, and there were travel restrictions between regional and metropolitan Victoria) met in some of the local national parks away from people, and we celebrated our seasonal festivals with the regulars deep in a local forest.”
The group’s last public meet of 2020 was in March, and their re-opening was in February this year.
“We missed nearly a year of what used to be very regular and very enriching, supportive, fun, and spiritually fulfilling events, as well as not being able to provide those for the wider community,” Sarah told TWH.
“We were inundated with messages about when we’d be opening again, but for much of the last year we had no idea at all when we could recommence – and whether it would be safe to do so.”
Elsewhere in Australia, Pagan events were also forced to make sweeping changes and cancellations to in-person events once the pandemic took hold.
“We originally started by doing gatherings every six weeks at a local organic city farm,” said Dan Mercurial, co-founder of the Temple of All Gods in Brisbane, Queensland. “We also had a Pop Up Temple… which could be taken to events and set up with altars etc.” This later evolved into the Temple of all Gods doing large scale ritual events for the general public.
“Our Temple was founded on the idea of bringing together the diverse Pagan community, regardless of path or interest for the sake of networking and community engagement.” Mercurial told TWH. “We have a fairly large following on the Facebook page, so most of the connections with our community were through that [during the lockdowns]. We did a few events online via Facebook live, for events like Samhain and Yule that year.”
Also in Queensland, Wayne Pina-Roozemond, founder of nonprofit organisation the Queensland Pagan Collective, and organiser of a large Beltane festival in October/November each year, told TWH, “We didn’t need to make any changes as such as there was nothing to change.”
“Many activities that we were thinking of planning in 2020 didn’t go ahead. The impacts on Beltane were no interstate visitors, only local, increased size of area required for feast, so [we had] extra expenses for additional marquee,” Pina-Roozemond explained.
“As we are an outdoor event on a large property we didn’t have to worry about spacing rules other than in talks and workshop areas.”
The English Ale, an annual May gathering in South Australia’s Adelaide Hills, was cancelled in 2020. In its place, Spiral Dance hosted a online “Not the English Ale” concert. The festival usually celebrates the turning of the seasons, from summer to the “green time” in autumn/winter, and is based around the traditional calendar customs from the United Kingdom.
Many groups utilised technology more than they had ever before. For some, this was less of a change than others. “As most Reclaiming folk are linked via the inter webs in some form or another we all just transitioned. We took almost everything online,” Reclaiming witch and author Fio Gede Parma told TWH.
“We have very active Facebook groups going, different regional communities took their public rituals online via Zoom. Core Classes have transitioned to Zoom.”
Prior to COVID, Thr333fold was a bricks-and-mortar store with a focus on play and interaction in Brisbane, Queensland. “Alongside the stock we sold we had a public pagan altar which was maintained by local witches and a craft table of sorts for the creation of magical oils and charm bags,” proprietor Eryk Adish told TWH. “The store became a hub where we held regular groups and classes, collaborating with respected local teachers and Pagan group leaders. The restrictions really forced our ingenuity.”
Thr333fold store front via Facebook
Ultimately, it wasn’t viable to try to maintain a physical location with such little foot traffic and Thr333fold closed the doors to its physical location at the end of March 2020.
“We transitioned to utilising online platforms like Zoom, as was the trend, to continue connecting with our clients, to host classes and to engage with our more social groups,” Adish said.
“Our divination services, which have always been at the heart of our work, continued in the form of online readings and a weekly live broadcast from our Facebook and Twitch platforms,” Adish continued.
“I think the biggest loss was that closing our physical store meant ending the important relationships we had with many local Pagan artists and craftspeople who used the store as a means to share and sell their work.”
In Western Australia, Combined Covens Social Club (CCSC) had to put their in-person events on hold for the first time in over twenty-five years.
“We shut down our Samhain markets and Coffee Club meet events in 2020,” said Tree, one of CCSC’s organisers. “However, we were incredibly lucky in Perth to still have our annual Spring Camp event [in September 2020]. This is the highlight of our pagan events calendar in Perth. There were a few adjustments to attendance numbers and arrangements to provide best support against Covid, such as the sad loss of our bouncy castle!”
Eris was an attendee of the 2020 Spring Camp. Her group, Spiral and Web Coven, conducted a ritual workshop. “Some changes were evident at the event such as having a consent badge for hugs – which was a very welcome addition not just for COVID related reasons,” she told TWH. “I hope some of these changes stay.”
The Combined Coven Social Club organisers also turned their attention to creating a Community Crate, to “…provide support, cheer and connection to community during this time.”
The crates were a box of goods containing pagan themed goods. “We tried to include information, news and ideas from our community,” Tree said.
David Garland is the president of the Pagan Awareness Network (PAN Inc.), an educational association that works correcting misinformation and addresses issues in the media and the Government. The organisation also runs public events and gatherings: their full moon events in Seven Hills in New South Wales has now been running for 24 years.
Pagan Awareness Network logo
“Everything stopped, except [PAN inc’s] monitoring of the media and Government legislations,” Garland said. “All our events were cancelled, and we still have money out there as deposits for evens that were cancelled because of COVID. Even the committee meetings have become virtual. The full moon saw its first cancellations in 2020 Feb because of the Floods, and April and May because we were not allowed to gather under law.”
Many Happy Returns
The SGP ran their 2021 Autumn Equinox public ritual in Melbourne in March. “It felt good because we had to cancel the previous one.” Manticore told TWH. “The 2019 Summer Solstice [in December 2019] was our last offline event prior to the lockdowns, so it was like picking up where we left off.”
Just outside Melbourne, the Monthly Hills Pagan Coffee Meets recommenced in February. “It’s still weird being out in public, surrounded by people again.” Sarah told TWH. “We’ve had access to a lovely big table outside, so the meets since February have been in the café’s garden rather than indoors at our old regular table. As the strangeness of normalcy has worn off, we’ve all been thrilled to be back.”
“We missed each other, we missed meeting and welcoming new people, we missed our lovely café and the folks who run it. What’s interesting is that our numbers are still quite low, aside from the regulars; there’s a lot of engagement with the Facebook event pages, but people still seem reluctant to go out to things.”
In Brisbane and surrounds, the Temple of All Gods have also started offering in-person events again. “We are taking the precaution of having the meetings in outdoor spaces and including a check in sheet for people to record their details,” Mercurial said. “We have started offering small group classes… and we are super excited to be offering our Samhain public ritual on May 2nd. It has become a very important part of the Temple’s life and we can’t wait to be back with the community at that event!”
In the northern suburbs of Brisbane, Eryk Adish’s living room has been transformed into a temporary retail and meeting space for Thr333fold’s weekly coffee and card reading group.
“We’ve definitely been tentative when putting our toes back in the water in terms of meetspace events,” Adish said to TWH. “We have been hesitant to try to simply reinstate things as they once were, but we’ve been able to expand the services we offer to include in-home divination sessions for folks in Brisbane’s Northern suburbs.
“Now more than ever people really value an interpersonal spiritual experience and it’s been incredible and humbling to see the community’s support over this last year.”
Fio Gede Parma explained that for Australia’s Reclaiming community, many events are still being run online. “We’ve done a lot of experimenting and some members of our community with tech and media skills have grown rather proficient at wielding these platforms to do really exciting things!”
“Recently the first fully-online Reclaiming WitchCamp happened over 4 nights and 5 days. This was CloudCatcher WitchCamp, an intensive that usually happens in the Gold Coast hinterlands over Easter. It was successful and profoundly incredible on multiple levels. We are beginning to consider in-person Core Classes once more, but are still cautious,” Parma said.
The Combined Covens Social Club in Western Australia decided against the larger meets of the Samhain markets into 2021. “That event is open to the general public and is harder to police re hygiene etc,” Kundra explained. “But we fully intend to hold our annual spring camp and continue to implement some of the covid safety restrictions we used last year. Our coffee club also resumed after restrictions were lifted.”
In Perth, Eris formed the Western Australian Reclaiming Community and Spider and Web Coven during the height of the pandemic. “Shortly after we started, a small coven formed from a core group and now most of our energy and focus is going towards fostering that,” she said. “We were all acquainted with each other and had worked with each other magically before COVID, but something about the circumstances in 2020 brought us together with a shared vision of what we really wanted to see in the pagan community locally.”
Compared to other parts of Australia, Western Australians experienced far fewer restrictions due to fewer cases. “We had extremely low case numbers and public transmission from the start thanks to our Premier who was tough on border control and policy,” Eris told TWH. “By July we had organised a Pagans in the Park gatherings with some caveats around social distancing whilst the rest of the world was in lockdown. It felt like our whole state was in its own little bubble whilst there was this thing looming over us.”
In South Australia, Adrienne Piggott and the other organisers are gearing up for the return of the English Ale, complete with a COVID safe plan.
“We were lucky to secure a grant from the Adelaide Hills Council to cover the cost of festival fencing to go across the oval and bonfire site, quite a feat as it’s a big space to cover!” Piggott told TWH. “So we are able to have ticketing to enter the site. We’ve never done this before so it’s been interesting to be able to track just how many people come to the event.”
At time of writing, tickets for the procession and bonfire had sold out. “There will still be dancing and music outside of the hall as per past years but there is Covid Check in as well as marshals keeping an eye on distancing,” said Adrienne. “The Pagan community as well as the Mylor community are all very excited it’s going ahead, and we’ve had so much happy feedback about it.”
Festivities at the English Ale include massed Morris Dancing, a torchlight procession with Pageant giants, guisers, hobby horses and a bonfire with burning of a Wickerman. The evening ends with a concert in the local hall with Spiral Dance and featured guests.
This is Part I of a two-part series of how the collective Australian Pagan communities have managed during the pandemic. Part II will examine the vaccine rollout and future plans for the community.
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