The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/sleeps)
What will Pagan hospitality look like in the future? Often times we look towards our past for inspiration. Yet what do we see? Gone are the mead halls and warrior bands of old; in ruin lay the civic temples and sacrificial altars; the bruidean are pages in the historical record. And while some part of my psyche as a Pagan and Witch yearns to relight the fires and resurrect the temples and groves of old, I am a person of the modern era.
Throughout the 1930’s, Hoovervilles dotted the landscape of the Willamette Valley, just as they did throughout most of this country. The Great Depression sparked a wave of homelessness throughout the United States, a wave that triggered mass migrations and the proliferation of shantytowns that popped up everywhere from Central Park in New York City to a nine-acre settlement in Seattle on the mudflats of Puget Sound. Hoovervilles were generally tolerated throughout the Depression until the advent of WWII, when an economic resurgence triggered the eradication of the shantytowns. With the demise of the Hoovervilles, homelessness left the public spotlight but it never truly went away, hovering out of sight until the recession of the 1980’s fueled a resurgence of the visibly homeless across America. The historic parallels between the Great Depression and the Great Recession are rather illuminating in terms of understanding the patterns, attitudes, and social tendencies that are at the foundation of modern homelessness.