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I suppose most campuses have one: the self-appointed, probably slightly psychotic, street-corner evangelist to the (presumed) fallen.

In the late 80s, the University of Minnesota had Brother Jed.

You'd see him around campus, haranguing. No one took him seriously. Some engaged him; some egged him on. Me, I avoided him.

(One day, Brother Jed noticed me walk past, face averted, as he was enlarging on the evils of homosexuality. “Whah, they-ah goes one na-ow!” he denounced, adding, in an uncharacteristic moment of self-doubt, “Ah think.”)

Every (black) pearl starts with an intrusive piece of grit. One day, after the umpteenth encounter with Brother Jed, a graduate student named Magenta Griffith had had enough.

“We need a student pagan organization,” she thought.

She teamed up with some friends, and thus was born Children of the Night, the University of Minnesota's first student pagan organization.

(Yes, the name comes from Dracula. We're of a poetic bent here in the Northland; savoring irony is something of a local sport.)

Here's where yours truly enters the story. I'd come to the Twin Cities the previous year, ostensibly for grad school, but in actuality to find the Pagan Community of my dreams. In those pre-internet days, hooking up with other pagans was hard. Twelve months had gone by, and I still hadn't met any.

Then one day I walked into Lind Hall and saw the mimeograph on the wall.

Are you interested in Wicca? Druidism? Paganism?

Children of the Night: Student Pagan Organization

xxx date and time

xxx location

Interested? Was I ever! My memory is (thank you Mama) that I actually kissed the ground in joy.

That year, Coven X had volunteered to lead the big Samhain ritual for the Wiccan Church of Minnesota.

Weeks before Samhain, the winds of controversy had already begun to blow.

The folks in Coven X, the new young coven in town, thought of the WiCoM folks as stodgy and regressive, mired in Wiccan dogma. Clearly, their intent with this ritual was to blow some of the cobwebs out of the attic.

It didn't take a seer to foretell where this was going to go.

The day before the ritual, the priestess told me all about it with a glint in her eye.

“We'll show them,” she concluded.

Well, if she wanted a firestorm, she got it.

“One would think you lived in Minneapolis.”

(Christopher Isherwood, to the residents of Berlin on their sang-froid following the division of their city in 1945)

Ah, fair City of Lakes: scrappy little Minneapolis, small town on steroids.

Minneapolis, where the winters are too cold and the summers too hot.

Minneapolis, where we have laws against everything.

Minneapolis, which routinely pays world-class architects first-rate money for second- (and third-) class work.

Why would anyone live here?

Not every pagan community gets referenced in Gary Trudeau's cartoon Doonesbury.

But, back in the early 80s, Paganistan did.

Remember Take Back the Night?

Back in the 80s, there would be a big rally and march here in Minneapolis every summer. The organizing committee, notoriously dysfunctional, was a seething cauldron of in-fighting and ideological purism. The general tone of the marches was outrage, anger.

Except for the pagans.

Hel, we figured we had as much right to be there as anyone. We opposed violence against women. (We still do.) We were staunchly feminist. (We still are.) We hated rape. (We still do.)

But we weren't interested in rage or ideological purity.

We wanted the night back.

So we took it.

We danced, we drummed, we satirized. We chanted the praises of our Goddess through the streets.

The organizers hated us.

At the very last march—just before the organizing committee (irony of ironies) finally tore itself to shreds in a maelstrom of self-directed, woman-on-woman violence—we were consigned to being literally the very last group in the march.

Since we were last, everyone else left the park before we did. That was the moment of horror.

The hillside where people had sat listening to speeches and music, now empty of occupants, was blanketed with garbage: papers, soda cans, water bottles.

That year, the pagans were irate, too.

Talk about not getting it, we said.

Don't they see that everything is connected? we said.

Earth is a Woman, too, we said.

Unlike most other nation-states, Paganistan has two national flags.

(Paganistan being, of course, not so much a state as a state of mind.)

No doubt you've seen it: Tower, gray, on a field of (from the top down) blue, yellow, green.

The tower, of course, references Paganistan's iconic “Witch's Hat” tower, which graces the Water City's highest point. Witch hat aside, Dion Fortune once remarked that “the standing tower is one of the symbols of the Old Gods.”

For this reason, of course, the flag is proudly known to Paganistanis as the “Witchtower.”

As for the field, well, no pagan needs to have that explained. Blue, yellow, green: Sky, Sun, Earth.

That's the Summer Witchtower, which flies from Beltane to Samhain.

Then, of course, there's the Winter flag, flown from Samhain to Beltane: Standing tower, gray, on a field of blue, yellow, and white.

Back in the day when (assuming you were foolhardy enough to try) you could have fit all the pagans of Paganistan into one large room, the community ran into its first collective problem.

Most of us were Cancers.

What this may say about the nature of this community, I'm not sufficiently well-versed, astrologically speaking, to know. (Cancers don't believe in pseudo-science, anyway.) What I can say is that by the end of the sign, folks were all partied out—even pagans get there—and those whose birthdays fell toward the Leo end of things felt deprived.

Hence the Cancer Birthday Party.

On some Saturday night after Midsummer's—usually in July—the pagans would foregather in collective natal celebration. And if it just so happened that this was the Saturday closest to the birthday of whoever was hosting the party, well, who could find fault with that?

The Cancer Birthday Party was thus the functional equivalent of the only other community-wide gathering at the time, the Saturnalia party, which usually happened on the Saturday of finals week in December. (A lot of us were students at the time, so you wanted to catch everyone before they headed off for winter break.) The 80s being the 80s, these were (naturally) Toga Parties. I have fond memories of watching a wine-soused friend fall simultaneously off the couch, out of her toga, and into Uncle Wolf's lap.

Well, the day is long since past when you could fit all the pagans in town—even assuming you wanted to—into one room, even a large one. Nowadays you would need a stadium at least, not to mention (probably) gladiators. It's long and long indeed since we knew one another well enough to fight over irrelevancies.