Denver Pagan Pride is an annual event held in Denver, Colorado that celebrates and promotes the pagan community and its beliefs. The event brings together pagans from different backgrounds and traditions to gather, share knowledge, and foster a sense of community. The main focus of Denver Pagan Pride is to educate the public about paganism and dispel common misconceptions about the religion. It provides a platform for pagans to showcase their beliefs, rituals, and practices, while encouraging dialogue and understanding with the broader community. The event features a range of activities and performances, including workshops, presentations, rituals, live music, and vendor booths. Attendees have the opportunity to learn about various pagan traditions, such as Wicca, Druidry, Heathenry, and Eclectic Paganism, through interactive experiences and discussions.

Denver Style News

Sept. 17, 2000 - For two millennia, pagans have lived on the spiritual periphery, their Earth-based faith demonized by mainstream religions.

"The Christian church has spent 2,000 years making "witches' and "pagans' bad words because we are the religion that lost the war (between paganism and Christianity)," says Denver psychotherapist Judith Brownlee, who is also a witch. "Anthropologists will tell you that any time a culture comes in, takes over and ousts an older culture, the gods and goddesses of that defeated culture become the devils and demons of the new culture." Weary of being associated with satanic worship, black magic and other unsavory practices, and tired of keeping their dearest values hidden for fear of discrimination, some pagans now come together to celebrate Pagan Pride Day. This year it falls on Saturday.

"People need to see that we're like everybody else," says Brownlee, who last year participated in Denver's first Pagan Pride Day, a small affair in City Park. This year, Colorado Springs will host the event with a day of rituals, rhythm circles, discussion groups, ceremonies, vendors and psychic readings.

Pulling off such an event is no mean feat; pagans are solitary by nature, eschewing structure and embracing individual power and responsibility. Many also fear the loss of family and friends, jobs and housing if their beliefs become known.

"Organizing pagans is a little like trying to herd cats," concedes Colorado Springs organizer Carolyn Caplan. Still, she says, "we need to come out of the broom closet and show the world that we are proud of who we are." "Pagan" embraces a broad range of beliefs and practices, though all have in common a profound connection to and respect for the Earth. In general, pagans gather not at churches for weekly services, but as nature dictates and often outdoors: Solstices, equinoxes and lunar phases are common occasions for celebration. Many believe in reincarnation and use tarot cards, runes, psychic readings and other forms of divination as part of their spiritual practice.

Pagans also focus on the divine feminine, which some call the Goddess, as the primary creative and life-giving force. Women are drawn to "the Old Religion" by this ascendant respect for the female principle, Brownlee says.

Wiccans, or witches, are probably the largest subset of pagans and suffer from the most bad press. In modern times, they've typically been depicted as mean-spirited tyrants ( "The Wizard of Oz'') and sinister satanic consorts ( "Rosemary's Baby'').

But Wiccan notions of "magick" - pagans use the "k" to distinguish the spiritual practice from stage illusion - are broadly misunderstood and unnecessarily feared.

"It's not the "pop, flash, wham, bam!' stuff you see on Disney cartoons, on television shows and movies - all the stuff that breaks natural law," says Brownlee, who teaches two classes on magick each year at Isis, a metaphysical store in Denver.

Rather, she says, spells and rituals acknowledge the existence of a "great creative power."

Wiccans believe magick must occur within an ethical framework that decrees no harm be done and that the free will of others be respected. "In paganism, you are responsible for your life: Do you as you will, but harm thee none," says Mikie Coates, a Manitou Springs witch.

Modern Christian practice and ritual owes much to the paganism that predated it. "It took the Christian Church a really, really long time, and they had a hard time wiping out the Old Religion," Brownlee says. "The (rural) people in the country were loathe to let go of that. There was a power - in the sunrise and sunset, in the harvest, in animals giving birth -- that they saw in their lives everyday. So the church added the sword as one of its tools for conversion."

But even violence wasn't entirely successful, a truth conceded by church fathers who ultimately assimilated what they could not eradicate. By combining some beliefs and practices and reinterpreting others, "Christianity managed to absorb nearly all of paganism except its Goddess," writes scholar Barbara G. Walker in The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. Every feast in the Christian calendar, including Christmas and Easter, was borrowed from pagans of old, Walker notes.

Now, their spiritual descendants would like in return a little understanding, a little respect for the sanctity of different beliefs.

"People fear what they don't know or understand," Caplan says. "One of the purposes of Pagan Pride Day is to educate.

"If we can pull it off, we will show the world - -or at least Colorado Springs - -that we are not evil, scary or secretive, but good, sincere and honest folk who just want to practice our religion in peace and who are proud to be pagans." Colorado Springs Pagan Pride Day will be celebrated from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Saturday in Bancroft Park, on Colorado Avenue near 24th Street. All are welcome and are asked to bring a donation of canned food for the Southern Colorado AIDS Project. What's a pagan?

The terms "paganism' and "neopaganism' span a considerable range of spiritual beliefs and practices.Denver psychotherapist Judith Brownlee uses a broad definition.

"Pagan religions are Earth-based,' says Brownlee, who as a witch falls within perhaps the largest subset of pagans.

No one knows how many pagans there are; they have no formal church or structure. One poll puts numbers worldwide at 1 million - a good estimate, according to Cecylyna Dewr, executive director of the Indianapolis-based Pagan Pride Project. Pagan Pride Day organizers anticipate 63 events in 36 states and five Canadian provinces this year. They offer the following description of a pagan.

Someone who self-identifies as a pagan, and whose spiritual or religious practice or belief fits into one or more of the following categories:

- Honoring, revering or worshipping a deity or deities found in pre-Christian, classical, aboriginal or tribal mythology.

- Practicing religion or spirituality based upon shamanism, shamanic or magickal practices.

- Creating new religion based on past pagan religions and/or futuristic views of society, community and/or ecology.

- Focusing religious or spiritual attention primarily on the divine feminine.

The International Pagan Pride Project Web site is www.paganpride.org.

Copyright 2000 The Denver Post. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

I Felt Ashamed At Pagan Pride

This simple shape, along with the square and the triangle, introduces our early minds to geometry, to symmetry, to physical and social design.

This past weekend I felt ashamed at Pagan Pride on account of a circle.

Photo by Katie Walker, Flickr

My body helped form the edge of a circle. My body stood next to other bodies — thirty perhaps — in the middle of one of the most public of spaces in all of Denver, Civic Center Park. This circle of bodies in the middle of my city, in the middle of a crowd of onlookers, did something I did not expect this circle to do.

It created an us and a them.

Casting circle before a crowd of people, some of whom were unsuspecting passers-by, and others virtually residents of the park, established a kind of religious exclusivity. It was as though we said, by joining hands and turning our backs to the crowd:

This is our circle. You are on the outside of this circle. We are doing our religious work on the inside.

The circle seemed to other the onlookers.

None of this was done explicitly. The leaders of the ritual, all good-hearted Pagans, did not inform the crowd that they were to remain outside, or that they were unwelcome in the ritual. They didn’t need to.

They’d invited us to come down for ritual, but the non-Pagans were not addressed. There was no clear explanation of what the ritual would be like, what might be expected of the participants, or — for those who weren’t familiar with Pagan (or more specifically, Wiccan/New Age-ish) rituals — what it would all mean.

The insiders were told that the ritual was going to raise power to bring us protection. The irony would be that this circle inspired the same antagonism and meanness from outside the circle from which the ritual was seeking to protect us.

There was heckling. It sounded like drunk heckling. Drunk, Christian heckling. And there were disruptions from a few men who, while we stood there in our circle, paced slowly around the perimeter. One asked for a cigarette. One stood outside the circle by about 5 feet and folded his arms across his chest.

The ritual leaders did not acknowledge any of this.

In response to the jeers and taunts, one ritual leader stood in solidarity inside the circle and began to talk to us about how protection was so important because there were people out there who didn’t understand us or respect us. It was as close to a “preaching” moment as you might find inside this kind of circle.

I heard her reassure us, and I thought,

But we just created an out there by casting this circle. We closed them off from us, shut them out, but only symbolically because they could see and hear all of what we were doing. Play it like we’re the victims, but we just created — through ritual — the same kind of alienation that we feel in relation to the greater society.

We just became The Church.

The rest of the ritual involved the distribution of smooth stones to each of us, stones which had been blessed and inscribed with a pentacle and the word, “protection.” These were our charms, we were told, to give us strength and to provide us protection as we leave the circle and go back into the world.

I found myself feeling so embarrassed. I kept looking down. I didn’t want protection from the people on the outside of the circle; I wanted to connect with them. To explain. To try to find some sort of understanding.

But it wasn’t my ritual.

To close, we imagined a ball of white light — the quintessential ball of white light — enveloping the circle, and then extending outward to include all of this place and all of the world. This imaginary light would attempt to do what we had not done with our physical bodies, which was to include all. In that moment our meditation, our magickal working, was an obvious self-deception; a willful ignorance of what was actually occurring in the space around us.

At least, that’s how it felt from where I was standing in the circle.

I don’t know about circles anymore. I don’t know if they’re appropriate to cast in these kinds of public settings. I doubt them in a way that I didn’t before Denver’s 2012 Pagan Pride.

I trust that many of you either cast circles, or have been in a ritual where one was cast. I wonder if you could shed some light on how you see them as useful, or how you find them to be problematic. Could you imagine other forms of ritual, ones that do not create a boundary between those on the outside and those within, that would feel appropriate at a Pagan gathering? Or, is this kind of “protective barrier” a necessity?

I felt ashamed at Pagan Pride because I was a part of something that felt, on account of the circle, incredibly exclusive. Could there be a more inclusive, perhaps even radically inclusive way of doing Pagan ritual in public?

Denver Pagan Pride Day

Attendees have the opportunity to learn about various pagan traditions, such as Wicca, Druidry, Heathenry, and Eclectic Paganism, through interactive experiences and discussions. Denver Pagan Pride also emphasizes community service and giving back. The event typically hosts food drives, clothing drives, and other charitable activities to support local organizations and those in need.

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This highlights the pagan community's commitment to social responsibility and making a positive impact in the broader society. Overall, Denver Pagan Pride serves as a celebration of diversity, inclusivity, and spiritual exploration. It encourages both pagans and non-pagans to come together, exchange ideas, and foster mutual respect. By providing a platform for pagans to express their beliefs openly and share their wisdom, Denver Pagan Pride plays a vital role in bridging the gap between different communities and promoting a more tolerant and accepting society..

Reviews for "Denver Pagan Pride: Celebrating the Magic within Us All"

1. John Doe - 2 stars - I was quite disappointed with the Denver Pagan Pride event. Firstly, the organization seemed disorganized, with poor signage and limited information about the schedule and performances. Secondly, the overall atmosphere felt lackluster and uninspiring. The vendors were few and offered repetitive products, and there was a lack of engaging activities or workshops. Overall, I felt this event did not live up to its potential and failed to provide a meaningful and memorable experience for attendees.

2. Jane Smith - 1 star - Attending Denver Pagan Pride was a complete waste of time for me. The event seemed more like a disorganized flea market than a celebration of pagan culture. The vendors were limited and lacked originality, offering the same generic pagan-themed products I could easily find online. The workshops and performances were poorly executed and provided little educational or entertainment value. I truly hope the organizers take constructive criticism and make significant improvements for future events.

3. Samantha Johnson - 2 stars - Denver Pagan Pride did not meet my expectations. The event felt unorganized, with delays in the schedule and a lack of clear instructions for attendees. The workshops and presentations were lackluster, providing basic information that most attendees already knew. Additionally, the overall atmosphere was underwhelming, lacking the vibrant and inclusive environment I had hoped for. I left feeling disappointed and discouraged from participating in future pagan pride events.

4. Michael Thompson - 3.5 stars - While Denver Pagan Pride had some redeeming qualities, it fell short in a few areas. Firstly, the organization of the event left much to be desired. There were long wait times and confusion regarding the schedule throughout the day. Secondly, the vendors were limited and did not offer a wide variety of products or services. However, the positive aspects included a few interesting workshops and knowledgeable presenters who provided valuable insights into pagan practices. With some improvements, this event has the potential to become a more engaging and inclusive celebration of pagan culture.

5. Sarah Davis - 2 stars - Denver Pagan Pride was a disappointment for me. The event lacked a cohesive theme or atmosphere, making it difficult to fully immerse myself in the pagan culture. The workshops were poorly organized, often starting late or lacking in substance. Additionally, the limited variety of vendors made the shopping experience dull and uninspiring. The potential is there, but it needs significant improvements in organization and planning to truly showcase the richness and diversity of pagan practices.

Denver Pagan Pride: A Welcoming Space for all Paths