Originally published in the 'No Holds Barred Witchcraft' FB Group on 5th Feb 2021
Old English word Moot = An assembly held for debate, especially in Anglo-Saxon and medieval times.
I don’t know how many of you are part of / attend Pagan or Magical Moots. In the UK they are very popular. Back when witches, pagans, magicians and the sort were still very much in the shadows, there were few places where we could all meet up regularly and exchange ideas.
There are many famous places such as the basement of Atlantis books in London, UK, where witches and magical practitioners of all different types would meet each other. These still exist today, in fact the City of Bristol in the UK where I live has 4 at least that I know of.
My question is how many of you attend your local moot? Where is it? And what types of magical practitioners do you find there?
Truth be told out of the many moots we have in our local area, I can only stomach going to one lol. I like it because it has so many people on different paths. I have been to a number of other moots before, but there always seems to be a hierarchy with the organizers normally belonging to a specific path (usually wicca or some fake ancient druid crap) and all sitting together.
I’ve been to two different ones where they try to force you to pray to some random Goddess (at it always seems to be a Goddess lol) before the meeting starts and sometimes theres even a fucking talking stick. If I wanted all that I would probably go to Church lol.
That being said the moot I attend now, really is something special, everyone is treated as an equal (even the wiccans) and we have some very interesting chats. Attached to this post is a picture of the pub / bar where my moot takes place. We meet every Tuesday in a secret room above the main bar. I say it's a secret because it sounds cool, but in reality it’s just a room at the top of a staircase behind a side door at the side entrance to the pub.
We have help all sorts of meeting generally random magical people show up and just chat be we have managed to hold lectures & talks, workshops and I think at one point we got drunk and made a Goddess called Seren (she's an egregore lol) and tricked some local New Agers into praying to her.
.I have looked for some here and haven't found any. I should start one myself maybe. I am rather lazy, though
I have really benefitted from going to the monthly moot local to me and I can honestly say that having genuine conversations with other practitioners about how we practice and why certain people practice different ways has helped me to understand ideas that I've struggled to wrap my head around.
Also it has confirmed to me that most witches have thier minds firmly in the gutter at least 90% of the time 😂 (or maybe just the ones near me!)
As a Dutch person I've been always intrigued by the WLNHB posts and podcast mentions about the moots. We don't have something like that although a shop in a city near to me does host a "witches cafe" once a month now I come to think of it.... stupid thing is I never visited. Probably because I'm not always up for conversations with strangers. But I might give it a try... next one is tomorrow afternoon 😂 apparently "we will prepare ourselves for the big spring clean by making our own smudge bundle". I'll post a report if I can put myself to being a few hours amongst neopagans.
Sounds much better than my local moot where everyone’s a Wiccan or a Druid 😴