Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Utopia (part iv)

Episode Date: March 6, 2018

Our search for Utopia takes Andrew far from Mundania to the magickal Den of Iniquity in a pagan community called The Valley of The Dragons. Plus, your host takes a tour of FDR’s New Deal Utopias in search of a future that is possible. ********* click on the image for more **************  

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Utopia Part 4. A big part of our Utopia series has been the reports from TOE producer Andrew Calloway. He's been driving around America. This is his final report. When I was planning my Utopian road trip, I posted on Facebook looking for suggestions. And my French teacher from the 7th grade, Molly, sent me an invite to a secret Facebook group. It was for this festival she was going to by the Appalachian Mountains in Tennessee, at a pagan community

called the Valley of the Dragons. I wasn't really sure what to make of it. Molly was being kinda cryptic about what all was gonna go down there, but the thing is, she is one of the best teachers I ever had. She made me feel like less of a weirdo, and more like I was special. She had me learning French by translating Bois de l'air poems. And now with this invite into the pagan community, she has something else she wants to teach me about utopias. So I went. When I pulled into the campground, I knew I had the right place, because the first thing I saw was a huge stone dragon statue. There were already people getting their tents set up,

and I was happy to help. Here we go. I wondered, do these people really know magic? And if so, is that something I can pick up while I'm here? Some people are trained, and some people are just born that way, and that was me. That is Mama Bon, a 68-year-old natural-born pagan. She feels real lucky to have found this place.

They laughed at me and stuff when I was a kid. I talked about magic. So I quit talking about it. Finally went through life for a long time, forgetting all about who I was until I met these people that were just like me, and I was like, I've come home.

I found this place and when I walked through the gates, everybody kept telling me, welcome home. Hawken is another pagan who's super happy to have discovered this community. These people don't know me, but they're welcoming me home. I'm like, well, that's pretty cool. People jumping in like you did to help set up tents and things, you know, absolutely awesome community. And I said, this is what I need to be a part of. I felt pretty welcome there too. Even though I had a microphone, everybody

was happy to talk to me. After all the tents were set up, I lit a cigarette and started exploring. I found one of those medieval wooden things that you would put your head and your hands into. It's called a pillory. This guy, Solitaire, explained to me why it's there. We're kind of into ropes and chains around here. And we have that reputation. And we own it. It also comes in real handy if I catch you dropping a cigarette butt on my yard.

Before I had to explain that I always hold on to my butts, Molly came to the rescue. Hey! Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Molly's been coming here since she was 19. Okay, so it was 1994 and I found out about it. I was in a pagan group at Virginia Tech, and we found out about it from some website that it was posted to on accident. We had an epic, epic good time. I ended up naked and painted red. Is that right? Molly was with Brent, the friendly pagan neighborhood lawyer.

She brought him here to help her friend Annie. She was a lesbian in Kentucky in 1997, and her partner died, and everything was in her partner's name, and they had three little kids. So we needed legal services for free. She had a very conservative family. So we did magic to manifest Brent. Long story short, yes, we said we need a pagan lawyer. And then there he was, and we brought him here. And next thing you know, we said we need a pagan lawyer. And then there he was,

and we brought him here. And next thing you know, he bought a big chunk of land. We'll just say that we convinced him. We sure convinced him, didn't we, Brent? We sure convinced you that you wanted to buy land here. Annie ended up moving here too. And her son, he was exposed to a lot. One festival we were at, there was a woman who thought he was the reincarnation of Aleister Crowley and who decided that she was going to pretty much seduce him when he was, like, 14 years old. And she was, like, a stripper. Like, really good looking. She just, you know, if he had been a girl, she would have gone to jail.

But as it was, you know, I would not be cool with that happening to my son I would try can kick that bitch's ass gatherings were larger back in the 90s and early 2000s way bigger here and now you can't be naked at see anymore yeah but now the community is more solid and stable. You've got families and you've got longevity going on. You only have just 15 naked people coming, 350 people coming to party and have a ritual experience. And now you have people committing their lives to being here. So that's different. We should show them a little mermaid grotto over there.

We hopped in Brent's golf cart and went on a tour. Yeah, this is Avalon. It used to be our big bonfire was in the meadow here, and we thought we'd be afraid of burning these electric wires above me. Then we stopped by the Dragon Circle, their new clearing in the woods. This is a very sacred, sacred space. We have put a lot of people's ashes here. Further away from the campground and the drum circles,

they showed me some of the shacks where people live full time. So different people rent these places, and they don't have any toilet or shower. They use the municipal toilet and shower there. A lot of it, it's about trying to figure out like minimalist living like if you cut down how much you need or don't really need that much then you don't have to work as hard to make money to cover your expenses. They're poor mountain people. We came across this guy named Rizzard with a huge white beard and a cane. He told me that here in the valley, there are a lot of varieties of pagan.

You have a spot that's all goddess worship, and across the street you have Babylonian Ishtar cult, you know. This is a tolerant place. We actually have a Christian that lives here on property. The next morning at the community breakfast, I learned all the diversity is a big strength of this place. All paths are sacred, and there is unity in the diversity. That's Solitaire again.

He believes this place is a functioning anarchy. That's a big claim. But whatever they're doing, it seems like it's working. My son's father and Ricky, the father of my daughter, we love each other, you know, and they call each other baby daddy. And we all own that property collectively, which I just think is something that's really beautiful because there's so many people that have such a hard time co-parenting you know and even respecting the other person at all and somehow we've just figured

out how to have property together have kids together and love each other and and it's not weird uh this is baby daddy oh no it's not. It's the baby daddy's girlfriend. That's a pretty good example of what sets this place apart from the outside world. If you live out in Mundania, not only do you get stared at, and people think you're a weirdo, and who cares what they think? We're the weirdos in that world, but they're the weirdos in our world. Mundania. Everyone here uses that word. It's what these pagans call the regular world, where the normies live.

Here, Mama Bond told me, you can be yourself. Get your freak on and be empowered to do your magic thing, whatever that may be. This is some place you can come and be safe from the outside world and practice your rituals and do whatever you do magically that you really can't do out in the rest of the world. I really loved all the accepting attitudes here. The spiritual cosmopolitanism. It really felt like utopian anarchy. There's a certain level of anarchy

in that rituals and things are frequently ad hoc, meaning, hey, who are doing this, you know, it's a form of anarchy. Who relates to who when, and what happens, and what kind of projects are chosen is fairly anarchistic to some extent. But no, the landowners are the poobahs, and the tenants are the workers, worker bees. So it's still an unequal situation in the extreme. That's Chi, and she really laughed at me when I told her why I was here. So Molly sent you. Yeah.

That's even funnier. She's such a trickster. She's like sending you to investigate this as a utopia. That's funny. When I woke up the next morning, I was concerned. Was Molly tricking me? Is there anything utopian about this place? Before I left, Molly put my fears to rest. She showed me her secret magical spot. It's called the Den of Inequity. Oh boy. This looks fun.

Yeah, there's a lot of, there's some toys here. Various whips and and leather, leather things. This is like chained up to all sides of the wall. I've got to sit in this harness. Like this? Oh wow, yeah, I see how this could be helpful. All those horrible things you guys probably thought about me, Use your imagination. Oh, wow. Yeah, I see how this could be helpful. All those horrible things you guys probably thought about me and what I was actually doing was far more debaucherous than that you just weren't being creative enough.

Like, you couldn't even begin to think about my reality. How dare you? Molly clearly got a lot out of this place back when she was teaching me in San Francisco. I mean, she would fly all the way here to the middle of nowhere Tennessee just for the weekend. My bratty classmates and I were her mundania. She didn't have any control over us. We were monsters. But when she came here, she was treated like a goddess.

And it's not just that she was having kinky sex. It's that when she had it in the sex dungeon, she had the power. Magical power. Pagan magic isn't just about making stuff levitate or talking to the dead. It's about manifesting changes in the world by making changes in yourself. One of the reasons that sex magic is so popular here is because sex transforms your perspective. I think every community should have a sex dungeon,

but a lot of the utopias that I visited on my journey, like the farm or even Galt's retreat, have figured out how to be a group of self-empowered individuals. What I didn't find is a place that's figured out collective empowerment. And that's what we're going to need if we want to build a utopia that's going to fight addiction, toxic masculinity, economic inequality, landlords, and all the hierarchies in our community. This image of converging paths in Greenbelt, Maryland, these paths are meant for planned collisions between neighbors. That's photographer Jason Roblando, and he's telling me about an image in his photo book, New Deal Utopias.

Five concrete paths converge at a spot just in front of a playground. And even though there aren't any people in this photo, the six maple trees clustered around the meeting point look like they're in deep conversation with each other. It's clear that this is a beautiful and happening spot. I think the town planners wanted you to say hello to your neighbor. Nature and neighbors were really important when they were planning these communities. Greenbelt, Maryland is one of three towns developed

as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. And FDR was very proud of these Greenbelt communities. Franklin Roosevelt said, although I have seen the blueprints of Greenbelt, the actual site itself exceeds anything I've ever dreamed of. I wish everyone in the country could see it. This quote ended up being sort of a vision statement for Jason Roblondo. He set out to capture with his camera what FDR wanted people to see. When I first made the road trip to see all three of them one summer, I was just beside myself. I knew exactly when I crossed the border into these towns. And I think the humane scale of these towns is something that I wanted to evoke. There's another photo I love.

It's a simple neighborhood underpass. It takes people from their homes and deposits them into a beautiful, calm, and green park. The underpass itself was a safety feature. It's meant for pedestrians so families and children can have a straight shot to the town center and they wouldn't have to wait for traffic. So you have roads on one level and then pedestrians on another. So I think these design amenities were very forward-looking. The forward-thinking individual most responsible for these towns of the future was a man named Rex Tugwell, an economist who was a member of FDR's first brain trust.

Critics refer to him as Rex the Red because of his socialist leanings. He really believed in helping out the poorest third of the country. He saw the country was struggling. He saw that there was a housing problem. around cooperation instead of kind of rampant individualism, kind of unfettered capitalism that had accentuated the Depression. Tugwell and FDR hoped to build a hundred greenbelt towns spanning the United States and welcoming low-income families. But the opposition was overwhelming. They were only able to build three towns before the project was shut down. A newspaper headline of the time screamed, first communist towns in America. Jason Roblando

took a photo that newspaper editor could have used to go with that headline. It's from Green Hills, Ohio. It's a sign for Green Hills Cooperative Preschool. It lists the phone number, the website, and it proudly shouts out, hooray for co-ops. Indoctrination for two-year-olds. You know, it's funny that this cooperative preschool is something that is in practice, but they also, in one of the archival pictures, they have the gumdrop co-ops. So they really were trying to kind of indoctrinate children into this co-op model. When they were founded, all the businesses were cooperatively run. This image of the preschool co-op is proof that even though government ownership of these suburbs was liquidated in 1954, there is still an alternative, anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist,

cooperative spirit alive and well in these towns. There's like 15 different types of co-ops that are currently operating in Greenbelt. Jason Roblondo's photos show us small towns with a sense of civic pride and modesty. Places that have managed to take the best from both the city and the countryside. Places where Americans can live together and live with nature. Perhaps this is what FDR truly wanted all of us to see. A future. A future

that is possible. When I think about what the government really wanted to do, which was to provide affordable housing for people who need it. It was just a completely different mindset of how people thought about government back then. And I think it's important that as we move forward in whether it be town planning or selecting the place that we live, at a time where we're struggling with natural resources and environmental issues and housing issues. I think that these are really great models to look back upon. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything.

This installment is called Utopia, and Chi. The Theory of Everything is a proud member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.