Fluffy Fraud Central.

The BBC’s Pagan Topic message board provides a space where it was once possible to meet with and learn from people of serious pagan thought and practice. In the handful of years since its inception it had grown from a place where a cheerful and polite bunch of interested people exchanged ideas best described as esoteric to a mature forum which served as an pagan primer and network for many newcomers. Of particular merit were the contributions of a broadly Heathen contingent. Now, however, times have changed. With its current membership The Pagan Topic must surely be the most banal of all gathering places for both those youngsters who are seeking their place in adult society and also those adults who seek a new lease of life, all within the increasingly incoherent religious category of paganism.

Brimming with devotees of those modern medicine shows reiki and past-life regression it is now a place cackling with low innuendo and the kind of sordid nymphomania commonly found in sexual fantasists. New visitors are invited, more appropriately than is intended, to select their choice of garishly designed and fabricated straightjacket upon being accepted as genuine by an orgy of old farts who, believing themselves wise and experienced, dispense responses relying more upon the word “depends” and the personal redefinition of everyday words to fit personal prejudice and predilection than upon any identifiably authentic religious, social, historical, philosophical or magical traditions.


There are one or two more experienced and charitable types who remain at this forum - if it may be still described as such considering the tone of toilet wall graffiti into which it has descended - in order to try and elevate the general tone of the discourse and provide avenues of escape for those unfortunate enough to be caught in this awful place. Whether they will be successful in this is yet to be seen but it looks like something of an uphill struggle considering that they are horribly outnumbered by the fart-orgy, the members of which claim knowledge and understanding of the people, the practices and the principles of paganism while dispensing nothing in the way of these, instead pouring forth an apparently endless stream of “depends”, emoticons, “back-when-I-were-trad-gard“, sick jokes, anti-Christian invective, Islamophobic bile, sword-lust and talk of “deity” as though it were the latest wonder ingredient for fabric conditioners. I wish those stout hearted Pagan elders at the BBC all the luck in the world in their evangelical activities but in their hearts I feel they must know that they are fighting a lost cause and that their energies would be best applied elsewhere.