Over Presidents’ Day weekend, I attended Pantheacon in San Jose. Envision 3000 pagans, 4 days of workshops and rituals (with up to 14 of those being held simultaneously in any given time slot), plus vendors and readers and book signings and hospitality suites, in an airport hotel. This was my second year attending and my first year presenting.

I attended:

• Teacher’s Toolbox with Moss Magill
• Bioregional Totemism with Lupa
• Love Your Deomons, Love Yourself with T Thorn Coyle and Lon Milo Duquette
• Reconstructing the Qabalah Tree of Life with Gary M Jaron
• A Different kind of Seidh with Freyja’s Gift
• Margot’s Non-stop Ritual Chant Workshop with Margot Adler
• Papa Ghede’s Bone Yard Boogie with Dark Forest Coven
• Hekate’s Path – Dark Moon Ritual and Shadow Practice with Timotha Doane
• Magick & Occult in America with Jason W Mankey
• Manifestation: The Four Powers of the Sphinx with T Thorn Coyle
• Animals and Spiritual Imagination with Sabina Magliocco
• Stepping up Public Ritual: Bringing the Big Mojo to the Floor with Dark Forest Coven
• Working the Well of Magic in Witchery and Faery Practice with Orion Foxwood and Peter Paddon
• Tantric Shamanism Breathwork Ceremony with Sylvia Brallier
• Oracular Seidh with Seidhjaller
• White Girl Shamanism with Lupa

I also did readings one afternoon and offered by Becoming the Goddess workshop, visited a number of hospitality suites, and had some great conversations with people.

It was exhausting and exhilarating and informative and inspiring. I dredged up all sort of shadow stuff to be purged or otherwise dealt with. I learned new skills and techniques and affirmed old ones. I bought some earrings and a reclaimed raccoon tail that resonated with me the way most animal products don’t. I saw people I hadn’t seen in quite some time, people I had just seen at the Conference on Current Pagan Studies, and people with whom I had only spoken to online.

Out of everything I attended, the most useful workshop was, hands down, the Four Powers of the Sphinx. It laid out a very simple and easy to use formula for manifesting that, when combined with the other events I attended, really felt like it was going to make a difference for me. I also just adore T Thorn Coyle’s manner of expressing ideas, which I’m sure helped.

The most powerful ritual was Hecate’s Path. It was a ritual of mourning for a close friend of the leaders, and mostly involved a room full of people chanting the same thing for about an hour; but it was so very transformative and the energy was stunning. I originally chose to attend it because I do a monthly dark moon/new moon myself, and I wanted to experience how others might observe that. It ended up being so much more.

I was supposed to go up with a handful of my students (and possibly even my husband), and ended up going by myself, which was perfect. I was able to feel my way through which things I wanted to attend, didn’t have to worry too much about meeting up with anyone, and probably actually got more rest than I would have if I was part of a group. I stay off site, which enables me to completely shift gears when I need to, but having a hotel room there might have been nice simply so I could nap during meal breaks.

I am still processing the lessons learned, so this probably isn’t as in depth as I would like. It was a wonderful weekend and I do highly recommend it if you want a lot of workshops in a short amount of time, or if you want to feel a part of a larger community, or even if you want to expose yourself to new pagan experiences. It’s affordable, it’s convenient for anyone on the west coast (or at least Californians), and it is becoming an annual tradition for me.