Pagan's Night Out, or PNO, is a regularly scheduled social get-together, usually monthly, held in hundreds of Pagan and Neopagan communities around the world. Begun in Houston, TX in 1992 as a way for users of the Brewers' Witch BBS to meet face to face, Pagan's Night Out has become a worldwide phenomena.[1] Held in bars, pubs, coffee shops, cafes, restaurants and meeting halls, PNO is a social event for Wiccans, Asatruar, Thelemites, Druids, Setians and the hundreds of other Neopagan sects and sub-divisions.
Origins
The Brewers' Witch BBS
The Brewers' Witch BBS was started in May of 1992, running on a DOS PC using the Waffle BBS software and a single phone line. It was one of three Pagan-oriented BBSs in Houston at that time and, thanks to its USENET newsgroups and email, quickly became a favorite haunt of the online Neopagans there. Eventually expanding to 5 phone lines and an ISDN feed running on a FreeBSD UNIX system, the BBS eventually spawned a webpage and, as the BBS era came to a close, moved totally onto the newly emerging Internet.[2] In its time the website garnered numerous 'Net awards including Pagan Best of the Web, and the BBS was featured in Boardwatch Magazine. Although the dialup BBS ceased operations in 1998, and the website saw the end of its heyday by 2000, the website still exists in a mostly static form. In 2004, the BBS's SysAdmin, Donal, received the first Lifetime Achievement Award from the Council of Magickal Arts, a Texas-based 501(c)(3) religious organization that promotes spirituality, celebration and networking within the Neopagan community, for his work on The Brewers' Witch BBS and Pagan's Night Out, as well as his work creating the USENET newsgroup, soc.religion.pagan.[3]
Donal had quickly realized that many tensions existed between the members of various traditions that were using his BBS and, influenced by a regular weekly party held by a chat board he was familiar with, decided to get his users together for a casual social outing to try to get them to view each other as friends first and practitioners of widely differing faiths second. The announcement on his BBS regarding Pagan's Night Out said everyone should "leave the Bolines and starched robes at home", meaning there was to be no discussion of inter-tradition politics.
First PNO
The first PNO was held in September of 1992, at McGonigel's Mucky Duck Pub in Houston, Tx, with barely more than a dozen in attendance. The band that night, as it was also the following month, was the Celtic folk duo Ceili's Muse. By the next year monthly attendance was closer to 50 with occasional special PNO's (such as Yule and Samhain celebrations) exceeding 120.[4]
History
Impact
Trivia
- Pagan's Night Out is a song by Loke E. Coyote
References
- ^ a Google search for pagan +night +out turns up over 750 matches. Adding pno increases the matches threefold but with less relevance.
- ^ The Brewers' Witch BBS website
- ^ Donal was the author of the newsgroup RFD and charter, and husbanded the newsgroup through its creation.
- ^ Signed logbooks of many of the early PNOs are in the possession of Donal, the SysAdmin of The Brewers' Witch BBS.
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