About This Website

Hi, I'm Munušninanna and this is not only my first website ever, but a love letter to the local community and its history.

WitchVox, which previously acted as a central hub for Pagan groups to post information about their groups and events, made the decision to go offline at the end of 2019.

This was a big blow to online organizing. There have been previous (webrings, yahoo groups, mailing lists) and contemporary efforts (new websites, Facebook, Reddit) to replicate this, but with every transition some data is inevitably lost. Using the Internet Archive's incredible tool The Wayback Machine, you can still view defunct websites but are limited to what instances were captured. For large website like WitchVox, the archive is fairly good - it has mutliple snapshots per year, for its entire lifetime. This doesn't work as well for smaller websites or specific subpages of a larger website (in which the homepage may have been archived, but not anything else).

I have spent a *mumble mumble* amount of hours scouring these sites and webrings for traces of Pagan Group listings for the state of Georgia. When possible, I have gathered contact information and any official group descriptions, as once posted publically. In many cases I have expanded upon the information initially available. Unfortunately, for other groups there is either no extant or achived information or the information available is too vague to connect it to another data point.

Why teach myself HTML just to do this? Well, to be honest this looks and operates soooo much better as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. But in the course of my research, I have absolutely fallen in love with the aesthetics of the Web 1.0 era and the ways in which Pagan early adopters utilized the tools available to them. That has me pondering...

• How did they market themselves, share information and reach target audiences pre-Google or modern SEO, and transit data from paper to digital?
• What topics were considered most important to preserve versus better served offline?
• Who wanted a web presence and who did not?

I personally found a great group via WitchVox. I was new to town and feeling lonely. A quick google search for 'Open Litha Circles near me' brought it up. Since then, I have made incredible friends and opened up my world. And now, via this research, I have stumbled upon a vast network of stories and people. I wonder how many will be lost as the internet continues to be a pile of dead links. I want to contribute to the next generation experiencing that feeling. I don't know much about the art and science of Archiving, but by golly I want to try.

Why just Georgia? Well, it's an impossible task even limiting it down to one state. For the time period 1996 to 2025 I already have approx. 264 groups indexed. Also, uh duh, that's my home. I don't really intend to ever expand in scope. That's a good enough chunk of data.