Before search engines, before Wikipedia, before social media, there was the FAQ — the Frequently Asked Questions document. In the Usenet communities of the 1980s and 1990s, the FAQ was the primary mechanism by which a community documented itself: its practices, its theology, its culture, its internal arguments, and its answers to the endless stream of newcomers asking the same questions. In spiritual communities especially — Wicca, Druidry, magick, Quakerism, paganism — the FAQ was often the single most comprehensive freely available introduction to a living tradition. These documents were not written by scholars observing from outside. They were written by practitioners for practitioners, reviewed and revised by community consensus, and reposted month after month to remind the community of what it held in common.
The FAQs collected in this directory come from some of the most active and theologically serious spiritual newsgroups of the pre-web internet. Each represents years of community labor — questions gathered, answers debated, language negotiated across hundreds of participants. To read them is to encounter a tradition in the act of defining itself: what it includes, what it excludes, what it is willing to defend, and what it refuses to claim.
The FAQ as a Document Type
The Usenet FAQ emerged from necessity. By the late 1980s, high-traffic newsgroups had developed a persistent problem: new subscribers arrived daily and asked the same basic questions their predecessors had asked. Veteran participants, tired of repeating themselves, began compiling reference documents. These were posted periodically — typically monthly — to the home group and often simultaneously to news.answers, a moderated group created in 1991 specifically to serve as a central archive for FAQs across all of Usenet.
The formal structure of a Usenet FAQ was standardized by convention: an Archive-name: header, a version number, a posting frequency declaration, and a date of last update. Many FAQs carried a copyright notice and explicit permission for redistribution without modification. The FAQ archive maintained at rtfm.mit.edu — the canonical FTP repository — became the unofficial record-keeper. At its peak in the mid-1990s, it held thousands of FAQs across hundreds of newsgroups.
What distinguished spiritual community FAQs from, say, a software FAQ was the degree to which they were contested documents. Defining what Wicca "really" was, whether solitary practice without initiation counted as the real thing, what chaos magick held in common with traditional ceremonial magic — these were live debates, and the FAQ was often the document in which those debates found temporary resolution. Version numbers climbed not just as facts were added but as community positions evolved.
The Communities Behind These Documents
alt.magick was one of the oldest and most contentious of the occult newsgroups, predating the explosion of interest in Wicca and chaos magick in the 1990s. Its FAQ went through multiple hands and versions. The version archived here was maintained from 1994 onward by Shava Nerad Averett, Josh Geller, and Asiya — three figures who spent years stewarding the document through the group's many arguments about what magick was and who could practice it. A separate "Community FAQ" compiled the group's accumulated social conventions.
alt.religion.wicca produced one of the most carefully maintained FAQs on all of Usenet. Posted monthly on the full moon — a deliberate gesture toward the tradition it served — Version 2.0 represented years of community consensus on the basic contours of Wiccan practice, theology, and ethics. It drew the distinction between Wicca and generic neo-paganism, addressed the contested question of Wicca's historical origins, and presented the Wiccan Rede alongside its many interpretations.
alt.religion.druid had a smaller but intensely dedicated participant base. Its introductory FAQ, compiled by Elaine Stutt in 2005, was twenty-one questions long and ranged from Celtic archaeology to modern Druid revival to the contested question of what authentic Druidry could even mean when most of the ancient practice was never written down.
soc.religion.paganism was the broader umbrella group for neo-pagan traditions that did not fit neatly into the tradition-specific groups. Its FAQ addressed the diversity of the neo-pagan umbrella and the question of what, if anything, unified it.
soc.religion.quaker was the home of the Religious Society of Friends online. Unlike the neo-pagan newsgroups, it served a tradition with centuries of documented history and a living institutional structure. Marc Mengel's FAQ — one of the most thorough in the collection — covered the full arc of Quaker history, theology, and practice, from the early Friends' critique of church hierarchy to the diversity of modern Quakerism across its Liberal, Conservative, and Evangelical branches.
Why These Documents Matter
The Usenet FAQ is a primary source in two senses. It is primary as a document of what these communities believed and practiced at a specific historical moment. And it is primary in the sense that it was often the first place these traditions received comprehensive online documentation — before any book publisher had noticed neo-paganism's growth, before any seminary had considered including Wicca in its comparative religion curriculum, these FAQs were circulating freely on a global network.
Many of the traditions represented in this directory existed in a grey zone of public awareness for much of the twentieth century. Wicca was illegal in some jurisdictions in living memory. Ceremonial magick was practiced in small, secretive orders with no interest in public documentation. The openness of Usenet — imperfect, contested, often chaotic — created conditions in which practitioners could document their traditions for each other and for outsiders with a frankness that was genuinely new.
The FAQs collected here were not the only documents these communities produced on Usenet. They were, however, the documents the communities themselves selected as introductory, authoritative, and worth maintaining. They are the communities' self-portraits.
Colophon
These documents were produced by the Usenet communities of the 1980s through 2000s and preserved in the Internet Archive's Usenet collections. They are gathered here as a cross-tradition collection of community self-documentation from the first generation of online spiritual life.
Compiled for the Good Works Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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