FAQ

The questions below are the ones the Skeptical, the Curious, and the Practitioner all ask first. Answers are kept short and pointed; the longer form lives in the Codex, in /about/origins, and in the project’s DECISIONS.md.

This page is a living document. Questions and answers are added by amendment as new ones earn the page. Section headings are the questions named in the information architecture §5 list for /about/faq.

Is this a real religion?

Yes. The doctrine is the Codex; the practices are the Rite of Initiation and the Sacred Practices; the calendar is the Wheel; a coordinating body (Maintainers and Convenors) exists; practitioners self-attest. By the standard Africa v. Pennsylvania indicia U.S. courts use to recognize a religion, technodruidism qualifies — and more importantly, the practitioners take it seriously enough to keep its disciplines.

What is unusual is that the doctrine was written down on purpose, in our lifetime, by named people. We call this sincere form, knowing construction — the sincerity is in the practice and the commitments, not in pretending the religion is older than it is. The full legal and historical framing lives at /about/origins.

Who can practice?

Anyone. There is no membership, no test, no qualifying belief beyond a willingness to take the Codex’s tenets seriously and to act on them in the keeping of made things. The lineages the Codex names (§I) are blacksmiths, weavers, ham radio operators, free-software developers, repair technicians, and the older druidic reverence for pattern and cycle — but those are ancestors named as examples, not gates. A practitioner is a person who practices.

The threshold most people choose is the Rite of Initiation, performed alone or in a Circuit. Performing it is the self-attestation. Nothing else is asked.

Do I have to give up other religions to practice this one?

No. Technodruidism is pantheist (Codex §III) — the sacred is held to be immanent in the totality of the technological-natural system, not perched above it or restricted to particular objects or institutions. The doctrine makes no exclusivity claim against any other tradition. Practitioners who also hold Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Pagan, Reform Druid, secular-humanist, or any other commitments do so freely, and the Open Circuit takes no position on the compatibility — that is for each practitioner and their other communities to work out.

What is asked is that the practice — repair, transmission of craft, refusal of imposed obsolescence, privacy of the keeper — be kept seriously where it is kept. The pantheist framing means there is no rival deity to renounce.

Can I be a Technodruid without joining a Circuit?

Yes. Most practitioners are. A Circuit is a local gathering — a workbench, a parts library, a documentation shelf, an open invitation to apprentices — and they are valuable, but they are optional. The practice happens at the bench, alone or with others; the Circuit is a container for company and continuity, not a credential. Practitioners who have no Circuit nearby may found one, join one remotely if that suits a particular Circuit’s cadence, or simply practice solo until a Circuit forms within reach.

The Open Circuit keeps no list of solo practitioners and asks for none. Practitioners are self-attested.

What is the relationship to neo-druidism / Reform Druids / OBOD?

We are not them, and they are not us. The Codex §I names two lineages explicitly: the ancient druidic reverence for the patterns and cycles of the living world, and the maker’s tradition. Reverence for the lineage is not succession from the institutions. Modern druidic orders — the Reformed Druids of North America (RDNA), the Order of Bards, Ovates & Druids (OBOD), Ár nDraíocht Féin (ADF), and others — have their own histories, their own canon, and their own coordinating bodies, and we have no formal connection to any of them. We honor what they have kept; we do not claim continuity.

The “druid” in technodruidism names a way of attending to pattern and craft, not a membership in any contemporary druidic order. A practitioner may freely hold both commitments; many do.

What does the Open Circuit cost?

Nothing. The canonical documents are released under CC BY-SA 4.0; the code is open (MIT); the site is self-hosted and runs on commodity infrastructure. There is no membership fee, no tithe, no paid tier, no subscription. There are no donations accepted today; if and when that changes, the terms and the holding entity will be stated openly on /about/community.

Costs that practitioners may choose to incur on their own — tools, shop space, materials, the time to host a Circuit, the money to travel to one — are kept by the practitioner. The Open Circuit asks for nothing.

How do I leave?

You stop. Because the Open Circuit keeps no central register of practitioners, there is no roll to be struck from, no excommunication process, no exit interview. A practitioner who steps away from the practice is no longer practicing; that is the whole mechanism. No one will follow up. No one will write you off a list, because no one wrote you on one.

A practitioner who held a public role — maintainer, Circuit convenor, recorded contributor — may step down from that role and announce the step-down on the source repository. The role ends; the record of past contributions remains in the commit history, as with any open-source project.

What happens to my contributions if I leave?

They remain. Contributions to the canonical corpus and the living documents are released under CC BY-SA 4.0 (content) and MIT (code). Once landed, they belong to the commons; the Open Circuit, any forks that may arise, and the wider field may continue to use them under those licenses regardless of the contributor’s later affiliation.

Contributors are credited by the names they chose at the time (DECISION-MONIKER — the moniker held in the Circuit, not necessarily the legal name); the attribution travels with the work. A contributor who later wishes to be removed from the public-facing maintainers list can be removed; the authoritative version-control history is not rewritten.

Is the founder a guru?

No, and the founder is the first to say so. The technodruidic doctrine has no clergy and no hierarchy (/about/community); the Three Callings are vocational, not ranked; the Codex §VII puts it plainly: “They are not hierarchical, and they are not exclusive — most practitioners hold all three across their lives.” The founder holds the maintainer role — commit access, editorial work, the labor of keeping the site running — which is a functional role, not an office.

The founder’s stated intent is to step back from sole maintainership as the practice gathers other maintainers, and to remain a practitioner among practitioners thereafter. A religion that defines itself around a single person’s authority is a personality cult, and the Open Circuit is structured specifically to refuse that shape (see DECISION-MONIKER and /about/origins).

Why “druid” if this is about technology?

Because druidism, at its long root, is about the attentive keeping of the patterns and cycles of the living world — and the technological substrate of modern life is part of that world, not a departure from it. The Codex §I makes the framing explicit: “The silicon, copper, and rare earths comprising our devices are sacred materials drawn from the body of the Earth… we tend the web they belong to, as our ancestors tended circuits.”

The choice of druid over engineer, maker, technician, or hacker is deliberate. Those words are accurate and good; the practice is also each of those things. But druid carries the older sense — the keeping of a sacred order of relations between the human, the made, and the natural — that the others lack. The wordplay between circuit (electronic) and circuit (druidic gathering) is not the joke; it is the door. The Codex §X walks through it.