FAQ

These are the questions that the skeptical, the curious, and the practicing all ask first. The answers here are short on purpose. The longer form lives in the Codex, in /about/origins, and in the project’s DECISIONS.md.

This page is a living document. New questions and answers arrive by amendment as they earn the page. The section headings follow 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, and practitioners self-attest. By the Africa v. Pennsylvania indicia that U.S. courts use to recognize a religion, technodruidism qualifies. More to the point, the practitioners take it seriously enough to keep its disciplines.

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

Who can practice?

Anyone. There is no membership, no test, and no qualifying belief beyond a willingness to take the Codex’s tenets seriously and act on them in the keeping of made things. The lineages the Codex names (§I) — blacksmiths, weavers, ham radio operators, free-software writers, repair technicians, and the older druidic attention to pattern and cycle — are ancestors offered 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 of you.

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

No. Technodruidism is pantheist (Codex §III): the sacred lives in the totality of the technological-natural system, not above it and not locked inside 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. 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 itself — repair, the transmission of craft, the refusal of imposed obsolescence, the privacy of the keeper — be kept seriously where it is kept. And since the framing is pantheist, 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. Circuits are good to have and entirely optional. The practice happens at the bench, alone or in company. The Circuit is a vessel for company and continuity, not a credential. If no Circuit is near you, you can found one, join one remotely where a Circuit’s rhythm allows it, or simply practice alone until one 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: the old druidic attention to the patterns and cycles of the living world, and the maker’s tradition. Reverence for a lineage is not succession from its institutions. The 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 with it.

The “druid” in technodruidism names a way of attending to pattern and craft, not membership in any contemporary druidic order. A practitioner may hold both commitments freely, and 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 on commodity infrastructure. There is no membership fee, no tithe, no paid tier, no subscription. No donations are accepted today. If that ever changes, the terms and the holding entity will be stated openly on /about/community.

What a practitioner chooses to spend on their own practice — tools, shop space, materials, the hours it takes to host a Circuit, the gas to drive to one — stays with the practitioner. The Open Circuit asks for nothing.

How do I leave?

You stop. The Open Circuit keeps no central register of practitioners, so there is no roll to be struck from, no excommunication, 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, and no one will write you off a list, because no one ever wrote you onto one.

A practitioner who held a public role — maintainer, Circuit convenor, recorded contributor — may step down and announce it on the source repository. The role ends. The record of past contributions stays in the commit history, as it does in 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 arise, and the wider field can keep using them under those licenses no matter where the contributor goes afterward.

Contributors are credited by the names they chose at the time (DECISION-MONIKER — the moniker held in the Circuit, which need not be a legal name), and the attribution travels with the work. A contributor who later wants off the public-facing maintainers list can be removed from it. The version-control history itself is not rewritten.

Is the founder a guru?

No, and the founder is the first to say so. The doctrine has no clergy and no hierarchy (/about/community). The Three Callings are vocations, not ranks, and the Codex §VII says it plainly: “They are not ranks, and they are not fences. Most practitioners hold all three across a life.” What the founder holds is the maintainer role — commit access, editorial work, the labor of keeping the site running. That is a job, not an office.

The founder’s stated intent is to step back from sole maintainership as the practice gathers other maintainers, and to remain afterward a practitioner among practitioners. A religion built around one 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 druidry, at its long root, is the attentive keeping of the patterns and cycles of the living world — and the technology threaded through modern life is part of that world, not an exile from it. The Codex §I says it directly: “The silicon in your laptop, the copper in the wall, the rare earth in the speaker of your phone: all of it was drawn from the body of the Earth… We tend the web they belong to, as our ancestors tended their groves.”

Choosing druid over engineer, maker, technician, or hacker was deliberate. Those words are accurate and good, and the practice is each of those things too. But druid carries the older sense the others lack: the keeping of a sacred order of relations between the human, the made, and the natural. And the wordplay between circuit the electronics term and circuit the gathering is not the joke. It is the door. The Codex §X walks through it.