The Free Spirit Alliance (FSA) is a non-profit spiritual networking organization serving the Pagan and Pantheist communities. Founded on May 21, 1986 and based in the Mid-Atlantic area of the USA, the Alliance's focus has been on presenting regional and local events where people from diverse backgrounds can learn and share ideas. Its promotional literature and website state that the organization has striven to develop a national reputation for being willing to work with often sensitive and personal issues in a friendly and safe environment.
FSA’s main event is the Free Spirit Gathering, held in June. It has also run a retreat event in the fall but this is currently on hiatus. All of these are currently held at a private campground near Darlington, Maryland. FSA previously ran Sacred Sexuality Beltane (held over five days at Beltane in May). This festival has been transferred to Turtle Hill Events.
The Free Spirit Gathering is by far the organization's largest event, attracting people from as far away as Washington, California, Hawaii, Texas, Minnesota and Canada. It is one of the oldest Pagan festivals in the country, celebrating its 25th year in 2010, and in peak years has had an attendance of over 800 people.
The Free Spirit Alliance previously hosted the unique, adults-only Sacred Sexuality Beltane Festival, which for several years following its inception was the only festival of its type in the country. Smaller in size than FSG, Beltane attracts about 350 people each spring.
FSA also sponsors several other smaller events and rituals in the Washington, DC and Maryland areas.
Famous quotes containing the words free, spirit and/or alliance:
“Women born at the turn of the century have been conditioned not to speak openly of their wedding nights. Of other nights in bed with other men they speak not at all. Today a woman having bedded with a great general feels free to tell us that in bed the general could not present arms. Women of my generation would have spared the great general the revelation of this failure.”
—Jessamyn West (1907–1984)
“We soon saw, as he saw, that he was not to be pardoned or rescued by men. That would have been to disarm him, to restore to him a material weapon, a Sharp’s rifle, when he had taken up the sword of the spirit,—the sword with which he has really won his greatest and most memorable victories. Now he has not laid aside the sword of the spirit, for he is pure spirit himself, and his sword is pure spirit also.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Racism as a form of skin worship, and as a sickness and a pathological anxiety for America, is so great, until the poor whites—rather than fighting for jobs or education—fight to remain pink and fight to remain white. And therefore they cannot see an alliance with people that they feel to be inherently inferior.”
—Jesse Jackson (b. 1941)