I think I basically answered this in the reply to vedrfolnir - more people requires more effort (the simple fact that you need additional ringleaders makes for a harder problem than a single priest scaling their audience). Each ringleader has more work to do the more people there are. Intimacy stops being felt when you don’t know everyone there, etc, it’s harder to know everyone there if there are more people. Scaling past 30 starts to mean you either need to project your voice loudly or use a microphone, which limits the ability to do soft whispers and/or ruins the pagan aesthetic.
(Also, this is a thing where empirically, it doesn’t seem to scale AFAICT. I haven’t done a formal study but my impression talking to pagans is that pagan groups rarely do scale past a couple dozen, whereas Christian churches frequently end up in the hundreds, so whether it makes sense or not it appears to be true)
I don’t think the barrier to scaling is the practice, but the people. Large group experiences can’t be narrowly custom-tailored because their aren’t enough people in the target audience; small groups can. People who don’t chafe at experiences that aren’t narrowly custom-tailored are unlikely to become pagans.
Huh. I don’t share the intuition that it can’t scale. As long as the improvising ringleaders are on the same page, why would it fail?
I think I basically answered this in the reply to vedrfolnir - more people requires more effort (the simple fact that you need additional ringleaders makes for a harder problem than a single priest scaling their audience). Each ringleader has more work to do the more people there are. Intimacy stops being felt when you don’t know everyone there, etc, it’s harder to know everyone there if there are more people. Scaling past 30 starts to mean you either need to project your voice loudly or use a microphone, which limits the ability to do soft whispers and/or ruins the pagan aesthetic.
(Also, this is a thing where empirically, it doesn’t seem to scale AFAICT. I haven’t done a formal study but my impression talking to pagans is that pagan groups rarely do scale past a couple dozen, whereas Christian churches frequently end up in the hundreds, so whether it makes sense or not it appears to be true)
I don’t think the barrier to scaling is the practice, but the people. Large group experiences can’t be narrowly custom-tailored because their aren’t enough people in the target audience; small groups can. People who don’t chafe at experiences that aren’t narrowly custom-tailored are unlikely to become pagans.