The Spirit Way Project

Who decides what's sacred and what's supernatural? What's religion and what's magic? It's been a rhetorical problem throughout history.

If it's the mainstream supernaturalism of your own culture, it looks like religion to you. If it's an alternative supernatural tradition within your own culture or the supernaturalism of somebody else's, it may look to you like something else. (Magic. Witchcraft. Worse.) SPIRIT WAY PROJECT doesn't try to draw the hard line. It considers sacred/supernatural tradition to be of neglected value in our society, and believes that a serious study of a single area - Western New York - with that focus could be quite illuminating. Until someone starts putting the puzzle together we have no idea what shape it may take.

SPIRIT WAY PROJECT is a group of para-professionals dedicated to the understanding, the preservation, and the commemoration of the sacred/supernatural heritage of Western New York and the Niagara Frontier. We welcome supporters, colleagues and co-researchers.

Formed in May 2008 as the inspiration of author Mason Winfield, the organization is called "Spirit Way Project" after one of the nicknames for this upstate region, once the territory of the Iroquois Seneca nation. (In post-Contact years it was known as "the Burned-over District" and "Spirit Way" because of its proliferation of inspired cults, communities and activity.)

Our founding members - "Deans" in "the Invisible College" - have diverse fields of experience: folklore, mythology, religion, and even "ghosthunting..." We have perspectives from many different world-traditions, including African-American, Native American, Christian, Wiccan, Asian, and Spiritualist. Some of us are objective-thinkers, authors and teachers. Others are psychics, mystics, dowsers and intuitives. Mutual respect and good will unites us, with the hope of arriving at a better world by raising the bar of understanding.

We teach together and separately, in "Philistine Hall" on the Roycroft Campus and in many other places about Western New York. We communicate among ourselves about psychic and spiritual developments. We believe not only in the limitation of any single approach to the psychic/paranormal, but that the cross-disciplinary approach is the only chance at the fullest possible understanding.

SPIRIT WAY PROJECT solicits members to join us in this mission, keeping the heritage alive and broadening its understanding.