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Keeping the Eostre in Easter

religionnerd — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 10:45:40 +0000

By Kenny Smith

As Lauri Lebo noted in her March 23, 2010 Religion Dispatch post, “although most Christians assume that the ideas and practices surrounding the Easter holiday are native to Christianity, Easter’s historical origins in fact lie in the pre-Christian, pagan religious worlds of Northern Europe. “The word ‘Easter,’” Lebo explains, “is actually the name of an ancient, heathen goddess who represents fertility, springtime, and the dawn.” Contemporary Pagans, Wiccans, Heathens, Druids, and other such communities working to re-create, preserve, and practice various pre-Christian traditions (whom I will group together here under the term “Neo-Pagan”) agree entirely! Popular websites such as Covenant of the Goddess, Witches Voice, and Witchology, discuss the ancient roots of the Easter holiday as grounded in Germanic goddess-figures alternately known as Eostre or Ostara. Some have also begun to suggest that we “not forget the REAL reason for the season!,” and work to “Keep the Eostre in Easter.”

Now, we know that new and alternative movements, over time, typically grow more and more like the larger culture in which they live. A good example of this process (which scholars refer to as “accommodation”), can be seen in the Unificationist Church (popularly known as the Moonies). As Barbara Bradley Hagerty reported for NPR, with its membership “dwindling,” the Unificationist church has brought some of its teachings into greater alignment with the larger Western culture. For example, although marriages with the Unificationist community have been traditionally (and controversially) arranged by the movement’s founder, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, parents have now been granted the authority to arrange marriages for their own children. While past generations of converts were expected to sacrifice their careers and dedicate their lives to laboring on behalf of the church, personal achievement and financial success are now explicitly encouraged: “[t]oday, the church wants college valedictorians, not dropouts… [it] wants the second generation to fit into society — not fight it.”

This raises a very interesting question about the direction in which American Neo-Pagan traditions are headed. When we think about Christian communities insisting that the Christmas holiday be configured in explicitly religious terms, rather than, a more secular holiday defined by bright and colorful lights, decorating a tree, giving gifts, the myth of Santa Claus, and spending celebratory time with fiends and family, images of a religious militancy seem as if they are not that far behind. Indeed, while I sometimes grow weary of Christmas shopping, I always dread the shrill religious voices demanding that I observe a Christmas defined along certain pre-approved, sectarian lines.

Are American Neo-Pagans taking on some of these characteristics in their gradual accommodation to the larger culture? Can we expect increasingly shrill Neo-Pagan voices demanding adherence to sectarian understandings of Eostre over and above all competing others? I would argue that this is unlikely to be case, and that efforts to “keep the Eostre in Easter” differ significantly from those to “keep the Christ in Christmas.” This is so for at least two reasons.

Firstly, the positionality of Neo-Pagans within the broader culture differs radically from that of most Christians. While Christian communities often perceive themselves as a persecuted minority, as living in a time when all things Christian “are being discouraged and swept away,” this is a very difficult argument to sustain. As numerous sociological studies have shown, most Americans (72%) continue to self-identify as Christian, and most seats of political, economic, and social power are filled by those who see themselves as Christian. One suspects that, within some Christian communities, “being persecuted” has come to be mean “no longer enjoying an hegemonic presence” in American culture. Neo-Pagans, however, occupy a very different position. While their numbers continue to grow at impressive rates, if grouped with all other “new movements,” they only represent approximately 1.2% of the adult population. (http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2009-03-09-american-religion-ARIS_N.htm) Consequently, they are much more likely to experience not only discrimination in various forms, but social invisibility.

Secondly, unlike most Christian communities, Neo-Pagan traditions are not at all evangelical. They do not assume a mandate to make their worldview everyone else’s worldview, and so they do not actively seek converts. To the contrary, many such groups rebuff those who seek to join them and require the completion of lengthy periods of study (a year and a day is not uncommon), tests of competency, initiations, and group consensus as to the appropriateness of applicants, prior to admittance. In such contexts, rates of attrition may run as high as 90%. Neo-Pagan traditions, then, tend to regard their own teachings and practices as suitable only for a small number of persons with particular interests and temperaments.

Taken together, these differences suggest quite varied frames of reference for Christmas and Eostre purity concerns. Christians who seek to police the ways in which Christmas is conceptualized and lived are hoping to reestablish clear cultural control. For many, this is not simply a matter of preference, but a cosmological and eschatological necessity.

For Neo-Pagans, who are better understood as a religious species recently returned from the brink of extinction, and who practice a largely esoteric religious craft, Eostre purity concerns represent an act of resistance and a struggle to assert one’s cultural identity within a culture where such Neo-Pagan identities are often demonized or unrecognized.

Still, when we consider the sustained rates of growth with this community, the diffusion of its symbols into popular culture (e.g., in the Harry Potter novels and films), and the tendency towards accommodation over time, one wonders whether Neo-Pagan traditions might come to resemble more closely the dominant religion in ways that could shift Eostre purity concerns in a different direction. In my own research with Wiccans, more than a few have expressed concerns about precisely this issue. “I’m not sure I would be comfortable,” a Wiccan priestess remarked to me several years ago, “if Wicca became the dominant religion in our culture, the way Christianity is now. I’m not sure I would it would remain ‘Wicca’ anymore.”

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The Final Harvest

religionnerd — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 22:19:14 +0000

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By Lady Arsinoe

Samhain is fast approaching. Many of us look forward to this time of year. Candy, carved jack-o-lanterns, itty-bitty children dressed up as adorable bumblebees, princesses, or pirates. This is a joyous time of year! The leaves begin to crunch beneath our feet. And the crisp breeze begins to pinch our faces and burnish our cheeks. There is nothing so beautiful as frost on crimson leaves gleaming in the morning sun.

At this time, my thoughts turn to death and dying. Whoa! What? O, not in a fatalistic manner, or in the Goth-cool fashion either. Samhain is when the veil between the worlds is thinnest, when we celebrate those who have crossed over during the past year, and when we make reckonings of our lives. I’ve always seen parting the final veil as an adventure to be anticipated. Those who have taken this journey before me have all the secrets of the Universe on 3X5 notecards. Lucky! To be one with the Divine? Wow. Death is not the end, merely a new beginning.

“Death— the last sleep? No, the final awakening.”….Walter Scott

“Because I could not stop for death
He kindly stopped for me
The carriage held but just ourselves
And immortality.”….Emily Dickinson

“Seeing death as the end of life is like seeing the horizon as the end of the ocean.”….David Searls

“The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.”….Seneca

“For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?”….Kahlil Gibran

“People sleep, and when they die, they awake.”….Mohammed

“I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.”….Winston Churchill

I can’t help but find comfort and solace in these words. To awaken from sleep? To melt into the sun? How wonderful! How beautiful! How glorious! I hope to live my life in a manner deserving of such beauty.

Life, as someone once said, is a sexually transmitted terminal disease. We start the journey to death the moment we first hit the atmosphere. Nobody gets out alive. Yet, that is no reason to be fearful, or dread the inevitable. Embrace life, and live it to the fullest! One of my favorite sayings hangs in the kitchen of our dear friends, which sums up a wonderful approach to life:

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, wine in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming “WOO HOO what a ride!”

That’s going to be me, sliding into home plate with a martini in one hand and a bar of chocolate in the other. Wow! That was fun! Let’s to that again! After all, if life is too short to drink shitty beer, is there any good reason to fill it with fear, bitterness, and assorted and sundry negative crap? We are so much better off enjoying ourselves!

There is no escape from this prison called life, yet one day, we will be freed. In the meantime, we should endeavor to make Heaven/Summerland/Nirvana this life on earth. Be nice to people. Actually treat everyone and everything like you would want to be treated. Be compassionate. Be loving. There is no sense in waiting till we’re on the other side. That’s the ultimate in procrastination. Instead of bitching and whining about how badly life has treated us, why not, in the words of Mohandas Gandhi, “Be the change that you want to see in the world.”

Living in a compassionate, grateful state of mind prepares us for the inevitability of crossing the veil. The Buddhists say that one’s frame of mind at the end helps determine how one enters the next life. Filling our minds with happy, compassionate, and grateful thoughts as we cross the bridge helps move us into a new and better life. Thoughts of fear and anxiety hinder our progress on the spiral. Frankly, I don’t want to come back as a mosquito.

No one has ever come back to give a travelogue of the Summerland. Yet, I still get glimpses and fleeting sensations of those who have gone on before me. I swear I can smell my dog every once in a while. He and my cat are happily chasing each other around. My Mother and Father appear to me in my dreams and provide words of love, comfort, and encouragement. Based on this, I know the Summerland is a place of joy, peace, and fulfillment.

Of course we miss those who have gone before. That’s only natural. What kind of sick puppies would we be if we didn’t fell that loss? But, how dare we hinder their progress on the Path just because we can’t stand to let them go? That is the height of selfishness! By letting our loved ones go with love and compassion, we elevate ourselves on the spiral of life/death/rebirth as well. We will be with them again. And their echoes remain to guide us along the Path until our time to rejoin them. Dry your tears, my friends. Though our loved ones go before us, they are the lucky ones! And one day, we will be tenderly and joyfully caught up in their love and laughter again. Of that, I have no doubt.

How can we know there is life after death? We know our bodies decay. What about that which makes us us? A small, but increasing, number of scientists theorize that consciousness is related to, but not dependent on, the material brain. One scientist has even found that the brains of people who have had near-death experiences closely mirror those of nuns and monks, who are considered spiritual adepts. I have my own theory on what happens to us when we die. As Kahlil Gibran said, “we melt into the sun;” or, according to my theory, we melt into the All That Is. Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, the neuroscientist who suffered a massive stroke chronicled in My Stroke of Insight, said, “Our bodies are portals for energy.” I believe that which makes me me is the energy that comes through that portal, and that energy is part of God/dess. When our bodies cease to function, and are thoroughly used up, our consciousness is freed to join that of the All from which we came. So, death is nothing to fear! It is to be adoringly and joyfully anticipated, yet not sought. We have so many lessons to learn here, after all. Life is a journey to be savored, and the final awakening is the reward for a path well-traveled.

Think of who you were before you were born. That is who you will be again.

Yes, indeed, this is a joyous time of year! Happy Samhain!

********************************************

Lady Arsinoe’s Bio:

I was initiated into the Wiccan spiritual tradition as a First Degree in 1993. Over the years, I continued my studies and increased my involvement. In 2000, the members of OakSpring (www.HouseOfOakSpring.org) separated from Ravenwood to go our own way. In 2006, I became the High Priestess of OakSpring, with my husband serving as High Priest. OakSpring is large by Wiccan standards, and has been blessed to own and maintain our covenstead on 38 acres of woodland in the Metro-Atlanta area.

Like most Wiccans, my mundane life is similar to anyone else’s: I go to work each day (for a large engineering firm), bear with traffic, and go home to relax with my family and pets. Living a magical life isn’t always about the spells; it’s about living in a way that is harmonious with Nature, the Universe, and ourselves. I do my best to live in accordance with Wiccan principles every day of my life. I think that is the best way to show the world what Wicca is all about.

Ding Dong bin Laden’s Dead! By Lady Arsinoe Well, Enemy No. 1 of the World is dead. Osama bin Laden was killed by a Navy Seal team just over a week ago. Goodie for us. Yay! Don’t get me wrong. The guy deserved it. He was the ...
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Religion Lately: Mabon Celebrations, More Teavangelicals, Ugly Atheists, and the Machine Gun Preacher

religionnerd — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 17:01:18 +0000

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By Kenny Smith and Heather Abraham

Wiccans and Neo-Pagans of all sorts celebrate Mabon this September 23 (or there about), a celebration of the fall harvest and the Autumn Equinox, a day in which the hours of day and night are perfectly balanced, and just one day after the birthday of both Bilbo and Frodo Baggins! Looking for a primer on Wiccan/Pagan holidays?

Rob Bell, the controversial Christian minister whose book, Love Wins, published earlier this year questions some basic conservative ideas, for instance, that heaven is not a Christians-only club, strikes out on his own. Elsewhere in Christendom, one Southern Baptist leader argues that state executions are “pro-life.” Presidential candidate, Tea Party leader, and Evangelical, Michele Bachman, who now argues that the US government should have no tax revenues whatsoever, has self-identified as a Teavangelical. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Southern Baptist Convention is considering a re-branding with a new and perhaps less insular… name.

A federal judge has ruled that two film makers, who in 2005-2006 claimed that the Raelian International Religion recruited members by virtue of pedophilia, in fact fabricated the story entirely.

While Buddhist “flashmobs” gather for meditation in cities around the world, Jewish ones gather for shofar blowing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWaT90wjU4Q

The FBI has been criticized for it’s training materials that depicted the Prophet Muhammad as “a cult leader,” and the Air Force Chief of Staff has warned officers to avoid promoting and expressing preferential treatment for their own personal religious beliefs.

One fellow attempts an experiential comparison of demonic exorcism. This is probably not your religious studies professors’ idea of a comparative study.

The Church of Scientology encounters yet more troubles, as mainstream media pick up recent accusations of the “violent and toxic” nature of its leader, David Miscavige. Elsewhere, Scientology Church schools receive far more positive coverage.

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has announced that beginning in 2015, Saudi born women will be allowed to vote and run as candidates. The announcement came just days before this year’s elections in which women are excluded. Women can vote….just not yet.

Actor Gerard Butler, a consummate warrior of film, takes on the lead role in “Machine Gun Preacher.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25sM_72wEBI

The film challenges American Christians get off their comfortable asses and to think globally while giving new meaning to gun carrying Christians. “Apostle of Violence?”

Another of God’s warriors, Andrew Marin, is working to bridge the gap between the conservative Christian right and the GLBT community.

Bay Minette, Alabama judges are giving those convicted of misdemeanors the choice between serving jail time or attending church. Christianity is the only option available to those who want to opt out of jail. Christian and non Christian criminals, who choose to participate, will have to report to the local pastor and police for an entire year. The ACLU is in an uproar calling Bay Minette’s Restore Our Community Program “blatantly unconstitutional.”

“We’re not there to burn the Bible or desecrate,” said Bruce Gleason, director of Backyard Skeptics atheist group, who recently gathered in Huntington Beach to rip up pages of the bible they feel are immoral. The self styled “Atheist Athlete” created a video to capture the event at which he had “a lot of fun” and where he “got hugs” from attendees.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS5jmf5bav8

Brad Hirschfield explores “When Atheism Turns Ugly,” in his Washington Post On Faith article. While Christians and Atheists battle it out on the boardwalk, Jewish Atheists flock to welcoming Synagogues.

The Jewish High Holy Days are upon us and some Synagogues are worrying about “The Hard Economics Of High Holy Days.”

Religion Lately: Raelian Women Go Topless, WTC-Cross, An Atheist Hymn, & NASCAR-Christianity By Kenny Smith The International Raelian Religion (based on the teachings of Rael, formerly Claude Verhilon, who claimed to have been personally contacted by extraterrestrials in the early 1970s), is planning a “Go Topless Day” for female devotees on August 21 ...
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Religion Lately: The Church of the Cylon God and St. Gaius Baltar, Extinction of Religion, No “Go Topless Day” for Toronto

religionnerd — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 12:33:02 +0000

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By Kenny Smith

While they presently remain at the level of fandom and “just for fun,” elements from the Sci-Fi Channel’s Battlestar Galactica series have been re-crafted and re-presented in religious terms. See, for instance, the Church of the Cylon God Facebook page, or the Church St. Gaius Baltar.

“Pray at the Pump” founder warns President Obama, create jobs or face more earthquakes, a claim which God then quickly refuted. Others have suggested that the divine reprimand said to be implied in recent earthquakes and historic hurricanes was in fact aimed at Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor, in whose district a major quake’s epicenter was located, perhaps in response to the steep cuts Cantor proposed to the U.S. Geological Service. So, is God an angry geologist?

Moderate and liberal Christians are in fact Vampire Satanists sent to infiltrate churches, one Christian conspiracy theorist thinks so.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMAjdW-xinE

A recent mathematical model predicts traditional institutional forms of religion will soon be extinct in nine Western countries.

Lesbian Pagans, a fundamentalist’s worst nightmare. An African American Pagan priestess reflects on her experience in Christian and Pagan traditions and the lack of cultural resources she found in both.

A severe case of gender confusion seems to have baffled Islamic police in Indonesia.

Flash meditation mobs, sending peaceful vibes through the world’s cities, are increasingly common.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDTybVK76sg

The complexities of Scientology and celebrity continue, this time for Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith.

Former Fox News personality Glenn Beck wrapped up his “Restoring Courage” campaign in Israel, an event which seems to have been of interest mostly to American Evangelicals, Jews and Israelis not so much. Evangelical Michelle Bachman may already be “obsolete” as a 2012 Presidential candidate.

For would-be Dudeists fallen on hard economic times, some free copies of the forthcoming Dudeist Bible, The Abide Guide, are available!

After a very well-attended Go Topless day in Venice Beach, Ca. last week, the city of Toronto has denied GoTopless.org and members of the International Raelian Religion a permit for a public demonstration in a downtown park, though some plan to do so regardless.

Religion Lately: The Religious Art of Dudeism, Evangelical Protestors v. Vanderbilt Fraternities, and the Rise of Big Religion By Kenny Smith A Dudeist painter, inspired by classical Western artistic traditions, works to capture the spiritual complexities of the Dude and his companions. Despite the fact that even university-level courses in world religions often leave out discussion of the centuries-old tradition ...
Religion Lately: A Star Wars Mecca, Remembering Slackmaster Bob & Anonymous as Religion? By Kenny Smith Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has appealed to indigenous spirits and deities for aid in healing his cancer. San Francisco’s Yoda statue draws pilgrims from around the globe. Are we all Jediists at heart? (May the Force be with ...

Real Witches Cry Foul at Portrayal on “True Blood”

religionnerd — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 05:00:10 +0000

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By Coeli Carr, Reuters

(Reuters) – Critics of bloody violence and excessive sex on TV have long had HBO’s vampire drama “True Blood” in their cross hairs, but now the popular series has another group of wary citizens — witches, real ones.

The series’ fourth season has focused on Marnie Stonebrook (Fiona Shaw), a seemingly harmless medium and leader of a Wiccan group who becomes the physical conduit for Antonia, a long dead witch who is hellbent on vengeance against vampires who persecuted and burned her at the stake.

Marnie winds up as the mouthpiece for Antonia’s spell to drive the bloodsuckers of fictional “True Blood” town Bon Temps into the daylight. And that sort of deadly revenge, say some modern-day witches, is what gives witchcraft a bad name.

“I’m absolutely disappointed with the portrayal of Marnie,” said one witch — and professor of biology at a college in New England — who goes by the magickal name Taarna RavenHawk.

“When Marnie gives up her ‘power within,’ which is a witch’s ability to practice the craft without harming others, it allows possession by Antonia who becomes the controlling entity. Marnie lets it happen. It’s unconscionable a witch would act this way.”

Elaanie Stormbender, a witch and mother of five who lives in Jackson, Mississippi, said all the members of the small community of witches to which she belongs are displeased with Marnie’s behavior. “When witches invoke a spirit, they take precautions and retain full control to banish,” she said. “Marnie didn’t stay in control, so she’s entirely to blame for giving herself over to being possessed.”

Marnie’s behavior also feeds into some people’s fears about witches tampering with forces beyond their control, and the character’s recklessness only reinforces this fear, said Stormbender.

Christopher Penczak, co-founder and president of The Temple of Witchcraft, a religious nonprofit organization based in southern New Hampshire that teaches witchcraft to students worldwide, also had concerns about Marnie’s negative impact on the overall reputation of witches.

“Marnie does communicate with the dead but she comes into witchcraft lacking groundedness,” said Penczak, author of “The Inner Temple of Witchcraft: Magick, Meditation and Psychic Development. “A witch who gets good training usually learns to balance that with discipline, strength and focus. I would have liked to see a witch who was more competent and had a clearer sense of will and purpose.”

Another red flag for Penczak is how Marnie has begged spirits to enter her. He said modern-day witches don’t look for spirits indiscriminately. In fact, they are very specific about what they want to summon. “They’d never say ‘I’m opening the door to whoever wants to come through,’” Penczak said.

Being a witch is hard work, too, and a key complaint about Marnie is that she makes her job seem way too easy. Moreover, she actually raised the dead — something real witches don’t do. They just communicate with those who have passed on.

“Ethical witches communicate with the dead, not bring them back to life. Crossing these lines was very grave and not something any of us would advocate. She went overboard,” said RavenHawk.

Of course, going overboard is exactly what “True Blood” does best with not just its vampires, but its shapeshifters and werewolves and even were panthers. It’s the sort of behavior that spikes ratings and lures viewers.

Suzanne, also known as Moon, a witch in Atlanta, Georgia, who declined to give her last name, has observed Marnie’s huge appeal through the local online forum for solitary pagan practitioners that she created and manages.

“Since the new season of ‘True Blood’ began, I’ve seen an increase in new members who are in their teens and may be easily impressed by Marnie’s display of power,” she said. “It’s dangerous when viewers think witchcraft, as Marnie does it, is so easy. For this reason she’s a bad example.”

Still, all that complaining doesn’t seem to make the witches want to cast their own spell to hurt the “True Blood” viewership — not yet, anyway.

“My witch friends are rabid fans of ‘True Blood,’ and watch it every week,” said Ellen Dugan, a witch and priestess of a six-member coven she co-founded in St. Louis, Missouri.

Dugan, the author of “Practical Protection Magick” and “Natural Witchery,” conceded that Marnie’s portrayal contains a sensational element, but noted that her witch friends laughed during a recent levitation scene.

“Most witches have a good enough sense of humor,” she said.

Reuters

***Interesting related article “Wiccan and True Blood Controversy Good Reminder of Tolerance”

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The Housing Slump Has Salem On a Witch Hunt Again Buyers Worried About Bad Vibes From Foreclosed Homes Seek a Cleansing By S. Mitra Kalita, Wall Street Journal SALEM, Mass.—There's a certain look and feel to a foreclosed home, and 31 Arbella St. has it: fraying carpet, missing appliances, foam insulation poking through ...

Religion Lately: A Star Wars Mecca, Remembering Slackmaster Bob & Anonymous as Religion?

religionnerd — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 11:40:18 +0000

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By Kenny Smith

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has appealed to indigenous spirits and deities for aid in healing his cancer. San Francisco’s Yoda statue draws pilgrims from around the globe. Are we all Jediists at heart? (May the Force be with you.)

According to the Prison Literature Project, inmates most frequently request books on Buddhism, Wicca, and Islam. Practitioners of minority religions continue to face many different forms of discrimination throughout American culture.

One writer recalls the Church of the Subgenius’ Prophet Bob and the balmy days of the 1980s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt9MP70ODNw

Rather controversially, volunteers from the Church of Scientology have been seen on the streets of London after recent outbreaks of violence. Religious disagreements and the religious education of their children (at a Scientology school) may be to blame for the breakup of Jennifer Lopez and Marc Antony.

Fifty Pro-Islamic billboards go up across the U.S.

Who would Jesus nuke? Apparently anybody.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2Vkj0mLI2M

The popularity of religion comes and goes with the times, a new study says.

Self-identified American Buddhist Geeks gather in Los Angeles for a conference.

Former Senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell, infamous for her negative comments regarding Wiccans, (apparently) finds herself the victim of an online prank, hence her many vibrators and witchcraft books listed for sale on Amazon.

Is V for Vendetta functioning religiously for Anonymous members?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1K3XzzEICw

Religion Lately: The Religious Art of Dudeism, Evangelical Protestors v. Vanderbilt Fraternities, and the Rise of Big Religion By Kenny Smith A Dudeist painter, inspired by classical Western artistic traditions, works to capture the spiritual complexities of the Dude and his companions. Despite the fact that even university-level courses in world religions often leave out discussion of the centuries-old tradition ...
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Midsummer Day: A Once and Future Holy-Day?

religionnerd — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 03:00:05 +0000

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By Kenny Smith

In Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays, Leigh Eric Schmidt (Professor of American religious history at Harvard University) traces out some of the economic forces that have shaped the American understanding and experience of sacred time over the past three centuries. In 17^th century Puritan New England, he notes, holy-days were carefully segregated from the economic pursuits of the workaday world. The weekly Sabbath stood at the center of Puritan sacred time–they did not celebrate Christmas, Easter, or other traditional Christian holidays that smacked of Catholicism or Anglicanism–and represented an interruption of economic markets and the labors of ordinary life, directing the community toward prayer, personal reflection, religious education, and thanksgiving.

By the early 19^th century, Puritan understandings of holidays had given way to something quite different. In the wake of the industrial revolution, a vast array of commodities had become available for consumption, “from pottery to pets, from clocks to cutlery, from leisure and entertainment, to shaving and soap.” Alongside expanding inventories, “ever-expanding forms of advertising” emerged in order to match increased supply with increased demand. This larger economic context, Schmidt argues, exerted a powerful influence upon the ways in which holidays were culturally constructed and lived. Instead of representing a break with commercial endeavors, holidays offered heightened opportunities to move merchandise and maximize profits. More, national holidays that were celebrated in a uniform and predictable manner (e.g., Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Valentines Day, Independence Day, etc.), provided a reliable source of annual revenue for merchandisers, and thus became preferable to those that varied according to regional or ethnic affiliations. So strong did the link between holidays and commercial markets become that, by the early 20^th century, a number of still more holy-days (such as Candy Day, Sweetness Day, Poppy Day, Baby Week, Teacher’s Day, to name but a handful) had been proposed by industry advocates specifically to increase demand for related commercial products. To get a sense for how these dynamics play out today, one need only visit the local grocery and note the many “4^th of July” cakes, cookies, pies, napkins, drinking cups, hamburger patties, table clothes, party decorations, candles, T-shirts, and so forth, conveniently available for maximizing one’s enjoyment of the upcoming Independence Day celebrations.

That our modern-day holidays have been shaped by economic forces can prove a rather unsettling notion. We might find ourselves wondering not only about the new holidays we gained, but those we may have lost, in the commodification process. At the same time, it is worth acknowledging that cultural institutions are, like Heraclitus’ river, always in flux, always changing, and subject to any number of forces, economic, political, theological, astronomical, and even meteorological.

As British historian Ronald Hutton points out, ancient Northern European cultures celebrated, albeit in varied ways, the culmination of the summer months as sacred time. For many such peoples, divination, healing, and fertility practices (on both personal and collective levels), were rendered maximally productive during this time. Midsummer, Hutton writes,

represented the end of a solstice, the period in which the sun… [was] at the height of its strength, light at its longest… just before the days began to shorten again as the sun moved southward. In response to the swelling of heat and light, foliage and grasses were now likewise at their fullness… No wonder that it seemed to be a magical time to ancient Europeans (The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain).

While it is impossible to determine precisely when Midsummer was first marked as sacred time, it is almost certainly of distant pre-Christian origins. What is also virtually certain is that the early church developed its own liturgical calendar in ways that self-consciously appropriated and redefined (or usurped and distorted, depending upon one’s point of view) pagan Midsummer practices. Interestingly, both pagan and later Christian Midsummer rites included the lighting of festive fires and feasting as a popular custom, suggesting some manner of continuity. In any case, in the early centuries of Christian history (no later than the early 6^th century), pagan Midsummer was recast as The Feast of St. John, or St. John’s Day (although it continued to be known as Midsummer Day). The new Midsummer celebrated the birth of the biblical figure John the Baptist, said to have been born six months prior to Jesus of Nazareth (whose birthday was also set by the early church as falling on the winter solstice in December).

Although Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and some Protestant churches celebrate St. John’s Day, a Midsummer holiday has not gained widespread purchase within mainstream American culture. Wiccan and other Neo-Pagan communities are, of course, actively engaged in re-creating pre-Christian, pagan practices, cosmologies, and ways of being-in-the-world, which include Midsummer celebrations. For such communities, Midsummer (or Litha, as it is often called) is an exceptionally festive and mystical time. As one Wiccan website explains,

it celebrates the arrival of Summer, when the hours of daylight are longest… [and the] Sun is now at the highest point… The joyous rituals of Litha celebrate the verdant Earth in high summer, abundance, fertility, and all the riches of Nature in full bloom. This is a madcap time of strong magic and empowerment, traditionally the time for handfasting or weddings and for communication with the spirits of Nature. At Litha, the veils between the worlds are thin; the portals between “the fields we know” and the worlds beyond stand open. This is an excellent time for rites of divination. http://twopagans.com/holiday/Litha.html

It is interesting to note the ways in which contemporary Litha mirrors the scholarly account of ancient Midsummer offered above by historian Ronald Hutton. This is hardly accidental, as Neo-Pagans commonly look to the work of specialist scholars in re-creating ancient pagan traditions. To think comparatively, imagine a group of contemporary Christians who, rather than insisting that their own practices must surely have been those of Jesus of Nazareth and the early church (usually accomplished by a highly selective reading of the biblical text), actually looked to the work of scholars who possessed the requisite historical and linguistic skills to really know something about the early Christian world (such as Elaine Pagels, to cite but one stellar example) in attempting first to re-construct, from empirically grounded historical studies, how early Christians actually thought and practiced and lived, and then built their Christianities upon that.

This is not to suggest that all Wiccan and Neo-Pagan groups have carved out a privileged place for academic work, much less conflated the sacred and the academic. Most include the use of spiritually-guided intuition in their re-creative efforts, and emphasize the need to adapt ancient ways to the modern world in which they live. Some engage in what journalist Margot Adler has called “The Myth of Wicca,” the belief that the Wicca (or some other Neo-Pagan tradition) practiced today represents an unbroken religious tradition stretching back to Paleolithic times, about 35,000 years ago. Virtually all of the Wiccans and Neo-Pagans I have spoken with over the past decade, however, think about their traditions in a more sophisticated manner, recognizing that no religious tradition remains unchanged as the decades, much less the centuries or millennia, pass by. More, they are typically not frightened by scholarly studies that document the tremendous diversity within the ancient pagan world, or those elements that have been introduced into their traditions by modern founders such as Gerald Gardner (all of which of course suggests that what pagans do today is different than what was done in the past). Most start with the assumption (which is also argued by scholars such as Hutton) that their tradition represents something like what the ancients did, but surely differs in important ways as well.

I would like to press this point further still. Consider, for a moment, the further description of Midsummer rites offered below.

Those who celebrated Litha did so wearing garlands or crowns of flowers, and of course, their millinery always included the yellow blossoms of St. John’s Wort. The Litha rites of the ancients were boisterous communal festivities with… dancing, singing, storytelling, pageantry and feasting taking place by the village bonfire and torch lit processions through the villages after dark. People believed that the Litha fires possessed great power, and that prosperity and protection for oneself and one’s clan could be earned merely by jumping over the Litha bonfire. It was also common for courting couples joined hands and jump over the embers of the Litha fire three times to ensure a long and happy marriage, financial prosperity and many children. Even the charred embers from the Litha bonfire possessed protective powers – they were charms against injury and bad weather in harvest time, and embers were commonly placed around fields of grain and orchards to protect the crops and ensure an abundant reaping. Other Litha customs included carrying an ember of the Litha fire home and placing it on one’s hearth and decking one’s home with birch, fennel, St. John’s Wort… and white lilies for blessing and protection. http://twopagans.com/holiday/Litha.html

While this account displays nice continuities with Hutton’s description of ancient pagan practices, it also contains elements suggestive of Christian associations (e.g., references to St. John). My point here is that, in attempting to revive elements of an ancient paganism that was long ago blended with Christianity, might such re-creations inevitably contain some Christian elements? One suspects that they would. Of course, this need not pose a religious problem for Wiccans and Neo-Pagans (no more than Christian acknowledgements that ancient paganisms contributed much to their own spiritual path). Most acknowledge that history is a messy affair, and that it would be naïve to present one’s reconstructed tradition as “precisely how the ancients lived in pre-Christian times.”

So, what might be the likely future of Midsummer celebrations in America? While Neo-Pagan traditions are among the fastest growing in America over the past thirty years, and are currently estimated at 1.2% of the population (comparable to other sizable religious minorities, such as Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Jews), last week’s Midsummer was largely invisible to the broader culture. Still, given (as I have argued elsewhere) the longstanding American interest in pragmatic forms of religious-magic, and its ability to blend religious and cultural resources of different kinds, it seems at least plausible to imagine a Midsummer American holiday dedicated to personal and national prosperity, abundance, and fertility of various kinds. Thinking historically, perhaps the deciding factor will be its capacity to market and move merchandise: cakes, cookies, pies, napkins, drinking cups, hamburger patties, table clothes, party decorations, candles, T-shirts, and so forth, conveniently made available for maximizing one’s enjoyment of the Midsummer celebration.

Beltane in the Context of American Religious History By: Kenny Smith While popular imagination tends to think of colonial America (e.g., 17th and 18th centuries) as a land in which universal religious freedom reigned, the early America religious landscape was in fact quite the opposite. “In all but the ...
Keeping the Eostre in Easter By Kenny Smith As Lauri Lebo noted in her March 23, 2010 Religion Dispatch post, “although most Christians assume that the ideas and practices surrounding the Easter holiday are native to Christianity, Easter’s historical origins in fact lie in the pre-Christian, ...

The Lusty Month of May

religionnerd — Sun, 01 May 2011 11:32:57 +0000

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“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen;
I wish you a happy day;
I’m come to show my garland,
because it’s the First of May.

A bunch of May I have brought you,
and at your door it stands;
it is but a spray, but it’s well spread about,
‘Tis the work of the Fays’ hands.

And now I’ve sung my little short song,
no longer can I stay;
Faeries bless you all, both great and small,
and grant you a very happy May.” (1)

By Lady Arsinoe

As they sing in Camelot, “Ah, that lusty month of May!”

Beltane is the time of year when Wiccans celebrate the union of the God and the Goddess within the metaphor of a wedding. We celebrate the Masculine Activating Principle coming together with the Feminine Generating Principle, bonded together to bring forth life. Plus, we are a fun-loving bunch, and what can be more fun than frolicking in the woods all night a’ conjuring summer in?

When boiled down to its basic components, Beltane is all about fertility and the blessings fertility brings. The obvious fact is fertility is all about sex. It’s difficult to bring about the next generation without it! Plant sex drifts on the breeze and fills the gutters and clogs our noses. Plant sex becomes the fruits and vegetables we eat as the summer progresses. The birds and bunnies are at it, too. Babies are being made everywhere, from baby grasses and leaves, to baby birds, bunnies, squirrels, and…you get the idea. Lots of fun being had in the Plant and Animal Kingdoms!

We have a pair of crows who built their nest in a tree in our yard. They have been busy preparing the way for their next generation. Their nest is lovely, by crow standards. Once they are finished building, they will fill the nest with a great treasure.The crows in our yard truly care for each other and their nestlings. Otherwise, they would not spend so much time preparing the way, and expending all the energy to provide for them and each other. I’ve watched them travel back and forth from the nest carrying twigs during construction, and when that task was complete, gather food for each other as they take turns sitting on their eggs.

As much as some spiritual traditions would like to deny it, life depends on sex. And not just sex, but intimacy. Sure, we can go out and bonk and have babies, but without intimacy, there is no caring. It’s the intimacy and caring that creates the bonds that hold us together. Richard Dawkins says that humans have the Selfish Gene. I would politely disagree with him. I think all life has an Altruistic Gene.

Beltane Maypole

As soon as a mother looks into the eyes of her baby, she is hooked. Fathers, too, will kill or die to protect their offspring. This is true for animals of all stripes, humans included. Just as the crows care for each other and their young, humans care for each other and their offspring. A lot of time, energy, and resources are necessary to bring the next generation up to self-sufficiency, as well as maintain a cohesive bond between communities. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to just take care of ourselves, and live a selfish life? No saving for college educations, use that money for your own selfish enjoyment! But that’s not the way most of us are, because that’s the Altruistic Gene at work.

Life wouldn’t be quite so wonderful, or spiritual, if we were selfish. With joy, we watch our children grow and become their own beings. And we, as parents, revel in their accomplishments, and partake in our own bit of immortality with the next generation.

There is something to be said for rugged individualism, but without caring and intimacy, it’s worthless. So, this Beltane season, revel in the joys of pleasure and intimacy and the bonds they create. For without that bond, life just isn’t as fulfilling. As the Goddess says, “All acts of love and joy are My rituals.” This Beltane season, may we all be bound with the Lord and Lady and revel in joy.

(1) English Carol sung door to door on May Day

********************************************

Lady Arsinoe’s Bio:

Of Eggs and Bunnies… By Lady Arsinoe Can you feel the change? There is a fresh sparkle in the air. The world is being reborn! Life is returning! Flowers are popping up everywhere. Animals are nesting and preparing for the next generation. You may even ...
Ding Dong bin Laden’s Dead! By Lady Arsinoe Well, Enemy No. 1 of the World is dead. Osama bin Laden was killed by a Navy Seal team just over a week ago. Goodie for us. Yay! Don’t get me wrong. The guy deserved it. He was the ...

Magical Thinking Is Crazy!

religionnerd — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 23:32:45 +0000

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Lady Arsinoe

A lot of people think magic and witchcraft is for hippies, crazies, or those who have been kidnapped by aliens. I would say to them, a lot of “normal” people are running around with some pretty cognitive dissonant ideas of their own (Birthers, for example. Or any politician. And Fundamentalists of every stripe). The problem for these people is I have facts and science to back up my beliefs, not just wishful thinking. Beliefs I am more than willing to change if contrary evidence and fact is provided.

I also realize that no matter how many facts, backed up by well-crafted studies, with irrefutable evidence presented, some people just will not let go of their preconceived notions. A lot of the time, I get “Come on, how can you take that stuff seriously? Magic is something out of trashy fantasy stories! Nobody’s dumb enough to think it really works!”

Let’s break these statements into parts:

1) Come on, how can you take that stuff seriously? Easily. I am a scientist, in hard science disciplines (Geology, Physics, Mathematics). I firmly believe that if it can’t be stated in mathematics, it’s not science. Just because a study seems ‘out there’, doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Plate Tectonics was once considered fringe nuttiness because it didn’t conform to the paradigm of the time. Now, however, the science has proved true and the once dubious hypothesis is now the working norm.

After Sir Isaac Newton developed his Mechanical Universe theories, the scientists of the day thought there was nothing else worth discovering. They had the idea that they understood everything and all the good science had been done. Then radiation was discovered. And that darned Einstein came along and threw a monkey-wrench in the whole understanding of the universe! The point is—preconceived notions get in the way of new discovery. Entrenched science is continually challenged by those upstarts willing to think outside the box.

2) Magic is something out of trashy fantasy stories! Sure it is. So what? Jules Verne wrote science fiction fantasy stories. He predicted in the 1800s that man would travel to the moon. Arthur C. Clarke wrote profusely on science fiction and fantasy. He also came up with the idea that geostationary satellites would be ideal telecommunications relays. At the time, people thought he was nuts. Who would have thought 50, or even 20, years ago, that we would be able to be able to carry miniature computers in our hands and communicate via video with the other side of the planet? Dick Tracy did. And now we have smartphones.

One person’s “magic” is another’s “science”. In the middle of the last century (wow, does that sound weird to you, too?), the US Government sponsored research at the Stanford Research Institute and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) into the applicability of psychic functioning. Did you see the moving “Men Who Stare at Goats”? Yep, that really happened. But, unlike the movie (which was pretty awful, by the way), SRI and SAIC proved there really is something to psi power, but the government couldn’t figure a way to use it to spy on the Russians. Ten different experiments were conducted, six of those methods had p-values of <0.5 (range 9.1×10^-8 to 0.046) and effect sizes of 0.123 to 0.550 (if you aren’t a math geek, go look up p-value and effect size for yourself). What this means is that results these experiments were statistically significant and there was a measurable effect. The same experiments were then conducted in different labs, but with very similar results. That kind of consistence cannot be explained away by shoddy techniques or fraud.

3) Nobody’s dumb enough to think it really works! The Society for Scientific Exploration is a professional organization of over 800 scientists and scholars who study unusual and unexplained phenomena. Many of these individuals are involved in ”hard science” disciplines. Many of their studies have shown that magical thinking isn’t crazy. Many have also debunked magical theories. That’s the point of science. Testing hypotheses, learning what works and what doesn’t, and forming new hypotheses to test.

J. B. S. Haldane once stated, ‘The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we can imagine.” Just because something is strange or outlandish doesn’t mean it can’t be true.

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Lady Arsinoe’s Bio:

Ding Dong bin Laden’s Dead! By Lady Arsinoe Well, Enemy No. 1 of the World is dead. Osama bin Laden was killed by a Navy Seal team just over a week ago. Goodie for us. Yay! Don’t get me wrong. The guy deserved it. He was the ...
The Lusty Month of May “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen; I wish you a happy day; I'm come to show my garland, because it's the First of May. A bunch of May I have brought you, and at your door it stands; it is but a ...

Of Eggs and Bunnies…

religionnerd — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 00:49:14 +0000

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By Lady Arsinoe

Can you feel the change? There is a fresh sparkle in the air. The world is being reborn! Life is returning! Flowers are popping up everywhere. Animals are nesting and preparing for the next generation. You may even have a tickle in your tummy that you can’t really explain, that leaves you excited for the new day. Everywhere, signs of rebirth and renewal can be found. Trees are putting on new leaves. Birds are singing. Life is Good!

Axial tilt is the reason for the season. Because the Earth has a tilted axis, we wobble through space. In other words, if we envision a connecting line between the North and South poles projected into space, this line is inclined 23.5 degrees from the vertical. As the Earth rotates around this axis (which also rotates and wobbles), the polestake turns facing the Sun. When the North Pole tilts more directly toward the Sun, the Northern Hemisphere experiences warm weather. Conversely, while the Northern Hemisphere is buying colored eggs and planting tulips, the Southern Hemisphere is bringing out the sweaters and beginning the harvest season of autumn. If there were no axial tilt, we would have no seasonal changes at all. At the point that the Earth begins to rotate back toward the other extreme, the days and nights are of equal length, hence the term ‘equinox’ (‘equal night’).

The changing length of the days and nights caused early people to scratch their heads in curiosity and wonder—why? They embraced mythological accounts to explain the things they saw in the natural world. Winter always follows Summer, Spring always follows Winter, and the cycle repeats. As a result, many spiritual traditions around the world celebrate Resurrection Deities.

These Deities suffer Death, journey through the Underworld or Land of the Dead (winter), and are resurrected to life (spring). After the cold, bitter winter when the Earth seemed dead, the Springtime renewal is a perfect symbol for the return of life. Of these Saviour Gods, the one that most readily springs to mind is Jesus, but there are many others. Osiris was one of the original Resurrection Gods, who according to myth, was killed by His brother Set, His body thrown into the Nile. Isis, Osiris’ devoted wife, sought out His body, and through Her magic, brought Osiris back to life. Therefore, Osiris became associated with the annual flooding of the Nile which brought back life to the dry land. So too, Osiris became associated with resurrection and renewal of the entire world. As Osiris annually rose from the dead, so would those who were in union with Him. I will leave the reader to discover other Resurrection Deities such as Krishna, Mithras, Tammuz, Dionysus, Odin, Persephone, and Inanna (yes, there are female Resurrection Deities).

So, how did colored eggs and bunnies become associated with Easter and spring? In northern Europe, the Goddess Eostre returned each spring bringing new life and vitality to the world. Attending her were putti, little fairy-like creatures, and hares. Rabbits and hares are associated with fertility for obvious reasons (Ever heard the phrase “breeding like rabbits”?). Eggs, likewise, are symbols of fertility and renewal of life. So, it is only natural that these symbols became associated with a celebration of life, fertility, and renewal. The word ‘Ostara’ can be traced to the old Germanic word for ‘east’. In Roman times, the Celtic kingdom that would one day become Austria, Österreich was the name of the “Eastern borderlands.”Ostara, as the direction of the rising Sun, represents the dawn, Springtime, and the rebirth of the day. Combining the Goddess Eostre, Springtime, bunnies, eggs, fertility, rebirth and resurrection, you get the Wiccan celebration of Ostara!

Wiccans, at this time of year, celebrate not only the renewal of the Earth and ourselves, but also the balance inherent in a time when the days and nights are of equal length, and movement from that pivotal point. At Yule, the longest night of the year, the light is rekindled in the darkness, the Sun is reborn, and the days begin to lengthen. At Ostara, the light overcomes the darkness, and the days become longer than the night. Balanced against Yule is Midsummer, when the Sun is it its zenith. Yet also are the seeds of Death sewn. At the Autumnal Equinox in September, as the harvest celebrations begin, we realize the night has again overcome the day and that the time is drawing near to recoup and reflect inward. The turn of the Wheel brings us back to Yule with the rebirth of the Sun. It is a wonderful, powerful, ever renewing Cycle!

The cycling and renewal of life has become so much a part of the human psyche that we have built this idea into our spiritual understanding. Hence, many spiritual traditions have a concept of reincarnation as part of their tenets, even early Christianity. As is evident everywhere in Nature, the renewal of life comes from that which was seemingly dead. The cold dead Earth puts forth new shoots. An exploding star provides the materials for new ones. So, too, the Soul is renewed after the death of the body. Christianity believes the Soul lives on in the glory of Heaven; Hindus believe the Soul is reborn into this life in another body; Wiccans believe the Soul returns to the Mother for renewal to eventually return to this plane of existence. For Wiccans, the existence of consciousness does not end with the death of the body. We, like stars, rejoin All That Is, and eventually return in another form. As the Earth is reborn in Spring, so, too, shall we all be reborn.

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Lady Arsinoe’s Bio:

Easter – Christian, Jewish, Pagan? By: Heather Abraham Easter (Pascha in Greek and Latin) is arguably the most important feast in the Christian liturgical year yet the modern Easter celebration is often associated with Jewish Passover as well as pagan imagery and deities. Is the modern ...
The Lusty Month of May “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen; I wish you a happy day; I'm come to show my garland, because it's the First of May. A bunch of May I have brought you, and at your door it stands; it is but a ...

A Wiccan Perspective on Satan, Evil, and all that Biblical Stuff

religionnerd — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 01:35:55 +0000

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By Lady Arsinoe

I was raised Lutheran. It didn’t take.

I remember sitting on the edge of my bed at the tender age of five, crying my eyes out because I was going to hell. My teachers in Sunday School said that everyone was a sinner, and that all sinners go to hell. I decided right then I was no longer a Christian. At that point, I started looking elsewhere for my spiritual sustenance. How could a loving God condemn the innocent to an eternity of torment? To a child’s mind, that teaching was evil. As I grew up, I studied many different religions and history a great deal, and have read the Bible from cover to cover, though it took me a long time to do so. As a result, I have a basic understanding of many spiritual paths. This ultimately lead me to Wicca, in which I have found a great deal of comfort, love, and connection to the Divine.

Recently, I have been examining the nature of evil as viewed by the majority religions, Christianity in particular. I often wonder where the idea of the Evil One comes from. “From the Torah/Bible/Koran!” I hear you say. After all, these three Holy Books are based on the same Hebrew sacred texts. From a Wiccan perspective, Christian ideas, in particular, of “Satan”, “evil”, “the Devil”, and “Lucifer,” seem rather muddled.

But what is evil, after all? Where do our ideas about evil originate? “Evil” is generally defined as “morally wrong or bad, immoral, or wicked”. Many who follow spiritual paths other than The Big Three (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) are characterized as “evil” by many who don’t, or won’t, take the time to understand different spiritual practices and paths. From many of these perspectives, evil is often connected to the figure of Satan. There are forty nine references to Satan in the King James Version Bible. A typical Old Testament account is found in 1 Chronicles 21:1: “And Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel” for which God punished David and the people of Israel with a plague which killed 70,000 men. Punishing a people for being counted seems excessive to me. Which is more evil, tempting a king to count, or killing 70,000 simply for being counted?

Then we get into the unfortunate Book of Job, where God and Satan make a bet on the faithfulness of one good and pious man, “one that feareth God, and escheweth evil.” Poor Job gets the short end of the stick. “The fire of God is fallen from heaven, and hath burned up the sheep, and the servants, and consumed them.” All his property, livestock, servants, children, and wives, are wiped out by the hand of God, just to see if Job would crack. Being the pious man, “Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped, and said, Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD. In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.” In the end, God wins the bet with Satan, for Job never condemns God, despite all the things that God allows to be done to Job. In winning the bet with Satan, God loses. If “evil” means morally wrong or bad, immoral, or wicked, who was evil in this story? If God is the Good Guy, and Satan the Bad Guy, based on this story, the Good Guy is the bad guy. Therefore if one wants to live a Godly life, evil is good!

The name “Lucifer” pops up in modern times as a reference to the Evil One. There is only one direct reference to Lucifer in the Bible, as found in Isaiah 14:12, “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!” (This passage is actually a reference to King Nebuchadnezzar, not to any evil Divinity.) The only other reference to Lucifer is Revelation 22:16 which says, “I, Jesus, have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.” The word “Lucifer” translates from the Greek as “day star”, “morning star”, or “the light bringer.” If Christians equate Lucifer with the Devil, then they are equating Jesus with the Devil! Confused yet? No wonder the Abrahamic ideas of evil are so muddled.

The followers of the Abrahamic faiths often characterize Wiccans as evil and “satanic” by saying we worship the Devil. Based on the Book of Job alone, if I were of these religions, I would have to say that yes, Satan is the lesser of the Evil Deities. Since Satan and God are specifically of the Abrahamic faiths, who is the Satan worshiper? Certainly not Wiccans; we don’t believe in the Devil. “There is no Devil in the Craft,” as Sandra Bullock succinctly stated in Practical Magic. As Celsus, writing around 180CE, so succinctly stated, “it is blasphemy…to say that the greatest God…has an adversary who constrains his capacity to do good.” And, Christians “divide the kingdom of God, creating a rebellion in it, as if there were opposing factions within the divine, including one that is hostile to God.” If God is ‘all that’, how can there be a Devil?

The Wiccan idea of evil is vastly different from that of the Abrahamic religions. Wicca is a nature-oriented spiritual path that tends to focus inside ourselves and then outward to our relationship with the Universe. We do not see evil as being something outside or “other”. As a result, Wiccans have no convenient excuse for ill behavior; there is no “the Devil made me do it!” in Wicca. Evil exists only because mankind has evil tendencies. Wiccans understand that we, as human beings, are responsible for our own actions. No outside Deity of Good or Evil makes us do anything. We see humans acting out of Good or Evil because humans want to, and we reap the benefits or consequences of our actions accordingly. We see everything we do as coming back to us according to the Threefold Law: whatever energies we put out into the world comes back to us threefold, be it for good or ill.

Wiccans follow a very difficult path because of this. We have no Evil One to blame, only ourselves. The ultimate responsibility rests within us all. Our code of ethics is derived from the Wiccan Rede, the short version of which states “’An it harm none, do as ye will” which is an awfully difficult rule to live by, if you think about it! There is no way to go through life without causing any harm. We have to eat, for example. Even vegans cause harm, from the plant’s perspective. The Wiccan Rede demands that we closely examine all our thoughts, words, and deeds, and then to act in a manner that causes the least harm, and doing the most good.

Because of these laws, Wiccans do not practice animal sacrifice, as we have been accused of by some. The idea of taking a life is abhorrent to a Wiccan. How dare we, as Children of the Divine, take the life of another as a sacrifice to Divinity? All life is Divine in our eyes. And, since all life is Divine, we ourselves are part of that Divinity. By causing harm to another, we are ultimately causing harm to ourselves. This view is one of the reasons many Wiccans are environmentalists. By caring for our planet, and all that inhabit it, we are caring for all of us.

Wiccans have also been accused of being sex-crazed, we participate in orgies, and dance around naked. Do we dance “skyclad” (clothed in nothing but the sky) under the moonlight stars? Some Wiccans do, but really, how many people in their right mind want to run around naked in February? The answer is, “Not many!” And let’s face it; people don’t really want to see large groups of other people naked. Not all of us are as fit as we should be…

The main reason Wiccans are said to be evil, Satanic, or any of the other outlandish “crimes” we are accused of, is Fear. Fear of “the Other.” People are afraid of what they don’t understand, and for the most part, they refuse to even try. The Jews and Romans didn’t know exactly how to take the early Christians. Try looking at Holy Communion from the outside: Eating the flesh and blood of your God? Of course that sounds evil. How is one supposed to understand that? Why should one even try?! That’s just Evil! The same tired accusation lobbied against early Christians, of killing babies for blood rites, has been recycled and used against Wiccans. Simply because of fear.

Fear clouds otherwise rational judgment. People identify with those like themselves, and shun or “demonize” those who aren’t. It’s hardwired in us, biologically. This fact of humanity has been proved over and over again, in different ages and different cultures. Fear can be blamed for racism, sexism, war, and every other evil. Fear is the Great Evil. Understanding is the one sure way to combat Evil. The question is: do the fearful have the courage to understand? Or will they hide behind their fear, and continue their evil ways.

If there is a Devil, then his name is Fear.

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In addition to our regular academic and news articles, Religion Nerd also offers a forum for the religious “insider.” Lady Arsinoe’s thought provoking look at Evil from the perspective of a practicing Wiccan grants RN readers an intimate opportunity to “hear” the voice of a Wiccan High Priestess and presents us with a snapshot of her personal religious journey and chosen tradition.

Lady Arsinoe’s Bio:

Ding Dong bin Laden’s Dead! By Lady Arsinoe Well, Enemy No. 1 of the World is dead. Osama bin Laden was killed by a Navy Seal team just over a week ago. Goodie for us. Yay! Don’t get me wrong. The guy deserved it. He was the ...
The Lusty Month of May “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen; I wish you a happy day; I'm come to show my garland, because it's the First of May. A bunch of May I have brought you, and at your door it stands; it is but a ...

Goddess Worshipers and Tax Authorities Clash in an Upstate Town

religionnerd — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 00:12:59 +0000

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By Peter Applebome, New York Times

Palenville, New York

During Palenville Pagan Pride Day in August, the agenda reflected the goddess-centered theology of the Divine Feminine, which members say has its roots 12,000 years ago in the Goddess Cybele in Central Anatolia, in Turkey.

So after the opening ritual at 9 a.m. and sandwiched around “Lunchtime with the Priestesses,” the schedule at the old Central House Inn included “The Goddess in Antiquity,” “Pagans in the Mundane World” and sessions on sacred drumming patterns, dragon rituals and the Cybeline Revival.

Still, it was the least celestial item that perhaps mattered most. That would be “Discussion of Maetreum of Cybele v. Town of Catskill, N.Y.,” a legal case dating to 2007 after the town first approved and then denied tax-exempt status for the group, which has been certified by the federal government as a tax-exempt religious charity. The goddess may rule the universe, but the lawyers will help decide whether the pagans of Palenville have a future in this historic old town just down the snowy hills from Hunter Mountain.

Built in the 1850s, the Central House functioned for most of its years as an inn in Palenville, a hamlet of about 1,000 in the Town of Catskill, which is the fictional home of Rip Van Winkle and has been called America’s first artists’ colony.

Thus, it was both somewhat jarring and not entirely impossible to imagine when four women, with interests in goddess worship and the idea of a women’s housing cooperative welcoming transsexual women, bought the increasingly decrepit inn in 2002. It eventually became the Catskills Phrygianum of the Maetreum of Cybele Magna Mater, their global headquarters and convent house. There it stands: yellow paint peeling, a pink bus in the snow, bright banners above the porch.

The group’s public face is Cathryn Platine, a stocky former certified nursing assistant and cabinet maker, who long ago lost a finger to a miter saw. Ms. Platine, 61, who describes herself as a lifelong pagan descended from a witch hanged at Salem and from John Quincy Adams, said her religion had been the only one singled out locally.

“We’re women oriented,” she said. “We’re goddess oriented. We’re gay and lesbian friendly. We’re witchy. We’re set up for communal living for priestesses. I think we set off a lot of buttons.”

She said the town’s legal case kept shifting, and the only constant seemed to be animus toward the group.

“It’s a mystery to us why this fight continues,” she said. “We’re pretty clearly who we are. And there’s nothing threatening about what we do here. Come on, we’re practically Catholic nuns except we’re willing to have sex.”

Daniel Vincelette, a lawyer representing the town, said the dispute was not over whether the group was a religion or a charity, but whether the use of the house was directly tied to the religious purpose. If the use is primarily residential and the religious use is incidental, that would not be tax exempt, he said.

“Whether it’s Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Muslim, Hindu, whatever it is, we look at it the same way,” he said. “If you look at the documents, the way this has developed, the town’s position is that this is not supporting an exempt purpose.”

The town’s specific objections differed for the two years being contested by the group, but both focused on the use of the house, not whether the group was a valid religion.

That may be wise, given the religious figurines and pictures inside, the detailed theology on the Web site and regular events like daily praise observances, goddess meetups, full moon observances, priestess training and others that might not be Sunday church religion but could easily be viewed as religion nonetheless.

There are, of course, all kinds of questions that can be asked about religious tax exemptions over all, but the Maetreum’s $5,400 tax bill is unlikely to rival the multimillion-dollar exemptions of conventional religions. Still, with unconventional religions on the rise, it poses issues that go beyond the old inn here.

The Cybelines are facing possible foreclosure proceedings for the $13,800 they owe and appealing for money. But in the smorgasbord of religious law, they may also have weapons of their own if they want to pursue a discrimination claim. They say they just want to get back to where they were.

“Our goal is simply to have them recognize us, give back the money they owe us and our attorney fees, and leave us alone,” Ms. Platine said. “We will walk away from this happily if they’re willing to do that.”

A Walk on the Wild Side: Introduction to a Goddess-honoring Tradition Where the Witch and the Tantrick Meet By Chandra Alexandre Today, a robust and dynamic complexity of religious thought and engagement is being achieved through new traditions in which symbols, deities, and rituals (some only recently constructed) inform by connecting to passions, devotion and a desire for engaged ...
For End of the World, a French Peak Holds Allure By MAÏA de la BAUME, New York Times BUGARACH, France — The rocky mountain of Bugarach, rising just over 4,000 feet in the Corbières Mountains, in one of the poorest and least populated areas of France, has long attracted hikers and nature ...

The Housing Slump Has Salem On a Witch Hunt Again

religionnerd — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 04:38:49 +0000

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Buyers Worried About Bad Vibes From Foreclosed Homes Seek a Cleansing

By S. Mitra Kalita, Wall Street Journal

SALEM, Mass.—There’s a certain look and feel to a foreclosed home, and 31 Arbella St. has it: fraying carpet, missing appliances, foam insulation poking through cracked walls.

That doesn’t faze buyer Tony Barletta since he plans a gut renovation anyway. It’s the bad vibes that bother him. So two weeks before closing, Mr. Barletta followed witch Lori Bruno and warlock Christian Day through the three-story home. They clanged bells and sprayed holy water, poured kosher salt on doorways and raised iron swords at windows.

Lori Bruno, right, who claims to be a descendant of 16th-century Italian witches, performed a blessing on a home in Salem, as warlock Christian Day, left, assisted.

Residue, residue, residue is in this house. It has to come out,” shouted Ms. Bruno, a 70-year-old who claims to be a descendant of 16th-century Italian witches. “Lord of fire, lord flame, blessed be thy holy name…All negativity must be gone!

The foreclosure crisis has helped resurrect an ancient tradition: the house cleansing. Buyers such as Mr. Barletta are turning to witches, psychics, priests and feng shui consultants, among others, to bless or exorcise dwellings. Sellers, too, are adopting the trend to help move a property stuck on the market. In recent months, foreclosure and other distressed sales have represented about a third of all home sales, according to the National Association of Realtors. With so many foreclosures riddling the market, some buyers find that a coat of paint is hardly enough to rid a house of its creepy quotient.

“It’s not entities or ghosts that we’re dealing with anymore,” says Julie Belmont, a so-called intuitive who works in Orange County, Calif., where 40% of home sales last year were distress sales. “With foreclosures, a lot of it is energy imprints from past discussions, arguments, money problems. All of that is absorbed by the house.”

Homeowners of various faiths have turned to different rituals—called house cleansings or space clearings—for centuries. Catholics and Hindus, for example, might ask a priest to bless a new home before moving in. Before their new year, the Chinese cleanse the home to sweep away any bad luck accumulated over the past twelve months.

Ms. Bruno’s process pulls from a few methods: Ringing bells, she says, breaks up the negative energy of a place. Iron keeps evil spirits away, says Mr. Day, brandishing a sword across the living room. Mr. Barletta heard about the pair through his real-estate agent after his offer on the home was accepted. “I’m a spiritual person,” he says. “I just wanted to remove the negative energy first.”

In Salem, the site of the 1692 witch trials, the occult is a part of the everyday, from the high-school sports team known as the Witches to entrepreneurs such as Mr. Day and Ms. Bruno. He owns the Hex Old World Witchery magic shop downtown and she gives psychic readings there.

“It’s a very spiritual city,” says Salem real-estate agent Janet Andrews Howcroft. But the city’s real-estate market hasn’t been so charmed. Home prices here fell by about a third in the past two years, according to Ms. Howcroft. And Essex, the county that Salem calls home, had the state’s second-highest foreclosure level in October, says the Warren Group, which tracks real-estate data in New England.

In Salem, Mass., the high foreclosure rate is giving new life to an ancient practice: house cleansings performed by a witch to rid your home of bad vibes. WSJ’s S. Mitra Kalita reports. Ms. Howcroft attributes recent requests for house blessings in part to the economic picture here. She counted at least eight transactions last year that involved a house cleansing, compared to the occasional request in prior years.

The house on Arbella Street is under contract for $167,000, and was appraised for nearly double, pending renovations. But, Ms. Bruno cautioned, that bargain comes with a price. She gestured toward an empty room with “Mike, Age 13″ scrawled on the wall in child’s handwriting. “If someone took your home away, how would you feel?”

Taking her cleansing agent of kosher salt in a bowl of water and lighting a candle, she led the group—including the buyer’s agent—up the stairs. Arriving at the upstairs kitchen, gutted of its cabinetry and appliances, Ms. Bruno yelled into the air: “You will not hurt anything I hold dear. I am the exorcist of your garbage!”

She is quick to distinguish her services from that of a plain-vanilla psychic. “Unlike psychics, witches know you can change the future,” she explains. They might be described as good witches. Ms. Bruno, who feels she is well compensated for her readings, doesn’t charge for her house cleansings—she’s done more than 100, she says. Rather, she considers them to be a form of charity work. “I don’t want to live off people’s sadness,” she says. Fellow Salem witch Lillee Allee also performs house blessings and, like Ms. Bruno, she doesn’t take a fee.

Elsewhere, others are viewing the rituals as a real business opportunity. Austin, Texas-based feng shui consultant Logynn B. Northrhip is teaming up with Scottsdale, Ariz., real-estate agent Jason Goldberg to offer a package of services to create better vibes in a home, either before sale or after purchase. The two met at a yoga retreat.

In Sacramento, Calif., realtor Tamara Dorris also used feng shui to help speed the sale of a property that had been on the market for more than a year. She placed a jade plant, believed to bring good financial luck, in a “prosperity corner” and waited. “Within two weeks, I had two offers,” she says. “Most homes have at least one or two prosperity flaws. Foreclosed homes have five or six flaws.”

Sometimes, it’s bad feng shui to even attempt to buy a foreclosure. That was Grace Lee’s discovery as she toured 30 houses in the San Diego area, her consultant Simona Mainini in tow, to find a new home. In the end, Ms. Mainini just advised her to buy new construction, saying it would save her money on repairs and other troubles in the long run.

“You can keep looking for deals in distressed properties,” Ms. Mainini recalls telling her client. “But they all have an energy that is very weak for money.”

Prayers or Curses? By Heather Abraham During a recent MARTA trip to Georgia State University's downtown Atlanta campus, I had an interesting encounter with an outspoken and somewhat thought provoking middle-aged woman. Arriving at the Chamblee MARTA station, I met up with a group ...
How Hard The Hearing By Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University In an interview with Mother Theresa, not long before she passed away, the topic of her own prayer life came up. The interviewer clearly wanted to know how a real spiritual adept prayed--and ...

A Pagan Christmas in a Yuletide Way

religionnerd — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 10:00:21 +0000

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By Peg Aloi, Being Blog

When I was little, and like many kids before me, Christmas was special for many reasons that had very little to do with the birthday of baby Jesus. I loved the twinkling lights, decorating cookies, eating the savory dishes my Italian grandparents served on Christmas Eve, cutting down our tree in the forest, and singing Christmas carols accompanied by Mom on her Hammond organ. I was raised Catholic, but my parents weren’t terribly strict, and so for me Christmas was always a fairly secular experience.

Many years later, when I decided I wanted to be a witch and that Paganism was closer to my heart than Catholicism, I realized I wouldn’t really have to give up what I loved about the Yuletide season. The solstice celebrates the return of the sun; the rebirth of the sun is not far removed from the birth of the son, is it? Christ is a solar god, honored with gifts sacred to solar gods throughout history: gold, frankincense, myrrh. To some, he’s the light of the world, and so welcoming the return of longer, warmer days is a way to honor the Christian mythology and acknowledge our celestial connection to the cosmos. Many Pagans celebrate aspects of Christmas from their childhood or family traditions, combining them with an observance of Yule as the solar solstice festival.

My father was an avid hunter, and deer hunting was a favorite pastime from Thanksgiving onward in upstate New York. One year, instead of stringing Christmas lights up on our porch, Dad decided to take a mounted deer head, an eight-point buck he had named “Percy,” and tie a huge red and white striped bow interspersed with pine boughs around his neck and hang him on the front porch. I was mortified: what teenager wouldn’t be? Normal people hang lights, not taxidermy!

But I now understand Dad was a true pagan at heart, and his humor and love of nature are two personality traits I’m glad to have inherited. I now have Percy hanging on the wall in my living room, and he has holly boughs hanging in his antlers. I always cut fresh greenery from my yard or the woods for this time of year: holly, juniper, cedar, pine, spruce. The image of deer in the snow is my favorite visual theme for the holidays, and I celebrate it by choosing cards with this image, and making dioramas with toy deer and evergreen trees. When performing Yule rituals that tell the story of the Holly King and the Oak King, vying for dominance, until the Holly King finally surrenders to the Oak King until the summer solstice, I like to think my Dad would appreciate the woodsy, manly imagery.

Since becoming a Pagan, I’ve celebrated Yule in many memorable and beautiful ways. One year, I stayed with friends in the Berskshires, and we stayed up all night as a vigil. Those who eventually wanted to sleep would light a candle to keep their vigil, while the rest of us sang songs, read poems or stories, or played games. In the morning, before breakfast, we brought a bowl of home-made wassail outside to “toast” (this expression comes from the slices of bread floating in the wassail) and bless the apple trees in their orchard.

I’ve attended Yule rites with bonfires reflecting their golden flames on the snow. I’ve rolled in the snow after climbing out of an outdoor hot dub, beneath a solstice full moon. One year I was house-sitting in a remote village in England, and spent the day alone, walking to a Neolithic site in the fading daylight, and cooking banger stew for my holiday meal. In other years I’ve performed with Pagan musical groups, staging the Abbots Bromley horn dance, singing songs in Gaelic and Welsh, and chanting about fire, trees, and snow. There is a rich tradition of music full of rustic nature imagery that lends a wonderful spirit to the traditional canon of Christmas carols and popular songs.

My Boston-based coven celebrates Yule as a ritual ending the old year and beginning the new. In 2001 I decorated the temple for our Yule rite and decided I wanted the western altar to be a festival of light: no statues of gods or goddesses, just dozens of candles of all shapes and sizes in colored glass holders. It wasn’t until we were halfway through the rite that I realized the altar resembled one of the impromptu street memorials that appeared in many neighborhoods after 9/11.

In our Yule ritual, the author (our coven founder, who died in 1997) includes a poem by Charles Mackay which is spoken three times through as everyone, singly or with a chosen partner, walks beneath a holly bough suspended from the ceiling in the center of the circle. It is a renewal of the trust and strength of our relationships with others, a reminder to forgive others, to stop dwelling on misfortune and move forward with hope. It seems more and more pertinent with every year that passes.

Ye who have scorn’d each other
Or injured friend or brother,
In this fast fading year;
Ye who, by word or deed,
Hath made a kind heart bleed,
Come gather here.
Let sinn’d against and sinning,
Forget their strife’s beginning;
Be links no longer broken,
Be sweet forgiveness spoken,
Under the holly bough.

Ye who have lov’d each other,
Sister and friend and brother,
In this fast fading year:
Mother, and sire, and child,
Young man and maiden mild,
Come gather here;
And let your hearts grow fonder,
As memory shall ponder
Each past unbroken vow.
Old loves and younger wooing,
Are sweet in the renewing,
Under the holly bough.

Ye who have nourished sadness,
Estranged from hope and gladness,
In this fast fading year.
Ye with o’er-burdened mind
Made aliens from your kind,
Come gather here.

Let not the useless sorrow
Pursue you night and morrow,
If e’er you hoped—hope now—
Take heart: uncloud your faces,
And join in our embraces
Under the holly bough.

This year, the full moon brings not only a blue moon, but a full lunar eclipse, a rare event at winter solstice. The prospects for magic, for a culmination of focus, energy and intention, have rarely been as strong as they are tonight.

At this time, one so layered with traditions and memories, I enjoy thinking of Yuletides past, honoring and reinventing my family traditions. I spent the day baking, writing, and walking in the chilly sun. This evening, we’ve lit candles throughout the house. Tomorrow I’ll fill the house with music, and light a fire in our fire dish out in the backyard. And in between, in the wee hours of the morning, I will hope to glimpse a rose-colored moon through the clouds, bright, then dark, then bright again.

This and other articles can be read at Being Blog.

Peg Aloi is an adjunct professor at The College of Saint Rose and film critic living in Albany, New York. She’s a practicing witch who regularly writes on media for The Witching Hour and Orchards Forever.

S.A.D. Lights and Advent Candles: What is the purpose of religion? By Kari Aanestad, State of Formation I suffer from situational depression, and it’s called life. In its simplest clinical terms, situational depression is a form of deep sadness that often follows a traumatic life event such as the death of a ...
Religion, Lately: Christmas, Hanukkah,Yule, and Kwanzaa By Kenny Smith & Heather Abraham So Now It’s Christmas… But things went terribly wrong at a live nativity play in West Palm Beach, Florida. The camel, Lula Bell, was supposed to approach to the manger and lower herself into a sitting ...

Beltane in the Context of American Religious History

religionnerd — Mon, 03 May 2010 12:09:57 +0000

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By: Kenny Smith

While popular imagination tends to think of colonial America (e.g., 17^th and 18^th centuries) as a land in which universal religious freedom reigned, the early America religious landscape was in fact quite the opposite. “In all but the largest cities,” James Hudnut-Beumler, Dean of Vanderbilt University’s Divinity School, writes in his recent an quite excellent book, In Pursuit of the Almighty’s Dollar: A History of Money and American Protestantism (2007), “there was no choice in the matter of which church to attend. There [was] but one church for [each] settlement, [and] citizens were taxed to support the official faiths.” In Massachusetts, this meant the Congregational church, in Virginia and other southern colonies, the Anglican church, and in Maryland, the Catholic church. Frequently, citizens were legally required not only to support “state churches” financially, but to attend them regularly. Religious dissenters (that is, those offering brands of Christianity at odds with the official churches), were subject to social, and sometimes even legal, censure, fines, and punishments.

The state-church system ultimately failed in America; by 1830 or so, the last of the state-church monopolies (in Massachusetts) had been swept away, and over the ensuing two centuries the concept of “freedom of religious expression” has come to be understood in progressively broader terms, including not only different brands of Christianity (e.g., Mormonism, Christian Science, 7^th Day Adventist, New Thought) but religious traditions that look to other sources of inspiration beyond the biblical text (e.g., Scientology, Wicca, New Age). Today, one may “be religious” in an enormous number of ways, and scholars have even begun to wonder whether the most staunch atheists are, in fundamental ways, likewise “religious.”

Scholars who study American religion have also wondered why, exactly, American history played out in ways that have emphasized a philosophy of personal religious liberty. Some point to theology, noting the individualism implicit in Protestant understandings of Christianity, which emphasizes an individual’s relationship with God, to some degree unmediated by religious institutions and authority figures. Others look to geography, arguing that, as colonial Americans explored and “settled” an endlessly wide-open frontier (though one suspects native American peoples saw the matter somewhat differently), they were forced to think and live along more ruggedly individualistic lines. Still others have insisted that, from its earlier years, the colonial American landscape was, as Jon Butler tells us, far more “complex and bumptious” than has been previously acknowledged, and thus the enshrining of religious freedom in constitutional principles was simply a pragmatic acknowledgment of this basic social reality.

Butler, who teaches at Yale and is a giant in the field of American religion, overturns some widespread assumptions about the American religious past. The colonies certainly had their share of pious Puritans (New England), Anglicans (the southern states), Quakers (Pennsylvania), and Catholics (Maryland), as well as raucous “upstarts” like the Baptists (Rhode Island), Methodists, and Presbyterians (some of the “dissenters” frowned upon by state churches). They also, however, had atheists and agnostics, and less philosophically inclined others who were simply indifferent to religion and more deeply invested in trying to carve out a livelihood for themselves and their families in the uncertain and often treacherous New World.

Perhaps even more surprising, Butler argues, colonial America was filled with “magical” beliefs and practices. These were entertained and practiced by people of every class, age, race, and gender, and included such things as: astrological lore and the casting of horoscopes; use of charms or enchantments in influencing people, animals, weather, and good fortune; conjuring of angels or spirits of the dead; banishment of evil spirits or forces; communication with animal “familiars”; foretelling the future through prophetic dreams, visions, and the reading of omens in the natural world; the use of amulets for healing or protection; the finding of lost items or persons. As Catherine Albanese (another giant in this field, and who teaches at UC Santa Barbara), it is a “virtual certainty, given the geographical sources of immigration to New England, that cunning folk, witches and wizards were disembarking from English ships in Massachusetts Bay along with everyone else.”

Albanese, in fact, traces four different waves of British immigration to the American colonies between 1629-1775, each of which brought distinctive magical beliefs and practices to different colonies. The first of these was the English Puritan immigration to Massachusetts between 1629-1640. These folk hailed from Suffolk, Essex and Cambridge counties in eastern England, a region known for its central role in English witch-hunting. Thus, alongside Puritans, into colonial New England came “the rural and village metaphysics” of “cunning folk” who could see signs of the future in the present, manipulate the weather, discern the truth of hidden matters, heal illness, ease childbirth, and so forth. The second wave, a Royalist gentry class from southern England (with large numbers of indentured servants in tow) came to Virginia between 1649-1675. These possessed an “educated Hermetic inheritance,” one preoccupied with reading one’s personal fortune in the stars and in games of chance. With the third wave, hailing from the North Midlands regions of England and Wales and settling in the Delaware Valley from 1657-1725, “[f]olk magic came to Pennsylvania and West Jersey…even if the Quaker leadership discouraged it in favor of the doctrine of the inner light.” Here, witchcraft beliefs became common, as did “prophecy, divination, geomancy, chiromancy and astrology.” The fourth wave, from the north of Britain and Ireland, came to the Appalachian backcountry between 1718-1775. Among these peoples it was believed that “the signs that came to ordinary folk came from nature…in impersonal and unfailing ways and a source of wisdom, guidance, and, especially, warning in everyday life.” Of course, many of these practices were illegal up into modern times, and those who engaged in them would necessarily do so discreetly. At the same time, they were often deeply interwoven with Christianity and the popular culture of the time, an issue which scholars are really just beginning to address.

The latter half of the 20^th century has seen a number of attempts to revive these, and still older, magical pre-Christian traditions. Typically these traditions go by names such as Wicca, Paganism, Druidism, Heathenism, often grouped together under the label Neo-Pagan. Taken together, they constitute one of the fastest growing religious communities in America over the past two decades, conservatively estimated as representing at least 1% of the American population. This places them in a virtual tie in numerical significance with a great many other groups, such as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists, each of which represents somewhere between 1-2% of Americans (the largest groups are Protestants at 50%, Catholics at 25%, and those professing “no religion” at 15%).

For many Neo-Pagan persons and communities, this past Saturday night saw the celebration of a major holiday, Beltane. The Neo-Pagan calendar is quite distinctive, varying from the dominant western calendar in a number of important ways. For Neo-Pagans generally, the year does not come to a close in late December, but rather in the last days of October, when the agricultural cycle is winding down (after the harvest of fruits, grains, and animals). The course of eight major holidays (Sabbats) that follow (about every six weeks or so) trace out not just seasons and the changes in weather, but the ways in which sunlight and darkness change in relation to one another as the year progresses. Neo-Pagan calendars tend to be oriented around winter and summer solstices (the shortest and longest days of the year), and spring and autumn equinoxes (days in which light and dark are perfectly balanced). More, they are linked to the ways in which the Goddess and God (female and male aspects of divinity, or divinities), grow, mature, and develop, as the seasons pass. Beltane is a celebration of the coming of summer, a time at which the Goddess and God are young, filled with creative, loving, life-giving energy. Beltane is considered a very powerful, indeed fertile, time.

The Neo-Pagan “Wheel of the Year” is clearly a different way of experiencing time. Interestingly, as religious minorities that choose (and often need) to remain quiet about their religious identities (staying “in the broom closet,” as it were) Neo-Pagans learn to live in two calendars simultaneously, that of the dominant culture, and that of the sacred.

Midsummer Day: A Once and Future Holy-Day? By Kenny Smith In Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays, Leigh Eric Schmidt (Professor of American religious history at Harvard University) traces out some of the economic forces that have shaped the American understanding and experience of sacred ...
Keeping the Eostre in Easter By Kenny Smith As Lauri Lebo noted in her March 23, 2010 Religion Dispatch post, “although most Christians assume that the ideas and practices surrounding the Easter holiday are native to Christianity, Easter’s historical origins in fact lie in the pre-Christian, ...

An Encounter With A Modern Day Witch Hunter

religionnerd — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 14:53:45 +0000

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By: Heather Abraham

“Thou Shalt Not Suffer A Witch To Live.” How do you like that for an opening line! During a recent visit to a local book store, I encountered a middle aged man who thought it was appropriate not only to scrutinize my choice of reading material but to comment on them also. Since I was holding books on various religious traditions, it took me a minute to realize that in quoting Exodus 22:18, he was snidely referring to the Wiccan Encyclopedia I was holding. Without missing a beat, this stranger continued his one sided dialogue—shrieking that I needed to put the book down, repent my satanic ways, and open my heart to Jesus Christ. His continued ranting and bizarre body language left little doubt that a two way conversation would not benefit either of us. Escaping his venomous verbal barrage, I slipped into the ladies room and waited for an all clear from a concerned customer.

Although the crazed stranger was familiar with Old Testament scripture, he most certainly knew little if anything of modern Wicca or witchcraft. Yet for some insane reason, this crazed “believer” chose to embrace an archaic and superstitious worldview that would leave any reasonable person speechless in horror. I had to wonder if he could trace his ancestry to those responsible for prosecuting the guiltless women of Salem, Massachusetts. Unfortunately, this crazed creature is not a throw-back from the 17^th century—no he is product of and contributor to the persistent negative religious stereotypes embraced by a large part of our uninformed society. He was right about one thing; Witches are alive and well and flourishing in the Americas and Europe.

Contrary to popular belief, modern day Witches are no longer the “other”, but are in fact your neighbor, attorney, waitress, and teacher. Witches have gone main stream and believe it or not, they don’t make sacrifice to nor worship Satan. In fact, Wicca does not even recognize the existence of Christianity’s dark menace. For a Witch, blaming another entity for one’s behavior is unthinkable. Many Wiccan traditions believe in the rule of three or the law of return which teaches that all energy, positive or negative, will be returned threefold. Thus Witches are most assuredly aware of their actions towards others as well as nature.

Gaia

Although modern Wicca’s origins are still under debate academically, many Witches claim a direct and unbroken line from the “Old Religions” which thrived in pre-Christian Europe. Like the religions of yore, Wicca is a nature based religious tradition which promotes the sacredness of the earth. Although Wiccan and Witch are often used interchangeably—this is misleading. Many Witches are solitary and do not subscribe to practicing within a coven. In short, all Wiccans are Witches but not all Witches are Wiccan. Like all religious traditions, Wicca is complex and diverse and cannot be summarized here; there is much more for you to learn about their story.

Intolerance and religious fanaticism are real concerns for 21^st century. Religious extremism mixed with ignorance is a powerful and dangerous cocktail. If the first decade of the new century taught us anything; it illustrated the dangers of perceiving any group as “the other”. My bookstore encounter with the crazed lout is proof positive that we all need to exercise caution and make an effort to educate ourselves on the facts of religious traditions distinctive from our own. As for the crazed witch hunter; he is a sanctimonious ass who besmirches the beauty and message of Christianity.

Real Witches Cry Foul at Portrayal on “True Blood” By Coeli Carr, Reuters (Reuters) - Critics of bloody violence and excessive sex on TV have long had HBO's vampire drama "True Blood" in their cross hairs, but now the popular series has another group of wary citizens -- witches, real ...
The Housing Slump Has Salem On a Witch Hunt Again Buyers Worried About Bad Vibes From Foreclosed Homes Seek a Cleansing By S. Mitra Kalita, Wall Street Journal SALEM, Mass.—There's a certain look and feel to a foreclosed home, and 31 Arbella St. has it: fraying carpet, missing appliances, foam insulation poking through ...

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