The dust-up I’ve been keeping tabs on surrounds public education officials here in Buncombe County. It all started when Ginger Strivelli, whose son attends North Windy Ridge Elementary School (just 10 miles or so north of Asheville), contacted the school after the boy came home with a Bible in December. Strivelli’s son explained that the Gideons had come by and dropped off the Bibles, which were made available to students.

When Strivelli called the school to find out what was going on, she was told that other religious groups would be given the same access. She decided to call the school’s bluff and showed up with several copies of a book about Paganism.

Not surprisingly, school officials weren’t so eager to distribute that. They told Strivelli that a new policy on religion was being drafted, and that no materials were being accepted in the meantime.

The school board met recently to discuss the matter, and Strivelli was there. The gutsy mom didn’t hesitate to tell board members that they need to stop promoting religion. She pointed out that other parents objected to the Gideon Bibles but were reluctant to speak out publicly.

“I am the only one who is courageous enough to stand up to your bullying,” she said. “Many pastors have come up here and read scripture. This is not a church. Look around you; this is a public school board meeting.”

The Asheville Citizen-Times reported that the proposed policy says that school employees, school officials and volunteers “while acting in their official capacities shall not use their positions to endorse, promote, or disparage a particular religious belief, viewpoint or practice.”

It also requires the superintendent to provide regular training to staff and also encourages principals to consult with the superintendent “if they believe that a school-sponsored activity raises a question” of church-state separation.

Not everyone is on board, though. A local pastor, H.D. Scoggins, complained, “That is what brings us here tonight, the tyranny of a few seeking to force its will on the majority.”

And James Ponder, a Baptist minister, insisted that the Gideons should be allowed into the schools, asserting, “We need to make sure [students] have truth.”

Here’s something the pastors and their pals don’t get: When it comes to religion, the majority does not rule. Just because your faith happens to have numerical superiority doesn’t give you the right to use a public institution to impose it upon others. The Bill of Rights puts our core freedoms beyond the reach of the majority.

This is basic stuff, but it seems that even after 221 years, some people still don’t get it.

Members of the Buncombe County Board of Education have a chance to say they do get it. Here’s hoping that they don’t screw it up.

via The Wild Hunt,

In April of 2007 the Bush Administration agreed to a settlement that paved the way for approval of the Wiccan pentacle to be engraved on government-issued headstones and markers, bringing to an end a campaign that lasted a decade, one that saw casual anti-Pagan demagoguery morph into government policy. Nearly five years after that historic settlement, the number of grave markers with the pentacle emblem, according to iPad-formatted news magazine The Daily, has risen dramatically.

“Since its addition in 2007 to a list of recognized tombstone icons, the pentacle has begun popping up on grave markers at Arlington and other government cemeteries alongside crosses, Stars of David and Muslim crescents. “There’s been a large increase over the past few years,” Jeanet Ewing, co-founder of Northern Virginia Pagan Network, told The Daily. “We’re up to near 80 grave markers nationwide.” The symbol can be found on five Arlington headstones, including that of Army Staff Sgt. Thomas Huffard, a Vietnam veteran who died in 2009, and Army Spec. Charles Heinlein, who was killed in Iraq in 2007.”

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Happy Solstice! ~ Claire

Taken from “About That Yule Log”, December 23rd, 2009.

I forget sometimes that my traditions are not the same as everyone else’s. In recent correspondence with a friend about secular traditions and Yule spirit (in regard to how I celebrate the holidays), I explained my family’s peculiar tradition regarding the Yule log. I thought I would share it here.

The one and only lasting Yule tradition I have is a Yule log. The one in my possession has been maintained since my great-grandmother’s day. Every year I keep a fire burning in the fireplace for the whole Yule season, starting with the Winter Solstice around Dec. 21 and burning until Twelfth Night (around Jan. 6). The fire is started with the Yule log from the year before. And when the fire is ended on Twelfth Night, the largest remaining log is saved for the next year. This way there is an unbroken chain from each year to the next.

My family has done this for many generations, passing down the Yule log to our descendent’s. It’s a way of inviting ancestors to join you at the hearth, because technically parts of the Yule fires they made in their time are still very much present, since the Yule log has been passed down through the generations and the each new Yule fire is started with a remnant of the previous one. There are carbon remains of every preceding fire, and when you believe in the elemental spirits, that’s a big bonus.

To my family the Yule log is the most precious heirloom we can pass down. I’d save it in an emergency before anything else I own.

by Jason Pitzl-Waters

Perhaps one of most thought-provoking presentations I attended at the American Academy of Religion’s Annual Meeting in San Francisco was that by sociologist Helen A. Berger at the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group panel “Pagan Analysis and Critique of Religion.” Her talk,“Fifteen Years of Continuity and Change within the American Pagan Community,” was a flurry of statistical information  gleaned from a 2009 re-visitation of the Pagan Census project. This isn’t the first time Berger, co-author of “Voices from the Pagan Census: A National Survey of Witches and Neo-Pagans in the United States,” has presented some initial finding from this new collection of data; in late 2010 she wrote an editorial for Patheos.com’s “Future of Paganism” series where she revealed where the data was leading.

“In comparing the two surveys [The Pagan Census and the Pagan Census Revisited] I found that the number of Pagans who claim to practice alone has grown from 51% to 79%. The growth of solitary practitioners has been facilitated by books and the Internet. During the 1960s and 70s when the religion was initially spreading, it was passed from person-to-person, most commonly in groups, such as covens. This has clearly changed as in the PCR only 36% state that they were trained in a group. [...] Parallel to the growth of solitary practitioners is the increase in people who state that their primary form of practice is Eclectic Paganism, which is the most common designation, with 53% of the respondents claiming this designation.  Additionally, 22% state that they are spiritual but dislike labels.”

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Halifax Courier,

A BRIDE spent her wedding night in the cells in a bloodied gown after turning up on her neighbour’s doorstep and attacking her.

Imogen Hope, 37, was found guilty of assaulting neighbour Samantha Pilling by Calderdale magistrates yesterday. The court was told she and her new husband Keith, known as Homer, were on their way back from their reception when they confronted Mrs Pilling next door but one.

The couple had earlier married at Calderdale Register Office, Spring Hall, Halifax, before spending the evening drinking lager and spirits at The Shears Inn nearby.

Mrs Pilling told the court how she heard Hope drunkenly shouting abuse at her in the early hours of July 19 before coming up the path and banging on her door.

When she opened it, she said Hope tried to force her way into the hallway and punched her in the face around three times.

“I thought personally it wasn’t a way for a bride to behave on her wedding night. You don’t turn up at someone’s house and beat them up,” she said.

Mrs Pilling, a practising pagan, was accused of cursing the bridegroom’s parents, who live in the terraced house in between the two couples.

Mr Hope branded the mother-of-three a “white witch” who had given his father cancer.

Rubbishing the claim, Mrs Pilling said: “I don’t deal in curses. I work with crystals and herbs.

“In our belief system it’s the law of threefold – whatever you do will come back to you three times worse.”

When asked why she didn’t fight back, Mrs Pilling, who was in the Army before enrolling as a student nurse, told the court: “I am trained to kill.”

Her husband Stuart called police and when officers arrived to arrest Mrs Hope, she refused to change out of her wedding dress.

PC Stephen Young said: “It was suggested to her that she get changed out of her wedding dress. That was the initial agreement. She then changed her mind and decided to attend the custody suite as she was.”

He added: “There was a little bit of amazement from the lady and quite understandably on her wedding day. Her husband was obviously disappointed.”

Mrs Hope told officers she had bloodstains on her dress because she had earlier tripped on cobblestones and broken a nail, causing a cut to her finger.

She said she had confronted Mrs Pilling because she had been making her mother-in-law’s life hell by playing loud music and allowing her cats to breed “uncontrollably”.

The court heard there had also been a long-running dispute over a fence.

Mrs Hope was not allowed to return to her marital home in Clough Lane, Mixenden, for two weeks after her arrest due to her bail conditions.

Tearfully, she told the court she regretted the drunken confrontation but denied any violence.

“I was taken from my home for two weeks, I couldn’t see my kids, my husband, my dogs, for something I haven’t done, and it’s upset me,” she said.

She claims Mrs Pilling started the altercation by shouting insults from her bedroom window as she and her husband walked home.

Mr Hope told the court neither he nor his wife were violent and would not have started trouble on their big day without being provoked.

It was not the way they had planned to start their marriage, he added.

He said: “I remember her getting into the back of the police car. I said to the police officer: ‘Please don’t, it’s my wedding night.’”

Mrs Hope, a trainee nursery nurse’s assistant with no previous convictions, was sentenced to a 12-month conditional discharge.

She was also ordered to pay £300 prosecution costs and £75 compensation to her victim.

• Original Article

We hope you’ll like the changes we’re making. The new server is going to be much faster than the old one, and it’ll open up a lot of possibilities that we could never even imagine before. So here’s to hope and a brighter tomorrow. Or, as we’re fond of saying around here, “Ever upward!”

We’ll see you soon. And thanks ahead of time for your patience during our move.

From: Joy News/Ghana

The Ghanaian government will soon disband all of the so-called witches camps in the country according to Chief Psychiatrist Dr. Akwasi Osei. He says the practice of confining elderly women who are banned from their communities to such camps infringes on their human rights. His comments come on the heels of similar calls by Deputy Women and Children’s Affairs Minister Hawa Gariba. The minister, who toured the Nyani “Witches” camp near Yendi in the Northern Region recently, described the camps as a national disaster.

Chief Psychiatrist Dr. Akwasi Osei told Joy News a national conference will be convened next week to address the issue. He said there were about six withes camps spanning across the three northern region where mainly poor, old, desolate, sometimes childless women are held in the name of witchcraft.

“Never have you seen a man… being accused of [witchcraft] and being sent there; never have you seen a young lady, beautiful, resourceful being accused; it is always the defenseless, vulnerable woman and when they go there… there are literally ostracised from the society and they are starved, they go through a whole lot of things including child labour,” he stated.

But managers of some of these camps have urged government to be cautious in their approach to disbanding the camps. Alhassan Sayibu, who manages the Nyani camp told Joy News the focus should be on educating communities against the practice.

• Original Article

The monument is located on Hobart Street in front of Gates Field and the Senior Center. Across the street was the original site of the Salem Village Meeting House, where most of the witchcraft trials were held before moving to Salem proper. The meeting house was part of the parish property of First Church, which is located just up the road from the memorial at the corner of Hobart and Centre streets.

The memorial was completed in 1992 and dedicated that May by town officials and the Salem Village Witchcraft Tercentennial Committee, which designed the monument to coincide with the 300th anniversary of the witch trials. Numerous organizations and individuals in town donated the funds for the project. In addition to the victims’ names, public statements by eight who were executed are on display as well.

If you are Pagan, Wiccan or a witch of another flavor, and are in the Danvers area during your July 4th celebrations, we encourage you to exercise your hard-won freedoms and stop by the Witchcraft Victim’s Memorial to pay your respects. The memorial is open to the public daily, from dawn to dusk. There is a parking lot to the rear of the site. For more information on the memorial, visit the Web site.

Witchcraft Victims’ Memorial
176 Hobart Street
Danvers , MA 01923

Links

• Salem Village Witchcraft Victims’ Memorial at Danvers

When I read reports from other countries of old women accused of witchcraft being burned , or accused witches having their hair sheared off in public squares to publicly humiliate them, or dozens of people being hacked to death with machetes, or couples having their eyes gouged out with scissors, I am at a loss to explain the basic inhumanity of human beings. And I’m even more aware as I interact with my neighbors through the uneasy truce that exists between us that if it were not for the rule of law in the United States, I might well find my neighbors at my doorstep with machetes and torches. The hatred is often evident in the sideways glances, and I’ve heard minor grumblings that any misfortune that has befallen them might have something to do with an unrepentant witch living in their neighborhood – if not a curse, then possibly a rebuke from God for tolerating witchcraft.

It’s from the perspective of someone who has spent her life feeling as if she is far behind enemy lines that I read articles from national and world news and cringe. When one is aware of the horrors committed against accused witches in other countries, it’s hard to feel safe in the United States when you wear your religious beliefs on your sleeve. Most often, just as it was during the Inquisition, the accused witches in these other countries were not witches at all. It’s hard not to imagine what would befall someone like me should I be tossed among them. It’s even more disturbing to imagine what might happen to me if some of the people committing those horrors were to move to the United States, with those same faith-based atrocities listed as viable options in their playbook.

With all this in mind, it was with some horror that I read an article today from Malawi. The article did not discuss withcraft as if it was, as it usually is in African countries, unfounded accusations leveled at innocent people, but rather as a very real problem that needs to be addressed according to Islamic law. In other words, witchcraft in Malawi is an epidemic that must be destroyed. I encourage anyone who reads these occasional articles that we post on PaganCentric to read the article in full and imagine what would happen to us as Pagans, witches and Wiccans if we were to suddenly find ourselves in Malawi, attempting to live our lives and openly as we do in the United States. If nothing else, read the article and consider the tone it was written in. It is an old article, but little has changed there or in Africa as a whole. In fact, it seems to get worse with every passing week.

The Hellish Practice: Witchcraft in Africa
by Raphael Mweninguwe
Correspondent, Malawi

Malawi is one of the countries in the region where issues of witchcraft have become so frequently dominant in the media. On the radio and television, even in the printed magazines, witchcraft is always debated, with children claiming that old men and women are teaching them the “trade.”

The issue has become a concern, not only to governmental and nongovernmental organizations but also to religious leaders and followers among the Muslim community, most of whom have condemned the practice.

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Apparently a family in Khaira village had been having money troubles and health problems, and came to the conclusion that it was the fault of a 45-year-old woman, according to S.S. Baghel, a local police officer.

“The accused blamed the alleged witchcraft power of the lady for their problems and raided her house on Friday morning,” Baghel told Reuters by phone. “First they beat her up and then a few of them held her hands and legs and then inserted scissors into both her eyes.”

When her husband tried to intervene, the group turned on him and inserted scissors into his eyes as well, Baghel added. A doctor at a local hospital said the couple would likely never be able to see again.

The brutalities related to witchcraft, mainly against women, are not new for the interior illiterate pockets of Chhattisgarh, where woman accused of witchcraft are often killed or paraded them naked. Chhattisgarh state passed the Witchcraft (Prevention) Act in 2005 to crack down on offenders, but the law has hardly made an impact in tribal areas, where atrocities against women accused of witchcraft still flourish and the majority of cases go unreported.