Unleash the Hounds! (Link Roundup)

There are lots of articles and essays of interest to modern Pagans out there, sometimes more than I can write about in-depth in any given week. So The Wild Hunt must unleash the hounds in order to round them all up.

As you may have already heard, Congressional newspaper The Hill picked up the story of presidential hopeful Gary Johnson’s Q&A with Pagan and Hindu media on Sunday. You can read some follow-up and transcribed excerpts, here. Here’s Star Foster’s take. Here’s PNC-Bay Area’s report. I’m hoping more candidates for high office take the time to speak to their Pagan constituents, here’s to “GOP presidential hopeful courts pagans” being a headline we see again.
A team from PNC-Bay Area recently attended the Bioneers Conference that took place last weekend in San Rafael, California. Several reports, interviews, and photos are forthcoming. Until then, you can download a short interview with Pagan author and activist Starhawk conducted at the conference.
Chas Clifton points to a Salon.com review of Debbie Nathan’s new book “Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case”. An investigation into the famous and much-adapted still-in-print book “Sybil,” it tells how it helped fuel the Satanic abuse moral panic of the 1980s, and in turn ruined thousands of lives. Debbie Nathan is also the author of “Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt”. This is going on my must-read list!
The Guardian looks at Glastonbury and its “use of all these sacred sites by different groups. Christians and Pagans, Buddhists and new-agers all flock to the well, the tor and to the abbey. Each of them gleans a different meaning from the same phenomenon.”
Dominionists advise other Dominionists to tone down their rhetoric, noting that the “language of take over” is “very bad for media”. For more on this, check out a rather even-handed AP article on the political coming out of this movement. Also, a conservative evangelical warns us of the “cult of Rick Perry.”
LAShTAL interviews Tobias Churton, author of “Aleister Crowley: The Biography: Spiritual Revolutionary, Romantic Explorer, Occult Master and Spy”. Quote: “We are in the position, for the first time in history, to see the Man, warts and all. That’s it.”
Yeshe Rabbit, Founder and High Priestess of CAYA Coven, has decided to give her view of events at PantheaCon 2011 relating to the Rite of Lilith and the issue of trans exclusion. If you’re new to this discussion and want some context, check out this post.
Things Pagans have invented: Museums.
The LA Times features a lengthy expose on the now-infamous Kabbalah Centre, you know, the one that Madonna has been involved in, and is now fraught with scandal.
A registered sex offender in Oregon was arrested in Idaho for having “sexual contact” with two teenagers. The man, James Stueckle, allegedly met one of the teens through a Wiccan website (no, they don’t say which one).
Rookie Magazine has an interesting essay up about teenage girls, Witchcraft, the occult, and female power. Quote: “Much of the world’s paranormal history has to do with adults being terrified of teenage girls.”
Amanda Marcotte asks: Its 2011, why God is still involved in American politics? Quote: “By not challenging the assertion that only Christians should hold office, mainstream journalists encourage bigotry against all religious minorities, including atheists.”

That’s it for now! Feel free to discuss any of these links in the comments, some of these I may expand into longer posts as needed.

Pagan Puff Pieces

I wonder if the phases people go through in their youth should be given more thought, instead of dismissed as pure silliness and folly. Dumb teen girls may be onto something, but they can be kind of weird about it, being dumb youth, and the rest of us have an idea of dumb youth to just wave it off. “That was back when I thought I was a witch…” said an aunt of mine who’s now a corporate type.

But, on not quite so related note, I remember that moment of revelation as a teen, realizing the world was essentially afraid of my age group, like we were going around, looking at people and wringing our hands. I mean, it was not all that long before that I saw clear plastic “Safety backpacks” in stores. It hit me they were sitting around, wondering when we would explode…

Come to think of it, a lot of the fights over what to teach kids in school seem to be about managing them the way they are now instead of preparing them for when they are adults.
- Lioness
  
  IDK I was born within a year after the Baby Boom ended. The adults weren’t afraid of us. They completely ignored us. Widespread fear of the young happened later, when they decided not to devote the resources to provide young people with decent childhoods.
- http://blog.chasclifton.com Chas Clifton
  
  “realizing the world was essentially afraid of my age group,”
  
  This meme has been around for a while. The anarchist philosopher Paul Goodman wrote about it Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System published in . . . 1960. So he was not even talking about the Baby Boomers but about their siblings born before World War II.
  - Baruch Dreamstalker
    
    It was upon that generation that the demonic icon of the “juvenile delinquent” was first projected. I was alive then and remember it quite well.
http://forestdoor.wordpress.com/ Dver

The Rookie Magazine article was a bit disappointing, though I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Yes, she has a point about the societal and psychological factors at play, but that doesn’t negate the spiritual side of things. Adolescent girls ARE kind of scary, precisely because they are so often attracted to (and attractive to) supernatural forces that they don’t understand, and therefore often get in way over their heads (it happened to me, only I learned how to better navigate that terrain rather than dismissing it as imagination once I grew up). There is power there that can’t be explained away as simply hormones or cultural tropes.
Charles Cosimano

There were warts on Uncle Al that we don’t know about already?
Anonymous

Apologies for this OT comment. Info at the Hail Columbia blog and my blog about a demonstration in DC to counter NAR’s attacks on religious liberty. Oct. 30th. Statement from Rev. Barry Lynn. Katrina Messenger to lead ritual
- http://www.magickal-media.com Alice C. “A.C.” Fisher Aldag
  
  Politely requesting that you counter some of the anger and fear with goals such as religious tolerance and honoring Columbia. Yeah, I know, that is the ultimate goal, but I’m hearing words like “attacks” and wondering if that is creating a rather negative energy field that ultimately will cause problems.
  - cara
    
    You continue to ask that Hail Columbia have religious tolerance and such as a goal. If you had read anything by Hail Columbia, you would know that is, and has been from the start, the primary goal.
    
    This is from the Hail Columbia website’s “about’ page: Our mission is to distribute information and coordinate events throughout the United States to help re-affirm the idea set forth in our founding document: that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
    
    These words, the first sixteen words of the First Amendment to the Constitution, help to create the diverse society that gives rise to new ideas, accepts new cultures, and remains flexible in the face of an increasingly complicated world.
    
    Or, at least that’s the idea. We all know that there are those who threaten this freedom by seeking to enshrine a specific religion or creed either through legislation or manipulation. Throughout our history, these groups have denied others the rights they claim for themselves. We hope that through civil action we can help to defend the wall of separation that Thomas Jefferson wrote of in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist association.
    
    This letter was written to assure them that it was not the place of the government to establish or enforce a national religion. Who were they? A religious minority in Connecticut worried because their religious freedoms were seen as granted by their legislature rather than rights to be held in perpetuity.
    
    Now, more than 200 years later, we will — through the Hail Columbia project — continue to make sure our elected officials recognize and protect our religious liberty and freedom. To make sure that they don’t forget what our founding fathers and documents established for us. To make sure that our pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness is as valid and as protected as those of others.
    
    We’re just getting started; our edges are a little rough. But, if you’d like to be involved, you can check out the other areas of our site. We’re currently seeking project coordinators in state and regional areas as well as blog contributors. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions or suggestions and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
    
    http://hailcolumbia.us/
Daniel Kestral

In Celtic Mythology and Folklore, the hill/mound of Glastonbury opens on Nos Calan Gaef. Gwynn ap Nudd, the God of the Otherworld and the Sidhe, goes on the Wild Hunt, riding the White Horse of Sovereignty, to collect the souls of those who have died during the year.
Kilmrnock

Aye, the Establishment as we used to call them.I’m a child of the 60′s, the last of the post WW2 boomers. The older set, the estabishment has always had trouble talking to, equating to the young. This is nothing new .Tis rather odd to me now , that i’m part of the establishment myself . Altho some of this stuff we can chalk up to the generation gap , music , clothes etc. There is alot we can learn from our young ones .I can’t stand my daughters music either,lol. There was a song from the 70 ‘s, that to me, sums it a up.The song is Teach Your Children by CSN. Those of you my age will know who that is . The song starts out w/ teach your children well and ends w/ children teach your parents well.Any reasonable parent knows these words ring true.We need the listen to and guild our young ones as best we can , that also includes our own wonderful fluff bunny newbies . Kilm
Michael

As a Pagan therapist I do see occasional ritual abuse, recovered memories, and multiple personality (DiD) amongst patients. We stand in danger of denying the victims healing and redress for their injuries when we diss all possibility of multiple personality and/or ritual abuse actually existing. Both of these exist.

As Pagans, we need to decouple our loathing of being lumped in with Satanism and our dislike of evangelicals panicking over everything occult from consideration of the reality of some horrific and real forms of abuse and the mental disorders they cause.

Debbie Nathan’s “Sybil Exposed” may be a good book (I have not read it) but the Salon article seems full of cheap shots at multiple personality (DiD).

Unleash the Hounds! (Link Roundup)

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