I came across two completely different news stories today that seem somehow related. Both dealt with Pagans and how crazy we may or may not be.

First off, a pentacle-wearing Druid in Australia is taking owners of a local bar to court over possible discrimination and bullying. She says they accused her of being Jewish (confusing her pentacle for the Star of David), mocked her, and was ejected from the bar for being too old.

“Morgan, 51, a pagan who uses only one name, alleges security staff taunted her about sex toys and mocked her religion outside the Cushion Lounge in St Kilda…the disability pensioner, who moved from Byron Bay to St Kilda, alleged the bar and restaurant was interested only in young and desirable patrons…Morgan accused Eddie Almatrah of trying to bully her off the footpath early on December 12 last year and offering men $5 to take her away and have sex with her…Morgan said she had gone to the venue only to check on her teenage son’s welfare.”

The owners of the bar claim she is a crazy gold-digger who was trying to start trouble.

“They accused her of threatening to try to milk money from the venue…Michael Almatrah denied Morgan was subjected to derogatory comments. Mr Auimatagi told the hearing he had asked whether the star on Morgan’s necklace was a Jewish symbol to defuse a heated discussion with his colleague…He said Morgan told staff she had ‘made a lot of money from venues like us’. A security report referred to her saying: ‘Thank you for my early retirement.’”

The added flavor to this he-said, she-said is a touch of public ritual and just a hint of New-Age cultural insensitivity.

“She claimed Mr Auimatagi and Michael Almatrah laughed when she performed a ritual “evoking the guardians” to protect her…She then tried to explain to another guard that the star was a pagan symbol. “I said to him, ‘I’m a pagan, like your people’,” she told the hearing. “I assumed because he was an Islander he was a pagan,” Morgan said.”

Now, I have worked as a DJ in clubs and I have never seen someone kicked out because they were too old or weird. The bar said they asked her and many others to leave due to a private function. Did she assume the worst and fly off the handle? Threatening legal action and “performing magick” in the club? Either way this story doesn’t seem to be a PR coup for portraying modern Pagans as sensible, stable people.

From Australia we move to Russia where Mosnews.com looks at the high suicide rate of that country.

“As many as 60,000 people commit suicide in Russia annually, the RIA-Novosti news agency reported citing a senior Russian psychiatrist…people aged 45-55 and teenagers were the groups at greatest risk, and that the Koryak Autonomous Area in the Far East, the Komi Republic in northeastern European Russia and Udmurtia in the Volga region topped the list of suicide regions. She said suicide was rare in the Caucasus^*.”

Why those areas? Because they aren’t Christian enough!

“The Orthodox Church does not have a deep influence in the republics of Komi, Mari El and Udmurtia [with a large Ugro-Finnic population], where pagan beliefs have persisted and crossing the threshold between life and death is considered a proud and brave act,”

No figures or studies are cited to prove that this is a reason. They just assumed it was a lack of Christian morality, and not say extreme poverty, or other mitigating factors. Remember kids, correlation is not causation!

The lesson from both of these stories is that you can’t use a personal prejudice to label one group of people crazier than another (at least not without hard data and an understanding of different cultural contexts), and that sometimes what may seem like prejudice could simply be people reacting to your bad behavior.

*Which is funny since the High Caucasus of Georgia has its own Mesopagan population. Which blows the whole paganism = suicide theory right out of the water.

Tags: Paganism