PARKERSBURG, W.Va.- The city council has “voted to uphold a ban on fortune-telling this week, despite a formal request from a local entrepreneur to do away with the decades-old law,” as reported by Riverside City News. In June we published the story of Heather Cooper, who had opened up a local shop called Hawthorn. Her intent was to offer Tarot readings as well as a place for local artists to display their work. However, she was denied a business license due to an old fortune-telling law, and she pledged to fight to have it removed.
After her first attempt, it was announced that the Council opted to keep the law, with a vote of 5-3. Cooper was disappointed, but she is continuing to work in the store and will keep trying. Cooper wrote, “We will not be doing any readings until further notice. We WILL, however, have classes at our store and continue to have consigned work from local artists. Stop by to see what we have and continue to watch the page for upcoming classes.”
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PENSACOLA, Fla. — Pagan David Suhor, the founder of the local chapter of The Satanic Temple, delivered his invocation before the Pensacola City Council meeting July 14. As we previously reported, Suhor’s scheduled appearance generated concerns, and a special meeting was held in order to decide whether or not to cancel the city’s inclusive prayer policy.
The council voted to keep the invocations, and Suhor was left on the schedule. However, when the day arrived, the council meeting did not run as smoothly as officials would have liked. Suhor’s invocation was interrupted by people reciting the Lord’s Prayer, one council person walked, and others protested. During the meeting several people, including Suhor, debated the policy again.
The entire meeting, including the opening invocation, can be viewed online. We will have more from Suhor about his religious freedom work in the coming week.
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ATLANTA, Ga. — It was announced this week that the Celtic American folk band Emerald Rose would be retiring. The announcement reads, “It’s been a great journey, but all things have a life cycle. It is time for us to let you all know that Emerald Rose has decided to retire as a band after the end of this year.”
The group will be performing at Dragon*Con, held in annually in Atlanta over Labor Day weekend, and they are looking for one more venue to stage a farewell concert. The Wild Hunt has spoken to band member, singer and songwriter Arthur Hinds about Emerald Rose’s history, music and the retirement. We will bring you that interview this week.
In Other News
- EarthSpirit Community’s co-founder Andras Corban-Arthen has been in Prague participating in the annual meeting for the European Congress of Ethnic Religions (ECER). Corban-Arthen, who is currently serving as the organization’s president, wrote, “Representatives of 20 countries have gathered in a marvelous old building which currently houses the Czech Academy of Sciences.” Reporting from the event, Corban-Arthen said that they participated in a ritual built around “an old Celtic tripod of stones on the grounds of Vyšehrad.” He was reportedly told by locals that the “more than two hundred” people at that ceremony made up “the largest gathering of pagans in [Prague] in modern times.”
- The Temple of Goddess Spirituality, dedicated to Sekhmet, is experiencing a fiscal crisis. Founded in 1993, the temple is located in the Nevada desert near Cactus Springs. For 23 years, it has operated on the principle of the “gift economy.” However, in reality, the temple, which includes land and a structure, has been almost entirely supported by its founder Genevieve Vaughan. Donations reportedly make up less than 5% of their budget. Now in her 70s, Vaughan is not able to keep up with the temple’s needs. The organization has created a new governing “Temple Council” to develop new methods of funding. As they do that, donations of money and supplies are being accepted.
![Temple of Goddess Spirituality in Nevada [Courtesy Photo]](https://wildhunt.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/temple1_JPG-500x375.jpg)
Temple of Goddess Spirituality in Nevada [www.sekhmettemple.com]
- Earth Traditions, based in Illinois, has announced a Death Midwife Certification Class for February 2017. The announcement was just made and a Facebook event created. The class will be held in Archer House, Northfield Minnesota and will be led by Angie Buchanan, who was trained and certified as a Certified Death Midwife by Nora Cedarwind Young, one of the founders of the Death Midwife movement. Buchanan said, “Death is the only guarantee we have in life and it is a sacred Rite of Passage deserving of as much thoughtful care and planning as any other life event.” Registration for the class is online and currently open.
- The Guardian has reported on the opening of a local metaphysical store in the city of Lancaster. The owner of the new shop, called Bell, Book & Candle, is 38-year-old Dubhlainn Earley, who describes himself as a necromancer and a practitioner of “black magic.” In the interview he said that there should be more shops in the city due to its history. Lancaster is similar to the U.S. city of Salem. The Pendle witch trials took place in Lancashire, and the accused were all tried and sentenced in Lancaster due to it being the county town. Earley believes Lancaster needs a Witch museum and hopes more Witches come forward now, saying, “there is no need to hide away, come out, come out wherever you are.”
- There is a call for authors for the upcoming book Encyclopedia of Women in World Religions: Faith and Culture Across History. “Author-Scholars are needed for the two volume reference work […] to be published by ABC-CLIO Publishing. We seek contributors with expertise in Women, Religion, and History to write articles of 500 to 2000 words, with overview, historical background, and selected details.” More specifications and requirements are on the website. The current deadline is August 15.
- Another upcoming submission deadline is of the music kind. The Hermetic Library, which is celebrating its twentieth anniversary, is calling for artists to submit work for their 2016 Magick, Music, and Ritual 12 album. “These anthology albums help promote artists to the audience of the Hermetic Library and beyond. These albums raise awareness about the connection between ritual, music and magick. And, they are a mass of awesome fun.” The submission deadline is Aug. 15.
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It is my belief that we will see religious ‘wars’ being waged soon in the United States.
We already do. It’s a war in which the Christian side thinks the Pagan side wants to annihilate them, and the Pagan side just wants space to exercise its First Amendment rights. TWH covers the skirmishes in this war, but its all one big story.
Couldn’t agree with you more. The sad thing is, I think it will get much worse in the near future.
Depends on what one means by “worse.” I think these skirmishes will become more frequent as more Pagans assert in one way or another the right to a fair share of the public space, running into that most volatile form of resistance, those for whom an alternative to what they do, equally entitled to do it, had never occurred to them. Some are protected by a straightforward reading of the Establishment clause, and so are more tangled; we got an example of each today.If by “worse” you mean physical hostility, I see other social friction points opening up into that kind of eruption first. I would say we are in the middle of one in slo-mo right now.
I am certainly talking about physical hostility.
I prefer a liberation to a war.
Millions of formerly Pagan peoples are enslaved by an unspeakably evil Antisemitic hate cult with delusions of grandeur for millennia. Denied a meaningful sublime relationship with the true gods of their ancestors for generations, they need to be liberated from their ignorance and know the joy of worshiping the gods and goddesses of their ancestors again.
We must never rest until the last enslaved victim is free of the hate cult’s evil brainwashing.
Alas, Wolfsbane, this preference amounts to a license for aggressive Pagan evangelizing. I daresay enough Pagans have been put off by aggressive Christian evangelizing as to be unwilling to imitate it.
Well that’s the thing. I don’t think Pagans ought to be evangelizing as in trying to convert them to our particular tradition. We ought to be doing is liberating from the idea that Christianity IS a religion in the first place.
As far as I can see, it’s not. It’s nothing but an Antisemitic hate cult with delusions of grandeur, nothing more than ritualized mockery of Judaism The only place you can take the rejected teachings of a fringe rabbi meant only and exclusively for his own tribe. That was rejected by them and pretend that they were meant for all the people of the world is fantasy-land. Christianity is the world’s longest continuously running minstrel show. It is not and does not deserve to be considered a religion.
So Pagans ought not be trying to convert them to our particular brand of Pagan belief. We ought ought to be converting them to the idea they need to go out and find their stolen indigenous Pagan belief system and reconnect with their own traditional gods and goddesses. Convert them to the idea those gods and goddesses have never abandoned them, are sad they have been hoodwinked and bamboozled from knowing them joy of being connected with them. That they will be far happier when that happens. Unsell them of the idea that the false fake religion that was forced on their ancestors can ever do anything for them.
They’re expecting someone to try and sell them our beliefs, They’ve likely been indoctrinated against that. They not expecting someone trying to unsell them Christianity and to go out and find their indigenous stolen Pagan faith. They’re not expecting that and have never been coached how to respond to that.
It’s unexpected and I think it might be effective. Convince them they have a void, tell where the need to go to fill it. That they will find what they have lost because it’s out there looking for them too.
Your elaboration is an interesting read, but my earlier comment still stands.
The idea that all Christians are out to get us is ludicrous and doesn’t help anything. If we were really in a war against “Christianity” we would have already lost since we are outnumbered by a huge margin.
Are there some Christians who fear us and would like to silence us? Yes, and they are a very loud minority, but they are a minority. We have a whole lot of Christian allies, and an even greater number of Christians who simply don’t care about us one way or the other.
We need to be careful about not painting with a broad brush, because that will end up alienating those who support us.
I never said all Christians are out to get us. But everywhere we go some of the Christians we encounter wish we would go away. (Humanists, too; I could tell you stories about the reception Paganism got in Unitarian Universalism in the 1980s.) This is especially true if they see us as aggressive — eg, wanting our turn doing the public City Council invocation seems to them like turf warfare.
I would agree we are not at war with “Christianity”, but religious identity is not in any way incidental to the conflict either. A great many of the social justice struggles of the last 50 years or more – our own religious freedom, feminism, certainly LGBT rights, have been struggles against entrenched Christian privilege, often in tandem with other sorts of privilege such as gender, economic, racial etc. Our enemies in these various struggles have not always represented a minority of Christians let alone a small minority. They have tended to become a smaller minority as Christians have become generally more secular and turned off by the politicized and “Culture War” aspects of religion. Still, the proportion of Christians arrayed against us varies widely by place. Then too, progress is not always linear. A lot has been achieved in creating a secular and pluralistic country. If Trump gets into office, we can expect to be re-fighting some of these battles as he will indulge a lot of extremist nonsense because that is how populists always maintain power, in the absence of any real governance.
We’re not at war with all Christians, certainly, or Christianity per se. We are at war with what might be called “Christendom”. “Small o” orthodox Christianity is the enemy, and I see no value in trying to deny or soft-pedal that reality. They certainly don’t deny it, and I don’t think most liberal Christians would dispute that characterization either. They’re as much behind the 8-ball as we are.
Are anti-Tarot laws a Pagan vs Christian phenomenon? Eh….to a degree. I think many of these laws arose not only out of religious doctrine but also public sentiments against “vagrant” people and Roma as well as the first major push to regulate zoning and development in a modern way after the Great Depression. Tarot has a close association with modern Paganism as many of us happen to practice it or supplement incomes with it, but it’s not really seen as a core religious practice. I tend to see it more as a Free Speech issue than a religious or non-establishment cause. I would hope Heather Cooper somehow enlists some legal help and fights this, and I hope we would lend a hand as a movemement. I think it’s a very winnable battle and one which ultimately benefits everyone (except the religious thought police of course, and sticking it in their eye is reason enough for me to join a fight).
Thank you, Jason.
If she wants to fight this fortune telling law for real, the path has already been laid:
https://marygreer.wordpress.com/2010/07/25/fortunetelling-protected-under-first-amendment/
For a link to the actual court decision:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/10/AR2010061005366.html
Of course not all courts will view things the same way, but there are some pretty strong arguments against fortune telling bans, and a fairly steep slope for governments to overcome the presumptions of free speech at issue.
Didn’t know I could subscribe to a daily email. Now that I do, your potential pagan advertisers now get 1501 potential readers 😉
…controlling with fear and suppression as usual. Don’t they realize that making something ‘illegal’ makes it MORE desirable than ever? People never learn.
Is she able to sue based on it being a religious freedom issue? She should call the ACLU.
It depends. The Romanni,believe they have been given a special right by God the steal whatever they want from non-Romani. One of the scams they do is fortune telling. That WHY these laws were put into place in the first place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romany_crucifixion_legend
One can not claim a religious freedom that hurts another. Fortune telling is a financial crime that most certainly hurts others.
Do you mean that fortune telling scams are a crime, not fortune telling?
Wow, thanks for the bigot posts.
I had a Romani lover once and she told me one of them stole a nail from Jesus’s cross, and ever since the Romani have divine permission to steal.
Good for you.
I really hope that Pagans rally to keep the Sekhmet Temple open. It’s a magical place in a dry high desert environment. I made a pilgrimage there around 1998 with three friends. While there, we burned some incense one of us had that had been part of some incense removed from a tomb in Egypt. I think it was taken for analysis so it could be recreated. In any case, we had nothing to do with any tomb-raiding. We burned this incense and then a bit later, rain came, then strong winds that dried the wet from the rain, then lightning struck the copper rings that form the open dome — you can see them in the photo — when three of our party were standing directly below them inside the temple. Very impressive, I must say! The particular storm we encountered — and such storms are very rare in high desert country — had been named Isis.
I have also been to Sekhmets temple and it is a most welcoming experience. Facilities for a short visit or a longer stay can be had. However, the best is the temple itself. To kneel and bow in reverent prayer before the statue of Sekhmet is an experience beyond words. To feel the infinite power and love of our Mother God thru the fiery presence of Sekhmet in Her home environment of the desert is an experience to be cherished. I know I am going to do whatever I can to keep Her temple alive.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Sekhmet Temple as I’ve been enjoying a lovely incense they inspired:
http://www.mermadearts.com/product_info.php?products_id=7770
Now it’s time for me to put some money where my thoughts are. I hope they make it!