In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the city council’s Wednesday night meetings are frequently opened with a religious invocation by a member of the city’s community of clergy. Normally, the prayer is unremarkable, a standard bit of civic life acknowledging religion without openly endorsing. Had this week’s prayer been given by any Christian pastor – or even, as the city council rules state, any “minister, rabbi, or imam” – it would have been forgotten as soon as it finished.
Ah, but you let one Witch come out in public, and suddenly everyone gets excited.
Here’s what happened: Crista Patrick is an outgoing Tulsa city council member, and is herself a Pagan. (She decided not to seek re-election this year; this was her final council meeting before her replacement is seated this week.) She invited Amy Hardy-McAdams, a priestess in the Artemesian Faerie Witchcraft tradition and co-owner of Tulsa’s Strawberry Moon Herbal Apothecary and Ritual Center, to give last week’s invocation.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Italian, 1598–1680), Head of Medusa, 1630, marble [public domain]
Hardy-McAdams said the following:
As a priestess of the goddess, I invoked the Gorgonia, champions of equality and sacred rage. I call to Medusa, monstrous hero of the oppressed and abused. I open the eye of Medusa, the stare that petrifies injustice. I call upon the serpent that rises from this land to face the stars, the movement of wisdom unbound.
May these leaders find within themselves the embodied divine, the sacred essence of the spark of the universe, and the breath of the awen. Place in the hands of these leaders, the sacred work of protecting the sovereignty and autonomy of all our people. Gorgon goddess, make them ready and willing to be champions for all in this city, not just those in power. Shine a light for them that they may walk the path of justice, protected and prepared, illuminating the darkness. Endow them with the fire of courage, the waters of compassion, the air of truth, and the strength of the Earth itself.
As above so below. As within. So without. As the universe, so the soul. May there be peace among you all. And so it is.
Why invoke Medusa in the meeting? “Here in Oklahoma,” Hardy-McAdams told The Wild Hunt, “as soon as Roe vs. Wade was overturned, it was clear women’s autonomy and healthcare are under attack. Medusa started to come through for us in that time, and for a lot of us here locally, and in nearby states like Texas, Medusa has been affirming herself in our practice as a deity who is really here to lend strength and support to women against a government that wants to take our autonomy away.
“I wanted it to be apparent,” continued Hardy-McAdams, “to those of us who are Pagan, and who are women, that this is on my mind – those who are abused and victimized, not just those people who in power.”
Hardy-McAdams mentioned that Laura Tempest Zakroff’s The Medusa Sigil was an inspiration for her invocation.
By the rules of the city council, the invocation must refrain from proselytizing for any particular faith, or from denigrating any other particular faith. Hardy-McAdams’s statement did neither of those things: it calls on Medusa and her Gorgon sisters as champions of the oppressed and asks for divine guidance to be shown to the council members to aid them in securing justice for all Tulsans. One imagines there have been many, many similar invocations to Jesus said in those council chambers over the years, similarly refraining from openly evangelizing to the council members while still calling for the Christian god to guide their actions.
There were no complaints about the invocation at the council meeting itself, Hardy-McAdams told The Wild Hunt. There was one person in attendance who applauded at the end of the prayer because she was happy to hear a minority faith being represented at the meeting. Everything seemed copacetic.
Then the governor got involved.
“Satan is trying to establish a foothold, but Oklahoma is going to be a shining city on the hill,” wrote Kevin Stitt, the Republican governor, on X (formerly known as Twitter). “Tulsa City Council needs to stand strong against actions like this, and Tulsans need to remember who allowed this at the ballot box.”
Shortly thereafter, Ryan Walters – the Oklahoma superintendent of schools, who led the state to purchase millions of dollars in Trump Bibles and still got passed over for Secretary of Education in favor ex-WWE CEO Linda McMahon – chimed in.
“Satanic prayers are welcome in Hell but not in Oklahoma,” he wrote, also on X. “Satanism is not a religion. Tulsa should immediately move to ensure this never happens again and the person who allowed it should be held accountable.”
It even brought out some internecine conflict within the Oklahoma Republican Party: the state’s attorney general, Genter Drummond, took the opportunity to slam Stitt and Walters over their support for legislation that would allow for state-supported religious schools, which he claims “will result someday in state-funded Satanic schools, state-funded Sharia schools.”
“If [Stitt] and [Walters] get their way, this ‘Priestess of the Goddess’ could have her own religious school—funded by your tax dollars!” Drummond wrote on X. “I’m fighting to protect our religious liberty by ensuring our tax dollars do not fund this kind of sacrilege.”
And naturally there were plenty of pile-ons from people who weren’t elected officials, too. “God will not be mocked,” wrote one woman. “I pray the Presence of God be made known over Tulsa city council and that person who made that ‘prayer’ to Satan. I pray the Spirit of The Fear of The LORD pour out on Tulsa, Oklahoma. In the Name of Jesus Messiah, Amen.”
Thankfully, Hardy-McAdams told The Wild Hunt that there has not been any in-person harassment for Patrick, herself, or Strawberry Moon Herbal Apothecary since the governor’s post. “Instead,” she said, “there have been many comments in support and people stopping by the shop to say thank you.
“We have a pretty big Pagan community in Tulsa and the surrounding areas,” she said. “We’re in the middle of a red state and the Bible Belt – we get fiercely protective of each other when we’re attacked.”
Skyline of Tulsa, Oklahoma circa 2008 [Caleb Long, Wikimedia Common, CC 2.5]
Patrick and Hardy-McAdams have refuted the claims of the conservatives. “I hope that [Stitt] can find a place in his heart to focus on his own spirituality and not focus on those that he is not informed about,” Patrick said to Public Radio Tulsa.
“For anyone who actually listened to the prayer,” Patrick also said, “it asks for the strength to fight injustice so we may achieve equality and peace for all, and there’s nothing bad about that.”
Hardy-McAdams, meanwhile, saw the attack on her and Patrick as signs of the conservative movement’s affiliation with Christian nationalism.
“The Christian Nationalist movement is growing, especially here in Oklahoma,” she told Tulsa’s News Channel 8. “We already have Bibles being pushed into public schools. This is directly taking spiritual liberties and freedoms away from minority religions and those who choose no religion, but I give an invocation that I was invited to give, and simply by being Pagan in public I am somehow threatening the religious liberties of those Christian Nationalists.”
Hardy-McAdams expanded on the threat posed by Christian Nationalism when she spoke with TWH. “Christian Nationalism became this real focus in the past election season,” she said. “Now they are trying to put Christian morality into state and federal law, and that’s what’s really scary to me.”
Patrick and Hardy-McAdams have both disavowed the idea that Hardy-McAdams’s invocation was “Satanic” in any way.
“I think where a lot of people get stuck is with the word ‘serpent,'” Hardy-McAdams said. “Many Christians equate any reference to snakes or serpents directly with Satan, but I am referencing the serpents that makeup Medusa’s hair. This is classical mythology and before Christianity, snakes were ancient symbols of feminine divinity, healing, and transformation.”
Patrick, meanwhile, has said that Paganism is a nature-based religion, while Satan is a Christian concept.
I will interject here and say that while all of this is true so far as it goes, it doesn’t help our cause as members of minority religions to put distance between ourselves and practicing Satanists. Both theistic Satanists and atheists using the language of Satanism have often been our allies against Christian Dominion theology.
Even though most Pagans do not include Satan in their practice, this doesn’t matter at all to the Christian Nationalists. As shown by this very example, they are going to slap “Satanism” on any practice that falls outside of their narrow bounds of acceptable religion and persecute us accordingly. We need to refute the “Satanism is not a religion” charge every time it comes up, because if we implicitly allow them to use that frame on the Satanists, they will just as readily use it on us.
All that said: to my mind, there are two ways to look at this situation. The first is to say that nothing has really changed since the days of the Satanic Panic, and public displays of Paganism will continue to draw fire from the religious Right and that perhaps it’s safer for us to keep our heads down and not draw attention like this. As understandable as this instinct is, especially in a moment where Christian Nationalism is returning to the halls of power across the United States, I think it’s premature.
The second way of thinking of this is that Christian Nationalists and their allies know that their grip over our culture has been fractured – not completely, by any stretch, but still. The very fact that they have to cry so loudly over one-minute-long speech in a state where Republicans thoroughly control the government shows that they realize they won’t easily return to complete dominance.
To prevent that, we must remain in the public eye, standing up for ourselves and our gods.
“Our responsibility is to be seen and to be Pagan in public,” Hardy-McAdams told TWH. “I have close friends who think it’s not safe to come out of the broom closet, and I try to have compassion for that perspective even though it’s hard for me. If we make ourselves invisible, we are invisible. We need to act like equal citizens because we are equal citizens.
“We’re not doing anything wrong,” she concluded. “We’re living our lives and we have a right to that.”
I’m grateful to Amy Hardy-McAdams for standing up as a Pagan for our values last week – and a little sad that Tulsans won’t have Crista Patrick in their council meetings going forward.
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