Despite six years worth of requests, the U.S. Army officials has not yet added Heathenism or Asatru to the list of faith group codes as originally reported. In January, the Open Halls Project was informed that both Heathenism and Asatru had been approved. However, a short time later, that approval was put on hold, and the Army has yet to add the terms. As reported in a recent Army Times article, “The Army sidelined all such requests, pending the findings of a Defense Department working group investigating how to create a single set of faith group codes across the service.”
In response, the Open Halls Project and the Norse Mythology Blog have issued a Call-to-Action. Dr. Karl Seigfried writes, “Today, soldiers who follow the Old Way of Odin, Thor, Freya and the other Germanic gods and goddesses are still denied basic religious rights available to faiths that are recognized by the Army.” He included the email addresses of a number of Army offices, saying “Please send an email to any or all of the offices listed below, asking that Heathenry be added to the Army’s religious preferences list immediately.”
The Army Times article mentioned earlier includes updated interviews with Sgt. Daniel Head and Open Halls co-founder Josh Heath. Sgt. Head said that its “demeaning” to have to choose “other.” When asked if they’d get the ACLU involved, Heath said, “Personally, I don’t like the optics of that.” However, the idea hasn’t been completely ruled out. To learn more about the history behind this effort, read to our original article.
Eron the Wizard
Eron the Wizard (1952 – 2015), also known as Ian Alexander Wilson, lost his battle with cancer May 10. He was a practitioner of Alexandrian Wicca and was well-loved within his community. According to local reports, Ian was a member of a “pagan fellowship circle … at St Nectan’s Glen, near his home town of Tintagel, Cornwall.” Ian was a supporter of The Museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle and a welcome attendee at many of its events.
Several news outlets shared Ian’s story, as plans were made for a large Wiccan funeral. The well-publicized ceremony was held on May 22 in Cornwall. As reported by the BBC, “Hundreds of people dressed as elves, druids and witches have attended a Wiccan funeral to mark the passing of ‘Eron the wizard’.”
Julia Stoiber, an Alexandrian High Priestess from Austria, was in attendance and performed a portion of the funeral rites. Stoiber told The Wild Hunt that she “started Ian on his path” many years ago, and added, “Ian was a lovely man who used his image as ‘Eron the wizard’ to attract attention, so he could talk to people about Wicca and help people to gain a proper understanding of what it is. We were friends for 18 years and he sadly lost his battle to cancer.”
After the ceremony, Ian’s daughter Rebecca Spencer told local media, “He didn’t always live this way, he was once a builder in Gloucester with short hair. But he always wanted to do this, and live in Cornwall, which eventually he did. I don’t really know what to say at this time, other than I love my dad very much and I’m going to miss him.” Photos and video from the funeral are available online.
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Owner Bernadette Montana and Isaac Bonewits in front of store 2008.[Courtesy Photo]
Across the Atlantic, in another city of Cornwall, local Pagans will soon be celebrating the grand re-opening of Brid’s Closet. Owner Bernadette Montana and her metaphysical store, Brid’s Closet, have been fixtures in Cornwall, New York, for nine years. Montana was one of the first to move a business to the otherwise dilapidated Main Street. Her success helped to attract other businesses to the area.
Recently, the building, in which she rents space for her store, went into foreclosure forcing Montana to move. At the time, she and a fellow main street store owner decided to pool resources and move in together. That is when the problems began. Her friend Luann, a non-Pagan, owns the store Creative Gifts that focuses on handmade arts and crafts. When several of her vendors learned that a witch was moving in, they threatened to cut off all business to the craft store. Montana said that someone even asked Luann, “Why would [she] want to do business with a devil worshiper?”
After multiple considerations and discussions, the two women decided to move forward as planned. Montana said, “I am used to it and can take care of myself, but when a friend is affected-that brought me to tears. I am thrilled with the fact that she stood tall and figured out how to make it work!” She added that Creative Gifts did lose a few vendors. However, the Cornwall community has largely supported the decision and is even helping with the move. Brid’s Closet will be back in business in its new space by mid-June.
In Other News:
- Pandora’s Kharis announced that it has raised $1300 to help victims of the Nepal Earthquakes. The organization chose CARE for its “Mounukhion 2015 cause.” As explained on its website, “Pandora’s Kharis is a movement which arose from within the Hellenistic Polytheistic community, and sponsored by Hellenistic Polytheistic organization Elaion. Its goal is to come together as Hellenists–followers of the ancient Hellenic (Greek) Gods–and collect funds monthly to support a worthy cause, decided upon by vote from the members of the group.” In the past, The Wild Hunt has been a recipient of the organization’s efforts and generosity.
- On her blog Gnosis Diary: Life of a Heathen, Erin Lale posted an article describing her experiences running for public office. The article, titled “Running for Office While Openly Heathen,” details how she “came to run for the Nevada State Assembly.” Near the end she writes, “Over the course of my two campaigns, I became deeply connected to the local community, as well as becoming much more well-known in the heathen and pagan communities nationally … I learned a ton, influenced the local conversation on issues, and made lots of great friends, and I’m glad I did it, but I am never, ever, ever running again.”
- Dver Winter has announced the launch of “Winged Words Book Design.” She said, “I have been helping pagans and polytheists self-publish their books for many years, including Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Nysa Press (Sannion) and Sanngetall Press (Galina Krasskova) among others.” Winter added that she’s hoping to fill a niche with professional and affordable design work and expertise. Winged Words Book Design will offer a 10% discount to any books with a Pagan or Polytheist theme. Winter said, “I want to support the publication of more quality books in our religions.”
- The Pagan Values Blog Project has begun for 2015. Now in its seventh year, the project “seeks to encourage the deep discussions of Values and Virtues and Ethics within the Contemporary Pagan communities around the world.” The facilitators of the project ask interested writers to share their thoughts on the topic, and then post a link to their articles on either the project’s Facebook page or the comment section of the Pagan Values Blog. If you are not a blogger, you can join the discussion in the comments section of either site.
- The Pagan Federation announced that its plans for Summer Solstice at Moonhenge 2015 have moved forward smoothly. Tickets and more information can be found at the Pagan Federation site, including this year’s event lineup. The Solstice festival will take place June 20-21, at Moonhenge, Red House Farm, Woodwalton, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire PE28 5YL.
- Pagan Spirit Gathering, another Solstice festival, will be celebrating its 35th anniversary this June. Circle Sanctuary has recently posted a detailed history of the well-loved festival, which began as a small weekend event in 1980.
- Raven and Stephanie Grimassi have launched a new kickstarter campaign for their project “Ever Ancient, Ever New: Witchcraft by the Hearthside DVD.” The proposed 2 hour video will present “the Mysteries,Ways and Beliefs of Witchcraft, past and present, with Raven & Stephanie Grimassi.” They note that the making of this DVD has been “a dream” for eight years and felt that the time was now right for “its manifestation.” The Kickstater campaign contains the following video describing the project.
That’s it for now. Have a nice day!
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So the Army of the United States is “investigating how to create a single set of faith group codes across the service.” My first thought was “faith group codes; what’s that when it’s at home?” Then, “across the service.” Aha. That sounds like different parts of the Army have different policies, formal or informal, for dealing with minority faiths; possibly due to local evangelical infiltration on various bases. And the whole thing thus suggests that the Army is going to do it one way, service-wide, period, and this will take time. Imposing uniformity will involve winners and losers internally, and could be good news for us or it could be bad news. Luck to Heathens and Asatruer in service and veterans. Thanks for the update, Heather.
At first flush, it looks and feels an awful lot like the bullshit they fed us for a decade with the Pentacle Quest. Stall everything into oblivion with endless studies and commissions and working groups. Give the appearance that you’re hard at work with due diligence but make sure nothing ever comes close to a conclusion. They carried on with such glacial deliberation that you’d think we were asking them to license an unproven nuclear reactor design and to site the first one in a national wilderness preserve. They wanted to help us, truly they did, but it was all just an irreducibly complex set of technical problems that needed further study.
They’ve been playing this shell game with Asatru. Unless the Asatruar in uniform are comfortable changing the name of their religion to the Old Norse word for “other”, they would do well to worry less about “optics” and more about an effective pressure strategy. The ACLU may or may not be the ideal partners for a variety of reasons, but I don’t get the optics bit. Maybe they’re perceived as too liberal or something, but their core deal is defending the same Constitution and its principles, which the military is sworn to protect.
Success speaks for itself: The Humanists, who had the ACLU on their side, got their faith code almost immediately after the lawyers began writing letters. Six years in, the Asatru are still sitting on the outside looking in and will be for the foreseeable future.
You may well be 110% correct in all particulars. The main source of blockage in the Pentacle Quest, it appears, was the personal attitude of President Dubya, who’s been gone a while. From the earlier TWH article it sounded like Heathens were making progress; now this. I recall a News Hour piece on evangelizing chaplains and the chore of the chaplaincy corps topkick cleaning up after they’d gotten embedded; this just has the same feel.As to the optics of the ACLU, you nailed it. It’s seen as liberal and Heathens tend more conservative-libertarian than Wiccanates. But the ACLU has defended right-wingers, too, who might not have liked the optics either but if they’d lost they’d’ve gone to jail.
Ironically, I’m a liberal. As the co-Director of the Open Halls Project we’ve contacted the ACLU and have options if we decide to move in the lawsuit direction. The optics I’m concerned about having nothing to do with the ACLU (who’s mission I support), but are down to the Army. I honestly don’t think its beneficial to heathens in the long-run to have to embarrass the Army to make this happen. I think that is potentially harmful for mission readiness for soldiers still on duty.
Please avoid making assumptions, folks. It isn’t helpful. -Josh OHP
I’m trying not to go on assumptions, but the history of this issue and closely related ones. We have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t. Patience and watchful waiting fall squarely in the “don’t work” category. At the macro level, the Army is a bureaucracy like any other. Bureaucracies run on inertia and the path of least resistance. They don’t change what they’re doing out of good will or because you fill out the requisite paperwork.
They change when, and only when, someone forces them to do so by making their current practices untenable and making the desired path the one of least resistance. Unless you have some serious pull in Congress with members of the Armed Services Committees, lawsuits are one of the best tools you have to get the attention of that bureaucracy. They can ignore, dance around, or spin any other sort of petition till doomsday.
They can’t ignore lawsuits. They can fight it for years in court, but your goal isn’t to win a bazillion dollars and a Supreme Court ruling. The goal is to create a credible threat of embarrassment which the Army can put behind itself by doing the right thing. That’s how the Pentacle Quest worked. They amassed a hoarde of embarrassing documents in discovery, then leveraged a decent settlement.
If you don’t think the ACLU is a good fit, look at Mikey Weinsten’s work with the Air Force. That man had no qualms about embarrassing the service to fight religious discrimination. Few people living today can serve out a ration of crap in the media better than Mikey Weinstein, and he gets results. The Air Force seems to have the most solid command commitment to religious freedom of any of the branches today. They built us a ritual space at the academy.
Weinstein’s willingness to embarrass is balanced by his willingness to positively engage with command and his creds as a former service member himself.
We have already reached out to the MRFF and are waiting to hear back from Mr.Weinstein. If this letter writing campaign doesn’t do anything than that will be our next option.
I’ve always loved the expression and the spirit of: who’s/what’s thon or it/that “when thon or it/that’s at home”.
I had to opt for the “Other” option when I served in the Air Force in the early 1990’s. I agree that it makes you feel quite small.
:/ I hoped someone would dish some dirt on this “Last Witch Hunter” film. I’m not a fan.
As a typography & calligrqaphy fan, I salute Dver Winter on her beautiful logo design.
Thank you for this article – very informative – and in particular, thank you for the link to the Pagan Values blogject.