The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/law/page/18)
This week we bring you: UK couple accusing their neighbors of being “witches” and putting spells on them, child abuse cases linked to beliefs that the children were possessed by demons, and more, including how to transform your home with Witchcraft.
This week we bring you: VA police officer with links to the Asatru Folk Assembly placed on administrative paid leave, a temporary temple constructed to honor victims of the Parkland High School shooting, and much more – including Russian Witches, Muslim prison rights, and Furries.
BANGKOK – Most, but certainly not all individuals who follow a Pagan path come to one of the faiths within that umbrella through a different faith. The faith of origin is often Christian for those in nations with close ties to European immigration or colonization. But it is, of course, not exclusively the case. Regardless, the process of abandoning one’s faith of origin and practice to a new faith is formally an act of apostasy. Most of us in the West do not see or even recognize the idea of apostasy as having any serious consequence. Freedom of religion serves as a guarantee that the act of a adopting a new belief or dogma may have personal social consequences like estrangement, but nothing more serious in nature.
[The following is a guest post by Zay Eleanor Watersong. Zay Eleanor Watersong is a teacher in the Reclaiming Tradition of Witchcraft, community organizer, and law student. She got her start in Reclaiming with the Ithaca Reclaiming Collective and the Pagan Cluster, sharing priestessing roles in Pagan circles internationally and Reclaiming circles nationwide since 2003.]
“Anthro-arrogance is not an option,” stated one of the law student organizers for the 2014 Public Interest Environmental Law Conference (PIELC) at the University of Oregon in Eugene as they opened the conference on February 27. “This conference, this planet, expects action.” University of Oregon students took this to heart and continued a long history of protest at the conference with a 100-person walkout shortly thereafter during one of the keynote addresses, protesting the speaker’s anti-transgender stance. It was an interesting echo of the controversy at PantheaCon in 2012. Hopefully PIELC too will learn from the experience. This conference, now in its 32nd year, has a long history of bringing together legal scholars, lawyers, activists and organizers to discuss the pressing issues of the day and weave synergistic relationships to address them. It brings together so many who are working at the leading edge, whether in blockades or in the courtroom, to protect the earth which we hold sacred. There is a deep magic in being able to see the web of laws and policies that hold the current system in place, and seeing the points where if we push just a little bit, things can shift. Practicing law and practicing spellwork are not that different.
“The Parks Department may not want me here, but this land tells me otherwise.”
We were standing on the north bank of the Willamette River, where I had come down to check up on a friend who had lived on the river next to the boat landing for as long as I had known her. I had come to the riverbank bearing root beer, but Mary Ann met me at her entryway bearing bad news and a yellow piece of paper. Maintenance workers had just come through the area earlier in the afternoon, and the yellow paper had been left taped to her door. She was being evicted from her home. I looked around, forgetting for a moment as I always did that her “home” was not a house in the traditional sense, but a primitive hut built from waddling and covered with a canvas tarp that was tucked away within the confines of a city-owned park.