The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/oakland)
Pagans have long been drawn to the Burning Man festival and its community, but for many, actually attending the festival has been an unlikely dream. A new traveling Smithsonian exhibit now hopes to bring Burning Man to museums across the United States.
This year the Pan-African Festival celebrated it’s 7th year of festivities September 3 in Oakland, California at historic Mosswood Park. The event was filled with people of all types enjoying the fresh air, shopping, and eating food from the many vendors. This was my first year at the Pan-African festival, and I decided to go since I am always looking for ways to immerse my children in celebration of their African heritage. With camp chairs and drinks in hand, we met our other family members under the shaded trees where we set up camp. According to the website, the Pan-African Festival is described as a day full of activities and family fun:
“Oakland’s 7th annual Pan-African Festival is a free family event carefully curated to cultivate pride, joy, self-determination and sovereignty for diasporic Africans.
The fourth century C.E. Neoplatonist Sallustius, a friend of the Roman Emperor Julian (who revoked Christianity’s status as state religion and attempted to revive polytheist worship), wrote in On the Gods and the Cosmos that the myths told in religious initiations “never happened, but always are,” and that “as the myth is in accord with the cosmos, we for that reason keep a festival imitating the cosmos, for how could we attain higher order?” (section 4) Sallustius wrote that myths which mix both psychic and material interpretations particularly “suit religious initiations, since every initiation aims at uniting us with the world and the gods.” As an example of a “mixed” psychic and material myth, he cites the story of Kybele and Attis, putting forth the interpretation that Kybele “is the principle that generates life,” that Attis “is the creator of all things which are born and die,” and that “the creator who makes these things casts away his generative powers into the creation and is joined to the gods again.” Kybele’s priests, the Galli or Gallai (the latter term, of feminine linguistic gender, found in a fragment of Callimachus), were known for re-enacting Attis’ self-castration in their own ecstatic rituals. There is also a cave in at Hierapolis in Phrygia, of which Daniel Ogden writes in Greek and Roman Necromancy: “The …
OAKLAND, Calif — Last evening, Pagan spiritual leaders T. Thorn Coyle and Marissa Evans, along with 12 other interfaith leaders, were arrested for trespassing at the Alameda County Court House. The spiritual leaders were part of an interfaith service and a rally, demanding District Attorney Nancy O’Malley drop all charges against a group that has come to be known at the Black Friday 14. The faith leaders arrested are from the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, the Deacon of First Congregation Church of Oakland, Bend the Arc: Jewish Partnership for Justice, United Church of Christ, and the Starr King School of Religion. Also included was T. Thorn Coyle, Pagan author, spiritual leader, and President of Solar Cross Temple, and Marissa Evans, co-founder of Light Hands Healing and a Pagan seminarian at Pacific School of Religion. In a statement to The Wild Hunt after she was released, Ms. Thorn Coyle said:
We are in a state of emergency in the U.S. Something must be done to counter the corrosive effects of white supremacy and racist systems that are killing Black, brown, and trans people on a daily basis.
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA – Priestess and activist T. Thorn Coyle and over 100 others made local news when they showed up at the inauguration of Oakland’s 50th Mayor, Libby Schaaf. The peaceful protest, organized by a coalition of area groups and individuals, is another example of the ongoing #blacklivesmatter grass roots campaign and actions demanding social reform. “There is … a long history of corruption and misconduct in the [Oakland Police Department,] so much so that they’ve been threatened with federal receivership. Oakland has also played host to Urban Shield, a convention and training event that is a large part of the militarization of police in the U.S. By protesting at the inauguration, we wanted people to remember that as long as Black lives in our county are treated as if they aren’t sacred …