The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/refugees/page/2)
“Looking back at that boy who didn’t feel he could ever fit in Venezuela, the young man who was in danger and resented all of Venezuela, I came to think about a healing exercise: healing with the flag of that same country.”
In this week’s Pagan community notes, mass-hexing the Taliban, a sigil for safety, and Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority asks visitors to “respect historical and archeological sites.”
Karl E.H. Seigfried reflects on the role of the relationship between politics and refuge in contemporary Pagan religions.
Pagan Perspectives
Over the past year, and especially since the Frith Forge conference in Germany, I’ve noticed increasing use and discussion of the term “inclusive Heathenry.”
It often seems more of a rebranding than a revolutionary concept. Practitioners of Ásatrú and Heathenry have long taken sides over issues of inclusion, with some taking hard stances on either end of the spectrum and many situating themselves in a complicated middle ground. The battles that have raged for so long have been between positions that were often defined by the other side. The universalist position supposedly said that anyone could be Heathen – no questions asked. The folkish position supposedly said that only straight white people could be Heathen – with many questions asked.
Today we are faced less with a crisis of immigration than a crisis for immigrants. The Trump administration continues to aggressively ramp up its war on undocumented immigrants, as it seeks to expand the federal government’s ability to use police as man hunters and to build new detention facilities. Refugees have been repeatedly scapegoated as terrorists as the president and his allies seek to block them from finding asylum in the United States. Shortly after the election, a Trump surrogate cited America’s Japanese-American internment camps during World War II as precedent for a national registry of Muslim immigrants. At the end of January, President Trump signed an executive order aiming to build more detention centers for arrested immigrants whose deportation is pending.