News

Documentary film casts ‘Enlightenment Spell’

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SALT LAKE CITY – Filmmaker Joshua Samson was “writing a silly little short” some years ago and decided one of his characters would be a witch. “I didn’t want to rely on Hollywood stereotypes about who Witches are,” Samson said. “I knew Wicca existed but I didn’t really know much about it. I decided to start doing some research and build up my knowledge base so I could write a more realistic character.”

The more he read, the more fascinated he became. “Down the line I had conversations with someone who would make some offhand comments about Witches or Wiccans, and I realized that people know even less than I knew starting out,” he said.

Pagan Community Notes

Pagan Community Notes: Summerland Spirit Festival, protests continue, Mystic South and more

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CLAYTON, Wis. — The popular Minnesota camping event Summerland Spirit Festival has been cancelled for 2018. According to the event website, the organization has lost its venue. Since its maiden voyage in 2011, Summerland Spirit Festival has been held at Turtle Creek Glen in Clayton, Wisconsin. While that first festival was a stormy one, Summerland has grown to become a popular destination on the Pagan festival circuit, attracting recognizable speakers and performers.

News

Bang a gong: rock music rocks rituals

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TWH — Terry Riley, high priest of the Southern Delta Church of Wicca (part of the Aquarian Tabernacle Church), is preparing a Grease ritual for an upcoming new moon. It will be a “special circle” that will have “a double high priest and a double high priestess so we can get both movies in,” Riley says with a chuckle. “We’re planning on using ‘Greased Lightnin’ ’ to raise the cone of power.”

Movies? “Greased Lightnin’,” that John Travolta song? Grease the movie musical and not Greece the birthplace of Aphrodite, Persephone, Hekate and all those classical goddesses and gods?

Culture

Witch recasts Barbies as goddesses and Pagans

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RIVERVIEW, Mich. — Oberon Osiris walked into a Detroit CVS pharmacy in 2001 and found himself spellbound by the witchy female vision before him. Osiris himself had been a witch ever since, as a 12-year-old in the late 1960s, he checked out Sybil Leek’s Diary of a Witch from a library. “I read it voraciously and said, ‘That’s what I am – I’m a Witch, I’m Wiccan, I believe in nature and I believe in the other gods,’ ” he recalled. Osiris consecrated his path as a 15-year-old when he lit a candle in his small upstairs bedroom and “did the whole scary initiation thing” detailed by Paul Huson in his book Mastering Witchcraft – which required an initiate to recite the Christian Lord’s Prayer backwards phonetically three nights in a row.

News

New women’s workspace uses Wiccan terms to empower its members

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MINNEAPOLIS — A woman-focused shared workspace called “the Coven” has been opened in this city. Despite members being addressed as “witches,” it does not have a specific Wiccan or Pagan religious identity and appears to be completely secular. The Coven was opened March 8, International Women’s Day, by Alex West Steinman, Bethany Iverson, Erinn Farrell, and Liz Giel. It is a membership-based workspace for female and non-binary-gender identified people. All four women had worked in advertising, and elected to use the term “coven” to attract female entrepreneurs with whom, they felt, the term would resonate.