The Holy War Against Pop Culture Pagans

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

A trio of pretty, karate trained teens are battling demons around the world. Charmed? No. Worse. Brynne Larson, Tess Scherkenback, and Savannah Scherkenback are evangelical Christian exorcists who have been touring impoverished mining towns in Ukraine armed with nothing but crosses, holy water... and Larson's preacher father. Their efforts at saving these lost souls from the tortures of hell have received mixed reviews... from the director of their documentary.

[Charlet] Duboc said: ‘The way they come across on camera is just the way they were when we turned off the camera, they never stopped the vacant smiling,’ the British film-maker said.

They weren’t horrid, they weren’t unpleasant, they were just a bit creepy. It was a bit like talking to the Stepford Wives, I was like “where are the humans behind this?”’

The girls will be taking their glazed expressions and vapid smiles to the heart of the dragon, which is to say Potterworld, which is to say London. Someone has to protect unwitting entertainment seekers from demonic possession!

The threesome, from Arizona, believe the spells in J.K. Rowling's best-selling fantasy series are real, and dangerous.

In fact, they see Britain as a hotbed of occult activity whose origins go back to pagan times.

Savannah explains: 'It has been centuries in the making, but I believe it came to a pinnacle with the Harry Potter books.'

'The spells you are reading about are not made up,' adds Tess. 'They are real and come from witchcraft.'

Well, no. The Potter series is actually based on Western Alchemy, but why quibble.

Meanwhile, Methodist minister Keith Cressman is keeping his battle against idolatry closer to home -- Oklahoma, to be precise. It would appear that the state has graced its official license plate with the image of a the "Sacred Rain Arrow." The sculpture on which it is based depicts an Chiricahua warrior shooting an arrow into the sky to make it rain.

Said Cressman, through an attorney, putting such a plate on his car makes him a "mobile billboard" for a pagan religion. Despite his insistence to the contrary, it seems pretty clear that he holds Native American "religion, culture, or belief" in a fair bit of contempt. That, however, is his right, so I'm not really sure which side of this debate bothers me more -- Cressman's fear of the unholy savages who lived in Oklahoma first or the State's trivialization and cooptation of Native practices by reducing them to a logo.

Oklahoma no doubt meant this to be a way of honoring its large -- and largely discriminated against -- Native American population. But by putting an image of an Apache ritual on a state issued plate, they're effectively saying that those beliefs are not a religion. Would they put a an image of the Eucharist on a license plate? I'm betting not -- not even those Oklahomans who don't believe in separation of church and state.

“(T)he case presents legal issues of freedom of speech and religion that I feel are important for all Americans of all religious, non-religious and ethnic backgrounds,” Cressman wrote.

“The case may help define personal liberties and freedoms protected by the Constitution of the United States.”

. . .

Hemant Mehta, author and board member for the humanist-based Foundation Beyond Belief, wrote of the ruling:

“If this image goes too far, then surely a cross or other religious symbol can’t be allowed on a license plate, either. A devout Christian may have done a huge favor to all of us who support church/state separation.”

Okay, I've picked a side.

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The Solstice and the Serpent

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

Well here's something I did not know.

This morning, while scanning the news for fun Summer Solstice events, I noticed this item on the Mother Nature Network. Apparently, the famed serpent mound in Ohio is aligned to the sun on this day. How marvelous. That puts this ancient curiosity amongst sacred sites all over the world as aligned to key astronomical events. I don't know that this will ever make Ohio Bush Creek a destination on par with Stonehenge (see above) but I actually find this slightly more fascinating.

Sunrise with a snake: Twenty miles south of Bainbridge, Ohio, a mysterious mound rises from the Earth. A bird's-eye view would reveal that this mound is in fact man-made, and that it is in the shape of a giant serpent.

On the summer solstice, the sun rises directly over the head of this serpent, which was likely created by the so-called Fort Ancient culture that thrived nearby between A.D. 1000 and 1550. The Serpent Mound park is open during daylight hours, so solstice-seekers can stroll around the ancient snake and imagine the early astronomers that must have overseen its construction.

I've never seen the serpent mound. Ohio is big state and I grew up on the other end of it. But it's always tickled me pink that this vestige of ancient wisdom appears in such an unlikely place.

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To Wikipedia!

In 1987 Clark and Marjorie Hardman published their finding that the oval-to-head area of the serpent is aligned to the summer solstice sunset.^[9][10] William F. Romain has suggested an array of lunar alignments based on the curves in the effigy's body. Fletcher and Cameron argued convincingly for the Serpent Mound's coils being aligned to the two solstice and two equinox events each year. If the Serpent Mound were designed to sight both solar and lunar arrays, it would be significant as the consolidation of astronomical knowledge into a single symbol. The head of the serpent is aligned to the summer solstice sunset and the coils also may point to the winter solstice sunrise and the equinox sunrise.^[11]

. . .

The Serpent Mound may have been designed in accord with the pattern of stars composing the constellation Draco. The star pattern of the constellation Draco fits with fair precision to the Serpent Mound, with the ancient Pole Star, Thuban (α Draconis), at its geographical center within the first of seven coils from the head. The fact that the body of Serpent Mound follows the pattern of Draco may support various theses. Putnam's 1865 refurbishment of the earthwork could have been correctly accomplished in that a comparison of Romain's or Fletcher and Cameron's maps from the 1980s show how the margins of the Serpent align with great accuracy to a large portion of Draco. Some researchers date the earthwork to around 5,000 years ago, based on the position of Draco, through the backward motion of precessionary circle of the ecliptic when Thuban was the Pole Star. Alignment of the effigy to the Pole Star at that position also shows how true north may have been found. This was not known until 1987 because lodestone and modern compasses give incorrect readings at the site.^[13]

If it is, in fact, patterned on Draco, that could make it one of heaven's all-important mirrors. Such a theory is apparently advanced in Ross Hamilton's Mystery of the Serpent Mound. Huh. Whadda you know? Where have I been?

And now it is the time Summer Solstice when we dance.

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To Suffer a Witch

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

Put this in the broad category of things I really don't want to write about. But I'm afraid I have to. In a curious synchronicity I noticed the latest drivel from Rob Kerby on my start page. One of these days I will remove the Beliefnet feed, but a combination of morbid curiosity and laziness has prevented it thus far. (For the back story on the Beliefnet news feed's devolution into a reactionary, bigoted, wingnut megaphone for the Christianist Kerby, see here and here.) Kerby's latest bit of wrongheadedness is a diatribe on the dangers of witchcraft. Why is this synchronous? This may be a little hard to follow but bear with me.

Let me start by saying that Kerby's biggest mistake is in conflating certain third world, tribal fears of witchcraft with Pagan faiths. He expresses dismay at Harry Potter for trivializing the dangers of witchery and at the Cornwall schools' inclusion of Paganism in its religion curriculum. This is the first synchronicity. But even more curious is that I was watching this fascinating video last night which had me thinking about a very particular usage of the term "witchcraft." It's a documentary on shaman and "vegetalista" Don Emilio Andrade Gomez who more than once uses the term witchcraft to describe the dark practice of sorcery. A lot of this could be written off to semantic differences but the distinction is too important to leave to the Rob Kerbys of the world... because that kind of thinking gets people killed.



There are several admonitions in the Bible against various supernatural practices. It all gets very confusing because the Bible also extols those same practices in other contexts -- the Book of Daniel, chapter 5 comes to mind but there are other references. The specific use of the word witch which has caused innumerable deaths through the centuries comes from Exodus 22:18 and reads, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," in the King James version.

The word witch is a poor translation from the Hebrew word m'khashepah which is more fairly translated as "poisoner." It stems from ancient beliefs in the ability of some people to harm or even kill people through various forms of spell-casting.

When a shaman like the one in the video uses the term witchcraft, he is, somewhat ironically, closer to the actual meaning of the original term. It's clear from his comments that he is referring to malicious sorcery.

The hybridization of Christianity and indigenous shamanism is one of the most fascinating aspects of this documentary, which was made as part of Luis Eduardo Luna's field work in the Peruvian Amazon. It is also somewhat jarring, as is apparent in some of the comments posted on YouTube. It is an apparently benign religious drift. The merging of Christianity and tribal beliefs, though, isn't always harmless and has led to numerous witch persecutions in third world countries. I touched on this here in a discussion of Sarah Palin's mentor, Kenyan witch-hunter Thomas Muthee. I also posted recently about the disappearances of a number of Peruvian shamans which have been tied to fundamentalist Christian officials in the region.

What I find singularly horrifying about Kerby's post is that he seems to believe that these murderous witch hunters have something to teach us about the dangers of everything from Harry Potter (which is actually based in Western alchemy) to modern-day Wiccans, Druids, and other Pagans. He also touches on Arab persecutions of sorcerers and those who consort with the djinn. Here's a lovely example from Saudi Arabia. Yet, somehow, what Kerby seems to find disturbing is all the witchery that goes on, not the fact that innocent people are being killed for it.

The problem with some of this Christian outreach and missionary zeal is that it simultaneously feeds the fear of sorcery and disavows shamanism as a healing practice, viewing it all as "witchcraft." Don Emilio repeatedly refers to his own work as aligned with Christ and as a tool to use against sorcery. It is the distinction between the shaman as healer, or curandero, and the sorcerer. Sorcery, again, is a term that is subject to semantic variation and isn't negative in every context but to a Latin American shaman it's a very negative term. Shaman Christina Pratt draws the distinction thusly: A sorcerer is someone who uses the same tools as a shaman but for the highest bidder. (I'm paraphrasing from memory.) It's the difference between having a moral compass and not.

In a recent show, Christina waded into the sorcery issue again and dealt specifically with the subject of curses. I'll be very honest and say that this subject is way over my head. Psychic attacks and the like are just so far outside my paradigm, I don't feel able to speak to them. From my perspective, as a mystical thinker, I consider it impossible to attack someone else without tearing yourself apart in the process. Because my beliefs and practices are mystical, I don't actually think it's possible to "put a spell" on anyone but myself because I am the source of my reality. To put it another way, I can't bend the spoon without bending myself, so I couldn't damage the spoon without damaging myself. In any event, to any Pagan or shaman, dark sorcery is frowned upon. It also subjects the practitioner to painful blow-back -- the three-fold law and all that.

So, in sum, I highly recommend the video above as a small window into the world of ayahuasca using shamans. I also recommend Christina's show on curses as well as interviews she did with Steven Beyer on working with plant teachers. Both, I think, lend some context to the documentary. Beyer explains the "diet" of the initiate into plant medicine, for example.

And, I think Rob Kerby is a menace and an embarrassment to a site that still at least gives lip service to ecumenicism and support for the Pagan community.

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Paul Levy on the Collective Shadow

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

I've referenced Tibetan Buddhist and healer Paul Levy before -- notably in my review of The Secret. Levy's essays are available on his site Awaken in the Dream and in his book The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of our Collective Psychosis. In his newest book Wetiko, Levy continues to explore the projected shadow as a collective phenomenon and the Native American mythical embodiment of it known as wetiko to the Cree. Years ago, I watched a movie called Wendigo, another Algonquian name for the same phenomenon. It's a haunting film that brilliantly captures the sense of doom we experience at those times when life is turned upside down leaving us at the mercy of an unfolding fate that seems to have its own agenda. As Levy explains, we actually animate this darkness run amok from our suppressed shadow. The more in denial of our shadow we are, the more inevitably we will confront it as a seemingly alien entity in our reflective world.

One of the things that struck me in this Red Ice Radio interview is Levy's anecdote about a New Age bookstore that wanted him to appear but not talk about all that shadow stuff. They wanted it to be "positive." It put me in mind of another author who dared to write about the painful side of spiritual growth; Rabbi Yonassan Gershom who wrote about Holocaust reincarnates.  Said Gershom:

Then in 1984 I was invited to speak on Jewish mysticism at the annual Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship (SFF) retreat at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. SFF is an eclectic group of spiritually oriented people who are interested in psychic phenomena, and most believe in reincarnation. Here, I thought, would be a receptive audience for these case histories that I had been gathering. So I suggested "Cases of Holocaust Reincarnation" as my topic.

I was turned down flat. The SFF representative explained that the theme of the retreat would be "I Am the Light," and they wanted to focus on uplifting, positive material because that's what people expected. The Holocaust was just too heavy and depressing, and might upset people, even if I were talking about reincarnation. Couldn't I do something more inspiring, like a Sabbath liturgy?

This relentless focus on the upbeat and cheerful is not just naive. It's dangerous -- something I've written about ad nauseam, ad infinitum. And as Levy has been explaining brilliantly for years, it can unleash terrors beyond our conscious imagining.

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