A modern Pagan perspective
Whether this is a day of thanksgiving or mourning (or even “unthanksgiving”) for you and yours, may you find contentment, happiness, and peace. The Wild Hunt will be taking the rest of the day off to cook and spend time with loved ones. I’d like to give thanks to everyone who reads, comments, and supports this blog. All of you give me something to be thankful for.
Regular posting will resume tomorrow.
In one week several modern Pagans from across the globe, and representing organizations like C.O.G., Temple of Ara, EarthSpirit, Cherry Hill Seminary, Earth Traditions, Circle Sanctuary, Solar Cross, the Pagan Federation, Reclaiming, and the World Congress of Ethnic Religions will gather in Melbourne, Australia for the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Held once every five years, the Parliament brings thousands of religious leaders and grassroots activists together to find common ground on issues that face us all, and attempts to build bridges of understanding between diverse faith traditions. Ever since the parliament’s rebirth in 1993, Pagans have been an active and visible presence at these gatherings, and today we play a vital role in its leadership as well.
“The Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions was created to cultivate harmony among the world’s religious and spiritual communities and foster their engagement with the world and its guiding institutions in order to achieve a just, peaceful and sustainable world.”
Simply put, our participation and movement toward leadership roles within the global interfaith community in the last fifteen years is extraordinary. We are emerging as a significant world-wide religious movement at a time where our voice and perspective is increasingly relevant and needed, especially when you consider that this Parliament in Melbourne is built around themes of healing the earth, dialog and reconciliation with indigenous peoples, and addressing the roots of religious extremism. This is an extraordinary time to be a Pagan, and Melbourne holds great potential to show where our future challenges and victories will emerge.
Because of the special nature of this event, I’ve coordinated with attending Pagans to create a Pagan Newswire Collective-hosted project to transmit the voices of Pagans at the Parliament to as many people in our interconnected communities as possible. “Pagans at the Parliament” will feature updates from Pagan attendees and presenters, including Moira Ashleigh of EarthSpirit, Pagan chaplain Patrick McCollum, Ed Hubbard of MagickTV/PagansTonight, and Parliament Board of Trustees members Angie Buchanan, and Phyllis Curott*. In addition, I’ll be linking to updates and media posted by attending Pagans elsewhere, and coordinating phone/Skype interviews with individuals in Melbourne. All the content will be licensed under the Creative Commons so that Pagan media outlets, including blogs, podcasts, and magazines, can immediately re-transmit content, and use the site as a primary source for longer articles and explorations of the issues raised. Here is the address, spread the word, link to it, and subscribe to the RSS feed.
http://parliament.pagannewswirecollective.com/
There are also social networking “Pagans at the Parliament” options, including a Twitter feed (follow us!) that will syndicate the blog and track Parliament-related tweets, as well as a fan-page on Facebook (become a fan!). You can also count on The Wild Hunt distilling and commenting on all available updates on a regular basis during the Parliament.
I hope this endeavor will not only be enlightening, giving us a as-it-happens picture of Pagan participation in this historic event, but will also drive home the importance of building a modern Pagan journalism that can cover them when they happen. So join us December 3rd – 9th for what promises to be an exciting time.
*The three Pagan members of the Parliament Board of Trustees are Angie Buchanan, Phyllis Curott, and Andras Corban Arthen of EarthSpirit.
As a counter-point to the Saudi Arabia article I posted earlier this morning, the country of Nepal, as part of the U.N.’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women (That’s today!) and the White Ribbon campaign to end violence against women, has launched a one-month media campaign to end witch-hunts against women in Nepal.
“…the Office of the Prime Minister and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Nepal (OHCHR) have jointly launched a one minute television clip highlighting the violence against women who are alleged to be practicing witchcraft. A one-minute clip will be broadcast from the state-controlled Nepal Television just before the prime news at 8pm every day for the next one month. OHCHR and the PM’s office decided to air such video as a large number of women alleged to be practicing witchcraft mostly in the rural Terai have been ill-treated, tortured, brutally beaten up, and forced to eat human excreta.”
This is a big step, and should hopefully start a larger trend of governments taking the international witch-hunting epidemic seriously (Nepal is also taking part in the 2010 international initiative against violence towards women). It seems only natural that a country that honors “living goddesses” should concern itself with the welfare and safety of its women. If you’d like to thank Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal for addressing this issue, you can contact the Nepalese government, here.
Human rights groups have known for some time that the Mutaween (religious police) in Saudi Arabia has run amok. Operating with near impunity thanks to backing from the government, with special squads dedicated solely to rooting out “witchcraft and sorcery”, they roam Saudi Arabia looking for any hint of theological impropriety. Little can be done, because the country is virtually immune from outside pressures thanks to the policy of Realpolitik, which tells world leaders that oil and a strategic ally in the Middle East are more important than justice or human rights. A reality that condemns women like Fawza Falih Muhammad Ali, and others like her, to certain death. Now this sad state of affairs has made international headlines once again, as a Lebanese television presenter who made predictions about the future, and was arrested last year while on pilgrimage, has been sentenced to death for the crime of witchcraft.
“Ali Sibat’s death sentence apparently resulted from advice and predictions he gave on Lebanese television. According to Saudi media, in addition to Sibat, Saudi religious police have arrested at least two others for witchcraft in the past month alone. “Saudi courts are sanctioning a literal witch hunt by the religious police,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The crime of ‘witchcraft’ is being used against all sorts of behavior, with the cruel threat of state-sanctioned executions.” Religious police arrested Ali Sibat in his hotel room in Medina on May 7, 2008, where he was on pilgrimage before returning to his native Lebanon. Before his arrest, Sibat frequently gave advice on general life questions and predictions about the future on the Lebanese satellite television station Sheherazade, according to the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar and the French newspaper Le Monde. These appearances are said to be the only evidence against Sibat.”
Human Rights Watch also notes that Saudi Arabia has no codified penal code, with individual judges deciding what is and isn’t proper evidence for “witchcraft” and “sorcery”. Critics of this farce of a legal system are told that they have a “preconceived Western notion of shari’a” and ignored. Saudi Arabia is unique in the international epidemic of witch-hunts, as its persecutions and deaths are unambiguously backed by powerful government, and can’t be explained away as mere superstition or the product of corrupt “bad apple” religious leaders.
So what can be done? We can demand that governments start taking off the kid gloves with Saudi Arabia, no matter how friendly they’ve been with us in the past. We can also continue the work of raising the concerns of modern Pagans on this issue to the world stage, and with priestess, author, and attorney, Phyllis Curott (who has fought valiantly on behalf of Fawza Falih Muhammad) now on the Board of Trustees of the Parliament of the World’s Religions (along with two other Pagans) I feel that this process is well underway. Until then, we can pray and work for the innocent “witches and sorcerers” held and threatened with death for possessing the wrong books, believing the wrong things, or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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