“The court also pointed out Thursday that Circuit Judge David Burnett erred repeatedly in the case, including dismissing requests to consider DNA and other exculpatory evidence without a hearing. Burnett has been the focus of activists’ campaigns because of his pro-prosecution stances. He will not hear the new case because he was recently elected to the state legislature. Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel has also fought against a new hearing.”
The three teenage boys were convicted of killing three children in 1993 for what prosecutors claimed was a “Satanic ritual”, and used Echols’ interest in the occult and Wicca to help convince a jury, with no physical evidence and a coerced confession from the mentally challenged Misskelley, that they were to blame. Jessie Misskelley’s former defense attorney Dan Stidham, in an interview with John Morehead, paints a picture of the Satanic hysteria that surrounded the trial.
“…you really have to put this case into historical perspective. In 1993, the Satanic Bandwagon Folks like Dr. Griffis were mainstream and largely supported by both the media and established religion. We now know better, just like we now know that there are such things as “coerced confessions.” In 1993, virtually everybody believed that the phenomena of Satanic Ritualistic Homicide was very real, and perhaps even more regrettably, that no one, not even a mentally handicapped person, or a child, would confess to a crime that they did not commit. Thankfully, due in large part to pioneers with real credentials like Dr. Gisli Gudjohnson, Dr. Richard Ofshe, and Dr. Richard Leo, we now understand the dynamics of false confessions. By the way, not many people remember that Dr. Ofshe won a Pulitzer Prize for his work studying religious “cults.” He had a dual expertise.”
“I miss the things that most people take for granted, things people don’t want, like rain … to go out and touch it and get wet, or to feel snow. I loved snow my entire life, and I haven’t had that in almost 20 years now.”
We’ll be keeping track of this case as the new trials start.
The last couple of weeks have been pretty crazy, what with all the Samhain/Halloween coverage, followed immediately by election night, so lets catch up with some Pagan news of note we may have missed.
Nora Cedarwind Young, a green burial educator based in Washington state, participated in the burial and open house Sunday. She said that in modern-day burials, the casket is placed in a grave lined with a concrete and steel-reinforced vault. “The body is never truly returned to earth,” said Young, who also identifies as a Wiccan or pagan. “In a green burial, we are not only reducing the unnecessary use of resources and chemicals, we are preserving open spaces and greenways.” Death is a sure thing that’s going to happen to all of us, Young said, adding that today consumers want sustainable choices. “If I eat organic food for 30 years, why would I want to put chemicals in it at the end?” she asked. “I’d much rather be a sandwich for a tree or compost for the earth.”
Circle Cemetery is the first Pagan-run cemetery in the United States that will also allow for full (non-cremated) body burials in addition to the burial of cremated remains. You can read more about Circle’s cemetery, here.
“The commissioners’ failure to act came after people, including church representatives, spoke out against the practice of fortune-telling, likening it to witchcraft and sorcery. The board is hoping the town won’t face any legal challenges, which three of the commissioners said they would not bother trying to defend. After the Maryland Court of Appeals declared a similar Montgomery County ban unconstitutional in June, Bel Air has been challenged to make fortune-telling legal. The American Civil Liberties Union has also urged the town to overturn the ban because it threatens freedom of speech.”
The fear-mongering from local religious leaders and Christians gets quite dramatic, with one local paster exlaiming that “fortune-tellers always target children”, and a resident calling the “occult” practice “demeaning, destructive, demoralizing and detestable.” The problem is that local law enforcement and the town commissioners know the law is unenforceable, and are stuck trying to please local residents while avoiding a costly lawsuit. Something has to give, and it will no doubt happen soon. For more on this subject, see my Psychic Services and the Law series.
“This Halloween was perfect: perfect weather, perfect family event, perfect shopping and perfect Halloween night finale. And perfectly huge crowds. ”It’s been a really good October,” said Rinus Oosthoek, executive director of the Salem Chamber of Commerce. “You can tally up the money afterwards, but we had the crowds and people did some shopping.” It was so busy almost every store ran out of something. “I couldn’t handle all the readings,” said Lorelei, a witch and psychic who did about 30 readings a day this past weekend at Crow Haven Corner, an Essex Street witch shop.”
In his study “Hypnosis and Hemispheric Asymmetry,” published in the Jan. 2010 edition of the journal Consciousness and Cognition, he noted higher hypnotic susceptibility in those who, before being hypnotized, processed information much more quickly in the left brain hemisphere than the right. But during hypnosis, the situation flipped and the right became faster. No one knows whether they are born with that wiring or if it comes through experience. ”Clearly, highly hypnotizable brains are different,” said Naish, “but what you do once you are hypnotized is largely down to expectation. If you have the assumption that you visit the spirit world and can’t remember what you did there, then I dare say that’s what you do.”
You can find the abstract for this study, here. It could be interesting reading for any religious community that works with trance states and hypnotism. As for this article, it’s nice to see a focus on Santeria that steers clear of the usual sensationalism and actually interviews experts and practitioners of the faith.
Like many, he didn’t know exactly where their bodies were put to their final resting place. So he came to the Universal Tomb, an oversized gray and white concrete structure that long symbolized those who had died violent deaths under army rule. Now it is also symbolic of those killed in the quake as survivors placed flowers, beeswax candles and meals around it, pouring the coffee and perfumed Florida Water on the altar. As each approached the tomb, they knocked its walls with their open palms as if to announce their presence. “Sweetheart, I didn’t bring any cigarette or rum, but I am here,” said one man. Elsewhere in the cemetery, thousands participated in Gede as some became possessed by spirits and others paid homage to Baron Samedi, the Vodou guardian of the cemetery.
In a recent interview with the Pagan Newswire Collective Lale expressed frustration at how difficult it is for third-party candidates to receive equal treatment and consideration in the United State’s two-party system.
“…the traditional media, newspapers and TV, usually ignore third party candidates, although I got a really good interview in the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Voter Guide last Sunday, and I’m all over the internet and radio; some media, including not just internet radio shows but even broadcast TV, frankly email candidates promising news coverage if they buy advertising, and even more blatantly, local news channels — including publicly funded PBS!– refused to allow any candidate for governor who had not raised tens of thousands of dollars to participate in the televised debate; people have the attitude that the election is a horserace and they are supposed to bet on the winner, so voting one’s conscience to vote for a third party or independent candidate is somehow “wasting your vote”, and people think they should vote for the lesser of two evils instead of voting for what they believe in.”
In a message sent to Pagan+Politics last night, Lale had this to say about her campaign.
“Thank you for all your support over the course of this campaign. Although I didn’t win, I did get my ideas in front of a lot of community leaders, organizations, and other candidates, and made a lot of networking connections, so hopefully my ideas can move forward on another front, while I move into another arena of endeavor, whatever that may be. I am now looking for my next challenge.”
This is obviously a disappointment for Lale, but it does show that an openly Pagan candidate with almost no funding or mainstream media attention can affect local politics. As we become more confident, speculations about the “Pagan vote” and Pagan candidates will leave the realm of the hypothetical and be taken more seriously.
No matter how Democrats treat the issue, it seems unlikely that Wiccans will turn out for O’Donnell at the polls. “Her inability to separate anything non-Christian from Satanic is going to be an issue not just with her potential pagan constituents but with any other non-Christians or Christians of a flavor that does not match hers,” said Michael Smith, the Wiccan IT analyst who hosted the meet-and-greet the governor visited. “A couple of my local politician friends say she’s losing the Wiccan vote,” said [Ivo] Dominguez. “Well, I said she never had the pagan vote for the most part to begin with.” - Ben Crair, The Daily Beast
Ultimately “dabble-gate” cost her the election, and while the abundance of mean-spirited mockery had some in our community questioning why “dabbling” in a minority religion is such a deal-breaker for political office, O’Donnell’s largely unexplored connections to conservative Christianity and how they influence her politics made few Pagans regret her loss.
“Senate candidate Marco Rubio revved up a crowd of about 200 supporters at the Alaqua Country Club Wednesday, but Rubio had a little help from the guy who introduced him. David Barton primed the pump with his brand of America first, last and always political/religious revivalism … Barton’s primary message Wednesday – and most days – is that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation, was intended to be a Christian nation and would be a whole lot better if everyone started buying into that. Barton traces a number of social ills, for example, back to the prohibition of compulsory prayer in public schools.”
Too bad no one got to question him on the point of equal treatment for non-Christians, specifically Pagans. On the whole, some are starting to see this election not as the rise of the Tea Party, as some had hoped/feared, but as a second wind for Christian conservative candidates (some of whom have latched onto or gained the support from Tea Party groups). What that all means for minority religions (or for the fiscally-motivated Tea Party for that matter) in the next few years remains to be seen.
Have any election-night insights to share? Leave them in the comments!
“But this potted history of paganism is very heavily sanitised. There’s no mention at all of the overlap between paganism and various forms of Satanism – or the much broader overlap with the far Right. In northern Europe, some pagan movements have celebrated Aryan cultural and racial purity for the best part of a century. In the words of the historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, author of a brilliant study of the Neo-Nazi movement entitled Black Sun, Nordic racial paganism or Odinism is a “spiritual rediscovery of the Aryan ancestral gods … intended to embed the white races in a sacred worldview that supports their tribal feeling”, and expressed in “imaginative forms of ritual magic and ceremonial forms of fraternal fellowship”.
Needless to say, the white witches of Weymouth celebrated by the BBC are deeply opposed to this variety of paganism. But over the years there have been ferocious ideological battles between Lefty, feminist pagans and their racially obsessed but equally Green Odinist rivals, and there has been more contact between the two camps than the official representatives of British paganism would care to acknowledge.“
But the decision to give so much air-time to a minority event has raised eyebrows at a time of a 16 per cent cut in the corporation’s budget. It also brought into question how the BBC reacted to more traditional religious events. Andrea Williams, director of the Christian Legal Centre, said: “It’s not always healthy to represent such beliefs as paganism as mainstream, particularly when our national faith is so often pushed to the edges, “It’s vital that our national broadcaster remembers our great Christian heritage and all the precepts that come from it that are good for the nation. I would like to see this more clearly recognised.”
Andrea Williams, director of the Christian Legal Centre, said: ‘It’s not always healthy to represent such beliefs as paganism as mainstream, particularly when our national faith is so often pushed to the edges. ‘It’s vital that our national broadcaster remembers our great Christian heritage and all the precepts that come from it that are good for the nation. I would like to see this more clearly recognised.’ The decision to allow so much air-time to the minority event in Weymouth, Dorset, was questioned at a time of a 16 per cent cut in the corporation’s budget.
See what I mean? As for the controversy, and the supposed “marginalization” of Christians (you don’t see us complaining about being marginalized during Christmas or Easter), would there even be an uproar if it weren’t for the Telegraph’s own conservative Catholic blogger (who is never mentioned in the later article) and the instantly available pull-quotes from two conservative Christian organizations? It just seems desperately manufactured, an opinion that is only strengthened by the fact that the Telegraph and the Daily Mail (again following the Telegraph’s lead) are both currently (and luridly) covering the story of a diversity handbook given to police officers that includes Pagans.
“The PC’s guide to arresting a witch: It’s normal for people to be naked, bound and blindfolded and whatever you do, don’t touch their book of spells…”
“It was Halloween. A good chance, we thought, to explore the background to paganism. I would simply suggest that the decision to cover some aspects of paganism on one day indicates an interest in the fact there is in the UK a range of faiths - and among some a lack of faith. Our reporting should be seen in the context of BBC News’s wider coverage of religion and religious events where stories, as ever, are based on topicality and editorial merit. And Christianity - being the country’s main religion - still remains the faith with the most coverage.”
Bakhurst also notes that the BBC got flak for giving too much coverage to the Pope’s recent visit, maybe the Christian critics were too busy reading the Daily Mail to notice that distinct lack of marginalization?
Pope Benedict XVI and Catholic Cardinal-designate Raymond Burke both recently characterized voting as a moral act with spiritual consequences. The pope said that “decriminalizing abortion is a betrayal to democracy,” since he believes the procedure denies rights to the unborn. Burke called voting a “serious moral obligation” and added that Catholics “can never vote for someone who favors absolutely what’s called the ‘right to choice.’”
“Most Pagans love democracy and voting, why shouldn’t we? Pagans invented it! Whether you place the start of “people power” (Demos Kratos) with ancient Athens, or cast further back to parts of India, Mesopotamia, or various indigenous societies, few can deny that the concept and practice of democracy originated in pre-Christian minds and societies (just ask the Founding Fathers). By contrast, the Catholic state of Vatican City is a sacerdotal-monarchical state, with the Bishop of Rome at its head. The president of the Pontifical Commission, the leader of the city-state’s legislative body, is appointed by the Pope, not elected by citizens or chosen by representatives. Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, was able to thrive and become the world religion it is today thanks to the rulers of an ever-increasingly less republican Roman Empire in decline and the patronage of European monarchies after the Empire’s collapse. I say this not to demonize Christians or Catholics, only to point out the current irony of the Pope deciding what a “betrayal to democracy” is when he himself does not participate in one.”
[The following is a guest post from Brendan Myers, Ph.D. Brendan is a professor of philosophy at Heritage College CÉGEP in Gatineau, Quebec, and sometimes an instructor at the Cherry Hill Seminary. He is a winner of OBOD’s prestigious Mount Haemus Award for professional research in Druidry, a founder of the Order of the White Oak, and the author of five books including “The Other Side of Virtue” and “A Pagan Testament”. I've invited him to write a bit about the themes in his latest book: “Loneliness and Revelation: A Study of the Sacred”.]
Paganism can be described as a religion of relationships. We speak of magical correspondences, apprenticeships with teachers and mentors, therapy work with counselors or magical healers, initiatory group membership, relations with a totem or a patron deity, and ecological relations from local landscapes to the global biosphere. Some of our best known writers and leaders also emphasize relationships in their metaphysics: Starhawk, for instance, wrote that “the primary principle of magic is connection”.
It seems that loneliness is everywhere. Indeed I think it likely that just about everyone feels it at some point in their lives. Yet facts like these are not spoken of very often, perhaps because loneliness is a taboo topic. No one likes to admit to feeling lonely. It’s embarrassing, and sometimes humiliating. But loneliness is painful for many people. We should ask what, if anything, a spiritual point of view can offer to people who find themselves painfully lonely, and what it can offer to the counselors and therapists who assist such people.
This month, I have published a book which attempts to do exactly that: “Loneliness and Revelation: A Study of the Sacred”. This book does not describe any spells, rituals, invocations, or magic: I think there are probably too many books already on the market which address such themes. But if you are looking for a book by a pagan author which goes well above and beyond the “101” level, and which addresses a serious social and psychological problem from a spiritual point of view, then please read on.
The first thing I discovered about loneliness was that that it has nothing to do with how physically or geographically close you are to other people. You can feel terribly isolated from others, anytime and anywhere, even while hundreds of other people rub shoulders with you in the busy shopping mall. When you go to parties, or nightclubs, or other places where people gather, you get to see all the relationships people have with each other that you are not part of, and are not invited to join. We are also individuals at heart, taught to be self-reliant. But that very self-reliance can create distance between people. You might want to reach out to others, but then you would have to admit that you need others. So loneliness is not just a social problem; it also has the character of an existential crisis.
Some people try to fill the emptiness within them with food, alcohol, gambling, video games, or shopping sprees. But the relief that such things provide is always superficial, and always temporary. When it wears off, as it inevitably does, feelings of disappointment can set in. You might go back to them anyway, to try and regain the pleasure and distraction that they can create. But this creates a vicious circle of stimulus and withdrawal which strongly resembles drug addiction. So the problem is not just isolation. The problem is that people do self-destructive things to avoid isolation.
Religion promises you that you need not ever be alone, because the gods will always be there for you. But there are reasons why the gods, themselves, feels lonely, and probably feel it worst of all. Think of the distance between where you are sitting and the nearest star beyond our solar system: Barnard’s Star, approximately five light years away. We can understand that distance mathematically, using spectroscope analysis and stellar parallax measurements. The gods, if they exist, and if they inform the universe with their presence (as we often say they do), probably feel that distance right in their bones. A Hindu holy scripture, the Bhradaranyaka Upanisad, claims that God created the universe precisely to fill his own need for companionship.
But my study of loneliness also showed me reasons to have hope. Some of the world’s best known religious heroes achieved their spiritual victories in solitude: and examples are not hard to find. Siddartha Gautama achieved his Buddha-hood alone, beneath a tree, in a deep forest, far from others. Jesus defeated the devil in the desert, with help from no one else; he also took on the despair of the world while alone in the garden of Gethsemene. The founder of Bahá’í, a mystic who took the name of Bahá’u’lláh, withdrew from his family and community to live as a hermit in the mountains of Kurdistan, in northern Iraq, for two years. Odin hung himself from the World Tree alone for nine days, and at the end of his time he discovered the runes. Because of examples like these, and perhaps also because of the prevalence of individualism in our culture, most people “on a spiritual path” believe that enlightenment can only be accomplished on one’s own. Only by looking within, and attending directly to one’s own inner self, can one accomplish enlightenment. Or so the popular wisdom goes.
But how can one gather the spiritual benefits of solitude without incurring the suffering of loneliness? My suggestion is to look to the idea of revelation: this is the experience someone has when something of existential significance appears in his life. You find it in a stone dolmen, in a windy fenland in the west of Ireland, or in an Inuit cairn in the high arctic of Canada. You find it in lighthouses, clock towers, church steeples, symphony performances, rock concerts, and holiday fireworks. It’s in your voice when you say the words ‘I love you’. It appears in any activity which reveals presence, identity, and the goodness of life, and in anything which invites others to share that life. I believe this understanding of revelation is the solution to the problem of loneliness. But more than that, I believe it is the foundation of the good and worthwhile life.
My sincere thanks to Jason for allowing me to describe my book on his blog.
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Everyone is welcome to attend the launch event at The Clocktower Brew Pub, 575 Bank St. Ottawa, Ontario Canada, on Sunday 7th November. Starting at 1pm, Brendan will read from the text, sign copies, and answer questions. He’ll also stay to share a drink or two for the rest of the afternoon.
