Pagan Community Notes: The Passing of Danelle Dragonetti, Justice for Kathleen Dempsey, Occupy Pagans, and More!

December 22, 2011 By Jason Pitzl-Waters 9 Comments

Pagan Community Notes is a companion to my usual Pagan News of Note series, more focused on news originating from within the Pagan community. I want to reinforce the idea that what happens to and within our organizations, groups, and events is news, and news-worthy. My hope is that more individuals, especially those working within Pagan organizations, get into the habit of sharing their news with the world. So lets get started!

The Passing of Danelle Dragonetti: On December 16th Danelle Dragonetti, also known as WinterHawk, died after a prolonged battle with cancer. Dragonetti was well known in many Pagan circles as a musician, producer, and founder of the Wiccan Pagan Broadcast Network (WPBN), an Internet streaming radio service that prefigured the vibrant Pagan radio and podcasting community we now enjoy. Pagan podcasters Sparrow and Mojo of the The Wigglian Way dedicated their most recent podcast to Danelle, with Sparrow noting that “it weren’t for Danelle we probably wouldn’t have our show.” Witches’ Voice co-founder Wren Walker also noted Dragonetti’s influence in the world of Pagan podcasts.

“The Witch/Wiccan/Pagan communities have lost a guiding light and a vibrant voice. Danelle Dragonetti (Winterhawk) opened the door and set the bar for many of the podcasts that we enjoy today. Danelle wasn’t afraid to aim high or to take on a challenge. Good journey, Danelle. Thank you for speaking your mind and singing your song.”

In addition to her work within the Pagan community, Dragonetti was also a much-beloved figure within the Vampire subculture in her home of Denver, this included being dubbed the “Queen Vampyre Of Denver.” An outpouring of love, sorrow, and remembrances from friends and acquaintances have appeared at her Facebook profile. A memorial service and wake is scheduled for January 15th in Denver. My condolences go out to Dragonetti’s family and friends, may her spirit find rest and return to us again.

Justice for Kathy Dempsey: Nineteen years ago in Lexington, Massachusetts Kathleen Dempsey, 31, was stabbed to death in her home by an unknown assailant. Now, her killer, already serving a life sentence for another murder, has stepped forward and admitted his crime, bringing some sense of closure to her friends and family. Among those friends and family were the local Pagan community, as Dempsey was one of them, a member of EarthSpirit and their ritual performance troupe MotherTongue. One of Kathy’s acquaintances from that time, Peg Aloi, writes about the killing, how it affected her friends in the Pagan community, and how it feels to finally see her killer brought to account.

Kathleen Dempsey

Kathleen Dempsey

“I remember KD as a kind, funny, sweet, talented woman: always friendly, always upbeat. She loved animals, did not consider cleaning a priority, loved to dance, and seemed to think the best of everyone unless she had a reason not to. I saw her for the last time a mere three weeks before she was killed. Her smile, glimpsed in a hallway, still haunts me. I recall the Earthspirit Samhain gathering that year: the tears and wails of loss during the ritual as we named those who had passed that year. I don’t know who it was but one male voice screamed out “Kathy!” after a number of other names were recited. It was a soul-shattering moment I will never forget.”

I would recommend reading the entire post at Peg’s blog. My deepest sympathies go out to Kathy’s friends and family, I hope these events bring some measure of solace.

A Pagan Organizer at Occupy Eugene: One of the longest-running Occupy movement encampments has been the one happening in my own home town of Eugene, Oregon. There, a unique alliance between homeless tribes, anarchists, veterans, labor unions, college students, faculty, and Baby Boom generation activists who helped give Eugene its unique cultural stamp managed to create a community that was actively working to build new solutions to the problems brought on by economic disparity and injustice. Now, as we speak that encampment is being dismantled, and many Occupiers are claiming that local police engaged in sabotage tactics and psychological warfare to make it happen.  One of the main organizers of Occupy Eugene, who has acted as a go-between with city officials and police, is Alley Valkyrie, a longtime member of the Pagan community who originally lived on the East Coast and was a part of festivals like Brushwood. Valkyrie has been in the local media a lot lately, and she is featured in the Eugene Weekly’s cover story about the end of Eugene’s Occupy encampment.

Alley Valkyrie. Photo by Rob Sydor.

Alley Valkyrie. Photo by Rob Sydor.

“I don’t sleep here,” Valkyrie said, laughing. “I’m up all night.” She said in recent days the crackdown on fires had made the camp colder, and the stadium lighting the police put up and increased patrols were “psychological warfare.” [...] According to Valkyrie, one of the extraordinary things Occupy has done is bring the street families together and let street kids learn from older activists, and the activists in turn learn from the street families. “A Ph.D. stands next to a homeless kid and they both have an equal say and an equal vote,” she said.

I’ve been honored to get to know Alley in recent days, and have sat down to talk with her about Occupy Eugene and its future. I’ll be running a future story here at The Wild Hunt that will feature an interview with Alley Valkyrie, and discuss the unique spiritual culture of Eugene and its Occupy movement. In the meantime, keep an eye on Alley Valkyrie as I think she represents the shape of our future leaders and organizers: passionate, engaged, and more concerned about building community than taking credit for building community.

Other Community Notes:

That’s all I have for now, have a great day!

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Quick Note: Norse Mythology and Heathen Ritual

November 14, 2011 By Jason Pitzl-Waters 16 Comments

Just a couple quick notes for the Heathen-minded today.

If you aren’t already reading Dr. Karl E. H. Seigfried’s amazing The Norse Mythology Blog, then you’ve been remiss. I first mentioned the blog back in June for its in-depth interview with Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, chief priest of Iceland’s Ásatrúarfélagið. The blog is one of the most content-rich affairs for lovers of Norse mythology I’ve ever seen, and two recent features, his answers on Norse myth and religion questions posed by a high school student, and a massive five-part (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5) interview with fantasy author M. D. Lachlan (author of “Wolfsangel” and “Fenrir”) that covers everything from literary influences to using the Wolfsangel symbol.

Modern-day Asatru in Iceland

Asatru in Iceland, photo by Dr. Karl E. H. Seigfried

“You have said that, “in the Norse myths, the runes and the history of the Vikings we have a huge cultural treasure. We shouldn’t hand it over to morons without a fight.” No argument here. In the novel, however, you acknowledge the non-Viking origins of the symbol, writing that it is “not one of the twenty-four runes given by Odin.” When the witches first see the Wolfsangel, they have varied interpretations. Some see it as a thunderbolt, some as a werewolf. “Others,” though, “saw a different meaning in the rune, one that it would bear down the centuries until one day someone gave it a name. Wolfsangel. This was not a word the sisters would have recognized, though its sense was clear to them – wolf trap.” Did you choose this symbol because the book was originally intended – as you’ve said in interviews – to take place in WWII? Did you first plan to use it as a Nazi symbol, then reset it as a rune when moving the action back to the Viking age?”

The whole blog is a treasure, and has a clear archives page that will guide you to the important interviews and articles Dr. Seigfried has produced.

Meanwhile, here at Patheos, columnist Eric Scott writes about his experiences with a Seidhr ritual, and how it made him wonder if he could be a Heathen (in addition to being a second-generation Wiccan).

“I knew immediately that this appealed to me. I had known of the Norse myths since I was a child, of course, and had always felt fondly toward the gods of Asgard, but I had never experienced them so directly before. And yet I was, in a way, frightened: I had heard the heathens talking before the ceremony, and the way they talked, there would be no going back from this. They even signed contracts declaring that they would have no other gods before these, a declaration which, then and now, fills me with unease. I felt both at home and in a deeply foreign place. I was a Wiccan; I had just begun to discover just how important to my identity Wicca was. Did I want to be a heathen too? For that matter: could I even be both?”

It’s yet another thoughtful column from Scott, and no doubt there are Heathens out there with opinions as to whether one can be Heathen and Wiccan both, or if you must choose.

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Guest Post: In Praise of the Apostate

November 3, 2011 By Jason Pitzl-Waters 62 Comments

[The following is a guest post from Eric Scott. Eric Scott is a second-generation Wiccan, raised in the St. Louis-based coven Pleiades. He writes about paganism for Patheos in his Family Traditions column, and also serves as a contributing editor at Killing the Buddha. His fiction and memoir have appeared in The Scribing Ibis, Caper Literary Journal, and Ashé! Journal. He used to sing in a Taoist glam rock band. Find him on Facebook and Twitter.]

Today marks 1,650 years since Julian the Apostate became Roman Emperor. The story still seems farfetched: when Julian was five, his family had been murdered on the orders of his relative, the emperor Constantius II. Yet that same Constantius would eventually name Julian his Caesar in 355 and his successor as Augustus in 361 – though admittedly, Julian had already been proclaimed Augustus by his army in 360 and he had been marching to Constantinople when Constantius died. He was the heir of the world’s first Christian dynasty, a man raised by bishops and monks to carry on the Arianism of his relatives. And he shocked the empire by revealing himself as a pagan, and then set about restoring the worship of the gods of Olympus to an empire that had abandoned them.

I first studied Julian while taking a course called “The History of Christian Thought.” It was the sort of course you had to be a hardcore theological nerd to enjoy; most of the material consisted of bishops arguing over minutia and excommunicating each other. Julian stood out, though, a figure cut from another sort of cloth: a philosopher, a general, a philanthropist, and a strangely humble ruler. He was a Renaissance man a thousand years before the Renaissance.

He was also, of course, a pagan, and moreover, the last pagan emperor, which makes him a romantic figure to pagans in the modern day. I remember reading his plans to restore paganism to Rome: he asserted that the reason Christianity had become so popular was because the Church spent so much time feeding the poor. Julian’s response was not to close down the churches or outlaw Christianity, but to make the pagan temples even more charitable than the churches. He refused the idea of persecution. “It is by reason that we ought to persuade and instruct men, not by blows or insults or physical violence,” he said in one of his letters.

But Julian was also a tragic figure. His reign lasted all of twenty months, from November 361 to June 363. Like too many others in the classical world, he died from a spear-wound in Persia, attempting to be Alexander the Great reborn. Conspiracy theorists claim that a rogue Christian in Julian’s ranks delivered the wound, but it’s impossible to know what happened for certain. 

When we reached that point in the course, I could see a little shiver of happiness run through some of my classmates, most of whom had identified themselves as evangelical Christians in some way or another. The professor, who also served as a pastor on the weekends, assured us in a gentle voice of the relief the bishops felt when Julian died: “that little cloud has quickly passed away,” as St. Athanasius said.

A quote that has stuck with me is the first paragraph of W.H.C. Frend’s chapter on Julian in his book The Rise of Christianity:

“The world has always warmed to its fallen heroes. Hector rather than Achilles, Robert E. Lee and not Ulysses S. Grant, stir the imagination of posterity, however lost or wrong headed the causes they championed. They fill the Valhalla of our fantasies. The emperor Julian is in a similar class… [He] bent every effort during a reign of twenty months in a hopeless effort to restore the old religion. His death in battle at the age of thirty-two in a grandiose scheme to conquer the Persian Empire and emulate Alexander the Great seems only to add stature to what objectively was a wasteful and futile endeavor.”

Nearly all scholars suggest that Julian’s attempt to revitalize paganism was doomed from the start, that the tide of history had swung in Christianity’s favor and it would have been impossible for him to swing it back. I have always thought that opinion put a lot of weight on a reign of less than two years. What if Julian had succeeded in his Persian campaign, or at least survived? What if he had lived to be an old man, an emperor with the three decades Constantine had? How differently would our histories read?

I suppose there isn’t any point in fantasizing about a world in which Julian had triumphed. He didn’t; further, even if he had, the paganism he espoused was very different from what modern pagans practice, even Hellenic reconstructionists. There is a danger of feeling too much affinity with a figure like Julian. But nonetheless, he embodied many of the virtues our communities admire. Of all Roman Emperors, he was perhaps the greatest champion of religious freedom. He was a great scholar and a notable writer. He was humble, and preferred simplicity over decadence.

And one more: he was a person who had been so educated in Christianity that he had even held a minor position in the church as a young man, who had seen first-hand the sort of power Christianity held in the empire – Constantius, the emperor who had murdered Julian’s family, was a zealous Arianist – and knew just how institutionalized it had become. And yet he turned away from it and embraced the gods of Olympus. Julian was the last pagan emperor, true, but more than that, he was the only emperor who had been born a Christian and died a pagan. Most pagans living today can empathize with his situation.

1,650 years away, Julian enters Constantinople as the sole emperor of the Roman Empire, about to try his best to change history. I am proud of him: proud of him as a pagan, and proud of him as a human being. And as we modern-day pagans continue our work of restoring the old gods, I like to think that Julian would feel proud of us, too.

Filed Under: Paganism, Religion Tagged With: , , 62 Comments

Americanizing Hinduism and other Pagan News of Note

July 12, 2011 By Jason Pitzl-Waters 13 Comments

Top Story: The CNN Belief Blog has a story about Hinduism in America, and how some younger Hindus are trying to “forge a distinctly American Hindu identity that’s more tightly woven into the national fabric.”

The BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in Houston

“Our parents had to build everything from scratch to make a united Hindu community in this country,” said Tejas N. Dave, 17, a high school junior who volunteers with a project bringing yoga to unprivileged Americans. “Now we’re trying to reintegrate it back into society,” he said, “to make people realize that Hinduism is a religion and a way of life and a philosophy that’s not too different from what a lot of others believe. We’re all trying to make a better society.” Some young Hindus are envious of the attention that American Muslims and Mormons have received in recent years – even if not all of the attention has been positive – and are trying to raise Hinduism’s national profile.

The article mentions the Hindu American Foundation and its work, an advocacy group that has done outreach to the Pagan community in recent years, and profiles younger Hindus who want to take their faith “outside officially Hindu spaces.”

Yet [Kavita] Pallod, 23, has spent a good deal of time thinking about how to apply her faith to her life. “I believe that karma is the principal that guides the universe,” she said, referring to the Hindu concept of cosmic justice. “It’s one of the reasons I joined Teach for America.”

In my recent interview with historian Kevin M. Schultz, he mentioned that Catholics and Jews in the early 20th century worked to “present a positive and forceful image of what it meant to be an American” using the “languages of good Americanism to show they belong.” This article makes it quite clear that this process is well underway for American Hindus. That said, despite Hinduism’s many successes in building infrastructure and mainstreaming some of their practices, there still remains a lot of distrust and hostility, as evidenced by the comments section of the CNN profile. American Hindu organizations will also have to decide, ultimately, how they are going to present themselves to other faiths. Hinduism’s theological diversity has allowed proponents to engage with Pagans, noting their common ground, while also (sometimes vociferously) portraying themselves as monotheists. It’s a complex subject, but American politics hates complex subjects, and the process of “Americanizing” a diverse decentralized umbrella faith may present roadblocks in the future.

In Other News:

That’s all I have for now, have a great day!

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