“It looks very odd. My first impression was that they must have stolen something, but looking at the shrine of worship, it appears they just came in to do this,” temple member Rajesh Verma said, pointing to the desecrated shrine. Another television, DVD equipment, other electronics and a collection box with money inside were not stolen, Verma said. [...] It was the second time this year the temple has been burglarized, Verna said. In January, someone broke in through a bathroom window and stole a television, he said. Nothing was vandalized during that incident, he said. The members are not feeling secure now, Verma said. “I’d never experienced anything like this in 15 to 20 years, but to have this happen twice in a year is very worrisome,” Verma said.

The verdict is still out as to whether this is a religiously-motivated hate-crime. The police say there is some evidence of “possible juvenile involvement,” though the involvement of younger people doesn’t preclude this from being an anti-Hindu incident.

This incident is truly tragic because, for the most part, Hindu temples have been growing and thriving in the United States. A quick scan of the news will show the local government in Sugar Hill, Georgia aiding a Hindu congregation in getting their temple plans off the ground, a new 10-12 thousand square foot Hindu temple starting construction this Summer in Michigan, and a $2 million addition to New England’s oldest Hindu temple in Ashland, MA.

“The temple, first conceived by a small group of Indian immigrants in 1978, was built slowly over the next dozen years. Its ornate exterior iconography was carved by a team of Indian artisans, and its granite deities, including Sri Lakshmi, the goddess of auspiciousness and prosperity, were shipped from India. The community has grown dramatically since the high-tech boom of the mid-1990s, when many Indian professionals moved to the Boston area, leaders of the temple said.”

Hopefully the problems facing the Hindu community in Greenville are truly isolated, and don’t signal the beginning of some sort of anti-Hindu sentiment. The growth and acceptance of Hindu sacred spaces is a positive omen for modern Pagans as we start to gather the recourses and will to create our own dedicated spaces, like the new Goddess Temple in Ashland, Oregon opening in the Spring.

“The temple, founded by Graell Corsini and 18 others, will open under a full moon on the spring equinox, the women say. It will enshrine the great goddess mother of ancient times, working in equal partnership with the “sacred masculine” God to “celebrate the divinity in everything,” Corsini said. [...] Corsini founded AvaSha Goddess Temple in Mount Shasta and came with two of its priestesses to found the Ashland temple. For the Ashland site, she says she “received a vision” from the Celtic goddess Bridgit to draw together 19 trained priestesses, the same as the number at Avalon, a mythical sacred isle associated with Glastonbury and Arthurian legend.”

Modern Pagans have much to learn and gain from the Hindu community, and we should support them as they spread their temples across the United States, learning from their experiences. This could be an excellent time for Pagans in the Greenville area to reach out, and show solidarity and  support during this time of trials.

A Celtic Temple in Minneapolis: PNC-Minnesota reports that on September 18th a temple constructed by the Old Belief Society in Northeast Minneapolis will be consecrated and opened to the public.

September 18 heralds a new piece of Minnesota Pagan history: a Celtic Pagan temple,  in Northeast Minneapolis, opens to the public. Andrew Jacob, priest of the Temple of the River,  (TOR) will lead a purification ceremony in the Mississippi River. After the ritual, participants can dry off in the new temple, also called the Irish Cottage Building.

The temple is the first official structure of the Old Belief Society, a community intended to train Celtic priests by combining academic and spiritual teachings. Temple of the River, a smaller subset of that society led by Jacob, formerly occupied a space in Dinkytown before moving their meeting space to his home in Northeast. He conceived of building a physical temple after helping construct a Native American style pavilion in 2006. “We made it a priority to have a physical temple in a permanent space – because a welcoming meeting space is one of the first things you need for community.”

While there are many instances of Pagan-owned lands, Circle Sanctuary, for instance, Temple of the River priest Andrew Jacob claims this is the first temple of its kind in North America. Considering the fuzziness of the term “temple” within our communities, it’s hard to gauge if this claim is true. If you know of any other free-standing structures that are solely dedicated as Pagan temples and open to the public please drop a note in the comments. Whether unique or not, this is a remarkable accomplishment, and one that will no doubt benefit Pagans in the Twin Cities.

Lady Liberty League 25th Anniversary Reception: Founded in 1985 by Selena Fox of Circle Sanctuary, the Lady Liberty League is one of the most active and effective Pagan-run religious freedom organizations in existence today. On September 15th in Washinton DC, at the Universalist National Memorial Church, they will celebrating their 25th anniversary.

“This special evening includes networking, refreshments, and remarks by Selena Fox of Wisconsin, Lady Liberty League’s Founder and Executive Director, and Patrick McCollum of California, LLL Chaplaincy Affairs Director and among this year’s recipients of the Hindu American Foundation’s Mahatma Gandhi Award for the Advancement of Religious Pluralism.

The evening will include an overview of the history and accomplishments of Lady Liberty League, including its origins in September 1985 in the networking that defeated federal anti-Wiccan legislation. Lady Liberty League activists and Circle Sanctuary ministers from across the country will be helping with the reception. Among the national Pagan leaders already planning to take part in the reception are Marci Drewry of Virginia, Director of Military Affairs, Sacred Well Congregation and Holli Emore of North Carolina, Executive Director, Cherry Hill Seminary.”

This event is free and open to the public. To find out more, check out the LLL reception page on Facebook. PNC-Washington DC reporter David Salisbury is planning to be in attendance and will be covering the event. Congratulations to Lady Liberty League on their 25th anniversary, here’s to 25 more!

Patrick McCollum at HAF’s Capitol Hill Reception: Since the Circle/Lady Liberty League press release has given it away, I assume it’s now safe to announce that the Hindu American Foundation will be honoring Pagan chaplain Patrick McCollum with the Mahatma Gandhi Award for the Advancement of Religious Pluralism at their 7th annual Capitol Hill Reception on September 14th.

“Join us as we honor Congressmen, government officials and individuals for their commitment to promoting understanding of Hindu American issues, pluralism and tolerance.”

A prominent Hindu organization honoring a Pagan chaplain and activist is a big deal, and could signal a new era of cooperation and communication between American Hindus and Pagans. I’ve been in contact with HAF concerning this, and will be bringing you more on this story after the ceremony.

Wendy Rule Plays for a Pagan Nonprofit: Australian singer-songwriter and Pagan Wendy Rule is currently on a American tour to promote her latest album “Guided By Venus”. In addition to playing at the Pagan music-heavy StrowlerFest (as reported here previously) on September 10th and 11th, Los Angeles Pagan Examiner Joanne Elliott reports that she’ll be wrapping up the tour with a benefit concert for the Temple of the Goddess on September 15th.

“Australian singer-songwriter Wendy Rule – a self-proclaimed witch – will make the sole Los Angeles area appearance of her 2010 U.S. tour at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, September 15. Rule has agreed to make this a benefit concert for Temple of the Goddess (TOG), a nonprofit religious organization committed to the spiritual well-being of the Los Angeles and world communities. TOG will also sponsor this intimate, 60-seat, open air twilight performance under elder oaks at a private residence in Pasadena.”

For more on the concert, including information on purchasing tickets, click here.

Return to Stoudtburg Village: Some of you may remember the drama last year over a Pagan group holding a small festival at the tourist-trap Stoudtburg Village in Adamstown, Pennsylvania. Several Christian-owned businesses, offended by Pagans holding a gathering at the village, boycotted by shutting down their stores in protest. The situation soon made national news, and gained the attention of prayer warriors and Pagan organizations like the Lady Liberty League. Ultimately, the event happened, a few businesses shut down, and things were largely peaceful and productive. Now, the Reading Pagans & Witches are holding the event again, expanding it to two days, September 11th and 12th, and having Circle Sanctuary’s Selena Fox speak at the event.

“At 10 am on Saturday, Selena will open the festival with a blessing that includes the ringing of a memorial bell to coincide with the bell ringing at the Flight 93 National Memorial (www.honorflight93.org) in Shanksville in western Pennsylvania to honor those who heroically died when the plane crashed there at 10:03 am on September 11, 2001. At Noon, Selena will facilitate a Circle of Freedom and Remembrance. This 9th anniversary September 11 memorial ritual is a remembrance for all who lost their lives in the terrorist attacks on America that day. The rite also focuses on healing as well as will include an honoring of Freedom and America’s religious and ethnic diversity. Pagan first responders and Pagans in the US military – present and past - are invited to be part of the procession that begins this rite.

At 1 pm, Selena will give the Festival Keynote: Earth Spirituality & Religious Freedom. She will give an overview of Paganism across time and cultures and speak about ways Pagans of many paths can work together for greater religious freedom in society.”

The event is free and open to the public. You can find out more about the event, here. This whole situation shows how religious freedom and acceptance can happen if we don’t back down in the face of opposition and protest, congratulations to the Reading Pagans & Witches for making this happen.

Happy Anniversary Witch School: In a final note, today is Witch School’s 9th anniversary. Here’s an excerpt from a statement by co-founder Rev. Donald Lewis on the occasion.

“Today is the Ninth Anniversary of the founding of Witch School!! Witch School was founded on September 4, 2001. Co-founders Ed Hubbard, Don Lewis, and Lisa Tuit created Witch School as a response to the tremendous success of the Daily Spell e-zine, which had been offering the Correllian First Degree teachings. The school was initially run out of Rev. Don’s kitchen. With its philosophy of an “Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere online Pagan and Magickal education” the school grew rapidly, filling a void created by the lack of accessible teachers. Witch School was and is a revolutionary educational system utilizing peer-to-peer teaching and the power of the Internet to bring Pagan religious and magical education to people around the globe. The Witch School system was able to reach people in remote geographical areas who were otherwise unable to connect with teachers, and to provide training in an extremely flexible and effective way. Today Witch School has students on all seven of the Earth’s continents (yes, even Antarctica) and is the most trafficked Pagan site in the world. We are very proud of our school and its students and salute each and every one!”

Rev. Lewis goes on to explain the significance of the Sept. 4th debut, and connections between Witch School and the Correllian Tradition. While Witch School has certainly been controversial during its years of operation, few can deny that it has become a prominent Pagan organization, and looks to be around for a long time to come. Congratulations to Witch School on their anniversary.

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

An advice column for the Washington Times highlights the struggles of a Wiccan military family after the children are outed at their local school.

…my children are being discriminated against by their teachers and administrators because we are Wiccans. It all started when other children at their school found out we are Wiccan. The students now call my children witches and warlocks. I know my children are being harassed, and this is not fair to them. Their grades are now falling tremendously. I have complained about this to the teachers, counselors, assistant principal and the principal. They have done nothing about it. I wanted to use this experience as a learning tool, to teach others about our lifestyle without imposing our views on others. It was my desire to stay calm and educate only to stop the fear and harassment. I asked to do a professional development session for the staff and a presentation to my children’s classrooms. I know this would help others understand, so they would stop judging and name-calling. The teachers would not hear of this. They all said it would infringe upon the rights of other students who do not want to hear about Wiccans.

The columnist “Ms. Vicki” Johnson advises the mother to climb higher on the administrative ladder with her concerns, and to seek counselling in order to deal with the emotional stress, but I fear that this is a far deeper problem than a few uncaring teachers. The military culture has become downright hostile to non-Christian faith expressions, often exploiting loopholes to keep Pagans (and other faiths) from gaining legitmacy and equal treatment. It wasn’t simply because of Bush that the veteran Pentacle quest took so long to achieve victory. I don’t know if there’s an easy solution to this problem, but one can hope that things will open up a bit under the Obama administration.

Darin Najor, who assulted a teacher and threatened to set her on fire for being a “witch” after she assigned the class to read “The Crucible”, is undergroing a competency hearing to see if he can stand trial.

Police said the assignment to read and discuss “The Crucible” apparently set Najor off. The teacher had been discussing the play in class for a while before she was assaulted. Najor questioned the teacher the day before the assault, police said, and she told him she didn’t believe in witchcraft and that the play was an allegory about persecution. The following day, Najor came up behind the teacher chanting what sounded like religious verses and poured water over her that he carried in a Gatorade bottle, Denmark said. Najor was also carrying a large barbecue lighter and told the teacher she was a witch who needed to be purified, police said. Najor ran from the room and the teacher and a security guard followed him outside where he was smoking a cigarette, Denmark said. The suspect ran at the teacher and said he was going to “burn the witch” when he was restrained by the guard, police said.

While Najor certainly seems delusional, one wonders where he got the idea that a witch needed to be purified by fire? It’s too bad this account doesn’t dig a bit into his background. What’s his home life like? What religious instruction did he receive? I would like to know these things, just in case the water-bottle was simply a trial run.

Speaking of innocent teachers and witches, a Texas man has finally been cleared of all charges after being accused of confining two girls to a classroom because he thought they were witches.

It has not been an easy three years for Jose Ramos. The 45-year-old Spanish teacher has been unemployed and under a felony indictment for most of that time, chafing against what he saw as an ongoing injustice he could not seem to clear. Some days, it was hard to tell what was worse: That he was being accused of confining two scared teenage girls to a classroom, or that the Rio Grande Valley thought he’d done it because he thought the girls were witches. On Thursday, prosecutors dropped the last of his criminal charges and, with an apologetic shrug from a county court-at-law judge whose children had been his students, Ramos was once again free, innocent and employable.

In the span of three years the truth slowly came out, the girl’s stories changed, and they no longer wanted to testify. In fact, it seems that it was Ramos who was trying to protect the girls from fellow classmates who accused the girls of casting malicious spells. The tragedy is that this man’s life and livelyhood were ruined while under the shadow of these charges. Resentful, he’s now looking for a job far away from the town in which he once worked.

The Independent gives a decidedly lukewarm review to Gary Lachman’s new book “Politics and the Occult: The Left, the Right, and the Radically Unseen”, calling it “stodgy” and “uncontroversial”.

Gary Lachman has certainly done his research. This history of how the occult has influenced national politics – and not just wacky, fascist politics but mainstream and progressive political movements too … It could be fascinating, but the prose is stodgy, and the actual aims of these secret societies, where revealed, are often uncontroversial and bland – to create a better world, that sort of thing. It’s never entirely clear whether Lachman believes that occult study is a real means of acquiring knowledge, providing an alternative to “the hard-nosed empirical approach [of] science”. This book offers no evidence that it is; but then doubts are raised about Lachman’s commitment to rationality when he claims that “in 1960, aliens took an interest in US politics and backed a candidate for the presidency”.

For more on Lachman’s work (which tends toward the sensationalistic), you should check out this (slightly edited) excerpt from “Politics and the Occult”.

How did ancient Greeks choose their temple locations? According to Gregory J. Retallack of the University of Oregon in Eugene, it’s all about the soil.

No clear pattern emerged until he turned to the gods and goddesses. It was then that he discovered a robust link between the soil on which a temple stood and the deity worshiped there. For example, Demeter, the goddess of grain and fertility, and Dionysos, the god of wine, both were venerated on fertile, well-structured soils called Xerolls, which are ideal for grain cultivation. Artemis, the virgin huntress, and her brother Apollo, the god of light and the Sun, were worshiped in rocky Orthent and Xerept soils suitable only for nomadic herding. And maritime deities, such as Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and Poseidon, the sea god, were revered on Calcid soils on coastal terraces too dry for agriculture. The pattern suggests that the deities’ cults were based on livelihood as much as on religion. And, says Retallack, temple builders may have chosen sites to make the deities feel at home.

So if you’re looking to build a new Pagan temple, better check out the local dirt first.

In a final note, mega-rockstars U2 may be dedicated Christians, but that hasn’t stopped them from wondering if the patriarchy is all its cracked up to be.

“[The song "Get On Your Boots" is] based around the idea that men have f****d things up so badly, politically, economically and socially that it’s really time we handed things over to women.”

You can see the video for the song, here. Careful guys, you keep this sort of sentiment up, and you might lose some of your ardent patriarchy-loving Christian followers (but who knows, you might also gain some goddess-lovers to replace them).

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

Statue of Cybele from Balchik.

“The ancient temple of the Hittite, Phrygian, and Greek goddess Cybele, which was discovered by accident in Bulgaria’s Black Sea town of Balchik in May 2007 has been declared for sale, the Varna daily Pozvanete reported … The temple of the goddess Cybele is preserved really well, and according to archeologists, is the only one of its type in Europe. The temple is also the best-preserved building from the Hellenic Age in the Balkans. It includes a number of statutes of Cybele, coins from the time of the Roman Emperor Valens, and other ancient artifacts.”

The Director of the Balchik History Museum is calling the proposed sale a “sacrilege”, and is disappointed both with Kushlev’s asking price (too expensive for the city, who have already paid 100,000 BGN to secure and cover the site), and the lack of movement by the Bulgarian state to nationalize the site. Unless the state makes a move, anyone can now swoop in an claim this former temple, and the statues and artifacts within it, for themselves. Potentially robbing Bulgaria of a unique archaeological find.

“The temple of the goddess Cybele is preserved really well, and according to archeologists, is the only one of its type in Europe. The temple is also the best-preserved building from the Hellenic Age in the Balkans. It includes a number of statutes of Cybele, coins from the time of the Roman Emperor Valens, and other ancient artifacts.”

Scientists believe that this temple, unlike other finds from the Hellenic era, can be completely restored and opened to the public. It would truly be a shame if it were dismantled and spread around to museums and private collections across the globe. Will the goddess show her hand and stop the destruction of her temple, preserved for so long beneath the earth? Only time (and an influx of money or political will) will tell if this temple is destroyed, or turned into a place of pilgrimage and learning.
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