Pagan Child Custody vs. the Law of Man

Author: Rev. Morgana RedSkye Black
Posted: July 8th. 2007
Times Viewed: 832

The decision to dissolve one�s marriage is often a difficult step, and becomes even more difficult when children are involved. Especially if the parents are at each other�s throats and use the children as weapons in an attempt to gain control over the other.

What should be in the best interest of the child becomes a fight over who should get custody and what�s in the best interest of the child becomes left in the hands of strangers who have no idea what Witchcraft, Paganism and/or Wicca is all about. Everyone will have their own ideas and agendas on the subject when religion and/or spirituality come to the forefront in a child custody dispute.

I think the first step in this kind of dispute is not to panic. Hollywood has unfortunately done a fine job of discrediting Witchcraft, Paganism and Wicca to begin with. I think the only time this subject comes into play (all earth-based religions in general) is when a pissed off parent seeks revenge on the parent the child already has a good relationship with, out of spite and jealously (usually because of the bad break up and not necessarily over the child).

I believe its safe to say that one should arm themselves with a brief description of what our philosophy of life is (belief in Nature, Harm none, etc), and reminding them of the First Amendment (�Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...") Wicca, Paganism, and Witchcraft applies here too within that Amendment.

In 1985 there was a case (Dettmer v. Landon) in which a Wiccan prison inmate brought a civil rights claim alleging that his First Amendment rights had been violated by prison officials who refused him access to religious objects and worship materials. The district court in that case ruled that adherents of the path of Wicca had been established. Lets not forget the Witchcraft Laws that had been repealed (the last ones in England were repealed in the 1950�s). In Yoder v. Wisconsin, the free exercise of religious beliefs includes the right to direct the religious upbringing of one's children. This would include Witchcraft, Wicca, and Paganism.

A person�s religion should have nothing to do with a person�s ability to raise a child any more than sexual preference. Love and understanding raise a child, not religion.

I can understand if CPS and other authorities were called because the child was indeed in harm�s way (there are a lot of sickos out there), then there would be no question of the child being removed from a parent�s custody. However, many authorities of such a nature are not willing to take the time to really delve into their cases, and read the fine print as it were. If there is no evidence of ritual abuse, then how can these same authorities remove a child from a parent? Whom then will custody of the child in question go to?

There is a line between a Wiccan/Pagan parent teaching their child the significance of Nature, and worshipping a Goddess, and a parent actually abusing a child during ritual. A social worker and their ilk should be looking into the truth of the matter and not the misconceptions set forth by Hollywood and society. Their own religious beliefs should not take precedence but what is in the best interest of the child.

Some social workers have about as much compassion (not too mention the ones that actually do their job and do it well) as a stink bomb. Instead of actually taking the time to research the subject, and perhaps talking to people who are of an earth-based religion so they may get a clearer understanding of it they just assume the worst (based on their own beliefs which are usually Christian), and go from there. Hardly in the best interest of any child. Perhaps if they did, we would never hear of these cases at all. Unfortunately, they do happen.

What would we do if it were us? The simple matter of having an Athame and having to explain its significance to me seems daunting, especially when faced with some hotshot lawyer who thinks he knows it all (this scene was actually an episode of �Picket Fences�). The whole thing just seems to be intimidating.

How would we explain that an Athame is not a weapon but a tool we use to direct energy? Just like that? Perhaps, but that does not mean they would understand the concept. This is why I feel educating the public about Witchcraft, Paganism, and Wicca, is so important. To dispel the myths and misconceptions about earth-based religions as a whole.

A few hundred years of evolution has not changed the way we are viewed by society (and all these lawyers, judges, cps workers etc are a part of society). People will think and believe as they will; the information is out there they just refuse to accept it. In the case of a custody dispute or any case brought to trial for the enforcement of the First Amendment, that First Amendment is supposed to protect us, and not allow us to lose custody of our children.

That is where free will comes in, we cannot change how people think or feel about us, but we can change ourselves to be better people. I believe people are known by their actions not by their words.

The point is, do not panic. When faced with opposition it becomes quite clear that our children are the most important things in our lives. If we chose the dissolution of marriage and things get so bad that our religions become what is on trial and not the best interest of our children then something is terribly wrong with the whole court system. We must seek to correct that.

One thing I have learned over the years is that the Goddess and Gods will not give us anything we cannot handle, and that is where we have the upper hand.

The First Amendment is to protect us, not to allow our religious preferences to be put on trial. Isn�t that why we also have those anti-discrimination laws? As I said, one�s religion should have no bearing on someone�s ability to raise a child. Take away that right and we do not have any rights at all, and we loose what is dear and precious to us because our beliefs differed from someone else�s, and there is nothing more devastating than the lose of a child due to someone else�s ignorance.

Blessed Be.

Being a Pagan in a Christian World

Author: The Wiccan Warrior
Posted: July 8th. 2007
Times Viewed: 2,658

Ok, I realize that I am not the first Pagan to write about this sort of thing. But I believe that my real attempt here lies in the fact that I truly have faith in the higher mental and spiritual faculties of humans. And because of this, I choose to write of my experiences in interacting with those of the �normal� faiths; because I believe in the power of the heart, and I hope for a time where we can be completely accepted by a world that begrudgingly�I wouldn�t say accepts us, but rather plays nice. I suppose this began with my childhood.

As far back as I can remember, I would go and visit my extended family. My grandfather would always wake us up every Sunday morning for church. I always went, because as a child, I knew that one was supposed to obey one�s superiors. I think that this idea, or the resistance to it, is the primary idea in my conversion. I never felt connected to the church. I had the idea of God and Jesus and angels and Heaven and Hell, never truly understanding it, never truly able to believe.

One thing I understood from the beginning was a mentality that I felt from the Bible passages, from the parishioners, from the altar boys and the priests. All of these people that seemed so normal and so nice, these good, church-going people, they all seemed to fear their God. It was an accepted thing to them, because apparently fearing God meant you were a good person. I suppose by that token, they didn�t think me a good person.

It never made sense to me, why fear God? If you love God so much, and God is as good as you tell me he is, why are you afraid of him? It seemed that the Old and New Testaments portrayed God as a completely different thing... the Old portraying God as an angry, smiting, destructive deity, the New portraying God as wise, gentle, and forgiving.

Given my difficulty in understanding Christian doctrine, I drifted around, unaware of what I believed, unknowing of the truth I sought, confused and angry that I was ostracized for my lack of faith.

Christianity was very commonplace, growing up on the East Coast. Nobody understood my confusion; the kids thought I was weird, the adults thought I was deficient in some way. I was questioned all the time by my peers, why couldn�t I just shut up and accept the Word, and believe that Jesus was the Son of God, and that he died for my sins? Why did I have to be so weird, why did I have to ask questions? I didn�t even know; maybe I just wanted to be different.

All I did know was, something wasn�t right, and I didn�t like it. My real disdain I think was the fact that not many people liked me.

But I felt better outside, where I could be with nature. I felt better because this was something I knew was alive, something I could see and touch, and was undoubtedly real. I began to love the outside; I began to love nature and to want to protect it. And this love for nature undoubtedly meant distaste for the �glorified� industrialism that I saw closing in around me. I would often imagine great vines covering all of these unnatural buildings and things, just as the little vines covered the metal stuff my dad kept far into the backyard.

My understanding of mysticism was small, given my limited belief in anything, until I came to my grandfather�s new church. He took me to my first confession, and I met a friend of his who was a young priest. Upon telling him (most) of the �sins� that I had committed, something happened that I did not expect. The priest began his ritual of absolution, and at that point, I knew the true meaning of the word �absolute.�

It felt intense at first, but as I instinctively adapted my sixth sense to it, I was given a sense of actual inner peace! That whole thing actually did work, and I knew that even though I didn�t understand Christianity, something happened, something amazing. I knew it was healing, and at the moment I instantly wanted to know how this man did such an incredible thing!

When I was between the ages of fourteen and fifteen, I met four people who would change my life. The first were Jen and Brooke, two girls who seemed to like the Goth stuff. They liked to ask questions to the pendulum, which I later learned was something called �scrying, � or divination. My fascination with it was that I knew it was strange, kind of mystical or supernatural. Knowing that my parents would hate it, I began very much to like this kind of odd stuff.

Afterward, I met Nick and Hollie, who set me on the Wiccan path, and gave me a book to help me learn everything. I remember that day well... remembering how excited I was to secretly read a book that had some pretty taboo stuff. I never thought it was bad, but just different, and very clearly a thing that was frowned upon by the adults, so I as a kid thought it was cool. It was very cool to go against the grain, until the time when I was caught.

It was my step mom who found the book, and I could tell she tried to play it cool, even though she was pissed. I began to become afraid, because I thought my parents might have a priest try to �exorcize the demons� from me or something. I really didn�t know how they were going to handle it. They eventually just ignored it, probably hoping that it was a fad that I would eventually ignore; and for a while it really did cool off. That is until my little brother started asking me about it. Now, he did this because he was curious, because he was my little brother and he liked to do the stuff I did. That sent my parents on a witch-hunt.

All of a sudden, they were completely zealous, wanting to know who brainwashed me, and defaming the name of my best friend Hollie, calling her a lesbian devil worshipper that corrupted my mind. They wanted to know what it was that �thought� I believed, stacking it up to Christianity, trying to use Bible passages to prove that I was disillusioned and ultimately incorrect in my dogma.

This led to my resentment, and I was forced to keep my magickal workings a secret, dedicating myself to the God and Goddess in secret, meditating and practicing psychometry at midnight, when my family slept.

It came to a real head when I met Maggie, who later became my first girlfriend, even though this was an Internet based relationship. My entire family hated her, because she was younger than I, (she was fourteen and I seventeen) and because she was Wiccan like me. It was really painful for me to face this kind of discrimination because although I was prepared for people to resent my religious choice, I was not prepared to be almost disowned by my own parents.

This discrimination threatened to once again separate me from my quest for truth, and nearly forced me away from the Wiccan path.

It was Maggie that kept me to it, teaching me healing and meditation techniques, and more importantly exposing me to the wonders of altered states of consciousness and astral projection.

Eventually, I think my parents began to stop try to �save me, � and began to realize that I was adamant in my decision to believe in and follow this particular religion.

My next real important experiences began in my first year of college. During my stay there, I was almost immediately drawn to a Pagan organization in my campus, to which I inevitably joined, becoming very close to my fellow Mason Pagans.

It wasn�t all great, however, because probably two-thirds of my dorm hall were either ROTC, or some form of Republican, or Christian religious right. I was the only Pagan, and my faith was extremely criticized by men who weren�t sure what it was I did when I stayed in my room half of the time.

One of the guys became very angry with me, because I was very open about it, hoping that I could trust my peers. He confronted me in front of everyone, saying that they were a Judeo-Christian people, and they didn�t like the fact that I was so weird, and that I should believe in something real and stop being a devil worshipper. That did hurt my feelings, but as we both calmed down he came to me and apologized, and I talked to him calmly and helped to clarify what it was exactly that I believed. After I was finished, he told me that, �at least I was a Wiccan with Christian morals and values.�

Two other guys liked to play World of Warcraft, a game that I was largely unaware of, and they always busted my chops because some of what I believe and practice just happened to end up as magic spells or abilities that Magi and other characters could use in WOW; they would always ask me how large my mana pool was, how much mana the spell cost me, and what the cool down time on the spell was.

I liked them, I knew they were just screwing with me, and it was fun to be able to make jokes and help my friends to be comfortable with my faith.

It was easier, that was until the second semester, when two new guys showed up and moved into our hall. One of them was really cool from the beginning, and he instantly became like an older brother to me. The other guy, however, was rather �in-your-face.� He was very exact and precise, extremely intelligent, but he liked to challenge everyone�s ideas and screw with your head; in all things, ethics wasn�t very important to him.

He became the one to replace the first guy, trying to perceive the �truth� of my faith, and systematically cutting down everything that did not seem perfectly logical to him; he loved logic, and he loved to take apart the entire idea of what a religion is because religions don�t have to be logical. We called him �the religious wrecking ball.�

After a while, he accepted me (I think) and I was very pleased. But throughout the year, it was others that really kept me down, who unfortunately happened to be Republican religious right.

My college has a huge collection of different denominations of Christians, and according to those that I talked to, they all thought that they were correct, and that the other Christians were wrong; which again is something about Christians that I do not understand.

Anyway, I met various people who liked to preach, and who liked to �save� and convert people. And they did ask me to go to one of their meetings, which I did, but I told them that I was uncomfortable, and I hope that they accepted this.

And then there was the time that a Christian group from the outside invaded our school and started preaching about hellfire and brimstone. Basically, one guy stood up and said, �You�re a Jew, you�re a Moslem, You�re gay, and you�re all going to Hell.�

It annoyed me, and then these guys sat there and told me that I was a sinner who deserved eternal punishment, even though they did not even know what a Wiccan was, nor what I believed. I was more than willing to talk to them about the kind of things I believed in, but they didn�t care.

I would have just left, until they told me that because I feared neither the Christian God, nor my God, nor my father, that my father raised me incorrectly, and both my father and myself are immoral people.

I argued with and yelled at them for maybe three hours until I was hoarse, and I felt like crap afterward. I went back to my dorm and cried, mainly because of a mixture of disgust, rage, and anger at such injustice.

Well, this so far is the summation of my life as a Wiccan, living in a mainly Christian world. I wanted to share my experiences, basically to tell my story, and to urge people to really make an effort to understand each other.

I believe that we are living in a world that is on the cusp of change, and that change is a good one. We as a people entirely, as citizens of the world, need to change.

Christians believe very strongly in the idea of Heaven, but I tend to think that perhaps this may be a state of mind; perhaps we need to make a Heaven in this world, to make the best place we possibly can for the children of the future.

Whether I�m right or wrong, I believe that we will ultimately come upon a world that is like a Heaven, or at least as close as we can get to it.

Who Inherits Your Knowledge?

Author: Lady GoldenRaven
Posted: July 15th. 2007
Times Viewed: 87

Here is a thought: For us older wytchs, have you ever thought about who you will pass down your wytchy items to when your time comes to cross over? By the time we hit our "golden years", most of us have amassed a rather large collection of books, articles, herbs, oils, etc. So where does it go?

We have thought about how we divide up the money we leave for our children, which one gets the house and this one gets the car. But, has anyone given thought to the wealth of knowledge we have put into our Book of Shadows?

Who gets the special oils you created? What becomes of the beautiful staff and wand we created with our own hands?

Do we leave our sacred Book of Shadows to our covens?

Is there a special child or friend who will use this information wisely and keep its secrets to themselves?

Has anyone thought of donating them to the military or some other organization?

Will they find their rightful owners or will they end up in the trash or floating around space with all the missing socks.

As I approach my Crone years and since I have taught many students in the ways of the Wise, I have often thought about leaving my stuff to one of them. However, several of my students have been online. It would be hard to leave my trusted Book of Shadows to any of them, since I have only had little contact with them. So, that leaves the students I taught in person, who are now either in my coven or have moved on.

However, I am lucky. I recently met a woman who is 25 years old. She and I have become really close friends. She had several pagan friends (who are also my friends) who had taught her a little bit about their path.

She calls me Mama Beth, since I am older and she can talk to me about things one cannot talk to about with her real parents. Since I have no children of my own, she is now my adopted daughter. She is serious about her learning of the craft, so I am now teaching her my ways.

I thought long and hard about whom would be heir to my wytchy fortune. I do not own a home, so all I have to pass along is my wytchy stuff, my Led Zeppelin/Robert Plant collection, and my car.

All that has been decided. And now, I have made my decision as to where my Book of Shadows and the rest of my stuff shall go. My daughter shall be heir to all I have in my Wytchy World. I have such a huge collection of books on the subject that is would fill two walls!

I started thinking about this when a friend of mine nearly died a few months ago in a terrible accident. I put much thought and many hours of thought into this decision. Once I decided, I made my intentions clear.

When I told Debbie of my decision, I thought she would never stop crying. She was happy yet sad. It was something she did not want to think about.

Well, nobody wants to think about such things, but you must. She is the only one allowed to even touch my Book of Shadows, let alone look in it to read from it. She has come over for her lessons on time every time. She is learning the Craft well. Most of all--I TRUST HER.

Now, I don�t know about you, but I surely do not want my Book of Shadows, which I spent many hours working on, ending up in a dumpster somewhere. I wrote every word in that book in calligraphy. If anything, it is a piece of art. For one, I have the fortune of having bought a grand Book of Shadows from a great company called Brahm�s Bookworks (link enclosed at the end), which is like the one you see on the show Charmed. Mine weighs over 30 pounds. Now you see why I do not want it simply dumped in the trash.

Who do I know who would appreciate this? My daughter!

Where will the hundreds of jars of herbs end up? Herbs that I lovingly planted, nurtured, and harvested. I have many bottles of oils which I have made, not to mention the holistic medicines I have made from all the above.

My staff, which I lovingly hand picked, designed by me for me, blessed and consecrated and has become a part of me, I do not want to end up in a burn pile somewhere as trash. If, my daughter chooses to burn it in memory of me so that none can use my �magickal� staff, then so be it.

A few of my friends may end up with a few things--some of the herbs and oils and such. My stones and all I promised to a friend who also makes jewelry. So he can use what he wants for wytchy works and pick what he needs for jewelry.

Of course, some things, I can leave to the world via the net. Some of this I have accomplished already. But face it, out in the world of Cyberspace, one cannot be too sure of who they are dealing with. A lot of my stuff is found and will be found as I continue, on Pathways Seminary.

But, I thought I would offer up this little essay as a reminder to all not to forget about whom you will leave your most precious Wytchy wears to. Since the baby boomers are now into their Crone years or close to it as I am, there are a lot of us pagans who belong to this age group.

So while you are sitting there, making out your wills, reserve space and time to have it in writing, to whom you are passing down your religious and magickal items to. I know, whomever ends up with them shall appreciate both the deep thought you put into giving it to them, as well as appreciating the work you did, and all the knowledge contained within these items.

I am happy that I know where my knowledge is going to be used and appreciated.

Thank you,
LadyGoldenraven