From Circle Sanctuary: Veteran Pentacle Grave Markers across the USA

The following was distributed by Circle Sanctuary. I didn't write it. --MS

One year ago today, US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)-issued veteran grave markers with Pentacles were dedicated in a public ceremony at Circle Cemetery, a national Pagan cemetery, located in the heart of Circle Sanctuary Nature Preserve near Barneveld, Wisconsin.

In observance of Memorial Day this year, we are releasing information about Pentacle veteran grave markers the VA has issued in the past year since the Veteran Pentacle Quest victory.

This news was compiled from Freedom of Information Act documents obtained from the VA by Selena Fox of Circle Sanctuary just prior to Beltane, May 1, 2008. The following is excerpted and adapted from her report, which will be published in the next issue of CIRCLE magazine, which goes to press in early June.

VETERAN PENTACLE GRAVE MARKERS ACROSS THE USA

In the year since adding the Pentacle to its list of emblems, the VA hasissued 26 veteran grave markers with Pentacles. Two dozen are fordeceased veterans, and of these, one is for a veteran and his wife. The other two markers are interfaith with the Pentacle signifying the Wiccan faith of wives buried with their veteran husbands in federal cemeteries.

SERVICE: Wiccan and Pagan veterans honored by Pentacle grave markersinclude those who served in the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps.Their combined range of service has spanned seven decades. The majorityof the markers are for war veterans, including two who served in World WarII, three who served in the Korean War, and seven who served in theVietnam War.

WAR DEATHS: Some of the markers are for those who have died in 21stcentury wars. In addition to Sgt. Stewart, a Desert Storm veteran who waskilled in action in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and whosewidow, Roberta Stewart, spoke out publicly as part of the Veteran Pentacle Quest, there are markers for six troops who were killed in Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and another for a soldier who had served both in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and who died of war-related injuries after returning home.

CEMETERIES: The 26 Pentacle markers are in 17 cemeteries across the UnitedStates. 16 of the markers are in national cemeteries, five of which are in Arlington National Cemetery. One is in a state veterans cemetery. Nine are in private cemeteries, four of which are at Circle Cemetery in Wisconsin.

STATES: There are VA-issued Pentacle markers in 14 states: California, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

On this Memorial Day, we honor the lives and service of Wiccan and other Pagan veterans who have died.

We give thanks for the Pentacle markers that have been issued by the VA thus far.

And, we send out the wish that the VA will finally finish revising its protocols and procedures for adding additional emblems of belief to its list of those it will include on the veteran grave markers it issues so that symbols of other branches of Paganism can be included as well as symbols of other religions.

Liberty and Justice for All.

Circle Times: Memorial Day, Monday, May 26, 2008

'Witches' burnt to death in Kenya

BBC NEWS | Africa |

Oh. My. Goddess!

This has to stop. I don't care if you believe magick is real, or nonsense, or whatever, but this cannot be tolerated anywhere by anyone. We have to get under the entitlement that tells people they have the right to kill someone for Witchcraft. I don't care if the victims were or weren't, did or didn't - no one has a right to kill someone else for this or any reason. STOP IT!

YOU DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO KILL A HUMAN BEING, NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE!

This must be the basic understanding that is the foundation of our civilization. You don't have the right to kill. Period.

You don't kill Witches.
You don't kill gay people.
You don't kill immigrants, documented or not.
You don't kill women.
You don't kill children.*
You don't kill people who never did a damned thing to you, no matter where they live.

I don't care if you are a cop, a soldier, a parent, a spouse or a lover.

YOU DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO KILL.


*A fetus is not a child. It might be a human someday if the mother so chooses, but it isn't human yet. The right lies with the Mother.

Oberon explains the absurdity of a male deity:

THEAGENESIS: The Birth of the Goddess



Oberon Zell-Ravenheart is the original "guy who gets it." Would that all men were as wise as he.

At this point it becomes necessary to define Divinity:

Divinity is the highest level of aware consciousness accessible to each living being, manifesting itself in the self-actualization of that being. Thus we can truly say, "All that groks is God" (Heinlein; Stranger in a Strange Land). Divinity is a cat being fully feline, grass being grassy, and people being fully human. Collective Divinity emerges when a number of people (a culture or society) share enough values, beliefs and aspects of a common life-style that they conceptualize a tribal God or Goddess, which takes on the character (and the gender) of the dominant elements of that culture. Thus the masculine God of the Western Monotheists (Jews, Christians, Moslems) may be seen to have arisen out of the values, ideals and principles of a nomadic, patriarchal culture - the ancient Hebrews. Matrifocal agrarian cultures, on the other hand, personified their values of fertility, sensuality, peace and the arts in the conceptualization of Goddesses. As small tribes coalesced into states and nations, their Gods and Goddesses battled for supremacy through their respective devotees. In some circumstances, various tribal divinities were joined peaceably (often through marriage) into a polytheistic pantheon, being ranked in status as their followers' respective influences determined. In other circumstances, one particularly fanatic tribe was able to completely dominate others and eliminate their own deities, elevating its God to the status of a solitary ruler over all creation, and enforcing His worship upon the people, usually upon pain of death. However, no matter to what rank a single tribal deity may be exalted by its followers, it still could be no other than a tribal divinity, existing only as an embodiment of the values of that tribe. "Gods are only as strong as those who believe in them think they are" (Alley Oop). When the planetary consciousness of Gaea awakens, She too will be Divinity - but on an entirely new level: the emergent deity Carlton Berenda postulates in The New Genesis. Indeed, even though yet unawakened, the slumbering subconscious [and dreaming?] mind of Gaea is experienced intuitively by us all, and has been referred to instinctively by us as Mother Earth, Mother Nature - The Goddess for whom She is well named. Indeed, this intuitive conceptualization of feminine gender for our planetary Divinity is scientifically valid, for biologically unisexual organisms (such as amoebae or hydra) are always considered female; in the act of reproduction they are referred to as mothers and their offspring as daughters.

[Note: I came later to the conclusion that Gaea may have indeed achieved consciousness in more ancient times, and that she was actually "knocked unconscious" by the worldwide cataclysms and attendant destruction of Her worshippers which ended the Bronze Age and ushered in the Age of Iron around 1500 BCE. This hypothesis is more fully developed in my 1977 research paper, "Cataclysm and Consciousness - From the Golden Age to the Age of Iron." [OZ, 1988]]

Thus we find that "God" is in reality Goddess, and that our ancient Pagan ancestors had an intuitive understanding of what we are now able to prove scientifically. Thus also we expose the logical absurdity of a concept of cosmic Divinity in the masculine gender. These few pages, however, have only been the briefest of introductions to the implications of a discovery so vast that its impact on the world's thinking will ultimately surpass the impact of the discovery of the Heliocentric structure of the solar system. This is the discovery that the entire Biosphere of the Earth comprises a single living Organism.[emphasis mine]

So, is the Divine Mother sleeping? Unconscious? Dreaming? More like having a nightmare. No one can say when She will awake, but my money says 12/21/2012* - 12.21.12, the one that was divided in two, the two we are about to see as one again, realizing the one and the two are the same. We can make sure this happens by spreading the word about the Goddess to everyone we can.

I just read a manuscript by my friend Athana that has filled me with hope. She took her natural gift as a story teller, and applied it to a book that describes the ancient Matriarchy, in glorious detail, with meticulous research and sets forth her goal of getting us back to the Goddess by 2035. It can't happen soon enough to suit me. I say we get that book on the shelves ASAP, and pray to our Mother that many more follow from many men and women who "get it," too.

*Thanks, Medusa! ;-)

Merry Samhain, Y'all!

How's the New Year finding you? I'm exhausted, but strangely focused.

Kiss a Witch! Bite a Vampire! Eat a candy bar for me!

To ODE Magazine: Now, we're getting somewhere....

Yes, dear readers, it’s that time of the month again. I got my issue of ODE, and while it’s far from perfect, there are definite signs of improvement, as I’ll detail below. If I seem a little obsessed with ODE, I think it’s because I perceive its participants as people who “get it,” but maybe just don’t know what to call it. I could be wrong, of course - these are forward thinking people who may have encountered Goddess spirituality and found it not for them. The more likely circumstance, though, is that they’ve never seriously looked at the Goddess, and how different Her path is than the more common ones.

Groups that are progressive and enlightened tend to gravitate toward Eastern paths because that seems to be an alternative to more traditional Judeo-Christian systems. I call people like that “Buddhist by default.” I mean that in the most positive and respectful way possible. Most of them will tell you that they’ve sort of created their own form of spirituality, and they just use the Buddhist symbolism because that is the language they’ve learned to describe spiritual practices. It’s different than the norm, but not so far out there that most people will think you’re weird or flakey. It seems a safe compromise.

Some people, naturally, are meant to be Buddhists and would be no matter what other system they encountered. I’m not talking about them - may they find peace in their own way. I’m talking about the people who settle on Buddhism because it seems the only real alternative, but don’t find it to be an exact fit. Those people, in many cases, are Goddess people or some form of Pagan, but they’ve never found the language to describe their own intuitive spirituality. If they’ve encountered Wicce or any other form of Pagan worship, they probably have had a negative experience. As with every religion, we have our share of kooks and flakes, and they tend to draw the most attention. I’ve met plenty that would turn me off for good if I didn’t know they aren’t the whole story.

More often, though, even more accepting people will dismiss anything that involves Witches or Goddesses because that’s what they’ve been trained to do. The default position in Western culture is patriarchal, and even Buddhism fits that pattern - the denial of physical pleasure in search of a spiritual clarity, asceticism, the idea that we have to DO something to be “good” or “balanced” or whatever. Duality, guilt hierarchy. Fear of women runs deep in the West and even the most enlightened men and women will have a knee-jerk reaction that says deity can’t be female. If there’s a way to get them past that reaction to a calm place, and they discover what the ways of the Goddess really are, they are usually surprised to find that the spirituality they thought they had invented for themselves actually has a name and a face - or 10,000 of each.

The Goddess is a bountiful Universe, and She loves Her children unconditionally. She has the power to create, to sustain and to destroy. She is a living entity, and we are integral and connected parts of Her body. We are never alone. Everything is connected. We don’t need an intermediary between us because there’s no “between” there. What the ancients called magick we now call Quantum Mechanics. Quantum Entanglement over time and space, and the ability to interact with matter by will is magick. Einstein found it spooky. We find it logical, but not in the linear way so loved by the masculist mind. All times and states coexist, and everything ultimately is an arrangement of atoms vibrating in a field of energy. The energy and the atoms are Goddess, and so are we. Our consciousness is part of one larger conscious mind that differentiated itself for a while and will ultimately return to the source.

I believe it is absolutely essential for people to begin to see everything as biological systems. An economy is a form of energy just like a tide, and ebbs and flows in the same way. Our culture expects linear continual growth in our economy, but biologically that only occurs in cancer. To be healthy, we have to look beyond a bottom line. We need sustainability, meaning, and connection in our lives or we’re just rats running on a wheel, going nowhere, creating nothing. So let’s look at the issue:

To the Editors of ODE-

Last month I wrote to you in hope and frustration because I felt that so many of your articles expressed a theme of “knowing” that something was happening but the authors were grasping for language to describe it. I suggested that the word they were reaching for was “Goddess.” I have no desire to convert anyone who is not meant for Her path. I do want people to know that a language exists that explains their observations and intuitions, and to make that language available for those who would use it. Having read this month’s issue (June 2007) I must say that I think we’re making progress. I saw many signs of hope in your pages.

The word “goddess” appears several times in Tijn Touber’s “Curse of the Alphabet” (pg 18) which is based on Leonard Shlain’s book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. That’s pretty much standard reading in contemporary Goddess circles, whether we agree with the premise or not. The tag line for the article, “How YouTube will make the world more feminine and peaceful” might be a little glib, but it makes a point - we will have to use more than the printed word to create new images of a peaceful society, because most of us have been raised with the idea that peace is not possible for humans. Let’s hope the aspiring film makers on YouTube find ways to undo the indoctrination of 6000 years spent worshipping violence. We aren’t trying to create a society unlike any that came before. We’re just trying to get back to the harmony we once lived in. Peace is our natural state.

Still no Goddess with a capital ‘G’ and he does conclude the article with a quotation about “a balanced society, one with room for both halves of the brain-- and for men and women,” but I’ll take that. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Some day, I hope that people will be able to mention a Goddess without a god, not because gods don’t count, but because Goddess is all-inclusive. There is one gender with many variations and the one gender is female. We all begin that way. 54% of us stay that way, and about 43% become male, with the other less frequent variations falling somewhere along the single continuum. One gender and many genders. All states co-exist. Think Schroedinger’s Cat. No opposition. No conflict. There is no “there” there.

Yes, it is convenient to divide the world into neat little dichotomies and binaries, but that has created isolation, opposition, stagnation, conflict. Nature is not neat or “50-50.” Even the Eastern philosophies seek “oneness” not “two-ness.” What would the world be like if everyone could hold the ideas of one and of many in their minds at once without conflict? That’s abstract thinking, and it’s the one thing that can serve as an antidote to the trap of black/white, good/evil thinking that holds the world in a constant state of struggle.

Back to the issue... “Our Hearts are Full of Memory” (pg 20) talks about the memory of the body. There are wonderful examples of transplant patients taking on the characteristics of their donors, which shows that there’s more to “us” than our brains, and that our bodies do count. I love that. “Nature’s Violence is Not Always Senseless“ gives Gaia credit for knowing what She needs to heal herself, however inconvenient that might be to one species with an overwhelming sense of entitlement and a serious disconnection from Nature. ”What Makes a Miracle?“ introduces us to Brazil’s visionary, future-saint, or in my terminology ‘Goddess’, Nha Chica. This is a public statement by writer Paul Coelho, who tells of his personal interaction with Her, because in a really wonderful way, She asked him to.

”Three Cheers for Grazy Ideas“ (or ”Crazy“?) made me laugh because the line ”This world really does need more of these wonderful heretics“ seems so dead on when I’m trying to get people to see things in a different way, at least for a minute or two. ”Love Thy Neighbor for He is Me“ is nice though I would phrase it thus: ”I am He and He is Me and we are Goddess.“ Anything I do to another I have ultimately done to myself. On page 35 we have a wonderful picture of little African boys sitting with their feet in a circle with a caption ”Circle of Life.“ I know it’s from the Lion King, but we all know what the ”circle of life“ really is, right?

Then- BE STILL my heart! -we have an except from Paul Coelho’s ”The witch [sic] of Portobello!“ (pg. 36) and the story is about a real sort of Witch (capital W) which makes me really happy, even though it’s fiction. ”The Forgotten Thinker You Need to Know“ (pg. 41) made me sad because Ivan Illich was most definitely possessed of Goddess consciousness, though I’m sure he never knew that.

The photos of mostly indigenous groups in ”You’ve got a Friend“ cheered me right up again. Batches of Goddess’ own people (whether they remember than or not) assembled for a project called ”Moments of Intimacy, Laughter and Kinship” Get it? M.I.L.K.! I couldn’t make this up if I tried!

One small exception is that in “Remembering the Battle of Seattle” (pg. 58) as Paul Hawken recalls the first WTO protest which turned to mayhem because of fascists in police gear, he says “No charismatic leader led the marchers. No famous religious figure blessed the protesters.” Sorry to be a stickler, but I’m quite sure Starhawk, one of the most famous Goddess Priestesses in the world, along with many of her Reclaiming activists , was there. She’s on the front lines of most anti-globalization protests and took a group down to the Gulf Coast to help during Hurricane Katrina. It’s not that Goddess people aren’t around - it’s that the media usually ignores us, or occasionally makes fun of us.

“Selfishness is in the Public Interest” might have been a misstep, though. Contrary to what the very contrary Richard Dawkins says, people are not naturally selfish. We have been successful as a species because our first natural instinct is to help each other, and we are willing to make sacrifices for the good of our social group. It didn’t surprise me that the article spoke to Kevin Kelly of WIRED magazine - they are thoroughly entrenched in the patriarchal (and unworkable) idea of universe-as-computer. I get good information from that magazine, but very little inspiration and it’s one of the few I read as thoroughly as ODE.

“Healthy food is the recipe for peace” states the obvious but it needs to be stated. Good food creates well-adjusted people. People who eat poorly are more violent or hyperactive. So why do we feed kids and prisoners crap when it costs less to feed them the good stuff? You’d almost think someone wants to lock up all the poor people and drug our kids...

Anyway, sorry to send another long letter, but I wanted to point out that the Goddess was all over this issue and I hope that’s a trend that continues and grows. Keep up the good work!


Peace,

Morgaine Swann

Breaking News!!! Pentacle approved for Soldier's Memorial!

According to CNN's Wolf Blitzer, the VA has just approved the pentacle for Wiccan Soldiers. Roberta Stewart, wife of slain Sgt. Patrick Stewart, hopes that his memorial plaque bearing the Wiccan symbol, will be ready in time for Memorial Day. Stewart was the first "out" Wiccan to die in combat.

All Hail, Wiccan Warriors!

Damn you, Harry Dresden!

Next stop... the Flickr zone....

Sorry I haven't posted much in the past few days. I've been lost on Flickr. If you aren't familiar with the site, it's a place where you upload all of your pictures and get to know other people by the pictures they post. It has another, "underground" use, though and that's what I've been doing. There's a collection of artists there showing their work and networking in different ways. I'm particularly drawn to the areas where people post pages from their sketchbooks, and I posted a few drawings from mine. I want to make the most of the service before someone fucks it up the way Google did YouTube.

YouTube gained popularity because it was a place to post snippets of stuff like the Daily show and the Colbert Report. Then Google bought it and unsubbed all the people that uploaded the content that brought people there in the first place. It went from a great underground form of communication to being a commercial enterprise concerned with Digital Media Rights and advertising. Ugh. In much the same way, Flickr has become a place for certain artists to communicate with each other. There are other sites for that purpose, just as you can get Daily Show clips at Comedy Central, but it isn't the same. The sharing aspect isn't there, or it doesn't flow as naturally.

Anyway, Flickr is not fond of the artists. They want strictly photographers. They aren't kicking people off the site, but they are leaving people out of the search engines somehow. Before my usual critics start yelling that it IS a commercial enterprise and they can do anything they want, stop and listen for a minute. This isn't about what they can do and it isn't about rights. It's about the Commons springing up organically in unusual places and how companies would garner more support if they'd ease up and go with the flow. There's more than one way to be in a band - you can be a whiny bitch like Metallica that pisses and moans over every penny, or you can be a laid-back cultural icon like the Grateful Dead and nurture your fan base. Money is only one measure of value. There's something to be said for generosity and caché.

Anyway, I'm having fun cruising people's sketch books and related sites about pens and pencils and Moleskines, and I'm learning a lot about art, about people, about what I like and don't like. I learn from looking at the way others do their art, and maybe somebody will gain something from seeing mine, meager though it might be. It's fun to how differently people can use something as simple as black ink or a box of paint.

I also spent the day watching the HEX marathon on BBC America - damn! Ancient curses, lesbian ghosts, Witches, fallen angels and cute guys... it's everything Buffy should have been but never was. I just hope they don't screw it up - they may have killed one of the main characters already and I'm having flashbacks of the way VANISHED killed my beloved and committed suicide in one swift act of stupidity.

What are you all doing this week end?