Pagan Defense
Some Responses to Christian Slander and Prejudice
A lot of well meaning and sincere Christians, expecially of the Fundamentalist varieties, are engaged in slanders and outright lying when it comes
to their characterizations of the Neo-Pagan movement. One of the worst types of this is the supposed 'ex-Pagan' or 'ex-Witch' who proceeds to
give either written or spoken testimony about their involvement with Pagan groups and practices. In this type of story, we are lead to the premise that
Paganism is really just a front for Satanic conspiracy in which the followers eventually begin doing all sorts of disgusting and illegal activities on behalf
of that Christian god-form known as Satan. These 'testimonies' often follow the same pattern and usually employ the same urban myths. They vary little from account to account and can be shown
to be false upon serious investigation into the claims made by the so-called 'ex-Pagan.'
Usually such testimonies often include the person's own admissions about their own drug abuse and other various immoral activities which they proceed to
project onto Paganism as whole, instead of upon their own failings. They also make other spurious claims which can not be backed up or supported by any
research. One of the most blatantly prejudiced claims is that all of the plethora of Pagan deities are really just Satan in disguise who is thus deluding the
Pagans into Satan worship. This is of course nonsense and it only comes from the belief that the Christian God is the only true God and therefore all others must be
false and/or Satanic traps to keep people away from the One True God.
Normally I stay out of the fray, preferring instead to let other more accomplished Pagan researchers do the job of
exposing these slanders. (People like Kerr Cuchulain in his "Witchhunts" series at the Witchvox website.) But I have had it with all the recurring lies and misinformations
being willfully spread by some very unbalanced or uninformed Christians. The time has come for my own version of the DJ to manifest in this sphere by defending my
naturally accepted Paganism from such dangerous lies.
If you want to know who I am and which group I belong to click here.
Keziah Thomas's Ex-Pagan 4 Christ Site
The first salvo in this defense concerns the information published by someone identified as Keziah Thomas [ website "http://us.oocities.com/expagan4christ" email "expagan4christ@yahoo.com" ]. She has a personal testimonial on her site which basically follows the
whole urban myth briefly discussed above. It should be noted that such testimonials are not a new phenomenon. The actual narrative structure, the motifs, and many of the events have been continuously used, lock stock and barrel, since
the Roman times, and possibly further than that (as the case of Bibilical Israel's slander of their neighbors shows).
I have rifled through her testimonial and commented on a forum elsewhere. (I may choose to post that rebuttal here at some point.)
I will comment on her 'testimonial' in the following paragraphs.
Her "What Pagans Believe" page is about the only one that doesn't contain violent slanders.
You can find this page at the url [ http://us.oocities.com/expagan4christ/beliefs.html ] which will not be linked directly, but feel free to type it into your own browser and have a look at the original.
I will merely concern myself with what I feel is an attempt to present Pagans as being very simplistic and deluded and therefore of a need to become targets of evangelism.
First off I will get into the page's meta-naming code which, as an avid web explorer and page writer, I tend to look into. She has the page listed as
"A true story of deliverance by Christ from the chains of the occult movement, and a call to action for Christians to confront the Neo-Pagan movement."
and under
keywords such as "pagan, witchcraft, heathen, occult, witch, wicca, neo-pagan, neopagan, new religious movement, coven, nest, grove, evangelism, christ, jesus, ex-pagan, expagan, christian, evangelist, salvation, deliverance, satan, demons, demonic, sacrifice, cult"
Despite her obvious confusion between the terms "occult movement" and "Neo-Pagan movement", at least her purpose is clear. Now before we move on I must clarify that though there may be a Neo-Pagan movement, there is most assuredly not an occult movement, though the occult tends to go through explosions of growth from time to time. The reasons are simple, the occult is very difficult for the majority of people and to become an accomplished
occultist or magical operator takes years of training, much like in the field of music. As to the Neo-Pagan movement, there is definitely a steady and spectacular growth which can be called a movement, though many Pagans won't see it as such. Why anyone would wish to mess with the Pagans and try to convert them to Christianity is anyone's guess, since most Pagans have access to the Christian teachings and yet have decided to either not join or to leave the religion. The list of keywords to be snagged upon during websearches makes it clear that she intends for Pagans to read her pages and come to an understanding that her subsequent slanders
and outright lies are in fact the truth.
Throughout her testimony, which spans 12 pages, she repeats the key points to the whole Fundamentalist Christian misapprehension of Paganism: That Pagan religions, especially Wicca, are really just front organizations for Satanism. This false
idea comes from many sources. One is the old Christian dualism which posits that since their God is the only one true God, then any other gods, goddesses, etc must be agents of Satan. This idea also posits a spiritual war between good and evil so if a person
is not a member of the One True Religion, then they must be servants of Satan, whether they know/admit it or not. Another source for this is the collection of records, accounts, and thoughts pertaining to the historical persecution of
'witches' in the Early Modern Period of Western Europe. The Inquisition fabricated the myth that the so-called witches were really a Satanic conspiracy against the Church and wrote fabulous accounts of what witches were supposed to do, so that when they actually arrested
someone they knew what to force them to confess to. All of the Christian Fundamentalist ideas about Paganism and/or Witches dealing with human sacrifice, baby-murders, sex with demons and/or Satan, accepting the Devil's mark, and magical operations against the Christian Church came from this period of persecution.
Now she proves that she adheres to that prejudice often enough by repeating it throughout her narrative. Her account follows the standard formula of the 'ex-Pagan' testimonial as she describes her childhood and the lack of exposure to 'Bible-believing Christianity', her slide into
drugs and partying, and then her spiritual hunger which leads her to find a Pagan group, who she calls a 'coven'; all followed by her complete horror as she falls victim to Satanic conspiracy; her story is then completed with the much expected 'salvation through Jesus' technique. As a genre of testimonial, she follows it to the letter.
By the very basis of her account of the coven and its members, it is very clear that she borrowed the idea from Schnoebelen's Wicca: Satan's Little White Lie which merely continues the old
urban myths of Satanic conspiracies. She is clearly fabricating the entire account because such things as she describes simply do not exist, even in more of the weirder and darker of the occult circles - and I should know having been in the thick of the occult for several years now.
Throughout her account she also has the tendency to confuse Paganism, Wicca, and occult magical practices. Yet, as any experienced practitioner of any of them will tell you, they are not
the same thing, though some parts can overlap. Her confusion is easily understood when it is remembered that she has no real experience in any Pagan community or group and probably never even met a serious
practitioner of occult magic. She simply grafts onto her story elements from the old urban myths, from long discredited Christian 'ex-Witch' and 'ex-Pagan' testimonials and expositions (such as the aforementioned Schnoebelen book), and from other slanders mostly popularized by the British novelist Dennis Wheatley (who practically revived the modern Satanic conspiracy mythos).
Thus a normal tale of a drug abuser who got cleaned up by her new-found Christian religious practice is spiced up a bit and made to seem more fantastic. But the question is "Who really could believe such things?"
She writes of participating in two human sacrifices, in magical operations which caused significant damage to others, and in doing rituals that pervert the very meaning and practice of magic. She claims that her coven had the traditional thirteen members, that Satan himself gave them orders, that she was told by her supposedly Pagan elders that
Satan was the real leader (in the guise of Lucifer, who is even Biblically not the same being as Satan anyway), that they practiced the 'Great Rite' in the form of a mass orgy (even though Wiccans know that the Great Rite is either: a private undertaking between consenting individuals who also tend to be lovers; Or: a symbolic ritual where the union is represented by the wand in the chalice - though I have seen athames plunged into chalices too),
and that they extensively used drugs in their rites, and that the group was so magically powerful that she was afraid to leave. And all of this somehow never caught the notice of anyone else outside of the coven? Really?
As some of us more long-time Pagans and/or magical practitioners (yeah, us 'lifers') can attest to, both the 'metaphysical' and 'Pagan' communities are not very large. It is very easy to become well known, and subsequently it is very hard to remain unknown. If a group or coven was going around doing the sorts of things this writer claims then hundreds if not thousands of Pagans and/or occultists would
have known about it within days. Vows of secrecy notwithstanding, Pagans have healthily often-used big mouths and consequently we as a community are very quick to know about assholes and/or foul deeds. The same is true for the more hard core occultist community. And then there is the issue of energy and magic; trust me, if the sorts of things the writer describes were happening in reality, a lot of us would have been made aware to the fact simply because of our sensitivity.
But Keziah Thomas' account expects us to simply take her slanders as truth even though she provides no evidence, no real names, no real dates, nothing that could support even just one of her claims. The sad fact is that many misguided people will believe her simply because she professes to be Christian. Subsequently many more Pagans might have to undergo discrimination and/or persecution.
Simply put, she does not and can not substantiate her claims. Now, despite my plain explanation of where she gathered her slanders and prejudices from,
I will here list the key points in the same old urban myth now used by Christian Fundamentalists. The Romans were probably the first people who perfected what is now known as the 'Satanic Cultist' urban myth.
According the them there were groups of evil cults who participated in:
human sacrifice
sacrilege or destruction of sacred symbols and objects
ate infants or drank the blood thereof
harmful magical operations
held mass orgies
The Romans believed these things to be true of the early Christians. When the Christians gained political and social control of Rome they applied these
same myths towards the surviving Pagans. When the Pagans had been destroyed or driven into extinction by their Christian persecutors, the Christians then
applied this same myth towards the Jews, and subsequently any group of people deemed "heretics." During the early modern period, Christians applied this myth towards
those people they were persecuting for 'witchcraft.' All evidence to support this myth was manufactured and confessions were extracted through torture as further proof.
The Great Witch Hunts were simply the latest flourish on this old style of circular reasoning which unfortunately caused the horrible deaths of hundreds of thousands of people through
history.
The modern Christian Fundamentalist claims of this Satanic Conspiracy should be seen in this context, so that it can better be de-constructed and disarmed. We Pagans, Wiccans, Occultists, and other minority spiritual or religious groups simply can not
ignore these dangerous ideas and slanders about us anymore. To do so may be to our peril as misguided individuals may believe that their attacking and harming us is okay because it is 'sincere' or 'well meaning.'
One of the best ways is to expose every so-called 'ex-Pagan' or 'ex-Witch' or 'ex-Occultist' wherever and whenever they rear the heads of this ugly and pernicious slander. Such people, if they are truly converted to Christianity should listen to their own moral code
and not 'bear false witness' against their neighbors.
Now, back to Keziah Thomas. Some of you Christians who read her testimony may be asking yourselves why her excursion into Paganism did not help her with her drug abuse problem.
The simple reason is that her excursion into Paganism was fabricated. If she had really gained friends among any Pagan group, they would have most certainly either helped her or referred her to the appropriate medical specialists and/or therapists.
We Pagans are pragmatic and would not have suggested that she simply give herself over to some mystery or belief in order for her to recover.
Through out her account, I get the sense that she made some cursory readings of books about Paganism, but not as an interest, for if she was truly interested she would have been unable to maintain her position that she fell into a Satanic Conspiracy.
The cat is out of our bags, so to speak, with respect to our major rituals, traditions, and beliefs, so it is impossible that there are any 'secret Satanic' inner circles among us as she and other deluded individuals have claimed. She is simply pandering to
people's fear of what they do not understand in the hopes that such people never really run across real Pagans or even real occultists. Any secrecy some of us may practice is more due to fear of being persecuted by prejudiced individuals then by any
lurid or immoral activities. And then there is the issue in the form of a question,"Why should we carefully explain our beliefs and rituals to those of you who clearly refuse to give up your prejudices and smug-spiritual supremacy?"
For the rest of you who wish to have intelligent dialogue and discussion, you will find many of us Pagans to be very happy to talk with you.
With this in mind, you may write to me through this site's email address. (Simply put the subject line Pagan Defense on the email, so my group knows who to forward it to.)
As time goes by I will add more discussions about these sorts of slanderous testimonies, so you may wish to check back here every so often.
-Irreverend Hugh, KSC, of the Discordians for Softer Sandpaper Society
and Participant in the Great Discordian Jihad Against Serious Discordians And Both For And Against the Bureaucracy
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KALLISTI!
This Page on December 1st, 2004 / Aftermath 43rd, 3170
Never Again the Burning Times!