This Last Line Is Golden

“Each Tradition has very specific beliefs, customs, rituals, practices etc. For example, Celtic witchcraft and Wicca hold very similar beliefs. They are both 'White Magick' and seek to harness natural forces (IE Elemental Spirits) to do good (or at least what they see as good.) Their motto is 'Harm none, do as ye will'. They worship 'The Goddess' - a feminine deity that is sort of nondescript - she is often referred to as Diana, The Moon Goddess, or can also be seen as Mother Earth. Her male (and slightly subordinate) counterpart is Horus, or 'The Horned One'. Wiccans can be the lady down the street, your local librarian or the girl (or boy) next door. They are generally harmless to anyone except themselves and those whom they deceive into joining them.”

Yeah, Yeah, And I Hear She's "Strong And Independent"

“Although she states in the beginning of her blog that she doesn't like to talk about politics or religion, she goes on to discuss her religious beliefs at length.”

He Said/She Said - I Don't Give A Fuck (You're All Lying)

Wicca was first publicised in 1954 by a British civil servant named Gerald Gardner who said the religion dated to an old witch cult that existed in secret for hundreds of years, originating in the pre-Christian Paganism of Europe.

Wiccans Just Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To

Hat Tip: iOwnTheWorld

Nigger Pimp

Charlie Manson's attorney is asking President Obama to get the crazy cult leader out of prison, because Manson never specifically told his followers to kill anyone, but just to "do something witchy". We've got a better idea:

Lock up all the Wiccans, too.

Payback's A Motherfucker (Hide Your Mothers)

Awww, Woody Allen's NewAge movie has failed at the box office, and is probably one of his "worst-performing films ever".

He obviously didn't study The Secret close enough.

After your introduction to the world of Wicca, we're having a party where you can enjoy a bunch of Wiccan recipes. Then, when we've got you together in one place - you're all being arrested for rampant female fruitcakery.

The Devil might be to blame for American foreign policy. Keep it to yourselves.

Charlie Crist offered his political opponent a cross to drop out of the race.

Christ. Christ-ianity. Get it?

Yea, it's insanity, and he probably should've kept it to himself.

And now we know that conservative actor/icon Kelsey "Frasier" Grammer has kept it to himself that he's a paranormal, psychic-loving nutjob. But, considering he's also a despicable human being (and there's a picture of him leaping in the air) this should come as no surprise:

Like Woody Allen, he'll get what he deserves.

Oranges And White Bread Is A Healthy Dinner, Right? (If Not, I Seriously Think I'm Going To Die)

" Just imagine, for a moment, a Chuck Schumer or John McCain standing up in the U.S. Senate to call for a probe into John Travolta's bizarro buddies and the allegations -- proven many times over in numerous court cases -- that Scientology is more economic scam than 'religion.'"

-- Tony Ortega, in The Village Voice.

I hear you, buddy. Really.

But then I'd have to imagine a totally different world - one where people were capable of serious thought - but, under the circumstances, that's just not realistic:

"James Arthur Ray had spent the money that customers prepaid for future events when his business collapsed in October, according to a class-action lawsuit a Tucson attorney filed against Ray.

In the suit, filed by local lawyer Todd Jackson, plaintiffs estimate that 1,000 or more people had prepaid James Ray International for future events when three people died at a Ray event near Sedona on Oct. 3. When Ray's business subsequently stopped holding new events, no money was left to pay back customers who had prepaid as much as $12,000 for future events, the complaint says.

Jackson, representing Ray customers Susan Smyser, Patricia Franklin and Kim Wilson, filed the suit in Maricopa County Superior Court April 2.

The three women had separately fronted about $24,000 to Ray's company for events scheduled for 2009, 2010 and even 2011: '21st Century Alchemy 2010,' 'Urban Shaman,' 'Quantum Leap 2009,' and 'Practical Mysticism 2010,' among others."

-- The Arizona Daily Star

Now how can I imagine a truly "enlightened" world when I see women so stupid it could be argued they already got their money's worth out of these deals:

Using 21st Century Alchemy, this Urban Shaman took their minds on a Quantum Leap into Practical Mysticism, and now their money is gone, too.

See? The "spiritual contract" is fulfilled! It worked! Lesson learned. You're goofy, bless your heart, now get outta here.

But then they do get outta here, and then what happens?

"A self-described Wiccan had a man's phone number programmed in her cell phone under the word 'sacrifice' before she stabbed him to death, then claimed he had tried to rape her, authorities said Thursday."

-- Sue Major Holmes, writing for The Associated Press.

They're NewAgers, people:

You can't turn your back on 'em for a second.

She's A Lot Like You (The Dangerous Type)

"A rite of spring allegedly turned deadly for a New Mexico man.

A woman claiming to be a follower of Wicca, a pagan religion often associated with witchcraft, is accused of killing a man she'd met an Albuquerque hiking trail with a dagger she said was to be used in ritualistic celebration of spring.

Angela Sanford told police that victim Joel Leyva, a man she had only just met, tied her arms, made 'inappropriate sexual gestures,' and took the dagger from her, ABC News reports.

Sanford told police that she feared Leyva was going to rape her, and decided to take charge of the situation by wriggling free of the ropes and allowing him to believe he was being seduced. She allegedly pushed Leyva on his back, removed her clothing except for her underwear, and knelt on the ground over him. She then then stabbed Leyva 'three times in the stomach area.'

Sanford allegedly left the scene, eventually asking a hiker to use a cell phone to call police.

But investigators found multiple inconsistencies in Sanford’s story of attempted rape. Leyva was actually stabbed 11 to 13 times in the head and torso, police said.

According to police reports, none of the witnesses saw Sanford fleeing the area or calling out for help, and her clothes were found folded at the scene."

-- Lindsay Goldwert, giving us a bit of the ol' "bubble, bubble, toil and trouble" - the photo's quite fetching as well - as another Wiccan goes from witch to WANTED, in The New York Daily News.

Witches, Warlocks, Welfare, Whatever

"Mita Bai, 34, will never forget the morning of May 6, 2005. It was 8 a.m. in the morning when a group of three men and six women came to her house with their allegations, branding her as, 'a witch.' As an attack against her broke out, she cried out for help, but no one heard or heeded her pleas. Instead, she was dragged from her home, stripped of all her clothing, and nearly hung from a tree.

What was her crime? She was accused of bringing misfortune to others in the village as a practitioner of 'Dayan Pratha,' known in rural India as the practice of witchcraft."

-- Shuriah Niazi (whose last name - since I can believe what I want to believe - is a cool anagram for "I, nazi") not informing this woman to call herself a "Wiccan" - which takes the sting out of witchcraft, every time, making it cock-suckingly exotic (believe me: I know) - at least here, in America, where (not only could she have gotten all of us to pay for her "free" healthcare but) NewAge fruitcakes are still trying to get the TruthOut.

Wicca's Really Hard To Figure Out (Until It Ain't)

"Wicca is a religion (or a lifestyle) that is being adapted by our youths as a 'New Age' way to ‘have it all’ by doing 'your own thing' and not having to pay homage to anyone or anything; because you’re 'all that and a bag of chips'."

-- Victoria Thomas, a Christian lady - and it's been my experience that Christians are much more aware of NewAge than the general public - nailing Wicca squarely with that title, and hanging it on The Examiner.

"Some readers (yourself?) will say that the book covers I've chosen here misrepresent real wicca, that this is just silly child's play. That's true, it is. But here's the kicker: there is no 'real' wicca! Or do you believe the hysteria in 17th-century Salem was actually based on women casting spells and cavorting with the devil?

But why does any of this matter? After all, nobody with a modicum of intelligence goes in for this New Age stuff. And that's true too. No one wants to be associated with the icky old 'New Age' anymore. It's so passe. Even New Age Journal changed its name to Body + Soul. Because, ever since ex-monk and 'former professor of psychology' Thomas Moore's ever so special care of it, soul has been cool. And we're not talking Ike and Tina."

-- Doctor X, riffin' really hard on thinkin' really soft - you know: in the head - that's resulted in a whole lot of this cultish nonsense, practiced by the Mystic Bourgeoisie.

"Ask 10 different pagans for the tenants of their religion, and you’re likely to get 10 different answers."

-- Rachel Hare, really confusing the issue - they're making it up - while complaining about what Hollywood makes of it, in The Carroll County Times.

"Prosecutors in Everett, Wash., say a Gold Bar man murdered his former girlfriend last month because she broke a 'Wiccan blood oath' to break off a relationship with another man.

Eric Christensen, 40, was charged Jan. 29 in Snohomish County Superior Court with first-degree murder in the slaying of 35-year-old Sherry Harlan. On Monday, Christensen entered a not guilty plea and remains jailed on $5 million bail. His trial is set to begin March 19.

Prosecutors say Harlan's body was cut up and left in various locations in the area."

-- David Lohr, with another story about how fucking wonderful the "Earth-centered religion" of Wicca is - not the kind of story Wiccans want acknowledged as they attempt to spread their B.S. - but just the kind of stuff you'll find, easily, when you're actually looking into it, on AOL News.

NewAge Takes Some Folks Longer Than Others

"[Bill Whittle’s] attacking a whole group association think-set. I had been an uber New Agey leftist for many years and his caricatured characterization is right on. He could have also put in adjectival terms such as 'homeopathic', 'Buddhistic', 'yoga posturing', Indigenous peoples loving’, or 'meditating'. Any of those fits the group although none on their own would be considered insulting — except for perhaps, homeopathic — if you don’t like invisible, non-existent medicines. There is definitely a personality grouping of the New Agey hip, cool, enlightened, pacifistic Earth warrior. I think that ignoring the hard core paganistic tendencies of the New Agey left is to be in denial."

-- mbabbitt, making the same point I did, years ago, but not catching the same hell for it - check the comments - as the great Bill Whittle enters my field of interest, Armed and Dangerous

Sharp Ass Attack

People around the world are supposedly outraged by a really short video of a mob in India attacking five women the crowd labeled witches. I gather it must be the invention of video that's upsetting everybody in the West because, at this point, I'm convinced it can't be the mass insanity that arises from superstition.

People must also be upset because it's women being harmed on camera. Being upset about what happens to women, specifically, is mandatory. Especially if they're witches, or otherwise messed up in the head.

I'm upset Indian women have to be labeled witches when America's blessed with more than enough self-declared witches - Wiccans - to keep India entertained for centuries.

I think we ought to encourage a cultural exchange:

Send India our Wiccans.

The Indians wouldn't have to worry about killing, torturing, or maiming anyone who isn't a witch - and America would have fewer and fewer effeminate pricks getting pissy over howling at the moon.

It's win-win.

I mean, let's face it, witches are a pain in the ass (always declaring to overthrow the order, or whatever) so giving them a little (or possibly a lot of) "thinking time" in the "spiritual paradise" that is modern day India (heh: where they all, as NewAge westerners, probably hoped to visit anyway) strikes me as the best possible - and from the looks of things, in some cases, final - solution.

There - another day: another difficult problem solved - by TMR.

Wicca 101: Stay Stupid

"We started by learning some basics about energy.  First how to see it around your own hands, which most accomplished on their first try. Then we explored one way to feel it, which I explained in this blog earlier. Almost everyone, I think everyone, could feel it rising off the top of another's head.   
    
More interestingly for the skeptics, almost everyone could feel when a person passed their hands rather far over the top of their head. These exercises demonstrated better than any book could that we are enmeshed in fields of energy that come from everyone and every thing."

-- Gus diZerega, a Wiccan who don't need no stinking "books" - he thinks "some things just need to be said" - which doesn't even make sense after he's said it, on A Pagan's Blog.

NewAgers: Those Who Don't Think (Because It Takes Too Much Thought - And A Mirror)

"...Just as the Nazi attack on Christianity was part of a larger war on the idea of universal truth, whole postmodern cosmologies have been created to prove that traditional religious morality is a scam, that there are no fixed truths or 'natural' categories, and that all knowledge is socially constructed. Or as the line goes in The Da Vinci Code, 'So Dark, the Con of Man.'



The 'con' in question is, in effect, a conspiracy by the Catholic Church to deceive the world about Jesus’ true nature and his marriage to Mary Magdalene. The book has sold some sixty million copies worldwide. The novel, and movie, have generated debates, documentaries, companion books, and the like. But few have called attention to the ominous roots and parallels with Nazi thought.


Dan Brown should have dedicated his book to 'Madame' Helena Blavatsky, the theosophist guru who is widely considered the 'mother' of New Age spirituality as well as a touchstone in the development of Nazi paganism and the chief popularizer of the swastika as a mystical symbol. Her theosophy included a grab bag of cultish notions, from astrology to the belief that Christianity was a grand conspiracy designed to conceal the true meaning and history of the supernatural. Her 1888 book, The Secret Doctrine, attempted to prove the full extent of the grotesque Western conspiracy that The Da Vinci Code only partially illuminates. Christianity was to blame for all the modern horrors of capitalism and inauthentic living, not to mention the destruction of Atlantis.
 

Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century, the second most important book in the Nazi canon, borrowed ideas wholesale from Blavatsky. Rosenberg lays out one Christian conspiracy after another. 'Before it could fully blossom, the joyous message of German mysticism was strangled by the anti-European church with all the means in its power,' he insists. Like Blavatsky and Brown, he suggests the existence of secret Gospels, which, had they not been concealed by the Church, would debunk the 'counterfeit of the great image of Christ' found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

'Christianity,' writes Hitler in Mein Kampf, 'was not content with erecting an altar of its own. It had first to destroy the pagan altars.' It was 'the advent of Christianity' that first unleashed the 'spiritual terror' upon 'the much freer ancient world.'

Large segments of the cultural left today subscribe to similar notions.
For example, Wicca and paganism constitute the fastest growing religion and religious category in America, with adherents numbering anywhere from 500,000 to 5 million depending on whose numbers you accept. If you add 'New Age spirituality,' the number of Americans involved in such avocations reaches 20 million and growing. Feminists in particular have co-opted Wicca as a religion perfectly suited to their politics. Gloria Steinem is rhapsodic about the superior political and spiritual qualities of 'pre-Christian' and 'matriarchal' paganism. In Revolution from Within she laments in all earnestness the 'killing of nine million women healers and other pagan or nonconforming women during the centuries of change-over to Christianity.


The SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, was convinced that the antiwitch craze was an anti-German plot concocted in large part by the Catholic Church: 'The witch-hunting cost the German people hundreds of thousands of mothers and women, cruelly tortured and executed. He dedicated considerable resources for the SS to investigate the witch hunts and prove they were attempts to crush Aryan civilization and the true German faith. The SS put together what amounted to their own X-Files unit—dubbed Special Unit H (for Hexen, or 'witches')—to ferret out the truth of over thirty-three thousand cases of witch burning, in countries as far away as India and Mexico.


Indeed, most of the founders of National Socialism would be far more comfortable talking witchcraft and astrology with a bunch of crystal-worshipping vegans than attending a church social. Consider the Thule Society, named after a supposed lost race of northern peoples hinted at in ancient Greek texts. The society was founded as the Munich chapter of the German Order, and while its occult and theosophical doctrines were nominally central to its charter, the glue that held it together was racist anti-Semitism. Anton Drexler was encouraged by his mentor Dr. Paul Tafel, a leader of the Thule Society, to found the German Workers’ Party, which would soon become the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Its membership was a veritable Who’s Who of founding Nazis, according to Hitler’s biographer Ian Kershaw."

-- Jonah Goldberg, quoting from his own book, Liberal Fascism, in The National Review Online.