During classes last weekend, the subject of Yule Logs came up. I was asked by one of my students to share my tradition of the Yule Log on the PaganCentric web site (especially in regard to a post I wrote a few years ago). This seemed like the perfect day to do so! So… here it is, in its entirety.

Happy Solstice! ~ Claire

Taken from “About That Yule Log”, December 23rd, 2009.

I forget sometimes that my traditions are not the same as everyone else’s. In recent correspondence with a friend about secular traditions and Yule spirit (in regard to how I celebrate the holidays), I explained my family’s peculiar tradition regarding the Yule log. I thought I would share it here.

The one and only lasting Yule tradition I have is a Yule log. The one in my possession has been maintained since my great-grandmother’s day. Every year I keep a fire burning in the fireplace for the whole Yule season, starting with the Winter Solstice around Dec. 21 and burning until Twelfth Night (around Jan. 6). The fire is started with the Yule log from the year before. And when the fire is ended on Twelfth Night, the largest remaining log is saved for the next year. This way there is an unbroken chain from each year to the next.

My family has done this for many generations, passing down the Yule log to our descendent’s. It’s a way of inviting ancestors to join you at the hearth, because technically parts of the Yule fires they made in their time are still very much present, since the Yule log has been passed down through the generations and the each new Yule fire is started with a remnant of the previous one. There are carbon remains of every preceding fire, and when you believe in the elemental spirits, that’s a big bonus.

To my family the Yule log is the most precious heirloom we can pass down. I’d save it in an emergency before anything else I own.

by Jason Pitzl-Waters
The Wild Hunt

Perhaps one of most thought-provoking presentations I attended at the American Academy of Religion’s Annual Meeting in San Francisco was that by sociologist Helen A. Berger at the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group panel “Pagan Analysis and Critique of Religion.” Her talk,“Fifteen Years of Continuity and Change within the American Pagan Community,” was a flurry of statistical information  gleaned from a 2009 re-visitation of the Pagan Census project. This isn’t the first time Berger, co-author of “Voices from the Pagan Census: A National Survey of Witches and Neo-Pagans in the United States,” has presented some initial finding from this new collection of data; in late 2010 she wrote an editorial for Patheos.com’s “Future of Paganism” series where she revealed where the data was leading.

“In comparing the two surveys [The Pagan Census and the Pagan Census Revisited] I found that the number of Pagans who claim to practice alone has grown from 51% to 79%. The growth of solitary practitioners has been facilitated by books and the Internet. During the 1960s and 70s when the religion was initially spreading, it was passed from person-to-person, most commonly in groups, such as covens. This has clearly changed as in the PCR only 36% state that they were trained in a group. [...] Parallel to the growth of solitary practitioners is the increase in people who state that their primary form of practice is Eclectic Paganism, which is the most common designation, with 53% of the respondents claiming this designation.  Additionally, 22% state that they are spiritual but dislike labels.”

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Halifax Courier,
Halifax, UK

A BRIDE spent her wedding night in the cells in a bloodied gown after turning up on her neighbour’s doorstep and attacking her.

Imogen Hope, 37, was found guilty of assaulting neighbour Samantha Pilling by Calderdale magistrates yesterday. The court was told she and her new husband Keith, known as Homer, were on their way back from their reception when they confronted Mrs Pilling next door but one.

The couple had earlier married at Calderdale Register Office, Spring Hall, Halifax, before spending the evening drinking lager and spirits at The Shears Inn nearby.

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We’re moving to a new server as part of the Windhaven Network migration. While we don’t expect any major interruptions, there are always unforeseen problems when you’re dealing with new servers. If you do notice any downtime at all, please keep in mind that it will only be temporary. We’re expecting a few hiccups, but nothing major. Expect the best but plan for the worst and all that.

We hope you’ll like the changes we’re making. The new server is going to be much faster than the old one, and it’ll open up a lot of possibilities that we could never even imagine before. So here’s to hope and a brighter tomorrow. Or, as we’re fond of saying around here, “Ever upward!”

We’ll see you soon. And thanks ahead of time for your patience during our move.

From: Joy News/Ghana

The Ghanaian government will soon disband all of the so-called witches camps in the country according to Chief Psychiatrist Dr. Akwasi Osei. He says the practice of confining elderly women who are banned from their communities to such camps infringes on their human rights. His comments come on the heels of similar calls by Deputy Women and Children’s Affairs Minister Hawa Gariba. The minister, who toured the Nyani “Witches” camp near Yendi in the Northern Region recently, described the camps as a national disaster.

Chief Psychiatrist Dr. Akwasi Osei told Joy News a national conference will be convened next week to address the issue. He said there were about six withes camps spanning across the three northern region where mainly poor, old, desolate, sometimes childless women are held in the name of witchcraft.

“Never have you seen a man… being accused of [witchcraft] and being sent there; never have you seen a young lady, beautiful, resourceful being accused; it is always the defenseless, vulnerable woman and when they go there… there are literally ostracised from the society and they are starved, they go through a whole lot of things including child labour,” he stated.

But managers of some of these camps have urged government to be cautious in their approach to disbanding the camps. Alhassan Sayibu, who manages the Nyani camp told Joy News the focus should be on educating communities against the practice.

• Original Article

It seems appropriate, as we head into the July 4th weekend, to stop consider some of the darker aspects of American history. Long before the Founding Fathers put pen to paper and declared the United States of America an independent nation, “the colonies” were overrun by superstition and religious intolerance. The witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts are largely considered to be the last gasp of the Inquisitions, but what most people don’t know is that the early witch trials happened not in Salem proper but in the township of Danvers. If you visit Danvers, Massachusetts today, you can find a monument to the 25 victims who died as a result of the witch hysteria gripping Salem Village in 1692.

The monument is located on Hobart Street in front of Gates Field and the Senior Center. Across the street was the original site of the Salem Village Meeting House, where most of the witchcraft trials were held before moving to Salem proper. The meeting house was part of the parish property of First Church, which is located just up the road from the memorial at the corner of Hobart and Centre streets.

The memorial was completed in 1992 and dedicated that May by town officials and the Salem Village Witchcraft Tercentennial Committee, which designed the monument to coincide with the 300th anniversary of the witch trials. Numerous organizations and individuals in town donated the funds for the project. In addition to the victims’ names, public statements by eight who were executed are on display as well.

If you are Pagan, Wiccan or a witch of another flavor, and are in the Danvers area during your July 4th celebrations, we encourage you to exercise your hard-won freedoms and stop by the Witchcraft Victim’s Memorial to pay your respects. The memorial is open to the public daily, from dawn to dusk. There is a parking lot to the rear of the site. For more information on the memorial, visit the Web site.

Witchcraft Victims’ Memorial
176 Hobart Street
Danvers , MA 01923

Links

• Salem Village Witchcraft Victims’ Memorial at Danvers

I am often asked why we post so much information about attacks on accused witches on PaganCentric. Aren’t Pagans supposed to be about Love and Light and Fluffy Bunnies? Why post all this negative stuff? Our reality can be summed up by the tagline that we associate with PaganCentric – “A home for the first to fall”. It’s all well and good to focus solely on the positive aspects of Paganism, witchcraft and Wicca. There’s a place for that, and there’s certainly no shortage of people and organizations out there who are doing just that. But as a hereditary which who has had to defend herself since childhood from all manner of accusation and recrimination, I’ve never felt very safe in my own country.

When I read reports from other countries of old women accused of witchcraft being burned , or accused witches having their hair sheared off in public squares to publicly humiliate them, or dozens of people being hacked to death with machetes, or couples having their eyes gouged out with scissors, I am at a loss to explain the basic inhumanity of human beings. And I’m even more aware as I interact with my neighbors through the uneasy truce that exists between us that if it were not for the rule of law in the United States, I might well find my neighbors at my doorstep with machetes and torches. The hatred is often evident in the sideways glances, and I’ve heard minor grumblings that any misfortune that has befallen them might have something to do with an unrepentant witch living in their neighborhood – if not a curse, then possibly a rebuke from God for tolerating witchcraft.

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This has been haunting me ever since I first read it on Reuters. On Friday, May 20th, eleven people stormed into a house in a central Indian village and assaulted a woman they had accused of witchcraft, blinding her and her husband by stabbing them in the eyes with scissors. The incident took place in the Raipur district of Chhattisgarh state. Police later arrested 10 suspects.

Apparently a family in Khaira village had been having money troubles and health problems, and came to the conclusion that it was the fault of a 45-year-old woman, according to S.S. Baghel, a local police officer.

“The accused blamed the alleged witchcraft power of the lady for their problems and raided her house on Friday morning,” Baghel told Reuters by phone. “First they beat her up and then a few of them held her hands and legs and then inserted scissors into both her eyes.”

When her husband tried to intervene, the group turned on him and inserted scissors into his eyes as well, Baghel added. A doctor at a local hospital said the couple would likely never be able to see again.

The brutalities related to witchcraft, mainly against women, are not new for the interior illiterate pockets of Chhattisgarh, where woman accused of witchcraft are often killed or paraded them naked. Chhattisgarh state passed the Witchcraft (Prevention) Act in 2005 to crack down on offenders, but the law has hardly made an impact in tribal areas, where atrocities against women accused of witchcraft still flourish and the majority of cases go unreported.

Nitesh Kumar Sharma,
May 8, 2011

JAIPUR: In the recently proposed Rajasthan Women (Prevention & Protection from Atrocities) Bill, 2011, a major thrust has been given to protecting women who are tortured or killed after being branded as witches, an evil practice prevalent in many rural areas of the state.

Similar to laws in states like UP, Jharkhand and Bihar, the state department of women and child development, has proposed stringent steps against such criminals.

The bill has been welcomed by women’s rights activists who had been demanding this for some time. A divisional bench of Rajasthan High Court had on Tuesday issued notices to the state government, women’s commission of Rajasthan and director general of police (DGP) in this regard.

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From the Hindustan Times, Mumbai, India, April 08, 2011.

The bill for eradication of witchcraft and unfair religious practices will be tabled again in the ongoing budget session of the state legislature. The validity of the draft bill that was passed in the assembly in December 2005 but was later withheld by the upper house expired last year. Deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar informed the assembly on Thursday that the new bill would respect religious sentiments. “We will issue an ordinance if we are unable to pass the bill this time,” he said.

The bill was given three extensions because of stiff opposition from all-party leaders, especially the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party.

Earlier, legislatures had contested certain provisions in the bill. Many argued that palmistry and astrology had a scientific base and hence should be deleted from the bill. They opposed the idea of stalling religious rituals such as animal sacrifice arguing that it would evoke public ire since the practice was socially accepted.

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