== Witches Begone! = By Mark Morford

[madokie]

Sarah Palin was de-witched by nutball pastor? What a shame

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/10/03/notes100308.DTL&nl=fix

Here's one way to make a small child's eyes go wide in creepyfun terror: Mention the existence of witches.

Real ones. Living ones. Witches living and existing right over there, just off the highway, in sad eerie-looking ramshackle hovels and trailers and barns not a mere few hundred yards from your speeding car, right up there in the parts of rural 1970s Idaho my family would pass through on the way to our little getaway lake cabin up north, deep in the misty, foggy, sunbaked summerland memories of my childhood.

Oh yes, the witches were there all right. At least, my parents sometimes hinted that they were, relating, as we zipped by these sweet-but-gloomy little towns, tallish tales of mysterious disappearances and unsolved murders and maybe a mutilated farm animal or two, and then they'd chuckle and wink to each other as my sisters and I stared out the windows, equal parts enchanted and suspicious and petrified.

Of course, to my 8-year-old imagination, these Podunk witches were at once terrifically real, and yet somehow, given how they lived in these weatherbeaten tobacco-spit burgs, also sort of tacky, like a cross between the Blair Witch and an emphysemic Wal-Mart greeter Ð- gaunt harridans in bad housedresses who kept small oozing things in jars and ate live rabbits and picked their six remaining teeth with the bones of small children and watched too much daytime TV and chain-smoked Winston menthols. ...

[Marrah_G]

1. You have no idea how scary this is to some of us

Fear is a killer.

Fear is worse then Hate.

Fear is what caused a Minister in Virginia to walk into a Pagan gathering carrying a loaded pistol. Not because he came to shoot us, but because he was SO terrified of us that he thought he needed a gun to protect himself. That is the sort of fear that kills. That is the sort of fear that causes communities to lose their mind.

I was disgusted as a woman when Sarah Palin was picked.

After seeing her being "protected from witches" by a "witchhunter" I became truly fearful, for myself, my children and my pagan community.

Others may see it as funny, quirky, silly......but some of realize all too well where it can lead.

[LWolf]

2. I liked this part:

<snip>

As for Palin, turns out Muthee laid on some hands, delivered a garbled serpents n' brimstone prayer designed not merely to help her leap from Mayor of Nowheresville to perky gubernatorial fireplug, only to later become, thanks to McCain's appalling judgment, the most insulting caricature of female empowerment in modern history who, as the VP debate painfully revealed, still knows not a single substantive thing about American domestic or foreign policy, but also to protect her from that same silly/terrifying witchcraft I imagined in my youth.

So I'm sad, but not necessarily because Palin credits Muthee, who likes to ramble about "spiritual warfare" and "the python spirits," with helping her win the governorship, or even that Palin doubtlessly called upon those same kooky Wasilla extremists to protect her from demonic forces far more horrifying than witches -- like, say, condoms, or gay people, or Charles Darwin.

and this:

<snip>

Is it worth setting the record straight? Pointing out how true 'n' deep witchcraftery has nothing to do with evil or Satan or excessive black eyeliner or sacrificing newborn babies while listening to Ministry and smoking cloves? That those who've taken up this most ancient and potent of callings actually study their enchanted craft for years and know more about, say, the cycles of the moon and the body and the rhythms of the planet than Sarah Palin's most secretest pagan fever dream could ever conjure?

Really, the irony of this whole affair is just too tasty to pass up. Because real witches are, of course, all about self-determination, complete spiritual freedom, and are often practiced in the innate magic of the earth, the body, the self. Most follow no particular deity or dogma, though that's entirely optional (you can be a witch and a Christian, for example). Truth is, it's too bad Palin's not a witch herself. She'd be so much more interesting. And, you know, useful.

[shadowknows69]

3. Can we organize a Pagans against Palin protest Marrah?

Big pentacles on signs and everyone bring their Athame or Sword or attend skyclad heh. I wonder if they would fill super soakers with Holy Water to disperse us lol.

[Marrah_G]

4. Yanno...... I didn't need a visual of naked pagans soaked in holy water this morning !!!

have you SEEN a large group of naked pagans???????????????

:rofl:

[shadowknows69]

5. Not recently but I've been to a couple orgies

And those never looked as good in real life as it did on paper. So I feel ya.B-)