CUEW Triad

Title:Two San Jose brothers accused in faith-healing scam
Link:http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_6013140?nclick_check=1
excerpt:The Salazars advertised exclusively in Spanish-language newspapers and radio and claimed that they could solve a host of relationship and personal problems. Police believe the brothers treated "hundreds and hundreds" of people over a number of years, guaranteeing results.
"That's where the problem is," Jurado said, adding that the men committed theft by false pretenses.
The brothers operated their business at 1140 Pedro St. in San Jose, near Lincoln Avenue, complete with a greeter and curtains that blinded the windows. Wearing robes, the brothers would perform tricks - such as turning water into a red substance they said was blood - that made clients believe they were possessed, Jurado said.
Jurado said the brothers were entangling three religions: Wicca, Catholicism and Santeria.

TITLE:Judge Upholds Harry Potter Books
LINK:http://www.11alive.com/news/article_news.aspx?storyid=97735
EXCERPT:Superior Court Judge Ronnie Batchelor ruled in favor of the Gwinnett County School Board, which, in May 2006, rejected Laura Mallory's efforts to have the books banned. In December, the state Board of Education upheld the county's decision.

TITLE:In pictures: The Seto people
Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/07/in_pictures_the_seto_people/html/1.stm
Excerpt:Although Orthodox Christians, the Setos retain their pagan traditions and beliefs with the worshipping of their ancestors and the eating and leaving of food on their graves in Obinitsa’s forested cemetery.

Older stories beneath cut....

TITLE:Wiccan veterans win right to have pentacles on graves
LINK:http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journalgazette/news/nation/17291007.htm

TITLE:University sparks religious controversy
LINK:http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Top_News/2007/05/27/university_sparks_religious_controversy/7647/
Excerpt:The decision by university officials to allow the Pagan Society to schedule its annual meeting on school grounds prompted the Christian Union to complain, citing the college's ban of one of its previous events, The Scotsman said Sunday.
Christian Union official Matthew Tindale said the school's acceptance of the pagan group's conference comes after it shut down one of his group's events about the "dangers" of homosexuality last year.

TITLE:Jody has gone back to her roots and embraced Druidism
LINK:http://www.peterboroughtoday.co.uk/features?articleid=2906714
EXCERPT:As a teenager, Jody was intrigued when a friend told her she was a Wiccan white witch. "I said 'Ha ha –where's your broomstick?', but then she explained it to me and I became interested," said Jody. "I went along to a few Pagan moots, and liked what I heard."
Now 27, she has since become a committed Druid – but not a white witch, as that is more fitting with the Wicca branch of Paganism than the Druid part. She volunteers at Flag Fen, and is organising a Druid-style festival of the arts there next year.

TITLE:Legal link cloudy
LINK:http://www.thehawkeye.com/Story/1stmfire_cult_23
Excerpt:Those who claim to be modern satanists have a wide variety of beliefs. Some, like the California-based Church of Satan founded by Anton LaVey in the 1960s, don't believe in or worship Satan or any other deity. Instead, they hold the concept of Satan up as a moral example to be emulated.

Posted by Kat at 03:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The first issue of UEWiccan is out.

click to purchase:
http://www.lulu.com/content/870289

Posted by Kat at 09:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The best way to get all the news is by joining uew-s and uew-l, as I forward some stories there when I haven't time to blog them....

TITLE:Staying in the 'broom closet': Fearing backlash or bias, Wiccans keep faith a secret
LINK:http://blog.al.com/forthelove/2007/05/staying_in_the_broom_closet_fe.html
EXCERPT:While Neela Banerjee writes that Wicca, a pagan religion celebrating the divine in nature, is among the most popular religions to have flowered since the 1960s, many adherents still hide their beliefs from family and friends.

Title:Inquiring minds want to know
Link:http://forestparkreview.com/main.asp?SectionID=3&SubSectionID=3&ArticleID=2230&TM=83520.75
Excerpt:A Wicca recently got the U.S. Department of Defense to inscribe a five pointed star on the tombstone of a fallen soldier. Are there any Wiccas in town who would be willing to go public and share their faith with us?
Comment: Bravo to this guy for being willing to admit he doesn't know stuff. Seriously. That's not meant in a snarky way.

Title:Letters: Doolittle, schools, etc.
Link:http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/181148.html
Excerpt:Let me say up front that I am a liberal, gay, pagan Democrat, a kind of poster child for the people the right wing would love to see shipped off to an island somewhere, so I never in a million years thought I would be writing a letter to defend Rep. John Doolittle.
Comment: Mr. Gorman represents a reasonable voice, a rarity on letters to the editor pages, he deserved a shout-out, just for being Pagan and not calling himself Lord Flaming Lips Hottybottom.

Title:Wiccans Keep the Faith With a Religion Under Wraps
Link:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/us/16wiccan.html?em&ex=1179460800&en=4c7ecd214919e356&ei=5087%0A
Excerpt:DUMFRIES, Va. — Above the woman’s fireplace hangs her wedding picture, taken in a Lutheran church years ago. Below it, on the mantelpiece, is a small Wiccan altar: two candles, a tiny cauldron, four stones to represent the elements of nature and a small amethyst representing her spirit.

Older Stories below the cut...

Title: Ronald Hutton - Wicca and other invented traditions
Link:http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/features/article2537290.ece
Excerpt:When I met Ronald Hutton, Professor of History at the University of Bristol, at the British Library, he had just come from lecturing to a group of sixth formers at the Camden Centre. When I asked what he had been lecturing on, he answered briskly: "Oliver Cromwell." For an author who's just published a book on Druids, and whose earlier work (Triumph of the Moon, The Stations of the Sun, Shamanism) centres on paganism, wicca, ceremonial magic and seasonal rituals, this seemed fairly mild stuff.

Title:One Christian's Perspective on The Harry Potter Series
Link:http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/05/11/183825.php
Excerpt:Witchcraft was unacceptable then and it is unacceptable for believers today. I believe that and, ultimately, know that practicing "witchcraft" or "Wicca" as many call it today, is fundamentally (no pun intended), a rejection of God. That said, I know quite a few people who are Wiccans, including one who is a High Priestess, and I'm happy to count them as friends. I disagree with what they believe, they know I disagree, and we have some good debates regarding our beliefs.

Title:Mystery solved as locals discover 'The Secret'
Link:http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070512/A_LIFE/705120301
Excerpt:"I've been searching for a long time: in meditation, in the metaphysical properties of gemstones, even in Wicca," said Marsha Lavagnino, 57. "And then I find this, and I just don't need to have all this other stuff anymore."

Posted by Kat at 08:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you have not finished The Event, please be aware this entry contains a minor spoiler.

On Monday, Mick LaSalle, http://www.micklasalle.com, brought his turn-about-is-fair-play rapture story, The Event, to a conclusion. One of the good guys at the end of this saga, in which the Radical Reich are the ones left behind and such “undesirables” as Howard Stern and Jimmy Carter are raptured, is Jerry Falwell, who after supporting the Bush-Like President East finally gets it and realizes (B)East is the antichrist. He ends up on the side of the angels, so to speak. [At the time of writing this, LaSalle was contemplating changing the character at the end, and I hope he does not. Update: Now it's Robertson in the online novel. I wonder if Pat Robertson will suddenly die?]

My first thought, when I heard that Falwell had collapsed, was that he’d read The Event and he’d fainted dead away when he saw that at least one person left in the world considered the possibility that if he were smacked upside the head enough with the non-Christianity, even anti-Christianity, of his political allies he might, just might, start to practice a Christianity that came out of the Bible, not out of the Radical Reich political agenda. I hoped, for one brief shining moment, he “got it” and saw that not only were his actions unchristian, they were ANTI-Christian.

Of course, it was not to be. There was no deathbed conversion from the path of hatred he’d placed himself on. Here was a man who blamed people he disliked for natural events and terrorism, a man who called BILLY GRAHAM, about the most innocuous of Christians (unlike his son) there ever was, Satan’s number one henchman! We permitted him to exist and perpetuate his hatred because we were better people than he ever was- we allowed his speech to be as hateful as he wished, never stifling him, because we were his superiors. He died unrepentant, and as Christians might say, may his god have mercy on his soul.

The general reaction amongst freethinkers when they heard of Falwell’s death was relief, fear at what kind of monster might be unleashed in his place and even a touch of mirth. Here was a man who said Jesus would appear and we’d all know “the truth” in his lifetime. He was wrong about a lot of things, and apparently that was part of the great body of wrongness. Here was a man who’d been segregationist and seen that house of card collapse and had set himself up, time and time again, on the wrong side of a debate. If fairness and justice was one side of the issue, Falwell supported the other. That didn’t mean the freethinkers didn’t feel bad about feeling good, mind you.

Falwell’s story is about hubris, and those of us who follow Apollo are instructed to hate hubris as clearly, perhaps more clearly, than Christians are told to follow only one god. I found myself, as a loyal follower of Apollo and as a target of Falwell’s hatred, placed in a position where feeling relief about a person’s death, even joy at that death, made me feel like I was less of a person. How could I not feel remorse for his family, his friends, even Falwell himself, dying alone?

I could not feel remorse because while all persons are born equal, the actions of a person in this life can remove a person from that equation of equality in short order. In saying that the ACLU was culpable for the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001 and other equally heinous statements, Falwell removed himself from the equality that he was born to. He held other people up to a standard where death was the result of disagreeing with his god. Therefore, by his standards, his death was the result of angering his god.

It would be disrespectful to his memory to see it any other way.

Posted by Kat at 11:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For the first half of CFFN's existance, I ran everything. I read every paper, good and bad, read every lesson and tried my damndest to keep the thing going. During these times, I went back to college and got a couple of BAs, got mugged, ran out of money to pay my bills (resulting in CFFN going offline a couple of times) got stalked twice, but I kept it going because I was dedicated to the idea of a virtual coven.

I tried to get Phoenix to take responsibilty, but she had neither the time or the inclination. I really don't think the CFFNers had any clue how many times we decided to can the whole thing and were just going to get to the next lesson before we just gave up.Always something, or more likely someone, would then do something that just FLOORED us, making us suddenly realize that we did the hassle for a reason.
We did discover a couple patterns, and the big one was that when the student list exceeded 50, we'd have a melt down. Of the five big size-based meltdowns, I personally blame myself for two. Remember, I was doing this with virtually no UEW support at the beginning and absolutely none by 2002, trying to balance life and family and, frankly, not having anywhere resembling enough money to live on. One person, especially a person who isn't a big group person, being seen as the end all and be all of a group is never healthy...Oh, yeah, and the fact that you've been doing something for 15 years is only impressive until people find out you started at 12...heh.
The other size meltdowns were primarily caused by the fact that some of us (the offline UEWwies, mostly me and Phoenix, and a couple of very dedicated students) were very dedicated to UEW as a tradition and many new people were more familiar with Wiccan mailing lists as things based on community consensus.
This meant that if someone with this view joined and decided, oh, that Rede of the Wiccae was dedicated UEW sacred text (this never happened, it's a fake example) and got a couple people to agree, I, as the big meanie, had to point out what UEW teaches, and the consensus people (First Circle Students, all, mind you) would demand that UEW and I change, and if I refused to change, it was because of something wrong with ME.
It may seem silly, but this was when I needed that dedication the most, because sometimes I *really* wanted everyone to be happy, but it's very much true that if you follow the fashion of the day, not your beliefs, you're a fashionista, not a priestess.
We countered this by crafting a fairly long list of the people we could serve (see the current iteration at http://www.cuew.org/cffn/index.html ) and could not serve and restricting the chat list to people who'd been in for a while, but the most effective way of dealing with this was for *me* to step back into an advisory position, allowing people to understand the UEW materials as a set of materials, not me, personally.

So, we had to limit our scope, saying what we could and couldn't teach, and then who we could and couldn't teach and stick to those same damn guns come hell or high water.

Each of these things was vital to making CFFN a functional virtual coven- we had to know who we were, who we could serve, what we could learn and teach and at the same time be dedicated to putting up with the absolute BULLCRAP that sometimes came up as a result of the fact that people were involved. We also had to change when change was mandated, and the first mandate would involve history....

Coming soon: Part 4, A History emerges where none was wanted

Posted by Kat at 08:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Part Two: "Constancy" and Clarity

If you joined CFFN early enough, you might've noticed the lessons got bigger, more complex and more intense, but they never ceased to be the same lessons. A person who joined CFFN in 1997 got much of the same material as those who joined in 2007, although the person in 2007 got more.

Since CFFN began with a fully formed tradition, there was no addition of new material as the founder learned new things, something we saw in a lot of our early competition. There was the addition of clarification as we noticed our students, and the students of other people, making certain mistakes regularly. A CFFN student is pretty much never going to make the "Wiccan rede means harm none," mistake, for example.
Our limit in scope (part one) meant we were immune from becoming a big monster, trying to handle an online and offline school, videos, merchandise, and the rest-and that meant we could focus on the lessons, not on selling more stuff or adding more appeal. CFFN was never a marketing scheme, so we never had to add stuff to keep people. Indeed, our goal was to get (the students) them in, get them through and, ideally, get them to a position where we were not needed anymore. People brag about having been in some online covens for five or six years. While we have some CFFNers like that (and we love them) they know it's not ideal, the ideal thing is to do it in under 2 years, go into the 3rd circle if you desire and have a foundation in practice for the rest of their lives regardless.
In some ways, sticking to what we taught, not what was hip at the time was very limiting. There are some things I'd love to add to the lessons that just haven't had a proper place (bad craft names, using Blessed Be casually, spells versus magic(k), the cultural mileu Wicca started in, etc.) the problem, early on, was separating the stuff a good UEWiccan must know from the stuff a good UEWiccan could pick up from osmosis.
The problem of the knowledge gap-friends have heard that rant often-is very severe here, we could not, in the limited format of CFFN (see part one scope) give students all of the knowledge they need to be (what I have elsewhere termed) the intellectual HAVES. We had to do our best to give students the tools they needed to come to the "light side" of the knowledge gap while allowing them to pick knowledge up on their own.
Initially, this was accomplished by pushing more students to publically share with the group the sum total of their work, but we noticed a trend....some students were waiting to see what other people submitted before submitting their own work. It wasn't always cheating, sometimes it was fear that they'd done the assignment incorrectly, but it still was against the way it needed to be...so we changed it (with some improvements, at the loss of a few benefits.)
Another problem we had early on (especially before the passwords) was the idea that the hierarchy of UEW had top secret keys to the kingdom (or as I call them Kingdom Keys) and that we were going to reveal them once you reached the magic super level of whatever....
(Watch me be silly about Kingdom Keys: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfywqTc4RPw )
We actually had a small schism about this. There were scary people involved, and this would come as a result of the FIRST time I tried to "fair and equitably distribute power" (IE: Take the load off myself.) The second time I tried to fair and equitably distribute power resulted in a schism that resulted in an ethics question in the second circle about being seen as complicit in someone's wackjob UPG out of a fear of offending. No names are named for a reason.
It was obvious constancy was not enough, so we tried to become more transparent. You cannot even get to the CFFN how-to join page without reading a fairly extensive "what we are and what we offer" section.
That's not to say they don't kingdom keys on occassion, but the ones who do are much fewer and further between.
It was actually in this the most that we benefited from the "we will make you a witch" websites. They offered glamour, glitz, merit badges, long titles and "real magick©" and we would happily point those that wanted such nonsense in their direction. As other (some quite wacky) groups developed, CFFN, an old lady by internet standards (We're only months younger than witchvox, for example) was allowed to go about her business and do as she would.
Without the consistancy of the lessons (oatmeal like) and the transparancy of what were were teaching, we, too, would've ballooned up to an enormous size and ended up collapsing, as so many "rivals" have.

Our constantness did have some enormous benefits, however. When Triumph of the Moon came out and pretty much said THE EXACT THING we'd said all along in our lessons (ours was the result of knowing people who knew people who knew people, not doing historical research, but we KNEW our sources were good) we went from being the tiny minority of modernists to the majority. We didn't say I told you so though (well not that much!)

CFFN has been credited with some very good things: The affirmation of acknowledgement (ours) UPG (not ours, but we like it) the idea that all Wiccans are not Witches (again, not ours, but we like it) and broadening the idea of Wicca.
We've also been blamed for things we had nothing to do with (People like Silver Ravenwolf) and sometimes for stuff we just can't figure out (For example, we've been told that the visualization exercises are "too advanced magically" for beginners and that we turn out Wiccans who can't figure out the basics of magic, and we've been told that we're teaching people that Wicca is a narrow defintion that includes only us and teaching people Wicca is whatever you want it to be...)

All of this tells us one thing....you can't please all the people all the time, and if you try to, you're doing it wrong.

Stay tuned for Part three: It's hard to keep a virtual coven running when you can't afford an ISP, and drinking your own damn medicine (Kat goes back to college)

Posted by Kat at 10:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Introduction: History
Coven of the Far Flung Net, at over ten years old, has seen a lot of rivals come and go, but the grandmother of all virtual covens still survives, and there are some interesting reasons why. I’ll try to examine some of these reasons in the weeks ahead, both to give our own horns a toot and to examine, objectively, why some other groups have failed, leaving a power vacuum in the world of online covens that CFFN has, frankly, no desire to fill.
CFFN was founded based on the comprehensive course in UEW, a sort of mail-order individual stay at home study that was invented sometime in the mid 1980s. UEW wasn’t the first tradition to use this technique, and the comprehensive course was abandoned early on. With Phoenix’s help, and her fiscal support, I began turning the tattered dittos of the comprehensive course and the early notebooks that would become All One Wicca into an html format, one part at a time, with the occasional input of my own elders.

The name “Coven of The Far Flung Net” came in an instant, when we were discussing turning the comprehensive course into an internet course of some sort. The idea was to provide a virtual coven, a place for people to study and debate, argue and learn, as was generally expected for the beginning students in UEW. We found, much to our surprise, that many of our students were interested in starting even before we had the material fully online. We knew, even if our elders didn’t, that CFFN was going to be the thing that took UEW from a struggling tradition with a handful of remaining practitioners to a vibrant, multicultural and international community.
It would be a lie to say that we had the full support of UEW. UEW had schismed a couple of times before the 1990s, over several points which today seem ridiculous. For example, in the early 80s, a significant portion left over the use of the word Wicca. For those unfamiliar with that debate as it stood at that time, the so-called “real Witches,” the same people who today want to call their beliefs Wicca and ours “Neo-Wicca,” had gotten it into their heads that “Real Witches” used the term “Of the Wica” or “Wicca” and pronounced it Wee-sha. To call your practice “Wicca” or yourself a Wiccan (“Wicken”) was to open up ridicule, since you were “doing it wrong.”
My elders didn’t hold much truck with the nasty types that were trying to dictate what others could call themselves, and went to Wicca, over Witchcraft, and Wiccan, over Witch, to make it clear that they were not the same as those nasty types of the past. I came into a UEW that was largely decided on such things, and a few other debates, and also decimated as a result of schism after schism.
The benefit, of course, was that we went in knowing what we believed with the excruciating detail of an oft-schismed group. We had had debates, and had agreed that some points were set in stone and others were open to discussion, and CFFN started as very much open to discussion, with many early UEWwies outright leaving in disgust over the concept. (To read an example, from a UEWwie that did not leave but is uninvolved with UEW as it now stands, visit this link:http://www.angelfire.com/rant/ingwitch/net.html) Placing some of the UEW material behind passwords, later, would help some of the more aggressive complaints, but more importantly would put an end to the early virtual covens that popped up with our material, although they still occur with a reduced frequency.

Part one: Scope
The idea was set that CFFN would have a limited scope. We teach that every student is something the teacher must take some responsibility for, not just some responsibility to. We realized that the online format meant that we had to read text, so we used the entrance assignment to limit ourselves to students who we felt could get the maximal benefit from a text-based system. People who had their papers rejected for grammar often threw tantrums, asking us who the hell were we to judge them. The worst one was a truly atrocious paper from a person who not only failed to convey her point of view in anything resembling standard grammar, but clearly did not understand the assignment itself. When we passed a polite thanks but no thanks to us, she stated that she was an English teacher, and we were terribly unfair and mean.
To learn in CFFN, a student would have to read a post in English, do research online and off, and respond in English. Without the ability to understand the assignment, do the assignment as directed and submit the assignment, a student could not be accepted into CFFN. With the ability to do this small thing, a student shows not that they know all there is to Wicca, but just that they are prepared to learn in the format of CFFN. It is an imperfect screening, but it certainly helps.
Other groups that came after CFFN have chosen to test a student’s dedication by expecting a student to pay for instruction or jump hoops to earn a scholarship. The problem with this, of course, is that when you take a student’s money, you are agreeing to teach them. In the history of CFFN, two people have been asked to leave, and a third left before we could ask. All three times, these people were evaluated by the group to be dangerous to the continuance of CFFN. If we took money, we would’ve never been able to cut these folk out, because the one with the purse strings is the one in control.
The scope of CFFN was limited in size, by language and in how far one could go through UEW with it. By limiting the scope, and not claiming to be the one stop shop for learning all that Wicca was, we could provide the services we were capable or providing, to students that were probably capable of learning, and change things as we desired, as the needs changed. What is perhaps most interesting about CFFN is that despite going through several permutations-pods, clans, groups, etc.-the CFFN that works now is pretty darn similar to the CFFN in 1997, where all papers went through me.
We also limited our scope by teaching only UEW, which is a rational tradition that is internally consistent. Other groups that have come and gone in the time we’ve existed have make the mistake of, for example, claiming to be the ancient tradition of the creator’s family while telling students to read Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon, or telling students that Wicca is a religion, and “testing” them in their techniques of spellcasting or astral projection-concepts that aren’t religious in the slightest.

Posted by Kat at 09:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Title:Not just words
Link:http://www.reformer.com/headlines/ci_5824569
Excerpt Though Vermont has a reputation for being tolerant and accepting, one local high school student recently learned that disrespect has many faces. And sometimes it can be scary.
The student, a 15-year-old Marlboro resident who practices Wicca, never expected to have her beliefs attacked in the form of an offhand joke.
"I told him several times to knock it off, but he didn't stop," said Gwen Williams, about a classmate who was quoting from a Monty Python movie.
"She's a witch," she said, repeating what he said to her. "Burn her."
He told her he was only kidding, but she interpreted it as intolerance. Rather than losing her temper with the boy, she walked out of the classroom, she said.

Further Coverage of Pentagram:
http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20070505/NEWS/705050305/1002/NEWS04

Title:Retooling Rosaries For Pagan Rituals
Link:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/04/AR2007050401986.html
Excerpt:"Hail Persephone, full of strength and beauty. . . . Blessed are you and blessed is the cycle of your life. Holy Persephone, queen of life and death, pray for your children now, and in the hour of our need. Blessed be."

Posted by Kat at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)