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The Medium As Medium ( 01Chapter1.qxd 7/22/2004 9:56 AM Page 29 HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html You can take Salem out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of Salem. — , The Medium as Medium , , ( How Witchcraft Measures Law, Human Rights, Sex, and Drugs and Makes for Great Cocktail Party Conversation , , , ; the Inquisition, the holocaust of witches; The Witch Manifesto; The Hammer of Witches; LCeltic fairies; Halloween; hags; werewolves; virgin sacrifice; Hitler and Jewish magic; astrology; shape-shifting; and W.I.T.C.H. (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) Popular witchcraft is a strange country. Bounded on the left by science and on the right by religion, this “Mesopotamia of the Mind” lies some- where between the flowing together of two great rivers: one a natural stream, the other a human-designed canal. According to Egyptologist Margaret Murray’s theory, Wicca, or the Old Religion—the religion of nature and human nature—predates Judeo-Christianity. The other witch- craft, a latter-day media phenomenon, has long since been channeled by the alternately commercial and hysterical tides of Western culture. Left to itself, witchcraft could have maintained a quiet flow as sup- portive to the Christian mainstream as Merlin was to Camelot. Can soci- ety educate away its fears? Damned by laws, however, witchery has always risen boiling to civilization’s floodgates. Can society legislate away its fears? The establishment, controlling nature with technology and suppressing www.JackFritscher.com 01Chapter1.qxd 7/22/2004 9:56 AM Page 30 HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html dissent with politics, uses the legal system to repress witchcraft, which it sees as too powerful and threatening. “Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft” (I Sam. :). Witchery, more often than not, has led the charge of human rights and social revolution: without witches there would be no feminism, no gay liberation, no civil rights for racial equality. Both the Old Testament and the New Testament are full of demonol- ogy. The archetypal biblical story of rebellion features the Archangel Lucifer, whose name means “Light-Bearer.” Fighting God, Lucifer fell from heaven to hell to wander the earth as the wild one—the new Satan—in search of souls. The brightest becomes the darkest. The conservative state ethic of Western culture—rarely separated from muddled-class churches—has long seen the need to write laws protecting the status quo from the threaten- ing freedoms of the progressive human rights movements, including the various occult liberation fronts. Babylonian King Hammurabi in legislated against witchcraft and image worship because too many of his tribes had too many exorcists telling people too many things that contradicted Hammurabi’s political control. The outlaw status of seers and witches can be seen by connecting the dots from the ancient Bible to the most modern state laws, all of them influenced by the canon law of the Roman Catholic Church, which, as reported in a update by Newsweek, is the oldest functioning legal sys- tem in the world. Mosaic Law, written for a Middle Eastern ethic that originally had no Devil, said, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exod. :). In Christianity, magic and mysticism are called Gnosticism, and in Judaism, Kabbalah. Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism each handle the mystical esoterica behind their standard creeds with, respectively, Sufism, Tantrism, and Dark Zen. The Bible is a written collection of oral folktales from a popular cul- ture of four thousand to two thousand years ago that had an opinion on absolutely everything. It is the traditional weapon of choice used by liter- alists to support their review-proof opinions. Always quoted as the ulti- mate argument from authority, the Bible is a gun. Often it is aimed at thinkers, scientists, occultists, women, homosexuals, and dark-skinned races. The Bible is a catch- that, in its circular argument, fails Logic : “Believe the Bible because the Bible says you must believe the Bible.” The Old Testament is the folklore of primitives wandering the flat earth of the ancient desert. The New Testament contains the monotheistic stories and letters popular in the polytheistic Roman Empire, yet it has power. It threatens contemporary people who cannot shake the superstition that www.JackFritscher.com 01Chapter1.qxd 7/22/2004 9:56 AM Page 31 HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html the Bible is some kind of magic book. Waving a Bible at a Christian is like holding up a crucifix to a vampire: both crumble before the symbol. History tells how this conditioning became the superstition that “the Bible will get you if you don’t watch out.” Scriptural quotations have been invoked for centuries to control people, to judge people, to convict people, and to kill people. Thus the Bible, like a loaded handgun, scares people. And why not? For centuries, for instance, in cases of occultism, Bible quotes have been offered in evidence at more than one witch trial, and have bent lawmakers’ attitudes toward the occult from ancient law to contemporary law. The Bible is based on the fundamental belief in God and angels, as well as in Satan and devils, and in all of these spirits must Jews, Catholics, and Protestants believe. Once upon a time, in the Bible stories of sex and violence, a (no doubt, priapic) Satan dressed in black leather boldly bragged that all the king- doms of the world were his to give when he tempted Jesus Christ to kneel in Satanic worship. “Again, the Devil took Him to a very high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them, and the Devil said to Him, ‘All these will I give You, if You will fall down and worship me.’ Then Jesus said to him, ‘Begone Satan! For it is written, You shall worship the Lord your God and Him only shall you serve.’ Then the Devil left Him, and, behold, angels came and ministered to Him” (Matt. :–). In the polar battle between good and evil, “Witch, be warned and beware!” In the antiwitch hysteria between the years and more than , people were tried, tortured, and killed. This is the “Wither- ing of the Witch,” according to an assortment of biblical laws that are so unnerving, it may be helpful to remember that in the classic American opera Porgy and Bess (), lyricist DuBose Heyward has a black preacher sing the warning that what one reads in the Bible: “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” Lev. :: “[N]either shall ye use enchantment nor observe dreams.” Lev. :: “Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wiz- ards, to be defiled by them. I am the Lord your God.” Lev. :: “And the soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits, and after wizards, to go a-whoring after them, I will even set my face against that soul and will cut him off from among his people.” Lev. :: “A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a www.JackFritscher.com 01Chapter1.qxd 7/22/2004 9:56 AM Page 32 HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones; their blood shall be upon them.” Deut. :–: “There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a con- sulter with familiar spirits or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord: and because of these abom- inations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee.” Kings :: “What peace, so long as the whoredoms of thy mother Jezebel and her witchcrafts are so many?” Kings :: “Moreover the workers with familiar spirits, and the wizards, and the images, and the idols, and all the abominations . did Josiah put away.” Isa. :: “When they say unto you, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards, that peep and that mutter, should not a people seek unto their God?” Gal. :–: “Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these: adul- tery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft.” When worlds collide, change happens. Constantine the Great (–) was a pagan warrior who in became emperor of the entire Holy Roman Empire. He grafted witchcraft and Christianity together, until he didn’t! He was, as Roman emperor, a God as well as the Pontifex Maximus (the high priest) of paganism. In com- bining church and state, he refused to choose between the Old Religion of paganism and the new religion of Christianity. He put the byzantine into Byzantine Roman emperor as he ruled the western and eastern Roman empires from the city of Byzantium, which he renamed Constantinople in . That city carried his name until , when it was named Istanbul. As Constantine united the empire politically, he united religion theo- logically—after he had a little, well, séance. He mixed together the Sun God with Christ on the cross after seeing—just before a battle—a vision of a cross appear in the sky. He heard the words “In hoc signo, vinces,” which means “In this sign, you will conquer.” This led inevitably to the cross that the Crusaders soon emblazoned on their shields as they first marched against Islam. That Latin phrase of those onward-marching Chris- tian soldiers entered modern popular culture as the motto on every pack www.JackFritscher.com 01Chapter1.qxd 7/22/2004 9:56 AM Page 33 HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE THIS MATERIAL www.JackFritscher.com/Drummer/Research%20Note.html of Pall Mall cigarettes.
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