Satanism, Witchcraft And Church Feminists

According to the authoritative Encyclopedia of American Religions, there are two basic types of overtly Satanist groups to be found operating in North America today. The first of these is the "sickies," composed of "disconnected groups of occultists who employ Satan worship to cover a variety of sexual, sadomasochistic, clandestine, psychopathic, and illegal activities."[1] In this branch of Satanism, which is sometimes used to rationalize paedophilia as well as the perversions cited above, one can expect to find those individuals engaged in grave robbery, sexual assaults and the ritual blood letting performed on animals and more rarely, human beings. According to the Encyclopedia, the "sick" Satanists are not theological in their approach.

The other branch of Satanists is said to be the groups that "resemble liberal Christian theologies with the addition of a powerful cultural symbol (Satan), radically redefined."[2] These groups "take Satanism as a religion seriously," and should not be confused with the "sickies" described above.[3]

Although Satanists are neatly compartmentalized, or some might say isolated by most of the standard or official sources, it should be noted that there is overlap between the two groups. Some followers of "theological Satanists" have been involved in horrific crimes. In addition, Satanists who do break the law may actually be less dangerous than those who are more theological in their approach. So, in a totally secular vein, a teenager who spray-paints the side of a Church with a Satanic symbol is obviously less destructive or dangerous than a devil worshipper who spends years writing articles and appearing on talk shows.

Anton LaVey

From its earliest years, rock music has been permeated with impurity and egomania, both highly symptomatic of Satanism. Aleister Crowley, for many of the younger generation the most famous Satanist of all time, could be said to have a strong influence on various rock-stars. But it is more certain that such a dubious honour can be attributed to Anton LaVey. In 1966, in San Francisco, LaVey gained instant notoriety by declaring the dawn of the Age of Satan, later compiling the Satanic Bible which has reportedly sold 600,000 copies. As would be expected, this "bible" simply takes the reverse stand to be found in Christian Scripture, urging followers to indulge their carnal and other appetites and to seek revenge instead of bestowing forgiveness on others.

Approximately ten years ago it was estimated that there were about 100,000 Satanists living in the United States.[4] This figure has likely become larger in recent years through the numerous Satanic websites now available on the Internet and the immense notoriety of rock star Marilyn Manson who is believed to have been directly influenced by LaVey.

Satanism & Witchcraft

Witches assert that Satan is a Christian, not an "old religion" concept. However, despite the strong protests of many witches, Anton Lavey and other Satanists have claimed a direct kinship with these practitioners of witchcraft and their beliefs. One of LaVey's books entitled The Compleat Witch (sic) can be found in many occult shops. According to the Encyclopedia of American Religions cited above, "Satanists do share in common the magical world-view of witches."[5]

LaVey and his followers have declared themselves to be atheists with Satan and God seen as mere symbols. Since his autobiographical assertions have been described as falsehoods, this is most likely just more of the same, but in 1975 LaVey's "apostasy" led to the formation of the Temple of Set, led by Michael Aquino, a former U.S. intelligence army officer. The Temple bases its "theology" on Egyptian motifs and declares Satan to be real, not symbolic.

When LaVey was at the height of his fame, he attracted famous entertainers like Sammy Davis Jr. and Jayne Mansfield. He also attracted Susan Atkins, one of the Charles Manson "family" which committed a series of atrocious murders in the late sixties in California.

The Power of Evil

Those who have attempted to laugh off Satanism as youthful rebellion or the harmless buffoonery of crackpots have not bothered to investigate the evils that the direct invocation and praise of the devil can bring into the world. Montague Summers' exhaustive work, The History of Witchcraft, describes in detail the horrific evils perpetrated by witches and worshippers of the Devil over many centuries. One only has to read of the sexual perversion and widespread practice of the black mass in France to understand that it was not just a desire for so-called liberty, equality and fraternity that led to the enthronement of a prostitute as the goddess of "reason" in Notre Dame Cathedral. When the French celebrate their "glorious" Revolution each year on Bastille Day, it's doubtful many fully appreciate its Satanic and Masonic roots, or know of the orgies of the Satanists that occurred on the night after their Catholic king, Louis XVI, was murdered before the Paris mob.

By their very nature, deriving as they do from the Father of Lies, manifestations of Satanism have always appeared disguised, far removed from their true source. In the late nineteenth century few of the ardent followers of the "atheist" Karl Marx knew of the terrible violence and bombastic praise of Satan that were to be found in the feverish poetry which the founder of Communism wrote as an adolescent and a young man. When Friedrich Nietzsche wrote The Anti-Christ in the late 1800s before going insane, who would have believed that his praise of aristocratic supermen crushing what he saw as the weak and the mediocre, would result in the occult-obsessed Nazis building a shrine one day in his honour in Berlin? When the poet and Satanist Charles Swinburne wrote his politically seductive and influential "Song of Italy" in 1867, how many of his readers appreciated the fact that its hero, the arch-Mason Giuseppe Mazzini, played such a central role in the destruction of hundreds of Italian churches and the eventual seizing of the papal states?

New Evils Surpass The Old

Although manifestations of the diabolical have obviously been great in the past, there has never been a time in human history when sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance have been so widespread. Pope John Paul II in his great encyclical Gospel of Life has told us that we are living in a "culture of death" where millions of unborn children are killed with the consent of their mothers. Sodomy is being accepted both inside and outside the Church as just another human variant, on a par with race, ethnic background and so on. No faithful Catholic can fail to be concerned about where Modernists are taking us since the ambiguities of Vatican II opened the way for the establishment of the "New Church."

The issues of abortion and homosexuality have only highlighted the widespread apostasy of many Catholic women who in centuries past might have been relied on to play an essential and central role in the Church as primary educators, mothers, wives and women religious. For women, apostasy has gradually taken shape under the name of a new religion based not on the teachings of Jesus, but on the foundation of the old lies of Gnosticism and the new "matriarchal" heresy of modern witchcraft, or Wicca, which has taken mere decades, not centuries to establish itself.

Every Catholic should be aware that no one over the past hundred and fifty years was more influential in popularizing the "rituals" and laying the foundation for this new demonic women's religion than the Satanist Aleister Crowley and his disciple Gerald Gardner.

Aleister Crowley

Rebelling at the early age of eleven against his parents' strict Brethren Protestantism, Crowley did not become an agnostic or atheist as many of the university educated men of his generation did, but a direct worshipper of Satan. Even while still listening to his devout mother reading the Bible in their comfortable English home, he admitted he had taken a fancy to the "false prophet" and "the Beast whose number is 666."[6]

Attending Cambridge in the 1890s, Crowley joined the "magical" society known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which David Barrett's book on sects and cults asserts, "clearly owed much to Freemasonry, with large elements of the Cabbala, astrology, alchemy and related subjects."[7] (Freemasonry often figures in the founding of heretical sects from the Rosicrusians to the Mormons). At around this time, Crowley was rumoured to have been involved in nocturnal graveyard activities — and even necrophilia — along with another soon-to-be-famous student, William Duranty. In the early thirties, Duranty would become the honoured and world-famous New York Times correspondent to the newly formed Soviet Union, spending a full ten years blatantly lying to millions of people about what was really happening in Russia. He was rumoured to have been blackmailed into supporting the Stalinists due to the discovery of his necrophiliac tendencies by the Soviet secret police.

Besides being an obvious influence on perhaps the most influential liar of the twentieth century, Crowley is credited with having popularized "Magick" in England and having brought it to America at the turn of the century. He defined the word as "the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity to the will."[8] His influence is so broad amongst esoteric groups in the Western World today, that it would be impossible to describe them all in the space of this article. However, his influence on laying the foundation for Wicca, or the modern practice of witchcraft which so influences Catholic feminists today, must be discussed in detail.

Crowley's Influence on Gerald Gardner & Wicca

Despite the fact that he engaged in disgusting acts like "baptizing" and crucifying frogs to blaspheme Christ, and was also a liar, a physical coward, a homosexual and a morphine addict, Crowley never lacked friends and fellow travellers in the world of "Magick." In 1912 he was visited by the German Freemason, Theodor Reuss, and together, along with another Mason named Franz Hartmann, a companion of Theosophy leader Madame Blavatsky, they founded the Order of the Templars of the East. This Order embodied yoga teachings along with sexual rites, including homosexual ones instituted by Crowley.

The most important of the initiates to Crowley's new order was Gerald Gardner (1884-1965), a Freemason who is credited with founding the Wiccan religion, which is composed mostly of converts who came into the "craft" since the early 1960s. The entire movement in fact, is not ancient at all but very new. The Encyclopedia of American Religions states that "rather than being initiated into a pre-existing Wiccan religion, it appears that Gardner created the new religion out of numerous pieces of Eastern religions and Western occult and magical material."[9]

It was Crowley, however, not Gardner, who authored the central Wiccan creed: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."[10] Modern witches such as the late Robin Skeleton have described the debt that witchcraft owes to Crowley. Again, the authoritative Encyclopedia of American Religions puts Wicca into its proper perspective stating that the "basic rituals were adapted from ritual texts such as the Greater Key of Solomon, the writings of Aleister Crowley, and Freemasonry."[11]

By 1949 Gerald Gardner had published a novel about witchcraft and then, after the repeal of the Witchcraft Laws in England in 1951, he published his highly influential Witchcraft Today, a book based on the academic studies of English anthropologist Dr. Margaret Murray, who argued that the medieval witches didn't worship the Devil, but were followers of pagan, women-dominated religions that predated Christianity. She called these forms of alleged religions "Dianic" after the goddess Diana. Murray's theories have been immensely popular with feminists, particularly those with access to public money, such as the producers of the Canadian National Film Board "documentaries" The Burning Times and The Goddess Remembered. Eminent historians such as Richard Cavendish, however, have described Murray's theories as "full of holes."[12]

Other scholars have found "no evidence whatsoever for a religion of one Goddess; early Pagan religions were pantheist rather than female monotheist."[13] Even those deluded followers of Gardner who have traced their ancestry to those accused of witchcraft in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, have not found evidence that the "craft" was continued in the intervening centuries.

Wicca Explained

Wicca is actually polytheistic, its pantheon consisting of the Horned God which is viewed as the consort of the Goddess, and the Triple Goddess herself, whose aspects are the maiden, the mother, and the crone. The basic form of Wicca is the coven (or base community), which consists ideally of 13 people who meet regularly to practice their so-called craft. The number is significant; it is a mockery of the number 13 which composes Jesus and his 12 apostles.

Covens cast spells which sometimes mock the Eucharist. They often worship in the nude. Modern witches practice "psychic healing," dance, chant, lay hands on one another and use storytelling in the coven to raise anger directed against the so-called patriarchy (i.e., the arch enemy, God the Father). In some spells they attempt to inflict harm on others, although this is supposed to be done only on those who may have banned others first. In a "banishing spell" published in Canadian witch Robin Skeleton's publicly-funded The Practice of Witchcraft, the first words read as follows: "If this one has hurt this other one, let him be racked with the same pain."[14]

Despite the commonly heard nonsense that Wiccans are life-affirming, Skeleton presents in his book an even more appalling spell to "cause a natural miscarriage." This bit of malevolent free verse begins with the lines "Take back this gift. Let the womb release the human fish in its bubbled seas. Unclench the gut. Let the birth run out that none may be hurt in flesh or heart. . . etc."[15] The caster of the spell used to ask the "goddess" to kill an unborn child is told that it will be stronger magic if an egg is broken into a dish and then buried in the earth.

Gnosticism

Although founded by the male disciple of a male Satanist who died only fifty years ago, the Wiccan faith has grown enormously amongst women across North America, becoming a significant belief system for dedicated feminist leaders who are self-trained and work cooperatively. Wiccans strongly deny any relationship to devil worshippers, however, their faith, like that of the Satanists, appeals to those who detest the idea of authority or order emanating from God the Father.

Gnosticism (based on the notion of a select few possessing superior "knowledge") is central to understanding the witchcraft of medieval times and that of modern witches today. According to Montague Summers, the witchcraft condemned by the medieval popes was gnostic heresy. It "was not sorcery nor any cult of witches renewing and keeping green some ancient rites and pagan creed, but a witch-cult that identified itself with and was continually manifested in closest connection with Gnosticism in its most degraded and vilest shapes."[16] In her book The Gnostic Gospels, author Elaine Pagels makes the connection to Gnosticism when she described a feminist revolution of late antiquity which referred to God as "the Mother,"[17] another name for the "goddess" that is central to the beliefs of religious feminists.

WomanChurch

"WomanChurch," which shares the general mindset of the Wiccans but doesn't describe itself as witchcraft, uses feminist consciousness raising to achieve a level of knowledge where one can be the equal of Christ. According to Cornelia Ferreira, who has studied feminism and its relationship to Gnosticism extensively, WomanChurch groups celebrate revelation as their "Word" obtained from dreams and fantasies according to the psychology of the modern arch-Gnostic Carl Jung.[18] They forgive each other according to their sacrament of Penance and celebrate their Eucharist, which "is not the transformation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ," but in the words of a WomanChurch leader, the transformation of the community "into the body of the new humanity, infused with the blood of new life."[19] The Eucharist, which Catholics know is the Real Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, is reduced by feminist gnostics to the community of women made "holy" by the worship of themselves in the group. The revelation of Christ is not fixed in time for these gnostics. Instead, in the manner of thinking of Carl Jung or Karl Rahner, Christ develops in the consciousness of the worshippers who gain understanding of themselves.

Rage Against God the Father

Both the old witches of the past and those of today are noted for their rage against God the Father (or to use the modern term, "patriarchy") found in everything even remotely authoritative, hierarchical or male-dominated.

This hatred of God the Father or the Yahweh of the Old Testament can be one of the essential elements of Gnosticism and permeates the literature of the religious feminists. Since God the Father is perceived as evil, to many gnostics so is His Son who abandoned the world, leaving it in the hands of the Catholic Church, the chief symbol of worldly oppression. The witches of the medieval times "looked to Satan for power and pleasure in this world and for a happy future in the next, and they vilified Christ as a traitor and a cheat, who had made promises which he did not keep, and who had gone away to live in heaven while Satan remained with his faithful on earth."[20]

When God the Father is viewed as Satanic, so of course are the commandments which He gave to Moses. In the gnostic world, Cain is a hero and so are the Sodomites whom God the Father judged and destroyed. Matter itself, created by Yahweh at the beginning of the world, is also considered by some extreme Gnostics, such as the immensely bizarre, procreation-hating Albigensians, as a manifestation of what is not wholly spirit, and therefore evil. Witches claim to worship or venerate the natural world, but only on their own terms as worshippers of strange gods. These gods have nothing whatsoever to do with the Creator of the Universe or His divine Son Jesus Christ. In fact, they are His antithesis.

Wicca & The Catholic Church

Straightforward Wicca or the similar but theologically more ambiguous WomanChurch have moved into many areas of the Catholic Church through feminist "theologians," feminist-inspired local activists and disgruntled nuns. These Church feminists prey on weak or unorthodox bishops who in turn naively try to involve them in a Church they despise. A good example of the product of this episcopal lack of orthodoxy or naivety, coupled with succumbing to bullying, is the infamous "Green Kit" ("Women in the Church Discussion Papers") issued by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) in 1985. If there were any doubts at that time that religious feminists had run amok in the Church, they were dispelled when faithful Catholic women found items in the kit's bibliography written by pro-abortion feminist nuns. Today almost every conservative Catholic publication has featured a horror story of some form of witchcraft or earth-goddess-inspired liturgy being performed in some Catholic Church in some large North American city.

Two of the most influential "Catholic" Wiccan, or WomanChurch figures to be found opposing the Church today are Mary Daly and Rosemary Radford Ruether.

Ex-nun Mary Daly teaches lesbian witchcraft. She has written several books, including the anti-male and anti-Catholic Beyond God the Father and. Wickedary, a dictionary of sorts for witches. In Wickedary Daly defines the Beatific Vision as: "the 'face to face' vision of god in patriarchal heaven promised as a reward to good Christians; an afterlife of perpetual Boredom: union/ copulation with the 'Divine Essence'; the final consummate union of the Happy Dead Ones with the Supreme Dead One."[21]

Dr. Rosemary Radford Ruether, an influential speaker and writer who authored Sexism and God-Talk, was named to the overtly pro-abortion Catholics for Free Choice board back in 1985.

In true gnostic style, Reuther has described the "patriarchal" Church as an "idol of masculinity" to be broken up and ground into powder.[22]

Typical of most WomanChurch feminists, Ruether has no problem defying Church teaching on homosexuality. In 1985, when promoting her soon-to-be-released Women-Church: Theology and Practice of Feminist Liturgical Communities, Ruether promised a feminist largely "Catholic" audience that one chapter would contain "liturgies for healing" from painful experiences "such as coming out as a lesbian. Not that being a lesbian is unnatural, but that the way we've been repressed by homophobia is unnatural."[23] At this same gathering she urged participants to establish female "base communities," "Women-Church groups," or "covens."

Starhawk

Another strong influence on Catholic women, but one who is less hypocritical than the "Catholic" feminists, is Starhawk, a self-professed witch and author of the modern witch tome The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. Starhawk calls witchcraft "a religion of ecology"[24] and urges, as most Wiccans do, the replacement of the present (i.e., Judeo/Christian based) culture of Western society. In gnostic fashion she omits the Creator from His Creation, stating that "the world is born, not made, and not commanded into being."[25] In her book she quotes Mary Daly's blasphemous depiction of God the Father as "spawned in the human imagination and sustained as plausible by patriarchy" all for the "oppression of women."[26]

Starhawk leaves little ambiguity about where she is coming from when she says that the "Horned God" was "deliberately perverted by the medieval Church into the image of the Christian Devil."[27] "The God of the Witches is sexual"[28] she says. "Our God wears horns" she continues, "but they are the waxing and waning crescents of the Goddess Moon, and the symbol of animal vitality." Perhaps missing the irony of her words, she overstates her case when she writes that the Horned God "is black, not because He is dreadful or fearful, but because darkness and the night are times of power, and part of the cycles of time."[29]

In Catholic circles, Starhawk gained notoriety through her association with former Dominican priest Matthew Fox (now out of the Church) who once employed her to teach ritual at his Holy Names Institute in California. Fox is a leading exponent of the gnostic-inspired and ecology-based Creation Spirituality, a movement that has now lost much of its novelty, but is still popular amongst many liberal Catholics. One of Fox's other major associates is David Spangler, a New Age high priest who has claimed that "Lucifer works within each of us to bring us to wholeness."[30] In her book The Hidden Dangers of The Rainbow, Constance Cumbey states that Spangler has "uttered some of the most outrageous blasphemies ever spoken against Jesus Christ and God the Father."[31]

The Lilith Phenomenon

A relatively new Satanic phenomenon, which shows the power that occult-based evil has been gaining in the world, is the growing popularity of Lilith, a recently invented feminist icon signifying rebellion against men and the patriarchal God. Just this summer. North America was the scene of the Lilith Fair, a two-month, 37-city concert tour billed as a celebration of women in music. The Fair raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for various feminist causes, and managed to get its main performer, Vancouver singer Sarah McLachlan, on the front page of Time magazine. In interviews, McLachlan has shown the hostility typical of religious feminists towards Christianity. She has publicly used four letter words to denounce Catholicism, which she describes as "backward."

The Lilith Fair performances featured Planned Parenthood booths where condoms were handed out along with abortion information, the latter being particularly appropriate as Lilith has been described as an ancient Hebrew infant-slaying demon. Like the Wiccan religion which was largely created by two men, Aleister Crowley and Gerald Gardner, the Lilith phenomenon has little basis in anything other than fevered imaginations. Unlike the more sophisticated historical inaccuracies spawned by Margaret Murray, Lilith is a facile pop theology pulled from Jewish lore, and refashioned completely by feminists desperately looking for a new non-male spiritual focus.

The myth of Lilith seems to have first gained a significant foothold through "The Coming of Lilith," penned by Judith Plaskow, not surprisingly a student of dissidents Rosemary Radford Reuther and Mary Daly. Plaskow's essay on Lilith is a major staple of the feminist essays to be found in Womanspirit Rising. According to the Plaskow version, Lilith was supposed to be Adam's first wife fashioned like him out of dust. She fled from Adam because he was too domineering. Like Lilith, Eve too became disenchanted with God and Adam, so she jumped over the wall of the Garden of Eden, joined Lilith and discovered the "bond of sisterhood."

In the Jewish Talmud of the 4th and 5th centuries, "Lilith appears simply as a female demon based on an account of the Judgement found in Isaiah 34:14 "the satyrs will call to one another, and there shall Lilith (the night hag) alight."[32] Satanist Anton LaVey lists Lilith in his Satanic Bible as one of the names of the devil. Given her place in Jewish lore, it is not surprising that for many hundreds of years Jewish mothers used amulets to keep Lilith from banning their children.

Sister Mary Collins

Sister Mary Collins, O.S.B., of the Catholic University of America, put Lilith and Christian feminists into proper perspective for Canadians when she discussed "The Challenge of the Feminist Movement for the Transmission of Christian Faith" at an August 1989 conference celebrating Ottawa's St. Paul University's centennial as a Pontifically Chartered Institute. Collins opened by describing how Lilith confronts God and Adam, and how she (Lilith) has captured the essence of the challenge of the feminist movement to Christian faith. Collins continued by describing how Christian feminists will change the structures, roles and ecclesial institutions of Christianity.

In a particularly illuminating passage that echoes Mary Daly and Starhawk's notion of the Catholic Church as the enemy of women, Collins states: "What they (Christian feminists) are voicing is their adult awareness that the Christian tradition which has formed and nourished their life of faith is itself malformed and toxic for women."[33]

Important to Be Informed

Faithful Catholics are naturally repulsed by Satanism and witchcraft, so they tend to avoid studying them in any detail. In general this is a good idea, as the world of the occult is chaotic in the extreme and insufferably disgusting and illogical. This of course is to be expected as its author, as previously said, is Satan, the Father of Lies. It is important, however, that Catholics be wary of those who reject legitimate religious authority or who appear to be obsessed with the "environment" and so-called women's rights while not respecting the sanctity of unborn human life. Support for Satanism in the mainstream media rarely comes directly, but is disguised as a plea for freedom of expression or belief. Similarly, support for witchcraft appears as a plea for tolerance and understanding of those who simply wish to return to a pre-industrial world where women could enjoy "natural" well-being and spirituality without being "oppressed" by men. In recent years, many high-school-girls and university women have become fascinated by Wicca because they are attracted by its simple rituals, seductive emphasis on ecology, and supposed sexual freedom.

Simon Magus

When the Acts of the Apostles was written, the Church was made aware of the evil of the occult through St. Peter's strong condemnation of Simon Magus, an early gnostic. Early Christians had no trouble understanding the fact that the practice of magic and the pagan worship of idols was diabolical. In the eyes of the first saints and martyrs, all pagan deities were of the devil, and had to be shunned immediately. Even death was preferable to submitting to the worship of false gods. Nothing has changed over the past two thousand years, except perhaps the high level of naivete and apostasy amongst so many Catholics.

Source: Catholic Culture


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