Panmankey

A first in my continuing effort to update the panmankey blog on a near weekly basis.

I guess I should start with a personal update.  I'm in the middle of planning the summer festival season, and have already begun to confirm events.  Right now I'm 100% sure I'm going to be at Wic-Can Fest in Ontario Canada.  It also looks like I'll be at Circle Sanctuary's Beltane Celebration over the weekend of May 1st.  I'm also planning to go back to Starwood, and then to Brushwood's Summerfest (which is being held the week that Starwood used to occupy).  Most of this is not set in stone, but I'm pretty sure I'll be doing all of those things.

Now, off to deep Pagan thoughts .  . . . 

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I came across this little nugget on The Wild Hunt blog (http://wildhunt.org/blog/, if you don't read the Wild Hunt at least once a week, I urge you too.  It's great):

“Raised in violent ghetto neighborhoods, Ramirez grew up despising his father for his careless disregard of his family. He learned to live like a street animal to survive the cold, harsh streets of the South Bronx. Looking for love and validation, he eventually found it in a new “family” of witches and warlocks who groomed him to become a high priest in their occult religion. Ramirez’s plunge into the dark side reached a boiling point on the night he sold his soul to the devil in a diabolical, blood-soaked ritual. With renewed fervor–and the mark of the beast now cut into his right arm–he actively recruited souls into this “unholy kingdom,” haunting the bars and clubs of NYC by night to find his next victims, including those who professed faith in Christ. His life continued on this dark path for 25 years until God intervened through a larger-than-life dream, revealing Himself for who He really is and snatching Ramirez back from the pit of hell. Out of the Devil’s Caldron walks you through the dark alleys of the occult religions of Santeria, Palo Mayombe, and espiritismo (spiritualism) while exposing the hidden secrets of darkness.”

Now I don't know Mr. Ramirez, but I do know that the tale he's spinning here is just not true.  A quick reading of the paragraph above almost confirms that Mr. Ramirez knows nothing about Santeria or any other occult practice for that matter.  I've never met a Santerian who claimed to be a "witch or a warlock," those words are just entirely absent from the Caribbean/Latin American-Pagan lexicon.  That's the first obvious lie in the piece, but there are several other whoppers.  It's true that Santerians occasionally sacrifice a chicken here or there (and not all groups do this), but I would hardly call that a "blood soaked ritual."  It's also difficult to sell yourself to the Devil when your belief system doesn't have the Christian Devil in it.  

I'm not sure what this "mark of the beast cut into his right arm" nonsense is about, maybe he got a tattoo?  I would hardly call that the mark of the beast though, and again, that's a Christian term that I'm guessing is missing from Santeria.  I'm also kind of surprised that any Pagan group in New York City would haunt the bars and clubs of that great city.  Pagans don't really proselytize, and if they bother to, it's far more likely to be done at a bookstore.  

I suppose it's possible that Ramirez believes these things happened to him, perhaps he's succeeded in deluding himself for the past 25 years.  That's not out of the realm of possibility, but what's more likely is that he's trying to cash in on the lucrative Evangelical Lecture Circuit.

There are dozens (and dozens) of individuals out there with crazy stories about Satanism, the occult, Witchcraft, and Santeria.  A girl I work with was once absolutely convinced that every Halloween Satanists came together to sacrifice babies and perform abortions.  These sorts of crazy stories are circulated in many Evangelical Churches, without anyone to refute them.  If there really were Satanists sacrificing people and aborting babies every Halloween there would be a pile of evidence (literally, all the dead bodies) supporting the assertion.  To this day there's no evidence that even one person has been ritually sacrificed to Satan in the United States (or Great Britain)

I picked up a book called "Wicca:  Satan's Little White Lie," published the by the Chick People (creators of those ridiculous little comic book tracts) about ten years ago.   If the allegations in that book are true, I've never really risen very far in the occult ranks, and this is after fifteen years of trying.  I've never been offered the initiation into Satan's inner-circle, or even seen a glimmer of him!  Most Satanists I've ever met hate my guts for being a namby pamby Wiccan, they certainly don't want to initiate me into anything.  "White Lie" though states pretty emphatically that third degree initiation in the Alexandrian Tradition involves the selling of one's soul to Satan.

What can be done to fight the idiots who spout this garbage?  The internet is full of good information refuting all of this crap (though none of it yet is specifically about Mr. Ramirez, though someone will probably get around to it one of these days).  I will tell you from experience that arguing with people about it does very little good.  It's best to let people live their own lives and learn from experience that the world is not littered with dead babies.  If you do feel the need to "argue" your best bet is to probably just print something off of the net, from a site like paganlibrary.com