You’re Not In Oz Anymore

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From Believer Beware;

You’re not in Oz Anymore which amounts to Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet interviewing Velvet

They met at the AGM of a few thousand witches, druids, and magick -workers. The gathering happens at a campground called Heartland, about an hour north of Kansas City. Velvet is not her real name but it’s the name she goes by in her coven of elf-witches. At first this sounds like a Dungeons and Dragons chapter but the more you listen, the more you get the sense that these folks take this all very seriously. Here’s what Velvet says,

“ There’s a list of elven gods this long, but I don’t even worship ‘em. I worship Hecate and Loki. Hecate and Loki are both ‘dark deities.’ I hate that term. The deal is they teach really hard lessons. And they’re not lessons you want to learn. People want Magick to be all flowers and rainbows. And life is not all flowers and rainbows. I’m sorry. Neither is is it all death and such, but people don’t even want to face that Loki has a tendency to teach by playing a trick, and once you pick it up you go, ‘You know, I should’ve known that.’ Hecate is more of the opinion of ‘Smack, okay you’re in this situation, now get out of it. Okay you learned something, didnt’cha?’

It’s not just the cosmos that is stranger than we could have known. So are the religious groups living all around us.

I sympathize with Velvet trying to explain what brings meaning to her life. I find myself in her shoes on a regular basis. I suppose for a lot of people today, elf-witches are no wierder or scarier than Christians.

And we don’t have to fight ‘em or convert ‘em or join ‘em. We can love ‘em. That was what this morning’s service was saying to me. Listen closely enough to our neighbours to find out what we share, and if we don’t get turned off by the strangeness, we might learn something.


Peter