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Bad Press

20:32 / 24.09.06

So. In the Times on Friday this caught my eye. BEWARE, it might distress.

"COX TOR on Dartmoor is as bleak and lonely as anywhere in southern England. Now, for dozens of farmers who graze their sheep on the surrounding commons, it is also a place of fear. This month alone more than 30 sheep grazing there have been found mutilated and laid out in bizarre patterns."

So, firstly does anyone know how to track down the sick fucks responsible and report them? Secondly the press love things that titilate and terrify and the crazy weirdness some of us know and love often makes our practice news. Stories and strategies for and against the Press here.

Seriously though, any Dartmoor area posters reading? If anyone's going to have any leads it's likely to be people moving in magical circles. A professor said that the killings were having a profound psychological effect on the farmers. “Somebody’s stupid ritual is affecting farmers’ livelihoods and their own wellbeing,” he said. “The psychological situation in the farm household — ‘what shall we find tomorrow?’ — is probably more harmful than the loss of stock.”

Fuckers. Stupid, evil fuckers.

14:12 / 25.09.06

Maybe I'm being over-sensitive about the sheep sacrifices. It does seem to be very unfair to the disturbed farmers though, and spectacularly damaging to the image of 'alternative' faiths. Any thoughts?

Maybe the satanists should have a share in the multifaith prayer room we're discussing in the other thread, a little corner for the ritual slaughter of lambs at lunchtime.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

14:29 / 25.09.06

This tends to happen every now and then; the papers all go wild for a couple of days. Happened last summer- not sure if it was at the same time, but it always does. There'll be articles here and there, the Mail will have a double (sometimes three) page spread, Colin Wilson will write something... then they'll all be surprised again next time.

My personal opinion? It's like my opinion on much (confirmed) ritual abuse, really- there are sick fucks out there who like doing really nasty things. Maybe they're "pagans", or maybe they're just using that as part of the act. The one shouldn't reflect on the other. Or maybe the media are putting an extra edge on the story that isn't there.

Either way, I tend to file this away in my head under "animal abuse" rather than "religious acts". The trouble is, and I guess this is your point, I imagine a lot of people don't.

(Interesting aside... a few years back, reading a Watchtower that had a thing about Satanism in it, with an obviously staged "Satanic ritual" picture... who were the people in that photo? Are we to assume that the JWs were paying people to put on hoods and stand in a pentagram? That's a bit... weird, really).

17:42 / 12.10.06

It's them Dartmoor people theysells doin' it. That's why they're quiet.

I would like to ask if anyone here has ever come across anyone involved in these sorts of 'occult' practices? I certainly never have, not that I'm the poster child for knowing multitudes of satanists (or darksiders if you prefer ha ha) because I'm not. But I've come across some pagans who are that way inclined and all the people I know would not be yomping over Dartmoor late at night, looking to strangle sheep to make a star with. Plently better things one can do that with.

18:43 / 12.10.06

I've come across a bunch of nasty trash'occult in the local boneyard mostly looks like frat boys playing at masonic silliness. Seeing as I often am in there for night strolls I like to keep an eye on the place. 'Ware my cane shaking!

I have known people with human remains looted from graves though supposedly they were gotten second hand through various punk rawk squatters. In highschool plenty of youngsters got up to no good in the boneyards but I never heard of anything involving livestock.

I have however stumbled across some ghastly sheep remains in Ireland on top of a mountain. AFAIK there are no predators that are roaming about to do *that* to so many sheep in one evening and the locals did not have a clue about dogs in the area roaming free and being sheep killers. Sheep farmers tend to be reliable about that sort of thing. Wasn't a ritual in any discernable sense just a lot of bits flung about like a T Rex had gotten loose.

19:28 / 12.10.06

I know this is kind of missing the point but, can you use seven sheep to make a seven pointed star? There are obviously lots of animals that have died vile deaths at the hands of bastards (may they get thiers), but still, can you?

19:36 / 12.10.06

er, you mean like a howto or is it physically possible?

Unconditional Love

19:48 / 12.10.06

I think this kind of thing is disgusting, especially when animals are killed without a context and the owners permission. I also think the stealing of human remains is just shameless.

But i do think the using of animal sacrafice and human body parts is also a spiritual practice, practiced by quite a few forms of religous tradition.

So would it not be better to legislate for these practices rather than deny them legal status?

Lets say for example i have an ancestral human skull or bone that has been passed down in my family for generations, or i wish to sacrafice a goat for the good of the religous community i belong to and then intend to cook and share that animal with the rest of that community, offering the unedible parts to my ancestors.

So if we take the same actions out of that transgressive context and put them in a traditional religous context, how does that change them?

20:08 / 12.10.06

meI know this is kind of missing the point but, can you use seven sheep to make a seven pointed star? There are obviously lots of animals that have died vile deaths at the hands of bastards (may they get thiers), but still, can you?

xker, you mean like a howto or is it physically possible?

Yeh sorry that was a bit apropos nothing. There is a lack of discusion of alternative motivations for these killings other than Satanic shananagins in the article linked above. The formation of the sheep in stars and other 'ritualistic' patterns is drawing the focus speculation away from the potential resentment caused by access to land being withdrawn, the only other examined motivation.

If these ritualistic paterns are the cause of the assumption of satanism and seven sheep found in a seven pointed star was the start of this, what conclusions might you reasonably draw when it dawns that you can't make a seven pointed star out of the carcasses of seven dead sheep. Crappy journalism, Redtara is shit at geometry, it was not Satanic to begin with?

Like I said, this is heinous. I am not trying to deminish what the animals and their owners have and are going through.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

20:08 / 12.10.06

I think it might be relevant to repost this comment by trouser the trousarian from the Stupid Magic Questions thread:

the "satanic" sheep-killings have been going on for some time now (the BBC website has a report from last October) and there are claims that it's been going on since January 2005. Yet no arrests - or even suspects and no documentary evidence has yet surfaced. I couldn't find anything about the killings on the websites for the RSPCA or the local constabularies. There was a discussion about the incidents on the UK pagans forum recently where several people who lived around Dartmoor said that the matter wasn't being talked about locally. Curious, eh?

This would seem to thicken the plot rather.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

20:36 / 12.10.06

that you can't make a seven pointed star out of the carcasses of seven dead sheep.

Err. Yeah, you could. You'd just have to be a fairly creative butcher.

20:42 / 12.10.06

'In some cases their eyes have been gouged out and their tongues and sexual organs removed. Most have been strangled or had their necks broken.'

There is also mention of 'mutilation'. I can't imagine a journalist missing an opportunity to expand on that if there had been creative butchery involved... Or am I just pathologically jaded?

21:00 / 12.10.06

Funny. My first thought was to blame the thing on UFOs... although cattle mutilations are a little different in the details....

17:34 / 27.11.06

More bad press!

The OTO is just a bunch of pedophiles who sacrifice children!
According to a legal complaint being covered by the Australian press, at least:

AN ANTI-CHILD-SEX campaigner accused an occult religious group of hosting parties at which naked children acted as waiters and at which members had sex with and murdered children, a tribunal was told yesterday.

The obscure group Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) claims Dr Reina Michaelson and the Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Program described it in a website article as a satanic cult that sacrificed children and ate their organs and blood.

It has complained under Victoria's religious hatred law that Dr Michaelson and her organisation vilified OTO members, causing revulsion, ridicule, hatred and contempt.

According to OTO's statement of complaint, Dr Michaelson said it was not a religion but a child pornography and pedophile ring, that its members practised trauma-based mind control, sexual abuse and satanic rituals to discourage its victims from complaining to the authorities, and that it condoned kidnapping street children and babies and children from orphanages for sex and sacrifice in religious rituals.

More at the link.

17:50 / 27.11.06

great....not that you could level any of those claims in the same hysterical shrill tone at a few major religions or anything.

Can't we just keep making fun of the outfits the OTO uses? Back in the day occult groups would just snicker at each others' choice of headdress. It's a fine tradition we should perserve and uphold.

17:10 / 04.12.06

see, i'm vegetarian anyay, but if you arent and want to kill a sheep then why the fuck not buy your own?
it seems clear to me it's all lot more about the self-image as a kerrazy and dangerous person(oooh, arenti scary with my make up on) than the ritual.

if not then these fuckwits would be farmers themselves, surely.

18:29 / 04.12.06

Yeah, it seems like sacrificing your own sheep would be more meaningful than someone else's sheep. It's like giving stolen toys to a children's hospital.

19:34 / 04.12.06

Okay, I don't have an issue with offerring respect to TPTB when slaughtering your food, but whose religion says it's okay to slaughter an animal they don't own, and then totally waste the meat? This sounds much more like a cowardly serial killer than anything religious.

There is a lack of discusion of alternative motivations for these killings other than Satanic shananagins in the article linked above.

They don't actually go into depth about the Satanic motivation either. They mention three motives, briefely, and then go back to discussing the locals reactions.

The obscure group Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) claims Dr Reina Michaelson and the Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Program described it in a website article as a satanic cult that sacrificed children and ate their organs and blood.

What the hell? I can't wrap my brain around the idea that people really still accuse the-they-them of Baby Eating. When's the last time somebody leveled a Baby-Eaters claim that actually turned out to be true?

It's like giving stolen toys to a children's hospital.

Nicely put

This does rather seem to completely miss the point that "Sacrifice" means "Make Sacred" not "Cause the loss of".

--Ember--

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

21:38 / 04.12.06

I'm inclined to think that any occult connection with this kind of thing (the sheep) works in a similar way to the Norwegian BM church-burnings, Manuela Ruda's "blood sacrifice" and all that stuff- it's not a "real" ritual- more likely impressionable people/kids going "What Would Satan (want us to) Do? Oh yeah, kill some sheep, burn a couple of churches, stab that guy..."

As such, it's hardly surprising the whole point of "sacrifice" has been somewhat missed.

15:08 / 29.01.07

Oh goody. Tyra Banks is doing a show on Witches, with never before seen footage of an actual ritual!

It is on as I write this. I have to hear what those on the panel have to say. I shall report back, but it is not looking very good for Tyra.

22:13 / 29.01.07

Duuude, totally glad you mentioned this. I think I'll go and watch it.

22:35 / 29.01.07

That one witch in the green...she was hot. That's about all I got out of this show.

11:57 / 30.01.07

Yeah, and the witch in the green dress was quite hot.

It was mostly nauseating what I did watch. Tyra interrupted the guest panel a few times to mention that she is sorry that this was such a difficult show for some people, and how some people thought they (the witches) should burn in hell. Oh, and she also insisted that there were good witches and bad witches continually, and warlocks, and interchangable wiccans and witches, and spooky spellcasters that curse people...oooooh!

It was like Tyra hadn't researched this at all! Imagine.

Fiona Horne, the guest star, was rather elegant and articulate, despite her books. It seems like her personal practice goes deeper than they do - one hopes, anyway. Lovely, lovely lady, Ms.Horne. She attempted to rectify some of Tyra's childish notions and added some dignity to the discussion so, it did not devolve completely into a utter freakshow. For the most part, it was just sickening, though.

18:52 / 15.01.08

Disturbing news article about child murders.
oh it was the spell that went bad alright.

*wince*

file this under stupid people giving everyone a bad name.

19:21 / 15.01.08

Ugh. I can't believe that there are people in the comments section complaining about the b*rn*ng t*m*s. It's so fucking tasteless.

Two children murdered and the first thing the neo-pagan community do is put on a robe and show off their victim mentality.

I'm appalled by everything about this. I think it would be easier to make a case for how beautiful and good witchcraft can be if it's most vocal advocates weren't painfully stupid people.

21:36 / 15.01.08

now, now, I'm a member of the neo-pagan community and I'm not doing that nor are a solid sampling of the peeps I know.

*some* turboprongs who happen to be lumped into that group are, but not the community as a whole.

*

03:02 / 16.01.08

To be fair, Princess said "some of its most vocal." It's a physical law of the universe that stupidity always sounds louder than intelligence. Like at a party when you've gotten slightly drunk and just as you raise your voice to shout to that hot person you've had your eye on the story about the time when you were a child and you fell into a pile of poo, the music cuts out.

The resistable rise of Reidcourchie

09:36 / 16.01.08

The sheep mutilations sounds like the act of someone who's quite ill regardless of how they're dressing it up.

When I was doing my A-levels many, many years ago I knew a rather disturbed young man who was quite interested in the occult. He swore blind that he had met people involved in human sacrifice. However the problem (or blessing) with these things is you always tend to hear about them at least third hand.

I have also heard in the past rumours of folk belief very separate from modern pagan beliefs, supposedly a continuation of some kind of pre-Christian religion in certain rural parts of Britain where children are actually bred for sacrifice. The implication was that the followers of these beliefs would not be involved in the more mainstream pagan community and valued their secrecy very highly. Again my assumption was that this was largely nonsense.

I guess why I bring this up is that I have always wondered to what extent there is a seriously nasty side to paganism and occult interest. Most of the bad things I here either tends to be unsubstantiated rubbish or people aping what they see as Satanic chic which has more to do with films and music than religious belief.

Incidentally Alec Constantine one of my favorite nut-job conspiracy theorists in his book Psychic Dictatorship in the USA (possibly my favorite book title ever) points to the OTO being a CIA backed brainwashing cult with lots of dodgy ex-military members that attacks other Occult organisations.

12:19 / 16.01.08

Oh, I know there are intelligent and beautiful neo-pagan people and groups. I wasn't meaning to say that all neo-pagans are stupid or that everyone in the community is a whiny fantasist. Apologies if that's how it came across.

I just think it's upsetting that a bunch of pagans felt it was nessescary to pull out their victim credentials, and that there hasn't been (as far as I can see) an equal pull towards useful and unselfish responses.

Now, the pagan communities in America might be very different, and there might be a whole unreported swarm of pagans putting effort into appropriate, well researched responses. There might be a massive rethink in the communities about personal responsibility re: the occult and our mentally ill neighbours. Hell, there might even be an effort to liase more closely with police and mental health groups, or to train in psychotherapy, or whatever.

But if the US pagan scene is anything like the one in the UK, then there wont be. There almost certainly will be caring, intelligent people doing caring, intelligent things. But the majority (or at least the incredibly vocal minority that appears to be the majority) will just see the word "spell", assume that means Wiccans, and use this tragedy as a soap-box for ego gratification and self-promotion. Before they've even read to see if the guy did self identify as a pagan of any stripe.

12:52 / 16.01.08

zippy to be clear I was responding to:

Two children murdered and the first thing the neo-pagan community do is put on a robe and show off their victim mentality.

Because we really ought not to condense any group down like this.

Oh, I know there are intelligent and beautiful neo-pagan people and groups. I wasn't meaning to say that all neo-pagans are stupid or that everyone in the community is a whiny fantasist. Apologies if that's how it came across.

It's ok I just needed to point out that it was registering like that.

Any generalizing statement especially about such a huge diverse group is likely to cause problems. If a specific association or coven was blabbing about it and had a history of doing so I'd be right there with you.

Most of my experiences with neo pagans are not people who identify as Wiccans but many other trads. I'd be hesitiant to say anything about the entirety of Wiccans but I would be comfortable commenting on some known Wiccan orgs.

trouser the trouserian

13:14 / 16.01.08

But if the US pagan scene is anything like the one in the UK, then there wont be.

Sounds like you've had bad experiences with pagans in the UK, princess. There are however, a good many caring, intelligent pagans in the UK, some of whom are involved in Interfaith work, as individuals or in consultancy groups such as Pebble or work as professional counsellors or therapists; some act as prison visitors, others work in hospices. In February of last year, The Manchester Museum consulted local pagans (and other faith groups) concerning the forthcoming 2008 exhibition of Lindow Man, and have agreed that local pagans can hold an "ancestor reverence" event at the museum (the full report on consultation day PDF makes interesting reading.

14:40 / 16.01.08

that was a fantastic PDF. Once again you post the best ones, trouser!

Unconditional Love

10:47 / 17.01.08

The worst part of reading that link was seeing how the children and children left behind coming to terms with the loss of there friends, get lost in the personal concerns of other people. A lot of misplaced thought without much heart.

00:59 / 22.01.08

However the problem (or blessing) with these things is you always tend to hear about them at least third hand.

surely people who are actually involved in this sort of thing, if they exist, would be quite careful about letting the secret slip. the trust barriers would only disintegrate at least third hand.

as if to prove myself wrong, here is another sort of related story with an agenda.

Milton Blahyi, a former feared rebel commander in Liberia's brutal civil war, [and now an evangelist preacher] has admitted to taking part in human sacrifices as part of traditional ceremonies intended to ensure victory in battle.