janelle
10-20-2003, 09:33 PM
What is Wicca?
"In the second half of the 20th century, a self-conscious revival of pre-Christian paganism occurred in the United States and Europe. The foundation of this revival was witchcraft, or wicca (said to be an early Anglo-Saxon word for witchcraft). Wicca is interpreted simply as the nature and fertility religion of pre-Christian Europe, which has been explored in books such as Charles Leland’s Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches (1899)... Although they are now considered unreliable by scholars, such books gave inspiration to some people seeking spiritual alternatives.
The writings of Englishman Gerald Gardner, who in his book Witchcraft Today (1954) claimed that he was a witch initiated by a surviving coven, imparted much of the alleged lore and rituals of English witches. Although his claims have been questioned, covens of modern witches sprang up under Gardner’s inspiration and spread to the United States in the 1960s. This form of witchcraft—with its feeling for nature, its colorful rituals, and its challenge of conventional religion and society—harmonized well with the countercultural mood of the 1960s and grew rapidly during that decade.
Modern witchcraft continued to prosper during the subsequent decades. Many followers of the ecological and feminist movements found in Wicca a religion with congenial themes. ...love of nature, equality of male and female, appreciation of the ceremonial, a sense of wonder and belief in magic, and appreciation of the symbolism and psychological realities behind the gods and goddesses of antiquity.
...Increasingly, Wicca draws from many pagan traditions, with the result that the distinctions between witchcraft, occultism, neopaganism, and various strands thereof have become blurred."
Author: Robert S. Ellwood, Ph.D., Professor of Religion, University of Southern California, "Witchcraft," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2003, http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2003 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
Ben Alexander was deeply involved with the spiritualist movement and the extremes of psychic phenomena in his native England.
Dear Wiccan Friends:
I am just going into my 80th year and my desire, no doubt like yours, is to help people have an eternal happy forever in the spirit world, which we call Heaven.
I have made this a lifetime occupation. It is my belief that God wants us to love and care for each other. I pray the following message will help you in your search for the truth.
First, let me introduce myself and where I am coming from. I was born on December 25th 1920, in London England to a widow by the name of Golda Alpern. I was placed up for adoption immediately. In those days it was easy to adopt a child. There were few questions asked. The couple who adopted me barely provided the necessities of life, but I am grateful to them for taking me in.
Theft drunkenness, gambling, prostitution and bedbugs - all were as common in our part of the East End of London as clean sheets and warm water were in other places. Bookies and prostitutes lived on the street. As children we made money from bookies by warning them when police were in the vicinity.
My father drank heavily, gambled, had affairs and beat my mother many times. I can still picture my mother with black eyes and swollen lips. She found life so distressing that she tried to commit suicide a number of times. One evening after my mother and father had been fighting, she threatened to throw herself out from the upstairs window. As she climbed out I managed to pull her back. On another occasion I recall her taking the tube off the gas jet and trying to inhale the gas;. These were terrifying times for me.
The event that had the single greatest impact on me was the death of my father. I was only eleven years old at the time. The subject of death was considered taboo in our house. It was something to be feared and never talked about. One night as I was lying on my bed upstairs, I could hear my father crying downstairs. He screamed out to God saying,
“Please God, don’t let me die! I don’t want to die God, help me!”
I will never forget the sound of his crying, it was one of despair, fear and terror. Now I can understand why he felt that way. He had lived as though he had a thousand years on earth. I really believed that he knew he was going to Hell and the prospect of this terrified him.
[ How can a God of love send anybody to Hell? Answer... ]
He was taken to the hospital in the early hours of the morning and within a few short hours was returned home in a cheap pine box. (In the Jewish religion they bury the dead within 24 hours).
I was totally unaware of what happened that night, when I came downstairs, all the furniture was taken out and lying on the floor was this closed coffin. I was terrified.
From then on the thought of death held a terrible grip on me, I was afraid to sleep at night for fear that I would not be alive in the morning. That fear stayed with me for many years and even now I can still hear in my mind the screams of my father.
DEATH STRIKES AGAIN
After my Father’s death, my mother turned to prostitution to support us. The next seven years were the most distressing, embarrassing and soul destroying years of my life.
Once more, I had another frightening experience. Death entered my life again when I was about seventeen. My mother had been in the hospital with bronchial pneumonia, and I had been staying in the house alone. Unfortunately my mother’s “customers” did not know about her illness and constantly came to the door knocking and calling her name. I stayed upstairs in my room, too terrified to move.
When Mother died in the hospital, a policeman was sent to the house to tell me. At first, I thought he was just another ”customer” and I did not answer the door.
After my mother’s death there was no place for me to go so I stayed in the house. One night shortly thereafter, as I was lying in bed, I could see her standing in front of me at the top of the staircase. She appeared white and etheric-looking, and she was smiling at me. It seemed to be some sort of apparition. I put the covers over my head, and when I peeked out, she was gone. It was a terrifying experience and from then on my obsession with death grew worse.
Shortly after her death World War II broke out and I was called up into the army. I married very young, and regretfully it was a bad marriage ending in divorce. (I have a son who is 52 years old. My first wife has since passed away.)
I have written the above to give you some background to show the reason for my getting into the occult. Two deaths in my family which left me in fear.
MY LIFE CHANGES
After World War II, I was discharged from the army and became a London taxi driver.
One day while driving my cab, I picked up a fare that wanted to go to the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain. I asked her what went on there. She told me an incredible story, which sounded unbelievable, but years later I found out to be true.
She told me that she attended séances and spoke to her dead husband. She told me how it was possible to not only speak to the dead, but actually see, hear and touch them. At first, it sounded too good to be true, but later to my surprise, I experienced for several years the reality of this phenomena.
Yes, I know there are frauds, but there are also genuine mediums, who have power to contact the spirit world. I know this for two reasons (1) because of my own personal experiences and (2) because the Word of God in the Bible tells us so.
The question is, are we really contacting the spirits of the dead, or are they demons impersonating the dead? I was involved in all forms of psychic phenomena, starting with the Ouija Board and ending up in materialization, through a substance called ectoplasm. I write about this more fully in my book Out From Darkness.
"In the second half of the 20th century, a self-conscious revival of pre-Christian paganism occurred in the United States and Europe. The foundation of this revival was witchcraft, or wicca (said to be an early Anglo-Saxon word for witchcraft). Wicca is interpreted simply as the nature and fertility religion of pre-Christian Europe, which has been explored in books such as Charles Leland’s Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches (1899)... Although they are now considered unreliable by scholars, such books gave inspiration to some people seeking spiritual alternatives.
The writings of Englishman Gerald Gardner, who in his book Witchcraft Today (1954) claimed that he was a witch initiated by a surviving coven, imparted much of the alleged lore and rituals of English witches. Although his claims have been questioned, covens of modern witches sprang up under Gardner’s inspiration and spread to the United States in the 1960s. This form of witchcraft—with its feeling for nature, its colorful rituals, and its challenge of conventional religion and society—harmonized well with the countercultural mood of the 1960s and grew rapidly during that decade.
Modern witchcraft continued to prosper during the subsequent decades. Many followers of the ecological and feminist movements found in Wicca a religion with congenial themes. ...love of nature, equality of male and female, appreciation of the ceremonial, a sense of wonder and belief in magic, and appreciation of the symbolism and psychological realities behind the gods and goddesses of antiquity.
...Increasingly, Wicca draws from many pagan traditions, with the result that the distinctions between witchcraft, occultism, neopaganism, and various strands thereof have become blurred."
Author: Robert S. Ellwood, Ph.D., Professor of Religion, University of Southern California, "Witchcraft," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2003, http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2003 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
Ben Alexander was deeply involved with the spiritualist movement and the extremes of psychic phenomena in his native England.
Dear Wiccan Friends:
I am just going into my 80th year and my desire, no doubt like yours, is to help people have an eternal happy forever in the spirit world, which we call Heaven.
I have made this a lifetime occupation. It is my belief that God wants us to love and care for each other. I pray the following message will help you in your search for the truth.
First, let me introduce myself and where I am coming from. I was born on December 25th 1920, in London England to a widow by the name of Golda Alpern. I was placed up for adoption immediately. In those days it was easy to adopt a child. There were few questions asked. The couple who adopted me barely provided the necessities of life, but I am grateful to them for taking me in.
Theft drunkenness, gambling, prostitution and bedbugs - all were as common in our part of the East End of London as clean sheets and warm water were in other places. Bookies and prostitutes lived on the street. As children we made money from bookies by warning them when police were in the vicinity.
My father drank heavily, gambled, had affairs and beat my mother many times. I can still picture my mother with black eyes and swollen lips. She found life so distressing that she tried to commit suicide a number of times. One evening after my mother and father had been fighting, she threatened to throw herself out from the upstairs window. As she climbed out I managed to pull her back. On another occasion I recall her taking the tube off the gas jet and trying to inhale the gas;. These were terrifying times for me.
The event that had the single greatest impact on me was the death of my father. I was only eleven years old at the time. The subject of death was considered taboo in our house. It was something to be feared and never talked about. One night as I was lying on my bed upstairs, I could hear my father crying downstairs. He screamed out to God saying,
“Please God, don’t let me die! I don’t want to die God, help me!”
I will never forget the sound of his crying, it was one of despair, fear and terror. Now I can understand why he felt that way. He had lived as though he had a thousand years on earth. I really believed that he knew he was going to Hell and the prospect of this terrified him.
[ How can a God of love send anybody to Hell? Answer... ]
He was taken to the hospital in the early hours of the morning and within a few short hours was returned home in a cheap pine box. (In the Jewish religion they bury the dead within 24 hours).
I was totally unaware of what happened that night, when I came downstairs, all the furniture was taken out and lying on the floor was this closed coffin. I was terrified.
From then on the thought of death held a terrible grip on me, I was afraid to sleep at night for fear that I would not be alive in the morning. That fear stayed with me for many years and even now I can still hear in my mind the screams of my father.
DEATH STRIKES AGAIN
After my Father’s death, my mother turned to prostitution to support us. The next seven years were the most distressing, embarrassing and soul destroying years of my life.
Once more, I had another frightening experience. Death entered my life again when I was about seventeen. My mother had been in the hospital with bronchial pneumonia, and I had been staying in the house alone. Unfortunately my mother’s “customers” did not know about her illness and constantly came to the door knocking and calling her name. I stayed upstairs in my room, too terrified to move.
When Mother died in the hospital, a policeman was sent to the house to tell me. At first, I thought he was just another ”customer” and I did not answer the door.
After my mother’s death there was no place for me to go so I stayed in the house. One night shortly thereafter, as I was lying in bed, I could see her standing in front of me at the top of the staircase. She appeared white and etheric-looking, and she was smiling at me. It seemed to be some sort of apparition. I put the covers over my head, and when I peeked out, she was gone. It was a terrifying experience and from then on my obsession with death grew worse.
Shortly after her death World War II broke out and I was called up into the army. I married very young, and regretfully it was a bad marriage ending in divorce. (I have a son who is 52 years old. My first wife has since passed away.)
I have written the above to give you some background to show the reason for my getting into the occult. Two deaths in my family which left me in fear.
MY LIFE CHANGES
After World War II, I was discharged from the army and became a London taxi driver.
One day while driving my cab, I picked up a fare that wanted to go to the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain. I asked her what went on there. She told me an incredible story, which sounded unbelievable, but years later I found out to be true.
She told me that she attended séances and spoke to her dead husband. She told me how it was possible to not only speak to the dead, but actually see, hear and touch them. At first, it sounded too good to be true, but later to my surprise, I experienced for several years the reality of this phenomena.
Yes, I know there are frauds, but there are also genuine mediums, who have power to contact the spirit world. I know this for two reasons (1) because of my own personal experiences and (2) because the Word of God in the Bible tells us so.
The question is, are we really contacting the spirits of the dead, or are they demons impersonating the dead? I was involved in all forms of psychic phenomena, starting with the Ouija Board and ending up in materialization, through a substance called ectoplasm. I write about this more fully in my book Out From Darkness.