Pictured in the foreground, left to right: Dixie
Deerman, Branwen, Serphant (kneeling), Byron Ballard, Donna
This picture accompanied a front-page
article in the Asheville Citizen-Times, 31 Oct. 1995. (Picture
credit: Steve Dixon/Citizen-Times)
On the night of October 30th, 1995, in a public plaza in the heart of Asheville, North Carolina, hundreds of Witches gathered from every corner of the Southeastern US to celebrate the Samhain Sabbat. Most of them had spent their whole lives hiding their beliefs from fundamentalist parents, neighbors, and employers, yet now they were joining together to weave a giant "dreamcatcher"-style web, play their drums and flutes, and dance a spiral dance in full view of local and national TV news cameras. It was the largest Wiccan ritual ever held in public in the home state of Sen. Jesse Helms, a mere stone's throw from Rev. Billy Graham's world headquarters. We were determined to show our neighbors, co-workers, and relatives that -- contrary to the hysterical rumors whipped up by fundamentalist Christians every Halloween -- they had nothing to fear from us. We wanted to show them that Witches do not drink baby's blood or sacrifice dogs and cats, but practice a peaceful, celebratory nature religion.
Our Story of the First
Public Ritual
News Coverage
The Press
Release and Poster We Distributed
Our Second
Annual Public Samhain Ritual
When they began planning the rite, Dixie Deerman and Byron Ballard (author of the Wiccan play "Mothertongue") had no idea whether 50 or 500 people would show up. The rest of us in Coven Oldenwilde and Byron's coven thought we would be lucky if the pagans outnumbered the Christian protestors we expected, and even luckier if we didn't come home afterwards to find a burning cross on our property, much less a burning house -- occurences that are still all too common in these parts. Our ambitions for publicity didn't extend beyond getting the local newspaper and radio stations to announce the event in their community calendars, the same way they announce church socials and Elks Club parades. Dixie and Byron expected the city would try to shut down such a potentially controversial ritual, so they carefully researched the local laws for public assemblies and obtained all three permits the law required. Dixie talked to the police to let them know exactly what we planned to do, and wrote a press packet describing the ritual and answering frequently asked questions about Witchcraft, which she faxed to the local media and to City Hall.
We were pleased when the Asheville Citizen-Times asked to interview Dixie, but doubtful that the article would make it even to the back pages. Imagine our surprise when we picked up the paper for Tuesday, Oct. 24 and found the interview and a color photo of Dixie and Oldenwilde's high priest, Steven Rasmussen, right on the front page! When we got home, the phone was already ringing off the hook, as it would continue to do for more than a week -- not with threats or bible quotations, but with requests for interviews from radio stations and TV shows from New York City to Florida to California, and excited Witches who had somehow tracked down our number to let us know they had been emboldened to come out of the closet at school, work, or home, and were bringing all their covenmates to the ritual. The Citizen-Times had put the story on the Associated Press wire, which meant that it had appeared on every teletype in every news outlet in the nation. By the day of the ritual, Dixie had filmed or recorded interviews with CBS Radio, the TV show "Extra", an ABC station, UPI, and a dozen other radio and print reporters and call-in hosts from all over the country. Even the 700 Club announced the time and place of the ritual, encouraging its viewers to show up and, presumably, protest. (Ironically, it was this announcement that first informed many of the Witches who came about the ritual!) One TV station which had earlier refused to announce the ritual because it went against the station's "family values" fell all over itself trying to get an interview from us after the story went national. We went to their studio and gave them their interview -- dressed in our black robes and silver pentacles.
Almost all of the coverage was very sympathetic to Witches -- a well-written press packet and a calm, intelligent voice make all the difference in how the story gets edited. And yet the press was intent on manufacturing a conflict with the fundamentalists. It seemed like every reporter went out of their way to get "reaction" from the most intolerant and inflammatory preacher they could find. Before long, almost every Baptist minister in town was promising to hold a prayer meeting for "the folk involved in the witchcraft", or trotting some crewcut zombie in front of the cameras to testify that witchcraft had sent him down the slippery slope toward Satanism. (Our personal favorite was a minister interviewed at the ritual who started off ranting about how "the bible says, 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live'", then caught himself when he realized he had just advocated murder on national TV -- "that's why," he glanced away and continued on, "they need to be borned agin!") Witchcraft, after all, rivals homosexuality and abortion for the rage and fear it inspires in the religious right. And no wonder -- they thought they'd stamped the last of us out three hundred years ago, yet here we are in fast-growing numbers, stronger and more joyful than ever, challenging them on the very turf they'd staked out as their own, just when they are claiming to be on the verge of achieving political and cultural dominance of American life. How many protestors would show up to harass us at the ritual, and would the police protect our constitutional right to worship, or turn their backs when the stones started flying?
We were nervous, then, as we assembled in a downtown parking lot the night of October 30th, and began our march through the streets of Asheville toward the courthouse plaza. Torches and drums led the way as an ever-lengthening line of robed and caped Witches snaked toward the center of town. And as we chanted and ululated and drummed, our nervousness soon transmuted into excitement and courage. When we crested the last rise before the plaza and saw before us a roiling sea of camera lights and protestors and expectant onlookers, we plunged right in. Leading the way, Dixie cut a swathe through the small crowd of fifty psalm-singing, bible-waving protestors, bussed in from a local Baptist college, who had gathered around a raised stage in the center of the plaza on the mistaken assumption that we would hold the rite there. By the time they recovered their wits, we had already formed a circle on the grassy slope we had selected earlier, a circle which quickly expanded till it was forty feet across in the center and eight or nine people deep -- the largest any of us had ever been in. The crowd of Witches spontaneously broke into a resonant and powerful "om", which momentarily struck the fundamentalists dumb -- the first of many shocks to their narrow mindset they would experience that evening. As we called the quarters, they tried again to disrupt us by shouting bible verses and singing (off-key). But they hadn't counted on our secret weapon. We signalled to our drummers, and from that moment onward the only sounds that could be heard were the primal pounding of native drums and the ecstatic howls of pagan worshippers.
Most of the protestors gave up and went home quickly. Those who stayed had to content themselves with arguing theology with a few of the pagans on the outer edge of the circle. Everyone else had their backs turned to them, intently watching the ceremony taking place in the center of the protecting circle -- where the only disturbances that we were aware of were the intrusive lights of TV cameras.
Tiny silver moons and rhinestones glittered like dew on the cords as we unfurled them and began to weave the web. We wove the outer perimeter and began on the second coil, when crisis struck: The cords had tangled! We tried to undo them, but the knots only grew worse. The web could have died right then -- but luckily this was no mere crowd of yuppie city pagans. Appalachian Witches are skilled in traditional crafts and lores of every kind, and we help each other out without a second thought. Seeing our plight, weavers and knitters sprang forward to undo the knots and coax the cords into easily unwound balls. At that moment, the web became more than a mere symbol. It was a true embodiment of that word so often mouthed yet so rarely practiced: "community".
When it was completed, we raised the web above our heads with a mighty roar of joy, and began to dance deosil with it, spiralling the energy upward and outward throughout all the city of Asheville and beyond. Then we linked hands and began a spiral dance that wound out and through the crowd of onlookers. Most of the folks who had come just to get a look at "real witches" dropped their inhibitions and joined in; others simply stood and watched with jaws agape, while the few remaining fundamentalist protestors jumped fearfully away from any open hands that were extended to them. In the midst stood a group of elderly Witches clad in bright polyester, too frail to join the wild dance, but with smiles of uncontainable joy on their faces. They told others that they had long dreamed of such a day in Asheville but thought till now they would never see it.
Eventually we broke into knots of spontaneous drumming and dancing. At last we knew it was time to end -- for now -- and we closed the circle. But the true webweaving had only just begun, as hundreds of once-closeted Witches traded names and phone numbers, discovering others who lived on the next block or the next mountain ridge over. Coven Oldenwilde gained a half-dozen new and very committed students. Months later, we still receive calls from seekers and onlookers who attended the ritual and want to learn more.
"War stories" are still trickling in to us about what happened to people before, during, and after the rite. Here's a few:
Backlash? There was none. No crosses appeared on our lawn, no bricks were hurled through our windows. Wherever we go in town, people recognize us now -- and come up to tell us how much they loved the ritual, or how they wish they could have been there. We hear people whispering behind our backs, saying, "There's the witches who did that public ritual at Halloween -- I sure wish I could have gone to it!" To our amazement, we have experienced only positive response.
Return
to top of page.
Return
to Asheville's Public Samhain Rituals.
Return
to Coven Oldenwilde's home page.
