Witches return to German forests (love of nature alert!)

Witches have returned to the German forests, dancing naked in groups under the full moon and calling to their gods.

The covens vary in size and in how seriously they take their calling, but the numbers are rising, particularly amongst the young.

Their religious ideas are described as "pagan" rather than Satanist, and many of the older practitioners have a history in the environmental movement, where they learnt a passionate love of nature.

In some cases this has led on to a belief in the natural powers of the forests. The women are convinced they can work magic.

"The witches' scene is experiencing a powerful revival," says Lutheran theologian Hansjoerg Hemminger. He says the covens range from "girlie witches" to the so-called "Wicca" covens. Wicca is an old Anglo-Saxon term for a group of witches.

Christian theologians are inclined to see the latter as a manifestation of a new heathen movement. The women tend to be members of associations like the Pagan Federation or the Stone Circle.

Maddalina, a 44-year-old witch, is high priestess of a witches' coven in Berlin, who became interested in Wicca about 15 years ago.

The former doctor's assistant, who declines to provide her real name, says she began looking around for women with similar interests.

"Today you are just a mouse-click away from making contact," she says, and she estimates that the number of witches has quadrupled in her time as a witch.

Conceding she is uncertain, she guesses there are several hundred Wiccans in Germany.

Maddalina is scornful of the teenagers interested in the witch cults. She gets e-mails daily from 13- and 14-year-olds, almost all of which she rebuffs.

Her own coven numbers just eight and the youngest trainee witch is 25 years old.

Most of the teenagers interested in witchcraft gain their information from the media, the internet or from books. Television series on witchcraft are currently popular in Germany.

These sources offer love potions aimed at curing shyness, or magical formulas spoken in the light of the moon to help with schoolwork.

Hemminger insists that these methods are never solutions to real problems.

But Maddalina is true to her beliefs. "We are heathens and believe in the power of magic," she says.

She and her coven go into the woods around Berlin several times a year to stand naked in a circle and call to Baldur, the god of light.

Their requests are of a banal sort; wishes for a better job, a new flat with a balcony, for good health.

By contrast with the teenage witches, the Wicca covens tend to be older women with a background in the women's movement.

Most commentators do not believe the groups have any links to Satanism and black magic. But Hemminger sounds a note of warning.

"Some of these circles operate in complete secrecy. We really don't know what they are up to," he says.

In general he regards the Wicca covens as a means to overcome personal crises that only cause concern once the cult begins to take over a person's life.

Maddalina insists her coven's activities are harmless. "We are not hurting anyone," she says.

And the Berlin forest authorities are taking a similar view, allowing the witches to dance under the moon.

More likely the prohibition on dams had to do with impeding the natural courses of waters which God (or the gods) intended to flow as they do.

The same issue arose in Catholicism, and showed a distinct difference between the French and the Spanish variants thereof. The French were great canal builders, linking the entire country by a system of canals that effectively gave France the waterway equivalent of a railroad by the mid-1600s. This was of enormous commercial benefit to the French, and was an infrastructural reason that France surged to such economic power under Louis XIII and XIV. Cardinal Richelieu and Cardinal Mazarin, as Prime Ministers, both invested heavily in the canal system and saw it much as Eisenhower saw the US Interstate Highway System.

Meanwhile, in Spain, the same concept of canals to link the river systems and, incidentally, irrigate the fertile but dry bottomlands was seriously considered. But it was opposed by various Spanish clergy, on mystical bases having to do with altering God's intent, etc.

The same sort of concept appears in the Magna Carta, which among other things orders the removal of all weirs and the building of no new weirs along various rivers.

The Spanish (and Norman-French rulers of England) were not thinking economically but religiously (or rather, superstitiously) when they opposed the construction of the canals. By contrast the French, just as Catholic as the Spaniards, had two Cardinals linking every medium sized village by a vast canal system which still operates today.

My guess is that the Egyptians were not thinking economically but superstitiously, just like the Spanish in the more recent example.

"This is a perplexing position you've taken. It leads me to wonder what criteria you use to differentiate concepts from one another, if not by name, time of origin, location of origin, appearance, disposition, or history."

The Christian criteria are "Divine Revelation". It does require an aspect of proof. For example a madman raving that that he has seen the face of God and this is what he told me to tell you guys is not sufficient. It requires a bit more than one person saying "this is true".

Since events in the ancient pass are so often dismissed just because they did not happen now is a common reaction allow me to give you a good and fairly modern event that the Roman Catholic Church has ruled as valid? It will give you an example of the sort of Criteria you are asking about. (I am assuming you are sincere in this)

In 1917 in Portugal (Fatima to be specific) there were 3 children (the oldest about the age of 10) started seeing the Blessed Mother. Crowd started to follow the children to the site of these visions on the days they were expected. Each time the crowds got larger and many of the crowd saw unusual things. It ended with a very impressive vision seen by the 70,000 observes involving the dancing of the sun. It had rained all night and into the morning and everyone there was sopping wet when it all started. In a few moments the ground was made dry and the people's wet clothing was dried. This one item alone is not explainable in science and everyone surviving the process to dry everything out in the short time that it occurred. (A process to do this would result in the death of those present if you are only willing to see such an event as a natural/worldly as explained by science)

This was witnessed my faithful Catholics of course but also a large number of disbelievers. Portugal at the time was being ruled by an anti-Catholic and anti-Christian government. Many there were atheist and other assorted types. The children had many predictions on world events that have come true.

There are a few things to know about the whole thing.

1. The children did not have the education or worldly knowledge to make an educated guess about the future.
2. The children never said a single thing that was against Catholic Theology which may have happened if they were faking.
3. The miracles that occurred were witness by many and many were hostile to the Catholic faith.
4. Science can not explain the entire event.
5. The event has been examined by the appropriate religious authorities who also sought out advice on the matter from science and those who where there and not just Catholics.

This is much more on this event should you wish to see it. There are other examples but I can think of no other religion that looks at such events with real hesitations and has to be convinced through real scholarship even using science to evaluate it.

The criteria are stricter in this one case alone than what often passes for criteria in the modern scientific community today. If you are a regular reader of FR you most likely can think of a few examples of this sort of thing without my help.

For more on the events at Fatima you can find many websites on the subject. Here are just a few:

http://www.angelfire.com/id/bvm/OurLadyofFatima.htm
http://www.fatima.org/
http://www.santuario-fatima.pt/portal/index.php?id=1000

I hope this example answers your question.

I seem to have misunderstood your question. Allow me to try again.

As I understand your question, you what to know how I can determine that one or all of these other religions are false (or “demonic”). You asked what was the criteria I used?

If this is correct allow me to say, I can not determine anything of the sort. And if you read my posts to others as well as to yourself I referred to what a well know authority has said. It is either “Saint Paul said…” or the “the Church teaches….”. To be honest left to my own imagination and reckoning I would join may others here in determining all these different faiths are equal or much the same. After all there is much common ground, right.

But as you may have guessed I have abandoned my own reasoning and accepted a different authority on these matters. As to why I have done so you can refer back to my post on the events at Fatima for an example of why. There are many other examples other than this one event but that one is as good an example as they come and still be fairly recent.

You may be thinking, that is not a good enough a reason. Why surrender my own sense of things, my own observations for a theology that pit me against so many and so much common thought in the world?

To answer that allow me to point out we all do just this sort of thing all the time. The best example of what I am talking about is your Doctor. Consider for a moment you rub your chest along the top of the bone that runs between your neck and shoulder and you feel a lump. It is firm but you do not feel any pain. You have felt something like this before when you had an illness but then you were obviously sick and the lump felt tender. This time it is different you feel in the best of health, maybe getting a little older but other than the sort of thing one expects you feel fine and this time the lump feels fine as well.

Your rational thought and your own common sense tells you to leave it alone it should go away by its’ self. If you think differently it is because you know something told to you from a credible authority. An authority called a doctor who is working in a government regulated healthcare system that regulates tests and monitors the credentialing of doctors. You see one of these licensed physicians eventually and show him your lump. His response is to schedule you with a surgeon; he tells you that painless lump may be a sign of cancer.

Your limited education would never tell you that all on it own, if you knew it, it would only be because those who have experience and education in this matter have told you your health is in serious question despite what you may feel. You put some trust in those who have been trained and that training has been built upon the back of one doctor after another one improving the skills of the profession upon the other, generation after generation. You have seen them work on others who you knew to be ill and you have seen real improvement in their lives, and so you override your own sense that you are in good health and submit to their higher level of education.

And so I do with Saint Paul as well.

Is this answer any closer to you question?

P.S. By the way that little lump is a real sign of cancer and in a very serious level of the illness. It is a sign the cancer has migrated into the lymphatic system and is spreading throughout the body. This very thing happened to my father and the doctor told him it was fine it would go away. I knew better and happened to be there during the appointment. I had to keep asking the doctor "Are you sure?" Which I did as gentle as I could. I know he wrote the consultation only to please me. Father died less than one year later. Again I relied on what I had been taught by a trustworthy authority and even when faced with someone with more credentials in the matter I knew I was following the training that the doctor was ignoring. I relied on that authority while the doctor ignored his own training. Much the same happens in faith as well.

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