Posted on 09/05/2002 12:23:19 PM PDT by Selmo
Ritual candles blamed in fire
ANGELES NATIONAL FOREST - The Curve fire that has consumed more than 16,000 acres in the Angeles National Forest was started by candles used in a ritual involving animal sacrifice, U.S. Forest officials said late Wednesday.
Fire investigators concluded it was candles that sparked the blaze which originated in Bichota Mesa, said Cliff Johnson, fire information officer with the U.S. Forest Service.
"I'm not sure what they found," he said. Details about the investigation were scarce.
Arson is believed to be the cause of the fire.
Rumored reports of a Satanic cult or a group of "witches" that are regularly seen in the forest lighting candles and cutting off chicken heads are also being looked into, sources said Wednesday.
More than 1,640 firefighters continued to battle the fire on Wednesday, as the blaze moved in nearly every direction.
In the fourth day of the blaze which started during the busy Labor Day weekend crews watered the flames and scurried to build fire lines to control the burn.
"It's moving somewhat west toward the San Gabriel Valley Wilderness area, a little bit to the north ... and most of the spread will probably be to the east into the Sheep Wilderness area," said Ed Gililland, a fire information officer for the U.S. Forest Service. "We're holding along the south pretty well."
More than 16,000 acres of chaparral and steep terrain have been charred since the fire started about 12:35 p.m. Sunday. With it, at least 72 structures have been gutted, including 50 recreation cabins built in the 1920s and 1930s and a historic ranger station at Coldbrook Station.
It might be Tuesday evening before Curve Fire is contained. That's the best estimate by fire officials in charge of different areas of the blaze, officials said. By late Wednesday, 15 percent had been contained.
Firefighters are hoping that weather forecasts for rain come true. A 50 percent chance of rain is expected today through Friday, with temperatures dropping to the upper 60s and 70s in the forest and in the upper 80s and 90s for the rest of the San Gabriel Valley, said Stuart Seto, a weather specialist for the National Weather Service.
"Any moisture we can get is real helpful," Gililland said. "Our only concern being is if it comes with lightning, but we welcome the rain."
Los Angeles County firefighters broke bread during a thank-you lunch with the volunteer firefighters at Follows Camp, near the East Fork of the canyon. Several crews were stationed there to protect the trailers and motor homes at the camp in the event the blaze headed over the one ridge that separated campers there from danger.
Others stopped at the area's only restaurant for lunch and to rest on top of the fire trucks and in chairs on the ground.
Joe Davison, the longtime owner of the camp, says he lost at least $5,000 on Sunday when the fire forced him to send nearly 1,000 weekend campers home and refund some of their money.
Lou Stevens and her husband are one of dozens of families who chose not to leave their Follows Camp homes when a voluntary evacuation was put into effect Monday.
"We have nowhere else where we could go," said Stevens, 55. "We weren't that worried. It's something you get used to up here. And last night, the sky just glowed. It was beautiful, sad to say."
The camp, and another one nearby, are closed to the public and open only to residents, officials said.
Although the fire does not represent a significant amount of the 692,000-acre forest, it does make up a sizable portion of the forest accessible to the public. And officials estimate there were about 8,000 to 10,000 people camping or taking part in other festivities Sunday afternoon when the fire started.
"The San Gabriel Canyon is very, very populated," said Gail Wright, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Forest Service. "This is a very well-used recreation area and it is a large part of where people recreate."
About 300 motorists in the north end of the forest were evacuated out of the canyon via a normally locked entrance to the Angeles Crest (2) Highway from Highway 39. The entrance has been closed since 1978, and some mountain dwellers have fought to have it reopened for years, citing public safety concerns.
Barry Wetherby is one of them. Wetherby, whose Pasadena Bait Club cabin in the West Fork has been unaffected by the fire, says he shudders to think about the lives that might have been lost had it not been for sheriff's deputies who opened the gate to Highway 2.
He also says cabin owners have asked for a meeting with representatives from the Angeles National Forest Service to answer complaints about whether enough personnel was sent in and whether the proper equipment was used. The meeting is scheduled for 6 p.m. Friday at the Glendora Public Library.
"They think that some of these cabins should have been saved and they don't know why it happened," Wetherby said. "A lot of these places have been owned by Hollywood actors, and there's so much history, I can't even tell you. One of them was made out of all saws."
Anyone with information related to the incident is asked to call the Forest Service Law Enforcement and Investigations at (626)574-5351.
It really makes me mad when the media lumps Witches/Pagans in with Satanists...not even close to being the same.
Actually, voudon and Santeria are syncretic religions that represent a mixture of African animism with Roman Catholicism - thus the name "Santeria" (ie., worship of the Saints, or Santos.) These religions typically emphasize strong family bonds, community loyalty, etc... animal sacrifices are only used under extreme situations (such as to prevent death or illness) and performed in much the same way that the ancient Jews did them in the OT.
On a related note, it really makes me mad when ill-informed "wiccans" and "neo-pagans" feel the need to lump traditional "black & tan" religions in with "Satanism" as a way to curry favor with ever more ill-informed Noth American Christians.
The African diasporic religions go back for centuries and centuries, starting with the slave trade. There are approximately 50 million followers of what you call "Satanic" all over the world (albeit mostly in Cuba, Brazil & Haiti). There is a saying that Haiti is 90% voodoo and 100% Catholic - huh - some "Satanists"!
On the other hand, what is Wicca? A made-up hoax of a religion based on faulty and misleading scholarship which posited the existence of a stone-age, utopian matriarchy (sorry kids, but this never existed) but in fact draws almost all of its "teachings" from Gerald Gardner's association with Aleister Crowley (speaking of Satanists)- ever notice that Crowley's admonition to "Do as ye will" greatly resembles the wiccan's own pledge? There's a reason for this.... wicca is basically just a popular, feminist, and dumbed-down version of all of that old OTO stuff.
One more thing: if a bunch of "celtic" reconstructionist types want to run around the US and England calling themselves "witches" more power to'em, but bad scholarship and revisionist history does not give them the exclusive right to the words "witch" and "witchraft." Any anthropologist can tell you that witchcraft and shamanism have existed for thousands of years all over the world, and continue to exist, long before (and probably long after)the internet, B Dalton, and people with names like "Silver RavenWolf" and "FaeryDust MoonBeam" have come and gone too.
Pagan just means non-monotheist, it's not really the name of a religion. Nature woshipping PETA types would qualify. So would the ancient Romans.
Self so called Pagans in modern times tend to be New Agers, Wiccans, or followers of Crowley. That is to say believers in a pastiche of pre-Christian northern and western European mythologies.
Santaria practitioners are Pagans, too, but they don't call themselves that.
Couldn't find a frame-grab for that one! LOL!
they were playing cards with superman and santa claus.
They worship 'Taus Melek'--'The Peacock Angel'--you know: Lucifer. They believe that when God redeems even him that when Lucifer takes up his former arch-angel position that he will have special favor for the Yezidi of Kurdistan.
Yeah right! and there are russian troops with snow on their boots stationed at secret NWO bases throught the American West.
From what I understand of Yezidism they are monotheists who worship god... but they also believe that god is remote from the earth and has left a group of seven angels in charge, lucifer being chief among these... Lucifer was so sad when he was kicked out of heaven that he cried and creid until the fires of hell were extinguished! And then he was restored to his former place of honor... or something like that... Good God, there is so much disinformation and misinformation about the Yezidi out there (and outright bad scholarship by people w. agendas - Anton Lavey is good example) that it is really hard to tell....
Anywho, thanks for the link, I'll check it out. Here's another good one too, BTW:
The followers of the Yezidi religion, who have variously referred to themselves also as the Yazidi, Yazdâni, Izadi, and Dasna'i, have often been pejoratively referred to by outsiders as "devil worshippers." They constitute less than 5% of the Kurdish population. At present they live in fragmented pockets, primarily in northwest and northeast Syria, the Caucasus, southeast Turkey, in the Jabal Sanjâr highlands on the Iraqi-Syrian border, and regions north of the Iraqi city of Mosul.
As a branch of the Cult of Angels, Yezidism places a special emphasis on the angels. The name Yezidi is derived from the Old and Middle Iranic term yazata or yezad, for ,1 angel," rendering it to mean "angelicans." Among these angels, the Yezidis include also Lucifer, who is referred to as Malak Tâwus ("Peacock Angel"). Far from being the prince of darkness and evil, Lucifer is of the same nature as other archangels, albeit with far more authority and power over worldly affairs. In fact, it is Malak Tâwus who creates the material world using the dismembered pieces of the original cosmic egg, or pearl, in which the Spirit once resided.
Despite the publication of (reportedly) all major Yezidi religious scriptures, and the availability of their translations, the most basic questions regarding the Yezidi cosmogony are left to speculation...
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