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Pagan Pipe Bombs
Just catching up with this a few months late, The Wildhunt Blog spotted an interesting news item about a pagan who was arrested for having pipe bombs in his house. According to the Georgetown Times, Norman Weaver awoke to the sound of gunfire. His house-mate had shot himself, and Weaver called the cops to report the suicide. When the police got there to investigate the death, they discovered that Weaver had several pipe bombs in a box inside the house.
The interesting part here though is that the news article also goes out of its way to highlight the following item:
[Sheriff’s Department Spokesman Cpl. Neil] Johnson said investigators also took two books from the house that are now in evidence. One is “The Complete Book of Witchcraft” and the other is “The Magus: The Complete System of Occult Philosophy.”
I don’t know if anything ever came of this, but you certainly have ask what kind of “evidence” having these books could really constitute. Evidence of anti-social behavior and radical philosophy?
Sounds preposterous probably to regular readers here, but those conclusions would probably seem air-tight to the regular man on the street, as is evidenced by a reader comment left on the Georgetown Times article:
I am not going to mock anyone’s religion but I KNOW what my religion has taught us about witchcraft and perhaps Satan was trying to tell him, with those books (if they are, in fact, his books) to do something very, very wrong to another person.
I know this all sounds really laughable to me, but obviously this is deadly serious to people like our commenter above. What do you think - is the occult, Wicca and paganism enough to drive somebody to acts of violence? Is the occult really the giant terrible threat that so many people seem to believe it to be? Why do you think people feel so threatened by it as to go so far as to link it to terrorism?
January 17th, 2006 at 2:15 am
They provide a framework through which justification can be drawn for violent actions… but the same could be said of any other doctrine, even if an orthodox view of that doctrine specifically spells out how violence is bad. What most might see as clear messages of peace can always be turned into a call to arms by someone else.
So… It depends on the somebody in question. World Cup results can be enough to drive some people to acts of violence.
I don’t think it is a threat in itself. The only threat is from those people who act violently because they believe in it.
If it is treated as a threat by anyone, it is because they believe in it. “Summoning demons” might be thought to be something extremely dangerous to a person who believes in demons, and believes that they can be summoned… and maybe they would want to do something about it. Alternately, it could be thought to be a source of power, and that power needs to be used against ones enemies… Or whatever other threatening stance one might take.
They see corrupted minds obeying the whispers of demons, and what is more terrifying in all the world than that to a believer in demons?
January 17th, 2006 at 11:24 am
I sometimes look through history and see that since the roman empire there has been a concious attempt to turn these things into something there not. The gnostics,witches,pagans,ancient tribes etc may just have a different understanding of the occult which does indeed give them the power but that power is sight. It may be our corrupted minds that are already being whispered to by the demons and thats why the publics perception is so important because they control public perception. It maybe me but when i look around i see occult methods used in many ways by the powers that be and its that knowledge that they fear the most
January 17th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
right… there’s never been any christian killers/bombers. Tell that to Oaklahoma City. Tell that to many abortion clinics. Tell that to the families of BTK’s targets. That’s just off the top of my head, there are many more. This guy is now probably being railroaded.
anti-christian Satanism is just a form OF christianity as far as I can tell. two sides of the same coin. Here’s something to research off - look around for the phrase “dual-practice” this is a term used to describe outward christians who are secretly satanists. It’s not as uncommon as we’d wish.
Paganism has zero to do with satanism, it is not a mirror reflection of christianity…
January 17th, 2006 at 1:32 pm
People associate the occult with negative, violent things because they don’t understand it. The same goes for “pagans” or occultists who don’t understand Christianity; they just focus on the negative.
Everything has a positive and a negative, a pro and a con because if it didn’t, it wouldn’t exist. One who is a believer in demons is merely focusing on a negative energy. It’s the same as a physicist believing in anti-gravity; it’s a focus on the negative aspect or opposite effect of gravity. That said, if anti-gravity were ever put into usable forms, it would revolutionize everything. Gravity creates order, or demands adherence, much like a monotheistic God creates order and demands adherence. When one exploits the opposite, chaos is bound to ensue. Such is the way of things. Progress and order rarely coexist, hence why change is so difficult to deal with.
When one decides to “take things into their own hands”, whether that be to find the opposites to “prevailing forces”, or focusing on the taboo, one has the potential to unlock a tremendous bounty of power, be it emotional, creative, intellectual, or even trans-physical (psi, magick, etc.). The real issue at hand is what you do with that power. Do you help people? Do you assert your power to gain more power? There’s a big difference between them, but the tightrope of the middle road is quite delicate (of course the carrot at the end of the stick is that, as you move along that tightrope, progress increases exponentially).
To answer your questions specifically,
The occult is neither good nor bad; it is a progression towards something new, PROGRESS. The problem is, the deeper one progresses, the weaker that tightrope becomes. It therefore becomes easier to succumb to acts of violence, to lose one’s virtue. The view it as a “giant terrible threat” much the way a hamster sees us as a giant terrible threat. It takes time to adjust, it takes the building of trust (which helps to strengthen that tightrope), and it takes a little leap of faith to get on the tightrope to begin with (perhaps a leap the size of a mustard seed
). People feel threatened by it because they are afraid of change; they are afraid of the massive potentials that become possible (both positive and negative) when one progresses.
The same phobias can be applied to conspiracy theorists. They see the massive powers and potentials of certain laws, actions, precedents, etc., and they can get bound up in a web of self-created fears.
January 17th, 2006 at 1:32 pm
Law enforcement is grossly ignorant of alternative religions and/or the occult. Recently, here in Ohio, they had a seminar led by an “expert” on occult-based crimes for state law enforcement. In the short 3 minute interview on the 5 o’clock news, she made three errors that even I caught. For example, that Enochian is an ancient language used to summon demons. What is worse, in talking about this person with someone who is a lot more informed than me, they not only knew exactly who I was talking about, but revealed to me that the “expert” had plagerized portions of her book!
Of course, its easy to get away with such things since the only real interaction most people have with the occult is through entertainment. And there its usually just to justify the special effects. So what objective standard can be readily applied by the public at large about such “experts”? As of yet, there isn’t a state certified position of occultist.
My guess is that, as you speculate, the books were taken as evidence that the subject was anti-social. And I’m not so sure that is completely off the mark. Any turn to an alternative conceptual scheme other than the norm is due to a dissatisfaction with that norm. To use your own recently articulated model, the only reason people leave the outer coil for the inner is that they perceive something lacking in the outer coil. It can’t be that the outer coil is inherently lacking since many people live their lives in that orbit, its something lacking in the subject. A dissatisfaction with the norm. So really, it shouldn’t surprise us if that disatisfaction sometimes manifests itself as violence since I believe that the adrenaline rush of violence acts as a way of escaping ordinary conciousness. None of this means that taking an interest in magic, paganism, etc is in itself dangerous or leads without fail into violent behavior. Just that one can make an argument that such an interest is indicative of of a certain mind frame that can, in certain cases, result in violent behavior.
Really, what I don’t understand, is why the kid didn’t claim the pipe bombs were the hobby of the deceased suicide victim? The fact that he didn’t leads me to think that he sees himself playing a role of importance in a world that chooses to invalidate that opinion unless he can get them to see him as being dangerous. But I wasn’t there, so that’s entirely an uninformed opinion.
January 17th, 2006 at 1:39 pm
I feel the same and once nearly got myself into hot water when i asked an hells angel if that meant he was a christian, which of course it does. Heavy metal and satanists going on about the devil all caught up in a christian narrative. Hell and heaven where seen as the same thing untill it became politically beneficiall to create the narrative so people could define who they where and have no common humanity with the enemy. Enemies with horns and tales.
January 17th, 2006 at 1:43 pm
Steven:
Yeah I tend to agree. As much as most of us wouldn’t like to admit it - there *is* something pretty anti-social about doing a 180 degree turn from what society thinks is acceptable (ie, Christianized society) and moving into the occult. That doesn’t mean the next step is violence, but it is undertaken by people seeking a separation from the norms.
I think that’s a really fine addition to the model in general. Although I think it would be a hard sell for most people leaving the “outer coil” so to speak to admit that its not the world that’s fucked up - it’s them. It’s much easier to externalize it and say that its the world which is at fault, or society or culture. Actually, I might do a separate post on that.
Great point about violence and adrenaline as an escape vector too!
January 17th, 2006 at 2:00 pm
Is the society in which we live not violent, survival of the fittest, might is right, social exclusion and poverty are all forms of violence we just choose not to see it that way. It may not be the world thats fucked up it may be me, actually it probably is but equall rights etc came from people turning away from the norm and saying what they felt was right so whilst a few egocentric individuals may turn to violence or cultivate the occult for negative means i would say that turning away from the norm can be a good thing.
January 17th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
http://users.cybercity.dk/~ccc44406/smwane/Made_me_.htm
January 17th, 2006 at 4:20 pm
“Is the occult really the giant terrible threat that so many people seem to believe it to be? Why do you think people feel so threatened by it as to go so far as to link it to terrorism”
christianity IS the occult. it is jealous of other occult methods. in a world of competing ideologies, the most powerful seeks to retain its position by painting the opponents as evil. They are all various paths people take hoping to achieve happiness. The majority wants to dominate. Even though that runs exactly counter to jesus’ message And even though jesus encouraged his followers to interact with spirit forms in both welcoming and scourging ways, any such attention to “otherworldy” phenomenon is regarded as devilish by mainstream christians. The “occult” is the elephant in the room of christianity. Christianity absorbed so much paganism that it ends up locked in a war with its own followers. and it has such a strong mystical tradition that it can only very hypocritcally deny each of its adherents the right to pursue identification with god, following in the steps of jesus.
January 17th, 2006 at 6:16 pm
I’m reading a book on the West Memphis Three right now– this post brings up some of the issues being discussed here. I know nothing about the case except that prosecutors focused mostly on the teen suspects’ alleged occultic ties.
January 18th, 2006 at 4:40 am
James, that is one of the saddest cases of Satanic scare that ever were. The WM3 case has kept me awake nights, and yes, it was based purely on the dress and mannerisms of these kids- there was never any physical or eyewitness testimony linking these kids to the case. Worse, while three innocent kids are waiting to die for being unfortunate enough to live inTennessee, there is a sadistic child killer on the loose.
Andrew, Satanists are exavtly what they want to be. A Christian is a follower of Christ. One wouldn’t call them Jews because their religion carried elements of Judaism into its system, so it makes about as much sense to make the same assumptions about Satanists. While many of the more vocal Satanists are anti-Christian rebels/reactionaries, so are many pagans, gnostics, what have you. It’s hard not to find critics of the dominant paradigm. However, its been my experience that Satanists (the religious sort, not the “I do what the voices tell me” sort) are not attached to a Christian, Jewish, or other particular deity- satan is usually a symbolic force to be understood in an entirely different context than the Christian concept of Satan. Satanism is really an inversion of sotrs, a way of looking at t6he work turned upside-down.
There are, of course, actual “satan worshippers,” but these again tend to view Satan as a deity of light who transcends religion- a promethian, liberating character or enlightening principal. For example, one might view Jesus/Christianity as dogmatic, restrictive, and requiring of self sacrifice, whereas satanists see satanism as self-focused, liberating, and requiring growth.
January 18th, 2006 at 4:48 am
Remember, this happened in the South, where being an occultist is equivalent to “baby eater” in the minds of many. There’s also a big push to jaul ‘left wing terrorists,’ so I would expect this kid is going to wish he’d left town.