Category Archives: Modern Satanism

Weve teamed up with North Carolina dark rock band Bloody Hammers to premiere the video for Blood, which comes from their upcoming EP The Horrific Case of Bloody Hammers. For this video, the band used footage from the 1922 Benjamin Christensen documentary/fiction horror film Hxan. The end result is a music video that marries the bands sinister and immediate presence with deeply unsettling imagery.

Vocalist/guitarist/bassist Anders Manga tells Dread Central:

Ultimately, the song is about the quest for freedom from oppression in any form. Many people blindly accept oppression simply because they were told to, or out of fear of retaliation from family or eternal damnation. Some never question it, because they dont even realize they are being oppressed. If constant fear and threats prevent one from simply enjoying their life, then something needs to change.

The budget was a little tight on this EP so we turned to Hxan, one of our favorite movies of all time, for additional footage. I remember ages ago, renting a documentary on satanism and the occult (on VHS by the way) from a local mom & pop video store. It was just a dumb typical satanic panic 80s style documentary, but they had footage from Hxan in it, which fascinated me. It wasnt credited on the video so it took me a long time time to find out what it was from. When I learned it was made in 1922, I was shocked. The visuals were better than some of the effects I was seeing in modern movies.

Check out the video below and make sure to pre-order The Horrific Case of Bloody Hammers EP through Bandcamp.

Bloody Hammers online: Official Website Facebook

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Lifelong horror fan with a love of music on the side.

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Exclusive: Bloody Hammers Use Old School Horror For Blood Video ... - Dread Central

some Prophets are stopped from having sex with their wives, they have sex with a snake

Coming in the wake of self-acclaimed Prophet Shepherd Bushiris stunts that he has called miracles, Malawian Prophet Trevor Kautsire made a rare confession on modern day Prophecy.

Prophet Kautsire (right) with host Brian Banda

In an interview on one Malawian television talkshow that was followed by Malawi24, Prophet Kautsire made the chilling claims that modern day Prophets are not using the power of the Holy Spirit to perform their so-called miracles.

I was in South Africa and I met the who-is-who of the gospel, what they told me is heart-breaking, said Kautsire.

He disclosed that when he was in South Africa he was told of rituals that he had to perform if he were to become a renowned Prophet. Kautsire disclosed that the ritual involved sacrifices that included the killing of family members or church members.

I am speaking this from experience, some Prophets have had to sacrifice their church members to gain fame. You have heard of people dying in places of worship, it is because they are using the people as sacrifices, said Kautsire, a comment which commentators said was referring to the Nigerian teleprophet TB Joshua at whose church over a hundred people died.

Kautsire further said that it was easy to decipher fake Prophets because they do miracles for no important reason.

A miracle is supposed to meet a need, however when a Prophet does a miracle that does not meet any need there is no reason to believe that Prophet, he said. Commentators have thought that he was apparently referring to Bushiri who has been in the news for the walk-in-the air stunt which does nothing to glorify the name of the Lord.

He said that Prophets are using magic, witchcraft and Satanism to perform miracles.

There are some who are told to keep a worm and keep feeding it, the worm grows into a snake and when it comes to that stage where it is a snake, it brings them money. The catch is that one should never sleep with their wife but the snake, said Kautsire disclosing the secrets in the dark world of Prophecy.

Go here to read the rest:

We are using witchcraft, Satanism and magic confesses ...

TWH Today marks Memorial Day in the United States. It is a day to honor the many men and women who have died in military service. According to a news report onABC, the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs together state that at least 1.2 million people have died fighting for America during its wars dating back 241 years. The VA has a breakdown of the losses per conflict since the American Revolution.In a 2016 blogpost,Druid John Beckett wrote, Let us remember our warrior dead. Let us remember those who answered the call to do what had to be done and who sacrificed all they had. It is right and good to celebrate their courage and valor.

Many Pagans, Heathens and polytheists have served and are serving in the U.S. military, and still others are members of military families. Memorial Day has a special significance to them. Veteran and Wiccan priest Blake Kirk said, Memorial Day isnt about veterans like me, who got to come home and go on with their lives.No, Memorial Day is supposed to be all about the soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen who came home in caskets or in body bags. Or who never came home at all.The modern military experience can bepart of themodern Pagan, Heathen and polytheist experience. Those who are wounded and die in service to our country are not an anonymous other removed from our society and daily lives. Today many will honor our Pagan, Heathen and polytheistbrothers and sisterswho have fallen in the line of duty.What is remembered, lives.

* * *

MANCHESTER, England The suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert May 22 naturally generated intense reactions from within the immediatecommunity. Local Pagans were no different, focusing concerns on the atrocity itself, the safety of their family members and friends, and the need for compassion for the victims rather than a vilification of the Islamic community. Pagan Heather Veitch, told The Wild Huntarticulating a response was difficult, that the shock was intense, but after that wore off, she began doing what she could to help.

Veitch explained, As I wasnt in Manchester city centre at the time, and the emergency services were asking people to stay away, I began doing what I knew I could do: holding space, offering healing, and reaching out to my gods and goddesses to aid my healing work, to comfort the bereaved and broken, to midwife souls as they transition. I sent up prayers and offerings to protect those who were working to find and heal those caught up in these events, and waited on my own friends and family to check in.

Veitch added that she is proud of the citys emergency services units, and the wider community who has stepped up and did what they could with what they, in turn, had: offering rooms, food, transport, comfort, and so much more, but she also aches for victims and their loved ones. She said, What started as an evening of excitement and joy ended in terror and death.

She also said that she is angry, adding, Once again a tragic event in the Western world has focused our attention on the war against terror but events such as the bombing in Manchester are happening on a daily basis in other areas of the world. We need to remember, honour, and work to heal the suffering throughout the world, not just in white and/or Western societies. As a collective consciousness, we keep doing this, we keep perpetuating this, allowing it. We are all connected.

[This is only part of a longer statement on the Manchester attacks. Read Veitchs full comment here.]

* * *

Kate Large

ENGLAND In another story out of England, Kate Large has stepped down as editor-in-chief of the Pagan Dawn, the official and long-running publication of the Pagan Federation. Large joined the Pagan Dawn staff in 2013 as reviews editor, and moved into the editor position the following January, having been appointed by her predecessor, Atreyu Crimmins. Large said that she has stepped down because she felt it was time. I have achieved so much with PD, thanks to an incredible team of people. I want to develop my own career, as well as spending more time away from the screen, improving my physical health (I have fibromyalgia) and working with my daughter, who is home educated.

Large is a freelance writer and longtime media professional, having worked in the television, magazine, and film worlds.What is next for her? She said that she will return to her role as reviews editor, and also increase her paid media work. She added, Political activism and social justice work are areas in which I want to deepen my engagement. I am closely following the post-Brexit political landscape in Northern Ireland, and am keen to increase the amount ofam keen to increase the amount of work I could be doing to support causes that focus on peace and community reconciliation.

As for Pagan Dawn, a new editor has not yet be selected, and the organization is currently looking for the ideal candidate. Large said, Its a demanding job, but incredibly rewarding, and many times, I have called it the best job in Paganism.' Reflecting on her time as editor, she added, My most lasting memories are the phone calls in my kitchen with former PF Publications Officer, David Spofforth, and of the PF gathering at Moonhenge at which I was finally able to put faces to so many names. Leaving has been an incredibly difficult decision and many tears have been shed, but its time to trust to the process, and hand over to a new successor to build on our established work.

* * *

TWHStaff membersfrom the Pew Research Center responded to our questions on the categorization of minority faiths in this years global religious landscape survey. Conrad Hackett advised that religions with ethnic ties were generally included in folk religions, while Wicca and other new faiths were aggregated into the miscellaneous other category along with New Age traditions. Generally speaking, we sought to distinctly measure those faiths large enough to be reliably measured in the censuses and nationally representative surveys conducted around the world. Unfortunately, in this project we did not have sufficient data to report on many of the important, fascinating but smaller faiths around the world. Hackett said that the recent Worldwide Heathen Census was not used as a source.

Gregory Smith, associate director of research, initially provided information pertaining to the United States in particular, which appears to use a slightly different scheme. Smith said, The Pagan/Wiccan category, which accounts for 0.3% of the U.S. adult population, consists of people who used one of those exact terms (or sometimes both terms in combination, as in Pagan Wiccan) to describe their religion. The Other New Age category includes a smaller number of people who gave a variety of responses that we placed within the New Age family. These include responses like Asatru, Druid, Eckankar, New Age, Pantheist, Polytheist, Satanism, Scientology, Theosophy, Transcendental Meditation, Urantia Book and Ancient Aliens.

* * *

Coming up this week:Two men were fatally wounded in Portland Friday after standing up to a man harassing two Muslim women. One of the victims is well-known in the Pagan community through his family: Taliesin Myrddin Namkai Meche. We will have more on the story and his life in the coming week.

In Other News

Originally posted here:

Pagan Community Notes: Memorial Day, Manchester, Pagan Dawn, and more! - The Wild Hunt

It is hardly a new observation that political leaders seeking populist appeal will exacerbate popular fears about immigrants, terrorists and the other.

President Donald Trump plays to fears of immigrants and Muslims. Benjamin Netanyahu inflames Israeli fears by constantly reminding citizens about the threats around them. And many African leaders bring up fears of satanism and witchcraft.

Such observations explain how leaders use fear to create popular anxiety. But this focus on fear and evil forces, I believe, does something else as well it could actually contribute to a leaders charisma. He or she becomes the one person who knows the extent of a threat and also how to address it.

In my book Evil Incarnate, I analyze this relationship between claims to discern evil and charismatic authority across history, from European and African witch-finders to modern experts in so-called satanic ritual abuse.

In popular parlance, one calls a person charismatic because he or she seems to possess some inner force to which people are drawn.

Social scientists have long perceived this ostensible inner force as the product of social interaction: Charisma, in this interpretation, arises in the interplay between leaders and their audiences. The audiences present their own enthusiasms, needs and fears to the leader. The leader, for his part, mirrors these feelings through his talents in gesture, rhetoric, his conviction in his own abilities and his particular messages about danger and hope.

In sub-Saharan Africa, over the course of the 20th century, charismatic witch-finders swept through villages promising the cleansing of evil. In both Africa and Europe, communities had long been familiar with witches and their modes of attack in general. It has been common in many cultures throughout history to attribute misfortune to witches, who are both a part of society and also malevolent.

Witch-finders have offered four new elements to the basic image of witches:

They proclaimed the immediacy of the threat of witches.

They revealed the new methods witches were using for harm.

They offered new procedures for interrogating and eliminating witches.

Most importantly, they proclaimed their own unique capacity to discern the witches and their new techniques to purge them from the community.

The witch-finders indispensability to the growing crisis of threatening evil shaped his rarely her charisma. People came to depend on his capacity to see evil and on his techniques of ridding it from the land. An uncleansed village felt vulnerable while a village a witch-finder had investigated seemed safer and calmer, its paths and alleys swept of evil substances.

Of course the witch-finder needed auspicious historical and social circumstances. These could be catastrophes like the plague, or new ways of organizing the world (such as African colonialism), or political tensions all of which could make his identification of evil people especially useful, even necessary. Also, he had to come off as professional and channel local fears in compelling ways.

This pattern can cause atrocities. Charismatic discerners of evil in medieval and Renaissance Northern Europe (often Christian clergy and friars) promoted false charges against local Jews and organized hunts through Jewish houses to uncover signs of mutilated Eucharist or childrens bones hunts that swiftly turned into pogroms as participants in these hunts felt a conspiracy of evil was emerging before them.

The contemporary West has in no way been immune to these patterns. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the United States and the United Kingdom found themselves facing a panic over satanic cults, alleged to be sexually abusing children and adults.

In this case, a number of psychiatrists, child protection officers, police and evangelical clergy were styling themselves as experts in discerning the abuses of satanists both in daycare centers and among psychiatric patients. Many people came to believe in the urgency of the satanic threat. Yet no evidence for the existence of such satanic cults ever came to light.

In many ways, we can see a similar interplay between charisma and the discernment of evil in those modern populist leaders.

For example, in his campaign, Trump insisted that he alone could utter the words radical Islamic terrorism, which assured members of his audience that only Trump was calling out the terrorist threat. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte threatened publicly to eat the liver of the terrorists there. These leaders, I believe, are trying to convey that there is a larger threat out there and, even more, they are assuring people that as leaders they alone understand the nature of that larger threat.

As my work on witch-finders shows, an anxious culture may invest itself in a leader who, it feels, can discern and eliminate a pervasive and subversive evil. Perhaps, in todays world, the terrorist has become the new witch a monstrous incarnation of evil, posing a unique threat to our communities and undeserving of normal justice.

Do our leaders provide the charismatic leadership for this current era?

David Frankfurter is a professor of religion at Boston University. A version of this story appeared online in The Conversation.

Originally posted here:

What witch-hunters can teach us - The Daily News of Newburyport

It is hardly a new observation that political leaders seeking populist appeal will exacerbate popular fears: about immigrants, terrorists and the other.

President Donald Trump plays to fears of immigrants and Muslims. Benjamin Netanyahu inflames Israeli fears by constantly reminding citizens about the threats around them. And many African leaders bring up fears of satanism and witchcraft.

Such observations explain how leaders use fear to create popular anxiety. But this focus on fear and evil forces, I believe, does something else as well it could actually contribute to a aleaders charisma. He or she becomes the one person who knows the extent of a threat and also how to address it.

In my book Evil Incarnate, I analyze this relationship between claims to discern evil and charismatic authority across history, from European and African witch-finders to modern experts in so-called satanic ritual abuse.

In popular parlance, one calls a person charismatic because he or she seems to possess some inner force to which people are drawn.

Social scientists have long perceived this ostensible inner force as the product of social interaction: Charisma, in this interpretation, arises in the interplay between leaders and their audiences. The audiences present their own enthusiasms, needs and fears to the leader. The leader, for his part, mirrors these feelings through his talents in gesture, rhetoric, his conviction in his own abilities and his particular messages about danger and hope.

In sub-Saharan Africa, over the course of the 20th century, charismatic witch-finders swept through villages promising the cleansing of evil. In both Africa and Europe, communities had long been familiar with witches and their modes of attack in general. It has been common in many cultures throughout history to attribute misfortune to witches, who are both a part of society and also malevolent.

Witch-finders have offered four new elements to the basic image of witches:

-- They proclaimed the immediacy of the threat of witches.

-- They revealed the new methods witches were using for harm.

-- They offered new procedures for interrogating and eliminating witches.

-- Most importantly, they proclaimed their own unique capacity to discern the witches and their new techniques to purge them from community.

The witch-finders indispensability to the growing crisis of threatening evil shaped his rarely her charisma. People came to depend on his capacity to see evil and on his techniques of ridding it from the land. An uncleansed village felt vulnerable while a village a witch-finder had investigated seemed safer and calmer, its paths and alleys swept of evil substances.

Of course the witch-finder needed auspicious historical and social circumstances. These could be catastrophes like the plague, or new ways of organizing the world (such as African colonialism), or political tensions all of which could make his identification of evil people especially useful, even necessary. Also, he had to come off as professional and channel local fears in compelling ways.

This pattern can cause atrocities. Charismatic discerners of evil in medieval and Renaissance Northern Europe (often Christian clergy and friars) promoted false charges against local Jewsand organized hunts through Jewish houses to uncover signs of mutilated Eucharist or childrens bones hunts that swiftly turned into pogroms, as participants in these hunts felt a conspiracy of evil was emerging before them.

The contemporary West has in no way been immune to these patterns. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the United States and the United Kingdom found themselves facing a panic over satanic cults, alleged to be sexually abusing children and adults.

In this case, a number of psychiatrists, child protection officers, police and evangelical clergy were styling themselves as experts in discerning the abuses of satanists both in daycare centers and among psychiatric patients. Many people came to believe in the urgency of the satanic threat. Yet no evidence for the existence of such satanic cults ever came to light.

In many ways we can see a similar interplay between charisma and the discernment of evil in those modern populist leaders.

For example, in his campaign Trump insisted that he alone could utter the words radical Islamic terrorism which assured members of his audience that only Trump was calling out the terrorist threat. In Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte threatened publicly to eat the liver of the terrorists there. These leaders, I believe, are trying to convey that there is a larger threat out there and, even more, they are assuring people that the leaderthey alone understands the nature of that larger threat.

As my work on witch-finders shows, an anxious culture may invest itself in a leader who, it feels, can discern and eliminate a pervasive and subversive evil. Perhaps, in todays world, the terrorist has become the new witch: a monstrous incarnation of evil, posing a unique threat to our communities and undeserving of normal justice.

Do our leaders provide the charismatic leadership for this current era?

David Frankfurter is a professor of religion at Boston University. A version of this story appeared online on The Conversation."

More here:

Column: What witch-hunters can teach us about today's world ... - Gloucester Daily Times

(THE CONVERSATION) It is hardly a new observation that political leaders seeking populist appeal will exacerbate popular fears: about immigrants, terrorists and the other.

President Donald Trump plays to fears of immigrants and Muslims. Benjamin Netanyahu inflames Israeli fears by constantly reminding citizens about the threats around them. And many African leaders bring up fears of satanism and witchcraft. In earlier times, too, American and European leaders invoked threats of communists and Jews.

Such observations explain how leaders use fear to create popular anxiety. But this focus on fear and evil forces, I believe, does something else as wellit could actually contribute to a leaders charisma. He or she becomes the one person who knows the extent of a threat and also how to address it.

This path to leadership takes place in much smaller-scale situations too, as I have studied in my own work.

In popular parlance, one calls a person charismatic because he or she seems to possess some inner force to which people are drawn.

Social scientists have long perceived this ostensible inner force as the product of social interaction: Charisma, in this interpretation, arises in the interplay between leaders and their audiences. The audiences present their own enthusiasms, needs and fears to the leader. The leader, for his part, mirrors these feelings through his talents in gesture, rhetoric, his conviction in his own abilities and his particular messages about danger and hope.

In sub-Saharan Africa, over the course of the 20th century, charismatic witch-finders swept through villages promising the cleansing of evil. In both Africa and Europe, communities had long been familiar with witches and their modes of attack in general. It has been common in many cultures throughout history to attribute misfortune to witches, who are both a part of society and also malevolent. Misfortunes can thus seem to be the product of human malevolence rather than some abstract divine or natural cause.

Witch-finders, as I see it, have offered four new elements to the basic image of witches:

The witch-finder could show people material evidence of witches activity: grotesque dolls or buried gourds, for example. Herarely shecould coerce others to testify against an accused witch. Often, he would present himself as the target of witches active enmity, detailing the threats they had made against him and the attacks he had suffered.

The witch-finders authority overand indispensability tothe growing crisis of threatening evil shaped his charisma. People came to depend on his capacity to see evil and on his techniques of ridding it from the land. An uncleansed village felt vulnerable, awash in malevolent powers, ones neighbors all suspect; while a village that a witch-finder had investigated seemed safer, calmer, its paths and alleys swept of evil substances.

Of course, in order for a witch-finder to be successful in activating fears, there were many extenuating circumstances, both historical and social, that had to work in his favor. These could be catastrophes like the plague, or new ways of organizing the world (such as African colonialism), or political tensionsall of which could make his identification of evil people especially useful, even necessary. Also, he had to come off as professional and he had to have the ability to translate local fears in compelling ways.

Indeed, there were many situations in both Europe and Africa when such claims to authority failed to stimulate a sense of crisis or to legitimate witch-finders procedures.

For example, in 15th-century Europe, the Franciscan friar Bernardino was able to instigate horrific witch-burnings in Rome but failed to persuade the people of Siena of the dangers witches posed.

But there are times when this pattern has come together and witnessed outright panic and ensuing atrocities. As historians Miri Rubin and Ronald Hsia have described, various such charismatic discerners of evil in medieval and Renaissance Northern Europe (often Christian clergy and friars) promoted false charges against local Jews that they hungered for stolen Eucharists or for the blood of Christian children.

These charismatic leaders organized hunts through Jewish houses to uncover signs of mutilated Eucharist or childrens bones hunts that swiftly turned into pogroms, as participants in these hunts felt a conspiracy of evil was emerging before them.

The contemporary West has in no way been immune to these patterns on both large and more restricted scales. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the United States and the United Kingdom found themselves facing a panic over satanic cults, alleged to be sexually abusing children and adults.

In this case, a number of psychiatrists, child protection officers, police and evangelical clergy were styling themselves as experts in discerning the abuses of satanists both in daycare centers and among psychiatric patients. Many people came to believe in the urgency of the satanic threat. Yet no evidence for the existence of such satanic cults ever came to light.

In many ways, we can see a similar interplay between charisma and the discernment of evil in those modern leaders that seek a populist appeal.

For example, in his campaign, Trump insisted that he alone could utter the words radical Islamic terrorism which assured members of his audience that only Trump was calling out the terrorist threat. In Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte threatened publicly to eat the liver of the terrorists there. These leaders, I believe, are trying to convey that there is a larger threat out there and, even more, they are assuring people that the leader alone understands the nature of that larger threat. Trumps several attempts to ban Muslim visitors since his election have made his supporters feel understood and safer.

As my work on witch-finders shows, an anxious culture may invest itself in a leader who, it feels, can discern and eliminate a pervasive and subversive evil. Perhaps, in todays world, the terrorist has become the new witch: a monstrous incarnation of evil, posing a unique threat to our communities and undeserving of normal justice.

Do our leaders provide the charismatic leadership for this current era?

______

Read more:

Duterte to Trump: What witch-finders can teach us about today's popular leaders - Philippine Star

Over a decade and a half since reinvigorating the horror comic scene alongside artist Ben Templesmith with 30 Days of Night, writer Steve Niles remains one of the foremost names in sequential terrorand collaborator Alison Sampson meets him scare for scare on their upcoming Image mini-series, Winnebago Graveyard. The road-trip-gone-wrong story finds a young family stranded at an unsettling carnival, where tastes run bloodier than cotton candy and funnel cakes. Sampsons photo-realistic style, as seen in the Image OGN Genesis, helps sell every ounce of viscera dripping from the page.

While Winnebago Graveyard revels in the cult-fearing Satanic Panic that dominated headlines off and on between the 60s and the 90s, each issues backmatter essays from Sarah Horrocks and Casey Gilly contextualize the horror and reveal a fuller portrait of real-world Satanisma practice (typically) devoid of human sacrifice. Sampson has also recruited a whos-who of rising artists, most of whom arent traditionally known for horror work, to provide pin-ups for the series. Weve got an exclusive first look at issue #1 art from Jen Bartel and Donya Todd, as well as confirmation of upcoming contributors Paulina Ganucheau and Aud Koch. Check out the full interview below to uncover Sampson and Niles devilish plans for Winnebago Graveyard, which hits shelves June 14th.

Winnebago Graveyard #1 Pin-Up Art by Jen Bartel

Paste: Road trips seem to be an experience on the decline thanks to AirBnB and other modern conveniences. Do either of you have personal experience with long-haul journeysor, for that matter, with creepy (or at least not up-to-code) carnivals?

Alison Sampson: Who needs an AirBnBwhen you have a campervan? My partner and I have a 1994 Bongo (a very small Japanese RV, you sleep in a pop-up tent on the roof) here in the UK and go on trips in it regularlyweve been to Ireland, France, Spain, Australia and all over the UK with it. It is a good van but like a lot of older vehicles it doesnt go too fast, so we often break the journey at whatever is around, and we stop where we can. When you go slow, you find all sorts of things. And it is a very modern convenienceall we need to do is park, switch off the engine and make the gin and tonics. That said, weve been to places where we moved along very quickly and one of those, in Ireland, was an inspiration for this book.

Paste: Alison, Steves name is synonymous with horror, but is it a genre you hold close to your heart as well? Are there any novels, films or other horror comics that inspired you to co-create something as bloody as Winnebago Graveyard? Or was this a darker place than you often go creatively?

Sampson: It is. Im from a farm and I was brought up on the horror stories my dad told to keep us safe there. It was the 1970s and we had a lot of freedom, so we needed to know: the rats go for the throat, youll drown in the grain, be crushed in the machinery like (name of person we know), be dissolved by acid (they burned the potatoes off with sulphuric acid!), be poisoned, be trapped by fire, or get stuck in a space where no one can find you and so on. I believed all this because it either was true, or was sufficiently credible, and I tend to think horror is very close to us in the real world. I dont think of horror as a genre, I just think of it as something that is. Butwhen our lives seem to governed by fear, as they seem to be more and more in our current political climate, horror stories actually seem to take the edge off. It is dealing with those edges and borders and achieving some level of catharsis, in a safe space.

If Id have to name a literary inspiration, it would be my early-adult reading. Most people in the UK of my age have read James Herbert and I was going for that similar pass-it-around-at-school feel. This isnt by any means the first horror story Ive drawn, but I think it is the first that demanded a particular mindset where Ive had to go there. I think there is an interesting place and appealing for a lot of artists to do that.

Winnebago Graveyard #1 Pin-Up Art by Donya Todd

Paste: Steve, youve been writing comics for decades, and your breakout work30 Days of Nightcame out 15 years ago. What keeps the horror genre exciting to you after all this time? Which horror archetypes are you still dying to put your stamp on?

Steve Niles: Horror has always been the thing for me. Ive been lucky enough to write tons of comics, but I always come back to horror. I think its easier to relate to an outcast monster than a superhero, or maybe thats just me. Id say werewolves are the one creature I havent been able to really dig into, though Ive written some werewolf characters. I know theres a great werewolf story out there but I havent been able to crack it yet.

Paste: What is your collaboration like on this project? Steve, if Im not mistaken, this is your first full-fledged creator-owned work at Imagewhy was this the right project for Image as opposed to some of your other regular creative homes?

Niles: Ive written a few creator-owned comics with Image over the years, but this has definitely been one of the best books due to Alisons amazing art and hard work. She really took the reins and steered the whole production, which is why it was perfect for Image. As a creator you can have full control of your book with them, and thats exactly what we wanted to do.

Sampson: Very straightforward and easy. This is mainly because weve had a very clear division of roles. Steve offered an outline, I made some art and designed some characters and settings and we had a bit of discussion, and then Steve wrote the script and Ive drawn it and then Ive put the book together. I have a strong sense of this being written for me, although much of it is things I have not drawn before. I told Steve not to hold back, and he hasnt.

Winnebago Graveyard #1 Interior Art by Alison Sampson & Stephane Paitreau

Paste: The book plays into some deliciously gory tropes surrounding devil worship, but youve enlisted guest essay contributions in the back that flesh out real-world Satanism. Was it important to you to pull back the curtain on that community?

Sampson: The backmatter is there for a number of reasons. I wanted to provide some non-fiction that is exclusive to the single issues because I (frankly) wanted to give people a bit more for their money, and then I wanted to provide some essays that were a foil for what people see in the book. Sarah [Horrocks] contributions provide color, where they explore space and violence in cult horror films, set in the space that our book inhabits. Casey [Gilly]s contributions provide context for our story. There are questions and feelings that come out of reading the workand we wanted to address some of those, and we do.

Niles: What made the Satanic cult movies of the 60s and 70s so great was the Fear of the Unknown. The cultists were mysterious and sinister. They came across as regular townspeople, they could be someone youre supposed to trustthe mayor, the head of the church, but at night theyd be wearing black cloaks and holding torches, chanting something ancient and unknown. We never knew too much about them, but as a group, they had power. Alison added a whole new level of essays and voices to the back of the issues, and it helps flesh out a bigger picture for a new generation.

Paste: Alison, you mentioned when we first started e-mailing that youve particularly sought out artists known for their Magical Girl work to provide pin-ups and guest contributions. What inspired you to pursue that mash-up of genre influences?

Sampson: I dont in any way think of this as a mash-up of genre influences. I was looking (and am looking) very much at the artists themselves and if this is something they wanted to do. There is a thin line, if indeed there is a line at all, between magical girl and Satanism. It is just bad magical girl, and that area is hugely appealing, and frankly I hope some of our contributors explore that it further.

I wanted to provide the best thing for our book and our readers and sometimes one doesnt have to have a single reason for that, or indeed a single style of art. For example, I have a huge fondness for Donya Todds chutzpah and the matter-of-fact earthiness of her work. It just felt like a good fit for the actual feeling we wanted to evokeit is almost folk art, yet is frenetic and full of emotion as well, and, if you look, it is very much about doing.

Winnebago Graveyard #1 Interior Art by Alison Sampson & Stephane Paitreau

Paste: Winnebago Graveyard is billed as a mini-series. What else do the two of you have in the works that you can tease?

Sampson: Ive got a story coming out in Shelly Bonds Femme Magnifique book very soon, maybe July, written by Leah Moore about Beth Ditto. The rest I cant talk about for nowto be revealed when it is ready.

Niles: Ill be starting a new October Faction series, more books, comics and projects to come.

Winnebago Graveyard #1 Interior Art by Alison Sampson & Stephane Paitreau

Winnebago Graveyard #1 Interior Art by Alison Sampson & Stephane Paitreau

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Alison Sampson & Steve Niles Stir Up Satanic Panic in Winnebago Graveyard - Paste Magazine

How not to get busted for child porn

Your cheatin Pedophile heart, Will make you weep, Youll cry and cry, And try to sleep, But sleep wont come, The whole night through, Your Pedophile heart, Will tell on you; Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when the Sheriff come for you?

WND An Arizona radio station is under investigation by the local sheriff and subject to a Change.org petition calling for its broadcast license to be revoked over a long-running public-service announcement advising those possessing child pornography on how to avoid arrest and prosecution.

KAVV 97.7 FM, The Cave, broadcasts a classic-country format out of the town of Benson and bills itself as southeast Arizonas most powerful radio station. The station also prides itself on broadcasting PSAs, or public-service announcements.

One of the announcements that ran regularly late at night for the past two years criticized Arizonas tough laws against possession of child pornography and proceeded to tell how to avoid being arrested. An activist captured the audio and posted it to YouTube, bringing it to wider attention.

In many cases the penalties for possession of pictures is worse than the penalty for murder. You should understand your Internet service provider could report you to the police if they catch you looking at a website featuring naked juveniles. The police then enter your house and seize your computer, the PSA said.

If you have such material, you can save yourself and your family a ton of grief and save the taxpayers of Arizona a lot of money by never storing such pictures on the hard drive of your computer. Always use an external drive and hide it where no one will ever find it. Likewise, never keep paper pictures, tapes or films of naked juveniles where anyone else can find them. A public service message from the CAVE 97.7 FM.

Read the rest here.

Blacks may need to kill white people in self-defense

A Texas A&M professor says that some white people may have to die in order to solve racism and bring about true equality.

Professor Tommy Curry expressed his frustration during a podcast that the movie Django Unchained made killing white people look fun, when in reality it should be part of a serious discussion.

Continue reading Black Professor says: Some White People May Have to Die to Solve Racism

Stupid Idol worshipers call it a miracle. The priest of the Mexican church has a little bit of sense and stated the statues head collapsed as fur ropes holding it gave way

But thousand will flock to that demonic manifestation and worship it, advancing their decline to Hell!

The MIRROR The moment a Jesus statue apparently moved its head during a Good Friday mass has been branded a miracle. Continue reading Demon Spirit manifests in Statue of Jesus during Mass in a Synagogue of Satan

I would almost guarantee that she lured the mother to her house to kill her to get back at the ex-boyfriend. Perhaps she took a liking to the Muslim Jihadist or Mexican drug cartel tactics!

Excerpts from Wichita Eagle Rachael Hilyard charged with first-degree murder in the April 9 decapitation of 63-year-old Micki Davis [.] The day of the killing, Hilyard contacted Davis and said she was putting her sons property by the curb if it wasnt retrieved, police said in an affidavit filed with the court.

Continue reading Demon Possessed Woman chops head off Mother of ex-boyfriend

Get this sub-headline at source: It is believed that the woman might have some psychological problems, authorities have suggested

Yea I think she has some psychological problems! Its called Demon Possession!

The murder took place on Wednesday night in the colony Periodistas de Mexico, in the city of Monterrey, in the north-eastern Mexican state of Nuevo Leon.

Maria del Carmen Hernndez Hernndez, 42, was found on the roof of her house sitting in a rocking chair and holding her son Jos Alejandro Iracheta Hernndez, who was totally burned. Continue reading SATANIC SACRIFICE: Mother burned three-year-old son to death in a devil Worshiping Ritual?

Hate Crime Hoax: Homosexual Church Organist admits he Vandalized his own Church with Trump and Nazi Slogans

Breitbart News An Indiana community was shocked after a local church was vandalized with Nazi slogans and Donald Trump graffiti, but now police say it is a hate crime hoax and the church was not attacked by an outsider. They have charged the congregations own organist, a Hillary supporter and gay activist, for the crime. Continue reading Another False Flag Hate Crime Hoax by a Homosexual Democrat

Financial elite child sacrifice rituals exposed by Dutch banker

The scum doing this are the rich and powerful. They are in EVERY community. They are in the Catholic Church, the FIRST Church, and the MEGA Churches. They put on a false facade. YOU MUST be able to DISCERN these Bastards and be watchful of them!

A former Dutch banker has given a sit down interview during which he claims that he was invited by members of the financial elite to participate in child sacrifice rituals.

Ronald Bernard was a successful entrepreneur who ran a number of businesses before entering the world of finance.

Upon doing so he was told by his peers to put his conscience in the freezer.

He was found guilty of eight counts of child molestation of a young boy and girl who attended his church. He publicly ridiculed and preached against Homosexuality all the while being a Queer himself!

Hint to Preachers: Get the beam out of YOUR own eye and repent of YOUR own SIN before you come against others. God WILL expose you!

The fate of controversial pastor Kenneth Adkins has been decided. Glynn County Superior Court Judge Stephen Scarlett sentenced him to 35 years in prison for eight counts of child molestation.

Prior to becoming a pastor in Brunswick, the 57-year-old spent many years in Jacksonville as a public relations and political consultant, raising the ire of many when he called gays sinners and attacked his critics on social media with crude anti-gay rhetoric and cartoons.

At 9:35 a.m. Tuesday, Adkins walked into a courtroom a very different-looking man. Gone were his tailored suits he wore during his trial. Gone was his confident and pleasant-looking face. Instead, a handcuffed Adkins emerged in a forest green jail-issued jumpsuit. His hands clasped a Styrofoam cup of coffee. His face sullen.

Former judge and Trumps campaign chair in Kentucky arrested for child sex trafficking

We are told pedophiles come in all bi-partisan varieties, including pillars of the community such as judges, police officers, teachers, and doctors.

The recent arrest of Tim Nolan, a 70-year-old former district judge and former chair of Trumps campaign, is a case in point.

Scott Wartman reports for Cincinnati.com, April 21, 2017, that the arrest of former Kentucky Campbell County District Judge Tim Nolan on charges of human trafficking and unlawful transaction with a minor has shocked the community.

Continue reading Republicans are just as Corrupt and Perverted as Democrats

Matthew 7:20 Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

Revelation 2:9 I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, but thou art rich and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, (Baptists) and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.

This is why the church is DEAD and God the Holy Spirit has left these buildings! Seminaries and Collages are led by UNHOLY FOOLS like this. Demon spirits have inhabited these people, classrooms and the whole campus!

They are modern day Pharisees and Sadducees and have introduced leaven into the Gospel. Matthew 16:6 Then Jesus said unto them, Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.

Paul said in Galatians 5:9 A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.

Leaven is considered to be a contaminate, a poison if you will, that will corrupt and ruin the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Satan knows he cant refute the Word of God so he tries and mix in worldly foolishness in with it. Paul says is 2nd Timothy 3:5 Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.

If you want to be taught the REAL WORD of GOD, then go to World Evangelism Bible Collage and Seminary (WEBC). You will NOT be taught by FOOLS and Disciples of Satan. You will be taught by MEN of GOD who SPEAK and TEACH the True Gospel of Jesus Christ! There are NO HOME BOYS there!

FORT WORTH, Texas Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) has issued a public apology over a photo featuring five seminary staffers posing as gangster rappers after the image stirred controversy on social media. Continue reading Gangster Rap: The Baptist Doctrine at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary

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Exposing Satanism and Witchcraft

Agents of SHIELD Season 4 is coming to a close and what a season it is. What made it really cool is its Ghost Rider and Framework arcs. The LMD arc is okay too. We wouldnt have the framework if it werent for that. As Season 4 wraps up and ABC is keeping everyone in suspense regarding Season 5, Ghost Rider is slated to return on the season finale which could turn a fascinating finale even cooler. As a fan, Im more concerned with Ghost Rider, hoping he goes on to Season 5 or gets a spinoff series as earlier speculated.

Lets talk more about the Ghost Rider character I fell in love with including his history. If Im to be asked who my favorite superhero is, it would be Ghost Rider. No, not Superman, not Batman, not Iron Man and not Spider-Man. Admittedly, I consider myself a vengeful guy. Im a very nice and pleasant guy but cross me, and shit goes down. I believe in the acceleration of karma on evildoers but was raised not to actually pursue it. Ghost Rider is the one that does that.

Ghost Rider is my all-time favorite superhero at least, the Danny Ketch version which re-popularized the mantle; but Ive grown to like Johnny Blaze as well. Theres more than one? Isnt Ghost Rider Johnny Blaze in the movies, now its Robbie Reyes on TV? Yes, but later on that. Ever since I saw Ghost Rider on a bootleg Flair Card during the trading card days of the 90s, I took a liking to this intensely interesting hero. He has the makings of a villain, the burning skull, the leather, the jeans and the spikes; he wasnt like all other heroes in spandex that I knew at the time, like Batman or Superman. (Note the year)

And his bike was a sight to behold though Ive always wondered why it looks so technological despite Ghost Riders mystical nature. But it looked badass just the same.

Ghost Rider Volume 3, Issue 34 was the first issue of Ghost Rider I read. I immediately liked the arts dark tone, but earlier issues by other artists were actually better. The following issue fixed my concerns with the bike, but other artists still drew it the modern way. Note I also like occult-oriented TV shows and books which is also a reason why I took an immediate liking to Ghost Rider.

Ghost Riders in Comics

Now, this article is for the benefit of everyone who wants to know more about Ghost Rider and are confused about Ghost Riders story, including those who know him from the 2007 movie starring Nicholas Cage and stumbled upon the convoluted world of Ghost Riders in the comics. Yes, theres more than one Ghost Rider.

Lets get the various versions out of the way before moving on to demystify the Ghost Rider character.

Everyone Knows About Ghost Rider in Film

Now, except for the Robbie Reyes Ghost Rider, the others are somewhat inter-related. With regards to the story of the Ghost Riders, lets begin with the perspective of the 2007 movie for the benefit of non-fans. Also, this seeks to resolve some confusion about the mess of stories regarding the Ghost Rider which began about two-thirds of the Danny Ketch stories.

The 2007 movie centered on the most popular version, that of Johnny Blaze, who was also the current Ghost Rider at the time the movie was made. The movies origin story was close to the comics but not quite. In the comics, Johnny was indeed the son of Barton Blaze and Naomi Kale. Naomi left her family, and Barton later died doing a stunt when Johnny was still young. Johnny was adopted by stunt cyclist Crash Simpson who became a father figure to him. Simpsons daughter Roxanne later became Johnnys love interest.

In the movie, Roxanne was simply a local girl who fell in love with Johnny. Barton Blaze took on Crash Simpsons role from the comics. When Barton was dying of cancer, Johnny made a deal with the devil (Mephisto, short for Mephistopheles which is another name for the devil) so Barton would be cured. Barton was indeed cured but instead died doing a stunt. Blaze was angry at Mephisto for tricking him, but Mephisto was determined to get Johnnys soul. In the movie, Mephisto imbued Johnny with the power of the Ghost Rider.

Things were different in the comics. Bartons dead, Crash was dying of cancer. Blaze made the deal. Crash still dies. Mephisto claims Johnnys soul, but Roxanne intervenes and identifies herself as a pure soul that drives away the devil. Mephisto angrily retreats but not before bonding Johnny Blaze with a demon which would later turn him into the motorcycle-riding, flaming-skulled, hellfire-powered Ghost Rider at night. This Ghost Rider doesnt have a flaming motorcycle though his bike does have special properties, He doesnt use a chain nor does he have a penance stare like in the 2007 movie. His costume resembles that of a stunt cyclist. Tights instead of leathers as seen below.

Johnny Blaze, Daniel Ketch and Howard Mackie

The demon bonded to Johnny would later be known as Zarathos who would increasingly try to take over him. In the span of Johnnys adventures, he would later meet the villain named Centurious, a seemingly immortal being who has a grudge on Zarathos. Blaze gets rid of Zarathos using an artifact called the soul crystal. Centurious and Zarathos are both trapped and seemingly end up fighting each other in the crystal forever. Blaze moves on, marries Roxanne and raises a family. Happy ending? Not quite.

Years later, teenager Danny Ketch and his sister Barbara walks inside Cypress Hills Cemetery, New York and become caught in a crossfire between two criminal organizations. Barbara is mortally wounded by an arrow to the chest, and Daniel carries her to a nearby junkyard. Threatened with death and desperate for help, Danny finds a junked motorcycle with a glowing gas cap. When his blood soaked hands touches the gas cap, he became Ghost Rider.

This Ghost Riders powers and appearance, his bike as well as his obsession with vengeance and innocent blood became an instant hit with fans and me as well. He became so popular that he was featured in most Marvel comic books and animated series. He also revived interest in Marvels supernatural lineup made up of Blade and the Nightstalkers, Morbius the Living Vampire and the Darkhold Redeemers.

This Ghost Rider goes on to fight his own villain lineup while trying to find out his true identity. He doesnt remember who he is but blindly goes about his purpose of avenging the spilling of innocent blood. His story eventually leads to his connection to Zarathos starting with the return of John Blaze.

John Blaze returns to destroy the demon that haunted him in order for him to have peace of mind but later finds out that the spirit inside Danny Ketch is not Zarathos but something entirely different. However, it doesnt mean its the end of Zarathos story. John then gains his own powers after being exposed to Ghost Riders hellfire. He is able to channel hellfire through his shotgun (as seen in the 2007 movie) and command a hellfire bike with flaming wheels of his own. John later gets involved in Ghost Riders adventures leading to a spinoff called Spirits of Vengeance. The spirits of vengeance, along with Marvels other supernatural heroes then fight an ancient evil called Lilith, mother of demons and succeed.

Writer Howard Mackie, who was involved since the first issue wanted to connect the stories of this Ghost Rider and Zarathos. First, Danny meets up with a character named Caretaker, a member of an ancient race called The Blood seeking to mentor the spirit within Danny. The Caretaker in the 2007 movie was a nod to this character but was made into Carter Slade a nod to Marvels first Ghost Rider. Danny later learns that he can summon Ghost Rider at will as opposed to him needing to touch his bikes gas cap.

Then, a mysterious villain orchestrates attacks on Ghost Rider and Blaze. Besides, the mysterious villain, Mephisto gets involved and introduces Vengeance. A more menacing Ghost Rider look-alike akin to Spider-Mans Venom. Vengeance wants revenge on Zarathos for an unknown reason and like Blaze goes after Ghost Rider.

The mysterious villain attacks Blazes Quentin Carnival which Blaze inherited from the Simpsons and Vengeance joins in. Blaze and Ghost Rider temporarily are taken away from the battle by Mephisto who is also curious as to Ghost Riders identity which confirms that Ghost Rider, at least in Mephistos eyes isnt Zarathos. Both make it back. The battle seems hopeless until one of Blazes carnival staff magically destroys the attackers and almost destroys Vengeance. The mysterious villain later reveals himself as Centurious who somehow got out of the Soul Crystal. Lilith returns and then teams up with Centurious, both wanting an artifact called the Medallion of Power.

Caretaker describes the medallion as a powerful magical artifact which was used by The Blood with the help of some spirits of vengeance in the fight against a once-powerful Zarathos. Zarathos was then a powerful demon who competes with Mephisto in the collection of souls. Mephisto then enslaved Zarathos when he was weakened in battle with the Blood and the Spirits of Vengeance. The Medallion was later broken into four pieces and given to several families to be kept through the generations.

Lilith and Centurious attack Ghost Rider and Blaze. In a subsequent battle, Blaze defeats Vengeance then Caretaker later convinces Vengeance to go with him. Through Centurious, they find out that shards of the Medallion of power was within Blaze and Ketch. Blaze, Ketch and Vengeance team up to defeat Lilith and Centurious. When Centurious is defeated, a newly-reformed and powerful Zarathos appears, all the time hiding within Centurious piggy-backing in his escape from the soul crystal. Ghost Rider and the others escape, and through Caretaker, Blaze and Ketch find out that theyre actually brothers.

When Caretaker explained the origin of the medallion and the Spirits of Vengeance, a panel shows more than three spirits which teased fans that there could be more than three (excluding the Phantom Rider type). This would haunt fans for the rest of the series and would later be resolved.

The Danny Ketch story is integral here as it plays a large part of how the rest of Ghost Riders story goes. So far so good, the story seems to be solid. Why did Vengeance team up with Ghost Rider and Blaze? When Blaze fought vengeance and almost killed him, Vengeance turned out to be a cop name Michael Badilino, the son of an earlier Badilino who was fried by the earlier Ghost Rider (Blaze/Zarathos) and went crazy and killed his family. Driven by revenge, Michael made a deal with Mephisto to get revenge on Ghost Rider. Mephisto actually knew a part of the medallion was in Michael and the demon simply awakened the spirit within Michael which was bonded to the piece. Writer Howard Mackie made the story as if Mephisto had long orchestrated for the Medallion of Power to be brought together, all the way back since he first approached John Blaze. Dan and Johnny each held a piece within themselves.

In the 90s while Marvels mutants and the Avengers were fighting Onslaught, Marvels supernatural heroes including Dr. Strange were busy fighting Lilith and Zarathos forces. Lilith and her Lilin were defeated when the Spirits of Vengeance used the Medallion of Power to send them back to their dimension but unfortunately brought back Zarathos own followers known as the Fallen, powerful former members of the Blood. Long story short, the heroes which include Blaze, Vengeance, Morbius, Blade, Doctor Strange, Hannibal King, Frank Drake seemingly kill Zarathos and the Fallen but Dan and Ghost Rider die in the end. Vengeance temporarily takes the Ghost Rider mantle.

A new villain, Anton Hellgate resurrects Ghost Rider by bombarding Cypress Hills cemetery with mysterious energies. He later reveals himself to the spirits of vengeance and inadvertently causes the death of Johns wife Roxanne, and their children go missing. John gets despondent, and the spirits go their separate ways. After this, the medallion ceases to matter for now as Ghost Rider moves on to a different path without writer Howard Mackie.

The Divergence and Ivan Velez

Blaze goes on his own adventures in search of his missing kids who were taken by another Blood member named Regent. It turns out that Roxanne, before dying promised the children to him in some kind of deal. Blaze escapes the limelight after this. Vengeance also goes his separate way but goes crazy later on in a mission for SHIELD against the organization known as The Hand. This is the part where things change from a seemingly concrete Ghost Rider origin to a confusing one.

The writer who replaced Howard Mackie begins to set up Ghost Riders origin when Ghost Rider and Blaze reconcile to go after a crazy Vengeance on a murder spree. Ghost Rider and Vengeance fight and while fighting, Vengeance uses the penance stare on Ghost Rider which results in a strange effect. Ghost Rider sees a woman being burned at the stake which he considers as his sin. Gaining some sanity, Vengeance destroys himself and takes Hellgate and his minions with him leaving Ghost Rider unstable.

Because of the resurgence of the suppressed memory, powerful spirits known as the Furies are released tasked to kill Ghost Rider. The furies were apparently summoned as a curse by the burning woman. Ghost Rider and Blaze later find out about the burning woman with the help of Dr. Strange and sorceress Jennifer Kale. The burning woman was actually Ghost Riders wife, Magdalene. Ghost Rider was then known as a man named Noble Kale and the period was during early colonial America.

This is where writer Howard Mackie and Ivan Velezs stories begin to get conflicted. Left me scratching my head for sure. Caretaker described earlier that Ghost Rider and Zarathos history go back for millennia. The events described here go back only a few hundred years. This is where Ghost Rider lost me and probably a lot of Howard Mackie/Ghost Rider fans. Now, a writer has to be given a certain degree of freedom to do his job effectively. Ivan Velez had been okay so far, up to the final issue of Volume 3. What this reader doesnt appreciate is him ignoring what Howard Mackie had built since issue 1. For me, Salvador Laroccas art improved a lot during his run. Unfortunately, the series went downhill after another artist change.

Before, despite the story, the art was intense under Salvador Larocca who went on to pencil the X-Men. However, manga and anime came into popularity and creeped into the comics scene. Uncanny X-Men was great under Joe Madureira, but Ghost Rider suffered under artist Pop Mahn. I hated to admit it, but the art sucked. I could live with the new costume and even thought that it would be cool as a manifestation of a higher power level for the character, like in Dragonball Z, in case Ghost Rider fought toucher opponents. But the art really sucked. Id rather if Brett Blevins returned who was the guy who penciled the first Ghost Rider issue I ever bought which was Ghost Rider 34. The return of the original artist Mark Texeira (Issue 1-26) unfortunately didnt help the failing book. The book was eventually cancelled before the final issue due to Marvel Comics almost going into bankruptcy. Issue 94 was a victim of Marvels financial dilemma as Marvel had to go anorexic and go bare-bones (pun intended). The final issue of volume 3 was never published until years later as part of marketing the 2007 Ghost Rider film.

Back to the story, they discover that Ghost Rider was actually a man named Noble Kale son of a pastor of a small town. A woman named Magdalena came to town during a harsh winter as part of an older version of the Quentin Carnival. She later stayed to become Nobles wife. The two later had a child. One night, Magdalena discovers that the pastor was actually a warlock who uses dark magic to ensure the towns prosperity. To hide his secret, the pastor accused her of witchcraft and was to be burned at the stake. Noble tried to stop it but was tortured and kept away. Magdalena was burned at the stake but not before cursing the town by summoning the Furies. The first victim was Nobles little brother. To stop the furies, Pastor Kale made a deal with Mephisto in exchange for Nobles soul. Noble was imbued with the power of the spirit of vengeance and became Ghost Rider and defeated the furies. Pastor Kale then offered Nobles son to the Ghost Rider to eat, but Noble would rather kill himself than do the horrible act. Mephisto then set to claim Nobles soul but instead was stopped by the archangel Uriel because Nobles soul was too pure for hell. They settled for a compromise where Noble would stay in a void and inhabit the bodies of his bloodline to mete vengeance whenever innocent blood is spilled.

This origin story by writer Ivan Velez sought to bring Judeo-Christianity back into the Ghost Rider mythos.

Its not exactly new since it was explored also in the Johnny Blaze (Volume 2) stories. The 70s was a time when the horror theme was quite popular with news of Satanism up til the early 80s. Its a bit of struggle to pinpoint where Gods pantheon exists within the Marvel universe of cosmic beings, Beyonders, Celestials, Asgard, Olympus and other pantheons. Heck, even angel Angela from Image Comics Spawn series came to Marvel and became Thors sister. Her Heven, is described to be a detached 10th realm from the original nine realms of Asgardian mythology. Since Angela is identified as an angel in the Image Comics universe, Heven would be synonymous with the Judeo-Christian heaven and at the same time, be the detached tenth realm. Marvel prefers not to describe everything in detail since these issues can rub certain people the wrong way. Before we go crazy here, lets move on.

This story is later expanded to Dan and Johnnys real mother Naomi Kale who was a Ghost Rider herself. Its unknown though if Noble is aware of himself within Naomi or he is as amnesiac as he is with Danny. Naomi left the family in order to find a way to release Johnny of the curse. She made an unknown deal where Johnny would become free of the curse but she didnt know that despite her efforts, Barbara would be next in line and that Johnny would later become a different Ghost Rider himself. Naomi dies presumably from cancer and was forgotten until the final issues of Danny Ketch Ghost Rider.

Ghost Rider, with the help of Blaze managed to stop The Furies and is again alone until Blackheart, current ruler of hell hatched a plan to destroy Ghost Rider by creating more spirits of vengeance. Pao Fu, from an unfortunate Chinese illegal immigrant; Wallow, from a suicide victim suffering from depression which is very different from the Wallow from the first Ghost Rider film, and Doghead from a Latino immigrant and his dog. They attacked Ghost Rider, seemingly killed him and brought him to Hell.

In hell, Ghost Rider is revived by a kiss from Black Rose (the corrupted form of deceased Roxanne Blaze). Blackheart separated the spirit of Noble Kale and Danny Ketch leaving Dan on Earth while for some reason, Blackheart sought to marry Noble Kale with Pao Fu and Black Rose. On Earth, everything seemed to be fine for Dan until Ghost Riders memories start to overwhelm him and for some unknown reason, Naomis spirit needed those memories to be brought to Noble Kale. Off to hell they go. The marriage in hell turned out to be a farce and Blackheart actually wanted to play with his food before killing it. With the help of Dan, Naomi and the hellbound Vengeance, they thwarted Blackhearts plan to ruin the prophecy wherein the angel of Death is sent to end the ruler of Hell, who happens to be Blackheart. Dan returns Noble Kales memories to Ghost Rider who remembers that he is, in fact, the angel of death and proceeds to kill Blackheart. With Blackheart gone, Noble Kale, Ghost Rider, becomes the ruler of Hell. Dan returns to Earth to live a normal life. Roxanne is resurrected and returned to Blaze. Roxanne becomes short-lived though as future writers didnt have this final issue to work from. Noble Kale goes back to Earth in order to find himself and continue his adventures as Ghost Rider. Vengeance becomes ruler of hell by proxy.

After this, I tried so hard to search on when Mephisto actually returned to hell after he was killed by Blackheart in the trade paperback The Dark Design. That story featured Ghost Rider, Wolverine and Punisher. Mephisto just came back, end of story. Blackheart is also inexplicably alive again in some other comic. Well, thats Marvel.

The franchise seemed dead for the rest of the 90s until they brought back John Blaze as the Ghost Rider in a series called Hammer Lane. According to a blog I read earlier, Danny Ketch, formerly a license to print money became a toxic character within the company despite his Ghost Riders costume and power set getting used in the Ghost Rider film. Because the last issue of Danny Ketchs Ghost Rider wasnt published, Roxanne didnt make it in this series and is presumed dead which extends all the way to Blazes long-running series Vicious Cycle. Lets assume she died in-between these events. So did Blazes kids, Craig and Emma despite him finding them at the end of his short-lived ongoing Blaze series. It also wasnt explained how he returned to having the flaming skull while having a similar costume and power set like Dans. Zarathos, who supposedly died has reconstituted within Johnny, and the spirit that resided in him when Zarathos was absent is inexplicably gone. I will have to speculate that the power Blaze had was simply residual energy from the part of the medallion that was within him. Anyway, Zarathos is back but in a minor capacity, no longer the godlike being he was when he first returned. It was on and off when it came to Johnny Blaze in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Check out Part 2 of Ghost Rider De-mystified here to continue on.

Go here to read the rest:

Ghost Rider De-Mystified Part 1 - Movie TV Tech Geeks News

The priest raises his arms, palms upturned. Lord Taranis, hear our prayer! he bellows, voice bouncing off the stone pillars and into the darkening fields beyond. The fires crackle fills the stone circle. We stare through the flames, past the boundary of our sacred space, to the patina of white looming over the white sky Mount Adams, close and huge.

It is high summer, and we are at White Mountain Druid Sanctuary in southern Washington State. Under the immensity of the mountain, a couple of ramshackle barns stick up from the hayfields. Our priest, a straight-backed, snow-haired man, is delivering a homily on the attributes of the thunder god. Taranis, a powerful thunderbolt-tossing deity, is being honored at todays solstice celebration because of his association with light, weather and sky.

Read more Narratively:These Blind New Yorkers Are Biking Across New York City

Arms raised, the priest pauses. We lean forward, breathless. The fire cracks again. The teenage girls on the edge of the circle, who might be high on mushrooms, giggle quietly to themselves. Finally the priest grins and lowers his arms.

Well, I forgot that part, darn it. With a shrug, he reaches into his white robes and pulls out a small piece of paper. His voice is wry, sing-songy, full of mirth. I should have practiced more!

Everyone laughs as the priest consults his paper. Sorry, Ive got it now, he says, resuming the formal diction few contractions, quick and clear consonant sounds that he uses for his rituals. Throwing his arms into the air, he intones, Lord Taranis. . . and completes the rest of the homily uninterrupted.

Read more Narratively:We Were Raped and Tortured. We Refuse to Hide Our Faces.

To get to the Sanctuary in the foothills of Mount Adams, I rattled down a gravel road and parked beneath some prayer flags tacked to a barn. A sign on the building read DRUIDS HERE. There is a large wooden lodge with bed-and-breakfast facilities, meditation huts, and a stone circle straight out of Stonehenge, where, upon my arrival, about fifty people were pouring whiskey into deep wells and speaking Gaelic. They were blowing horns and beating drums and generally having a hell of a good time.

As this is my first Druid ritual, I have no idea how much of this to take seriously. Its hard to tell how much the participants themselves take seriously; theres a lot of laughter and self-deprecation. But when Kirk Thomas, the Arch-Druid of r nDraocht Fin, asks the gates of the spirit world to open, creating a thin, traversable bridge across the red-gold evening breeze, we all grow tense.

Read more Narratively:Chasing Londons Mysterious Flock of Feral Birds

I dont know who Taranis is, let alone believe that hes going to visit our circle, but I strain, listening for signs. Birds wheel in the sky. Somewhere on the other side of the property, a bell trickles into the wind.

The gates are open, Thomas says finally, and we begin.

* * *

Loosely overseen by a central office set in a back room in Thomas old house in Santa Fe, New Mexico r nDraocht Fin (ADF) is a polytheistic neo-pagan religion that draws its inspiration from ancient Indo-European traditions. Its organized into local groups, called groves, and was founded in 1983 by a charismatic man named Isaac Bonewits, who, after completing a self-study program at UC Berkeley, earned a bachelors degree in yes, really Magic and Thaumaturgy. Bonewits had dabbled in Satanism and witchcraft before founding r nDraocht Fin, which in Gaelic means our own fellowship or our own magic.

Although nearly seventy groves worldwide are affiliated with ADF, each organizes its own tailored rituals. At annual pan-pagan festivals, camping trips, and ADF training workshops, as well as over the internet, ADFs 1,500 members exchange ideas on what rituals should look like. Rather than including official liturgical script, the rituals they perform feature a netting of ideas and ideals, created and debated by poets, Roman legionnaires, mystics, nature lovers, proto-European language nerds, and all kinds of wanderers in search of a connection.

* * *

Long before he became a neo-pagan reverend, when Kirk Thomas was seven years old and visiting his aunt in Utah, he was left mostly to his own devices. During the day he wandered the acres behind her house, picking through the scrub brush, the rocky terrain, the bristling white fir. One day while he was out, the hair on the back of his neck began to stand up. Something was watching; he was sure of it.

He dashed back to the house and rummaged through the fridge, emerging with a bunch of grapes. The boy cautiously returned to the place where he had felt the presence and laid the grapes on the rock. He knew what was being asked of him. The next day, the grapes were gone, and so was the feeling of being watched. The boy thought, an animal took them. But some part of him wondered.

As a kid, Thomas read all about the Old Kingdom dynasties of ancient Egypt; the names of pharaohs like Akhenaten and Nefertiti rolled off his tongue. In middle school he got into supernatural stuff, reading Diary of a Witch Sybil Leeks popular 1969 memoir of growing up pagan, which inspired a generation of witches and drawing pentacles on the garage floor. He studied theater in London and became a hot air balloonist, taking to the skies over the English countryside.

Later, around the year 2000, he read The Mists of Avalon, an Arthurian fantasy epic that he calls a gateway drug to Druidry. What it did was remind me of how I had felt as a teenager, with all that wonder and magic and joy, he says. He began to look for other neo-pagans online, in chat rooms and early internet sites. When he discovered ADF, he thought it wasnt quite as wacky as other neo-pagan belief structures, and was more scholarly and organized than Wiccan covens.

He attended his first ADF ritual at a public park in Tucson, Arizona, during an electrical storm. A few people gathered at a concrete pavilion, stood in a circle and read a ritual one of them had pulled off the web. Lighting was flashing in the desert sky. The thunder god was pretty obviously saying hello to me, he says.

But he felt the ritual was amateurish. He wanted to rewrite it and, lucky for him, hed found a religion that embraced rewriting, remaking, revising. He had become a Druid.

* * *

More and more in America, religion is something people choose (or dont), rather than inherit. According to a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, As the Millennial generation enters adulthood, its members display much lower levels of religious affiliation, including less connection with Christian churches, than older generations. However, the report also finds that many millennials remain spiritual in a broad sense, expressing wonder at the universe and an overall feeling of gratitude and well-being. About 1.5% of the American population identifies as other faiths, including Unitarians, those who identify with Native American religions, Pagans, Wiccans, New Agers, deists, Scientologists, pantheists, polytheists, Satanists and Druids, to name just a few. Druids will appreciate being listed separately from Wiccans (self-described benevolent witches), but both fall under the umbrella of neo-paganism. Almost half of New Agers a larger category that includes shamans, goddess-worshippers, and possibly your moms psychic are of the millennial generation.

Many druid practitioners are reacting to a childhood religion they found inadequate or oppressive. They speak of their practice as inclusive and pluralistic, but also self-define as rejects, misfits and seekers, drawing a protective boundary around their own otherness. In one sense, Druidry is very old school traditional and nostalgic for a way of relating to nature that most modern humans have lost. However, it is also willfully new. Druid rituals enact something not handed down or inherited, but deliberately created. There just isnt enough preserved out there to actually recreate Irish paganism, Thomas explains. One can do a nice superficial gloss, but we have no idea what any rituals actually looked like.

Perhaps that sense of freshness and invention is why, after accidentally stumbling into the solstice celebration, I began to see them as a perfect example of Americas tangled, 21st-century relationship with faith.

* * *

Iam holding a Dixie cup of wine. The woman who passed it to me called it The Water of Life, and she has lots of them on a tray, walking around our circle and handing them out to the motley group girls with braided hair and brightly-colored leggings, women in long skirts and hand-knit sweaters, men with handmade leather fanny packs and KEEN sandals. The sun has set, and the sky is a blur of hazy bluish-black behind Mount Adams. Just outside the stone circle, theres a cob shelter, on which is painted on one side with a triptych of ancient myths deities Taranis and the Morrigan, the Celtic goddess of death, first engaged in a devastating war, and then having sort of graphic make-up sex. The woman smiles and moves on, and I hold the cup but do not raise it to my lips.

A Druid ritual can take place anywhere, although outdoors is preferable, because a hearth must burn at the center of the assembly. Stoking the fire is Reverend Thomas, who earlier shook our hands and asked us all to write an intention on a small piece of paper. We stuffed them into a straw man made of twigs and later burned him in the fire.

We are fire priests if nothing else, Thomas says. The fire transmutes and transforms. It turns something into something else. It does it quickly. Also present are a well or water the epitome of the powers of the earth and the underworld, as Thomas explains and a tree or pillar the pipeline of communication that allows you to communicate between this world and other worlds.

After an opening potluck, with plenty of mac salad and mead and smiling folks who wore runes around their necks, we walked the gravel path to the stone circle. We asked for blessings; we burned our straw man. Now we are supposed to toast and drink the Water of Life.

It hits me that I am standing with a bunch of people I dont know in the middle of a dark and remote farm being asked to drink unmarked liquid by a dude in a long white robe. The Water of Life shakes between my fingers.

I have little context for this rite. My own religious upbringing was hybrid and scattered. I wasnt baptized, but I come from a long line of Irish Catholics, who attended schools taught by nuns and have names like John Michael Patrick and Mary Colleen and who drink their guilt from bottles of California chardonnay. From my mothers side, I got a consciously a-religious Judaism. My grandfathers first language was Yiddish, but his family eschewed things like temple and bat mitzvah, so when Jewish friends explain holidays to me, I usually just nod along, playing the more familiar role of the Irish girl. I am equally uncomfortable at Shabbat services and Sunday Mass, unsure of what to do with my hands, what to say, when to sing.

My family never offered me real entry into either of my birth religions, so instead, growing up I found faith in literature, storytelling, myth and nature a budding neo-pagan if there ever was one.

At some level, I wanted to belong to organized religion. During sophomore year of high school, I tried to join a Christian youth group. Several of my friends attended, and they always got older boys from the group to go to school dances with them (I, on the other hand, took a blow-up doll to junior prom). I joined them in the basement of a neighborhood church where they sat on straight-backed chairs and did trust exercises and ate snacks and prayed.

The group leader was a pleasant guy with a fleece vest and a patient smile. He asked me if I believed in God, if I believed Jesus was the Son of God. Although he wasnt unkind, he was looking for a specific answer to each question, and my answers were like fumbling through a giant keychain, jangling it awkwardly, trying to find the key that unlocked a kind of belonging I desperately wanted. I considered lying I mean, the boys and realized that I could perform being a good Christian. I searched for words that I thought would please him, like grace and grateful and community, placatory words that could take the place of certainty. I filled our conversation with placeholders, language itself becoming a kind of tenuous substitute for faith, because the truth was I had never really been drawn to a specific religion, but merely to the idea of religion. I could enter into this group and learn about Jesus and smile and hold hands with boys during prayers, and maybe no one would ever know that I didnt believe what I was supposed to. But it was pretty clear that I didnt have the right key, and I felt so ashamed that I never went back.

I look around at the Druid rite, and everyone else has already drained their cups. With a sigh, I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and chug my wine. Its cheap stuff, and the smell of cedar smoke from the fire mingles with the sweetness on my tongue. I get a brief, heady rush, and then Reverend Thomas begins passing out musical instruments tambourines and rattles, drums and shakers. People are grinning. We are alive on the base of a mountain, and we are going to dance.

* * *

To me, Druidry is an experiential religion, says Jonathan Levy, one of the founders of the Columbia Grove in Oregon. Simply talking about it doesnt do it justice. Levy has a trimmed beard and a skittish, enthusiastic manner. He was a hardcore atheist when he came across some neo-pagan websites at the age of eighteen. He couldnt have cared less about King Arthur legends, but he did love Roman history: Virgil and triremes and Mars. When he discovered an ADF ritual based on the Roman rite of Hilaria, it delighted him.

Levy realized that Druidry wasnt asking him to believe; it was asking him to show up and be in community, to make offerings and to light fires. He moved to Oregon and started a meetup called Druid Drinks, a monthly gathering at a local pub, where he could chat socially with other curious-and-questioning Druids. Finally convinced, he traded in his atheism for an enthusiastic polytheism. In ADF, he says, It comes down to doing something together. That part is appealing.

Levy says many of the Columbia Groves members are ex-Catholics and are used to elaborate rituals. However, ADF avoids churchy language as much as possible because it can be a very big turnoff for people . . .who were angry at their past religious affiliation.

Its that rejection that defines Druidry, explains Dr. Sarah Pike, a religious scholar at Cal-State Chico. Many Druids have found a place where they belonged. Pike adds that, for Druids, creating an identity out of what theyre rejecting is essential: it leads them to embrace otherness, and find meaning in being their own tribe.

* * *

Tall fir trees shade the lot; autumn sunlight drifts down. After almost a year away from the Druids, I have come back to visit them again, this time with Jonathan Levys Columbia Grove in Portland, Oregon. This is a celebration of Dionysos, the Greek deity of wine, held in a courtyard outside a Unitarian church. Around me, people drift in a loose, undulating circle on the stone. All of them are masked in foam cutouts and sequins and glitter glue: a chance to slip into a new face, and therefore avoid the madness that close contact with Dionysos can inspire.

Garbed in a toga and rust-and-orange fall garlands, Levy welcomes the crowd to autumn equinox. His pale legs are bound in high Roman sandals; his liturgy is broad-stroked and mythological, with syntax that deliberately invokes Christian liturgy: Let us pray with a good fire. Let us offer with a full heart. He and his fellow group leaders read from note cards. At one point they start to sing and realize they are doing different songs. They take a moment to shuffle through their papers, like actors who need to review the scripts.

The idea of reciprocity of giving something in trade holds particular importance in Druidic rite, according to Reverend Thomas: Human relations are set up this way, and we in ADF do the same thing with the spirit world. We make offerings and hope for and ask for blessings in return. So when Levy invites the audience to make offerings, one woman breaks apart a chocolate bar for Isis, an Egyptian goddess, and asks for good health in trade. The chocolate bubbles as it melts in the fire. Another pours out wine for Dionysos, making the flames hiss. A gender-nonconforming member burns a poem written to Thor. A young white man in a purple cape and Phantom-like half-mask invokes Hermes, the Greek messenger god, stalking the inside of our circle. The diverse pantheon doesnt phase anyone.

After the offerings are burnt, a young woman with dyed red hair tells us to close our eyes and leads us through a visual meditation, into deep woods, into worlds of nymphs, toward Dionysos. Then, tipsy on the presence of the divine, we stand and begin to circulate, holding hands, and dance to a chant: Come on thy Bulls Foot. I scratch my nose where the mask is slipping down. Hypnotic and repetitive, the chant pounds forward; people wriggle and writhe, close enough to each other that skin brushes skin. Come on thy Panthers Paw. I feel a rush beneath me, like standing on ice and watching a current flowing and shifting beneath the frozen layer. Although I dont have much invested in this rite emotionally, I am still doing it, moving my body among other bodies. Come on thy Snakes Belly. It feels like when youre upset and people tell you to smile. How just the action of faking it, of smiling through your pain, starts the flow of good hormones in your brain and makes you really feel better. Playing along is one way to access something real and physical. Dionysos come. Theater is not just a show; the act of the thing unlocks the reality of thing itself. I dont really believe in what I am doing, but it is sort of working just the same.

* * *

When people come to Druid rites for the first time, they expect to see us wearing all white, talking in thou and thy, Jonathan Levy says. Were modern people. Our Druidry is modern. Our rituals are modern. Sometimes we dress in stuff just for the fun of it, but its not supposed to be the centerpiece. We use modern language; we use very little foreign language. People are not expecting that.

Dr. Sabina Magliocco, a folklorist at Cal-State Northridge, says that ADF founder Isaac Bonewits was looking for a tradition that was rooted in history, but soon realized that resurrecting an ancient religion was impossible. Reverend Michael Dangler, a senior ADF priest in Ohio, agrees. We have rejected the fantasy of ancient lineages, he says. They are just not important from our personal practice perspective. We come out of a skeptical time.

For the average American, whose understanding of religion is synonymous with faith, Druidry can seem a bit artificial. But Dr. Sarah Pike says that Druids have a different type of commitment to their religion. Focusing on ritual action rather than creed can be a relief for people who have fled the constraints of orthodoxy, she says. When belief becomes so important, you have sharper boundaries between insiders and outsiders.

Still, there is tribalism in Druidry. Many of the practitioners I spoke with had the awkward, sharp, smart humor of the nerdy kids in middle school, which they wielded at me like little pikes, prodding and jabbing to see if I would laugh. Dr. Magliocco says this is partially constructed as a part of pagan identity. Humor is a way that we mark insiders and outsiders, she says. A joke is a spell. Jokes clearly mark the boundaries. We can all laugh because were unusual, but we also draw a firm circle of who we are.

* * *

Not everyone at the summer solstice ritual is a practicing Druid. The girls who are maybe on mushrooms are clearly not familiar with the rite. When Reverend Thomas hands out drums and rattles and shakers, so that we can all make a joyful noise together, parading around the fire and making music for the gods, one of them accidentally drops her tambourine. It shatters the silence with a flustered, lengthy banging. The girls sputter with silent laughter, their bodies shaking, as Thomas tries unsuccessfully to maintain a straight face.

On the other hand, we are all practicing Druids. Weve shown up at the ritual, after all, and if being a Druid means making offerings of whiskey and beer, reciting a prayer to honor your ancestors, and drinking mead from a horn, then I, too, am a Druid.

Get out there and do the stuff; thats what counts, Reverend Thomas says. What you believe is kind of your business. You step onto the stage, say the lines, block the actions. You do the work. Through recitation, the piece of yourself played that night has a chance, perhaps, to reconnect to something deep and missing within the modern psyche nature, the changing of seasons, the deepening shadow behind a white mountain. There is a real American optimism buried in this: that if we show up ready to try, something in the universe will respond positively to us. That we can deal with it, negotiate our futures: a bit of chocolate for your blessings, a dram of rye for your luck.

When it doesnt work, it looks like cheap theater. But when it does, something inside turns like a combination lock until it clicks, and then slides open. After all, there is nothing like watching the world respond to you. If it is a performance of the modern self to dress up in robes and ask your ancestors for blessings as bats snip and chatter in the summer dusk, then it is also deeply satisfying. Pouring good rye down the dark throat of a well, watching it drop fathoms deep: that act has its own, deeply human magic.

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