The CAWT_Network Yahoo! Group is sponsored by the Church of All Worlds Tradition Network (CAWTN) Two Rivers Nest and exists for anyone to express their thoughts about the evolving CAW Tradition, starting or getting publicity for a CAWTN Nest, and anything else of interest, of course. If you want an article to appear here, then all you have to do to submit articles is e-mail them to me.

        CAW III's Nesting (coven) program has been restarted, but getting recognized as a Proto-Nest has some requirements many CAW startups may not be meet the qualifications for awhile. A Shadow Nest has the advantage on *NOT* needing Official Permission to exist. A CAWTN Nest isn't a CAW Proto-Nest until you apply for proto-nest status, or as a 'nest forming' with CAW...

        CAWTN is an informal network which is not formally a part of CAW. One reason, out of many, is that this gives me the freedom to ignore 501.c.3 political restrictions because CAWTN is not a 501.c.3 church - this protects CAW from my "musings. Another reason is that sometimes a "shadow nest" can do things a CAW Nest can't do, much like the Baker Street Irregulars could do things Sherlock Homes couldn't have done...

        'Tis a Mystery -- CAWTN existed years before it was given a name - before I wrote its funky "Bylaws", before the hostile takeover of CAW II, before Liza Ravenheart wrote about the CAWT, and before I realized it existed. The WOW moment lead me to that conclusion happened before my short, OK not so short, letter was published in the very last Scarlet Flame which explained Something Interesting, (The Gods Themselves must have intervened to get it published before the Ohio BoD pulled the Plug on Scarlet Flame)...

        There was a lot of bitterness and angst over conflicts and misunderstandings of what was going on in CAW II, and some people have decided to go elsewhere because of it. This was partially a reflection of what's been going on in society at large - CAW has survived power plays by rogue Clergy, numerous personality conflicts, squabbles over money and Green Egg, highly infectious forms of HP[S] Disease, unfair treatment of members, the passsing of a CAW President, attempted dissolution by the BoD, and mass resignations from the Ohio BoD. However, this freedom has come at a terrible cost, and many people left CAW without understanding what it was really all about, or how to succeed within it. I'd like to help change that - we have the "C.U.R.E." - ["We can rebuild him..."]. CAWT_Network is offering to begin the process, and start a bone-head CAW II Classroom of sorts. there's only one registration, and that's to the CAWT_Network Y! Group itself...

The Usual Links and Stuff are here!!

        The present position on theCAWT Wheel of the Year is about re-establishing ties with CAW members that were broken during the Cusp. Green Egg, has been restablished as CAW's Flag pubication, the new version is an on-line Magazine...

        I have a sheik_sebir's Forum Please, take the time to answer either the Religious Survey 1040 for 2010 (Long form) or the quick and dirty 2010 1040-EZ Form Survey (Short Form) if you want to ask a quick question. The IRS tax form references are an inside joke, I used to be a Call Center Rep for the IRS, and they're really not bad at all -- the surveys that is!

        However, if you want to send me E-mail then send stuff to My Primary Email, or My Personal "Business" Email, or The really 'cool' G-mail.

Dear fellow Pagans,

I just wrote the following 200-word Letter to the Editor to our local newspaper. I hope they'll print it!

If anyone else would like to send a similar letter to your own local paper, giving your own group's contact info, please feel free to crib from this one as you wish. Let's get this message out! After all, "Avatar" is the biggest blockbuster movie of all time, with millions of people loving it for its essentially "Neo-Pagan" message. Now that the Pope has explicitly made that identification, we need to let all those "Avatar" fans know who we are, and how to find us.

Bright Blessings,
                    Oberon Zell-Ravenheart

Letter to the Editor;
Santa Rosa Press-Democrat
letters@pressdemocr at.com

Pope: 'Avatar' [is] 'Neo-Pagan'

In a recent review of the mega-blockbuster movie "Avatar," Vatican Radio condemned "pseudo-doctrines that turn ecology into the religion of the millennium. Nature is no longer a creation to defend, but a divinity to worship."

In his "Papal Message for World Day of Peace 2010," Pope Benedict XVI warned that "such notions eliminate the difference of identity and worth between the human person and other living things. In the name of a supposedly egalitarian vision of the 'dignity' of all living creatures, such notions end up abolishing the distinctiveness and superior role of human beings. They also open the way to a new pantheism tinged with neo-paganism, which would see the source of man's salvation in nature alone."

Indeed they do! Thanks, Your Holiness, for explaining this so succinctly to all the enthusiastic viewers of that phenomenal movie! After 1500 years of the Church misrepresenting Paganism as evil and satanic, we modern Neo-Pagans appreciate this tacit acknowledgement that what we are r eally all about is Nature worship. Neo-Paganism is "green religion," plain and simple. Our primary deity is Gaia-Mother Earth.

Readers who appreciated the ecospiritual message in "Avatar" might want to check out the at: Sonoma County Pagan Network

Rev. Oberon Zell-Ravenheart
Church of All Worlds

... "Some of my Pagan/Druid friends objected to 'Avatar' because it continued, in their opinion, the white-centrist savior concept. White superman savior leads and saves the naive childlike (infer less intelligent) natives from destruction (they can't do it on their own)."

          This rather odd and misguided interpretation of the movie seems to be getting quite a bit of circulation lately. Personally, I think it is a subtle right-wing plot to attempt to discredit the message of the movie with liberals and progressives.

          But, I think it's crap. The hero's race was irrelevant; he could have just as easily been black, Asian, Hispanic, or anything. That wasn't the point. The point was that he was human, and came out of the very culture that was intent on destroying the natives; but after spending time among them, he switched allegiance. That is only significant if he had started off far removed from them in the first place-which he so clearly did. Thus his education and transformation becomes that of the audience. Which is the whole intent of the movie, according to Cameron.

          I think the reason that so many stories like this involve white men "going native" is simply that they're in fact representative of the culture of oppression-the implication being that even they might become enlightened if they could only experience first-hand the traditional cultures their own culture so despises. And the actual history of colonialism - especially British - is replete with real examples of this sort of thing. The "savior" is not the white guy, but the indigenous culture he comes to appreciate. And thus, so does the audience.

          As a Pagan, I am always delighted to see such beautiful depictions of the values I hold dear reaching into the hearts and minds of wider audiences. I believe that such stories are our best hope for transforming humanity and saving the world. After all, Pandora is only a fictional world in a movie. But our own Earth is real, and we live here. And the plotline of Avatar is but a thinly-veiled allegory for the history of imperial colonialism and its brutal oppression and exploitation of indigenous peoples-which is all too real. But the movie-like the Pagan renaissance now in progress-also holds out hope for a future resolution and cultural transformation. And this hope is what we're counting on.

          And incidentally, those traditional peoples who have seen Avatar seem to love it! "Bolivia's first indigenous president, Evo Morales, has praised 'Avatar' for what he calls its message of saving the environment from exploitation."

BB-OZ

The Grey School

Vivere bene est vindicata optima.

Oberon Zell-Ravenheart
Headmaster

Grey School of Wizardry

          There's a new pilot from the Battle Star Galactica series called "Caprica" that shows alot of promise. It's a prequel that goes to the genesis of the Cylons and quietly introduces some interesting technology that may one day be real - like a tablet computer on a that looks like a paper sheet whhich can be folded up. In BG2, Starbuck was portrayed as a believing Pagan within a mostly Pagan society which is is only a few TV shows that highlights Paganism in a modern society in a good light.

          In "the Caprica" prequel the society is mostly Pagan, except for a sometimes terrorist group called The Army of the One (Army of One, grok?). It goes back to how a girl genius created a fully conscious avatar of herself which was then put into a proto-type Cylon robot by her father to become its Artificial Intellegence (AI). The TAO believes that the Pagan Society has no sense of right and wrong, yet one member thought society was so bad that he became a suicide bomber on a high speed railcar. HMMMM?... so much for monotheistic morality. I think the show has come along way since BSG1, where scene stealing from other movie scripts and the pseudo-Mormon mythology were obvious to some, but I didn't notice it at the time, because mebbe I've not studied Mormonism ;->

01/29/10:Massachusetts has a new 'Publican Senator in a state long held by the "blue" column, and it was the "Kennedy Seat" to boot. Very few MSM news outlets paid attention to, or even noticed this race, until it suddenly looked like the Dem candidate would be ecliped by the 'Publican dark horse, much like Sauron's Eye couldn't focus on the Ring until it was too late, and then the Black Swan event, the highly improbable event that no one was looking for - happened. The Democrat's runaway freight train - the ObamaCare and the 'Cap and Trade' bill and other runaway bills - have been stopped for now, but only if the 'Publicans' can all vote as one, otherwise that small advantage will slip through their fingers...

          Is this is a harbringer of a defeat to come for the Dems in November? It will be if the Dems don't get the message and reform their wicked ways: pandering to large corporations such as the Pharma, Wall Street, Financial, and Health care industries; goverment bankruptcy; bribery; buying votes; holding secret meetings instead of open, transparent ones that Obama promisedwould be done openly; the occupations of Afganistan and Iraq; the closing of Guantanamo; the treatment of terrorists as criminals in a court instead of what they really are - enemy combatants. The People are slowly waking up, will speak loudly, and deal with the corruption that prevades Washington DC and Wall Street, if the Dems don't do so, by throwing the bums out yet again...

          Getting the Goglet of Fire to work again took up alot of time and I had some frustrating time to figure out why it wouldn't work. This one is a little fatter than the original image, and I think it looks better that way, for now... 01/05-12/10:It's staring out the year in hopeless optimism that things will be marginally better for most of us eventually - and the operative word here is "marginally". Meanwhile, the decks of the 'Rap have almost been cleared and I have a new installment of the FUTER to write, but not right at this moment, for I'm still getting over the holidays which is much like the cold I can't get rid of. Actually I've just started it and it's in DRAFT Mode.

01/01/10:It's a New Year in Chicago, so here's some actual good news - Happy New Years! Unforturnately it won't last, it usually doesn't - there's always some bunch of morons or idiots that will do something stupid to ruin it for anyone who cares, and problems don't melt away because of a change in calendars. So, though it's usually unwise, it's time for optimism at least for a while - enjoy the day!...

12/29 -> 31/09:♫ Mithras is over ... and I feel fine... ♫ One thing that's done at this time is to try and forecast the future for the next year My first one is from James Kunsler's article, Forecast 2010 and the second one is An Introspective Look at the Future of America...

          Business has picked up and I'm getting more hits and my guess is because it was the Santa article, so expect more of the same. I went to my aunt's for Xmas and had a good time. I don't have enough web presence to require a Facebook account, and I've done absolutely nothing with my Twitter account - I just don't have the time. I also have no cell phone because I don't have alot of people to call - OK, I have almost no one to call. However, I plan to do someting with the CAWTN_Network Group in the next few weeks...

12/24/09:It's Christmas Eve and I hope y'all like the Santa article I've chosen to explain one point of view about a Xmas Tradition that is a wee bit odd. However, picking mushrooms is not an easy task for those who don't know what they're looking for, or what they're doing - if you pick the wrong 'shroom you can be poisoned. I prefer a less risky ways to reach a shamanic trance like meditation and Dreaming, drumming, or rattles, either taped or live. As always on Xmas Eve, I wish you all a Merry Mithras!...

12/15/09:My SSI has been restarted starting in November and all the dreadful things that coulda, woulda, happened are thankfully not going to happen. So, I'm a somewhat a less unhappy camper now.

There's not much use in describing Yule, Xmas and New Years are since everyone should know what it's all about already. Writing about the economy at this time of the year is not a pleasant task, or something many people want to read, so I've trimmed it out of the notes and I will tackle it another time from scratch (I erased it and lost the transfer to the FUTER), probably in January '10 or even later...

12/11/09:There isn't alot going on for two weeks before Christmas. Oberon reports that alot of businesses that buy Mythic Image statues and merchandise are either not buying as much, or are going out of business in the middle of the 'shopping spree time of the year'. He's offering up to 40% off many of his statues etc. I might be invited for Xmas by my cousins, then again mebbe not - who knows?...

11/18/09:Bummer! I just had to throw away my old stash of pulp "Green Eggs" and some business books I'll never need again, because of space downsizing realignments where I live, and no time to make other arrangements. I had alot of stuff returned to me from storage, and the GEs were part of some really old stuff I'd been packratting (I've been called a packrat by many people). They had been stored for years at my aunt's and her son wanted them out of her house. I eventually realized that I had more space than I thought I would, but it was too late, and the GEs were ♫ ...gone, gone, gone --whoa-a-woe ah ah!... ♫. Well, I wasn't reading them anymore, and I hadn't read them in several years, but the comfort of having them around is gone. If I had the time I may have been able to donate them somewhere, but who wants 10+ year old GE's? - the library? Even they would have said 'no thanks'...

11/11/09:Today is Veteran's Day and it's the time to remember both the fallen heroes that have given their lives and living veterans who have given of their lives for the country. Lest we forget, this is also a day for the active military as well, and those brave men and women who are sacrificing much of their lives, and sometimes their lives, to serve the country, even when those leaders who have gotten us into political mess after political mess depend on them to prop up and force their failed policies work. When it takes a President two months to dally about making a decision that should have been made in two days over the troop strength in Afgoulistan Afganistan, we should know that the military in deeply in a BOHICA (Bend Over, Here It Comes Again) moment, regardless of how many wreaths the ObamaNation places at the Tomb of the Unknowns in Washington CA

11/02-04/09:Samhain '09 is now history and the next holiday should be Yule, but I believe that Thanksgiving is partially a pagan holiday because the Indians (named that because of Columbus who thought he had found India) weren't Xtians! The date of the 'Rap is usually ahead of actual the actual holiday (unless I'm running late and there's a self-imposed dead-line to meet). So I celebrate it, and think of the promise the Pilgrims and Puritans both represented and made to the naive Native Americans, and how only a few decades separated the first Thansgiving from the hostile fear and loathing of the Pilgrim's next generation when the Indians help in former times was all but forgotten. Because Thanksgiving is one of several exceptions to the eight fold wheel, I don't plan on having a separate From Under the Editor's Rock (FUTER). I'll just expand on the Samhain one while getting the Yule FUTER ready for November 28th.

          Keep in mind the text changes are made, day-to-day, in the FUTER, the News, and the Notes (which have been put here in the News more often than not) The idea is to make it better over time. The FUTER is a separate file from the index page, but the notes are directly entered into the index page...

10/04-16/09:My computer problems continue, but after working with it (shutting it off and going to prior Windows configuations) it usually comes on OK after awhile. Some things it does are predicable and others are seemingly random. Predictable things are often software problems and random things are often hardware problems, at least at first. I think I have a little bit of both. I've started the Samhain From Under the Editor's Rock (FUTER) and it's now in Draft Mode and I'm close to close to finishing it in installments. What I have written so-far is now posted oops, it hasn't been posted right -- Working... working... working... The small error that kept (FUTER) from being displayed is fixed, I hope.

          "I'm having severe troubles with my computer so I don't know if I'll be doing the 'Rap from home much anymore (It's back to the library if things get much worse, which means that I'm going to have to cut down on the "News" and possibly close the 'Rap down). It's becoming increasingly worse over time. The monitor shuts off without notice, there's a blank black screen that always comes on about 3 minutes into any session, blue lines are appearing on the startup screen, the mouse freezes, The monitor goes into standby mode, I get a read disk error message, and the computer shuts off for no apparent reason. Except for the blanked out screen that always appears everything else seems to be random- it never happens the same way each time. I had to have a new Windows XP installed because of malware, and its either that yet again, or its hardware problems. 09/29/09:There's a lot of propaganda nonsense going around that the United States of America is beloved by the businesses of the other countries who still do business with us, but the Truth lies Elsewhere - in those governments or companies who have either quit playing our financial games, or left our country altogether for greener pastures, respectively. Well, one business has and attempts to say it like it is, since they want nothing to do with us forevermore. 'Farewell America', an August 24, 2009 letter by Swiss investment bank Wegelin & Co. reveals how much of Europe sees us, and calculates that the costs of future business relationships in the US outweighs its benefits. Here's an excerpt:

          "At the risk of once again winding up certain specialists in business ethics, let us briefly recall the sort of tax authorities we are dealing with, and the sort of state they serve: a country that, over the last 60 years, has unquestionably been one of the most aggressive nations in the world. The USA has fought by far the largest number of wars, sometimes with, but mostly without a UN mandate. It has broken the international laws of war, maintained secret prisons, and fought an absurd war against drugs, with serious consequences both abroad (Columbia, Afghanistan) and at home (according to reliable sources, the tentacles of the narcotics mafia now reach well into political circles).:

          "With breathtaking moral duplicity, the USA maintains enormous offshore havens in Florida, Delaware and others of its states. The moralizers have joined sides with a nation that still makes extensive use of the death penalty, and that has a legal system under which lawyers can get rich on the misfortunes of their clients. Liability cases often end in verdicts with exorbitant damages, which makes business activity extremely risky, for medium-sized enterprises in particular. The moralizers provide intellectual support for a country that allows its infrastructure to collapse, and then stuffs convicts into hopelessly overfilled jails, after what are not infrequently dubious proceedings. They fund a nation that tolerates – or rather, causes – regular crises in the global financial system that it manages."

          "A country whose underclass enjoys neither the benefits of an adequate education, nor a halfway functional healthcare system; a country whose economic system is increasingly inclined to over-consumption, and in which saving and investing have increasingly become alien concepts, a situation that has undoubtedly been one of the driving forces behind the current recession, with all its catastrophic consequences for the whole world."

          Doesn't sound so good, does it? I wonder how many of our overseas business partners secretly believe this or something similar to it?...

09/22/09:Well, Mabon's arrived and we are in the the Autumal Equinox. Mabon is sort of a marker holiday, and the "Wheel of the Year" covers most of the material about it, and the description of what ritual is used on the day is distributed widely over the net. So it's time to move onto /Hallowe'en/Samhain, and changing things around will take some time, but less time than it used to.

The BFR is now mostly put together using the perl/PHP insert instruction within a comment to link the separate files into the index page, except for the 'Rap News which is written on the index page itself. This means I don't have to create a special file to save old material at the end of the month.

08/25 to 10/08/09: The Mabon FUTER is all but finished, and there's a second article I'm writng that I tink is important enough to speak out on yet again. Otherwise, I'm concentrating on finding images to use and doing more editing.

Fascism Alert Just In: Massachusetts just passed a law that requires its residents to take the swine flu drugs in the event of a declared emergency, with fines up to $1000/day and a big jail sentence! The Question is Why? Since no one will be able to sue the manufacturers if these drugs are used, and the drugs are largely untested, then it could kill far more people than the disease itself. There are some really greedy companies that seem to be in control of things there and they won't let a little manslaughter get in their way of raking in $billions. The ObamaNation is in their pockets as well, so expect to see a form of this draconian legisation go federal fairly soon...

8/6/09 - 08/12/09 : I'm clearing the decks for the Mabon Ish. Thats why the last "Oberon Question has been removed. I've also started the FUTER, and it's about some of the nasty tactics the ObamaNation and their detractors are up to...

07/28/09 - 8/6/09: I've just recovered the use of my computer, which suffered a complete XP crash, and finally got it fixed for $220 by a tech - which is easier than having to buy it and do it my self. There was a file, "hal.dll", that was reported to be missing or corrupt which means that the Windows itself was probably corrupt with malware as well. HAL 9000 was the computer that malfunctioned on "2001, A Space Odyssey" Since I couldn't afford the backup fee, I lost all of my added programs and data, and I have to essentially start over again from scratch. Much of what was lost is internet based, everything from the IE Favorites list, images, to giveawayoftheday.com programs. Its been a lesson from the school of hard knocks, and I plan to do something about backing up my stuff in the future. I haven't got around to looking for a new article or writint FUTER for Mabon

I've made a backup of all my Barsoom images, more than half of them Fish 'Rap files I have stored on Yahoo! by using FileZilla which is a popular open source FTP program, and it's a heck of alot faster than trying to download them one at a time - which I did for a third of them before I got smart. Windows finally let me install service Pack 3, but I'm still having minor problems with Windows crashing for no apparent reason and unexpaeted black screens.

07/11-23/09: There's a new article in "From Under the Editor's Rock" on the Health Care bill up before Congress.