Testimony from a website article entitled, "Why Paganism and Withcraft are Making a Comeback": “The religion is individualistic in many ways,” Berger told me. “You can do your own thing. It’s not signing on to an institutional religion. It’s not signing on to a set of actions or beliefs that you must adhere to.”
"I myself grew up with Italian folk magic passed down from generations of practitioners who melded pagan customs with Roman Catholicism. This kind of syncretism is not uncommon in witchcraft today.
"In petitioning the archangel Michael for protection, for example, I will recite a prayer but also make offerings of wine, bay leaves and cloves. In addition to venerating Catholic saints, I light candles to the goddess Diana at every full moon and place small bundles of rosmarino, or rosemary, on my altar to honor the dead. This blending of faiths has been a seamless process for me and other folk magic practitioners despite what traditional religious authorities might say.
"Sometimes my magic is as simple as reciting an old Neapolitan incantation over a glass of wine to strengthen the love between two people. Sometimes it requires more serious action, like piercing a clove of garlic with a sewing needle and spitting three times to break a spate of bad luck brought on by malocchio — the 'evil eye.' Whether learned from a local healer or my grandmother as she blessed me by shoving salt in my pockets on my way out the door, I carry forward these old world rituals.
"At the heart of these practices is the fact that witchcraft enables me to see the world through a more balanced lens. I’ve felt the reassuring presence of the otherworldly in the midst of difficult circumstances, and I know that magic happens when I summon the strength to draw boundaries or stir away the guilt that bubbles up if I choose self-care over self-sacrifice."
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(here's an old post of mine on the subject)
Of course, witches, promoted heavily by all forms of media (perhaps you've seen their growing section at the bookstore?!), have a "mother" at the center of their pagan worship, the same one used for the invention of the "Virgin Mary."
In the earliest days of Christianity, while the Apostle Paul was going about establishing history’s first independent, grace-oriented local assemblies of Believers, societies worshipped at an organized WORLDWIDE church—the Church of Diana. She was called the “Queen of Heaven,” the same title Catholicism gives Mary.
As Bible expert Gail Riplinger writes in her 1993 book, New Age Bible Versions, “God in His foreknowledge focused 18 scripture verses on Diana and inroads her image had made into Ephesus and ‘the world’ (Acts 19:24-41). ‘New International’ versions have dropped Diana, just as she is being picked up by a new international generation in need of undisguised truth.”
Riplinger summarizes, “The New Age movement has served as fairy godmother for Diana. As the goddess of nature, she has been adopted by its ‘back-to-nature’ wing; as goddess of the moon, she is worshipped by witches.
"Los Angeles Times writer Russell Chandler dispatches: The great majority of people who call themselves witches . . . follow the nature-oriented polytheistic worship of the Great Mother Goddess whose names include Diana. . .
“ ‘Diana was chiefly worshipped by women,’ and consequently has become the ‘patron saint’ of the feminist and lesbian arm of the New Age movement. They call her the ‘living symbol of God’—just as the apparition in Belgium, who called for a mark, called herself ‘the Sign of the Living God.’ The New Age dictum reads:
'She is the Queen. . . the chaste Diana. . .[T]he last initiated Father of the church [Origen] died, carrying with him into his grave the secrets of the Pagan temples. . . Diana, the One Mother of God having her place in heaven. . . [H]er occult aspects and powers are numberless.' "
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History book Titans and Olympians (2003) says Diana’s main temple at Ephesus was considered one the seven wonders of the ancient world!
“It remained an important religious site for centuries: in the first century AD Paul of Tarsus caused a riot in Ephesus by trying to preach the Christian faith there,” the authors of Titans write. “The statue of her in this temple showed her with many breasts and with other symbols connected with fertility goddesses.
“More usually, however, she was represented as young and tall, wearing a short, practical tunic, carrying a bow and arrow (the Antichrist’s calling card, as we're told in the Book of Revelation) and accompanied by her hounds.
“Occasionally she drove a chariot drawn by two heifers or horses, each a different color. In rural areas, her statue was sometimes set up at crossroads: this acknowledged her connection with Hecate, because in popular superstition crossroads were often considered to be haunted. As a result of this she came to be known during the Roman period as Diana Trivia—trivia being the Latin word for crossroads.”
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Replicating what the Bible says about the Antichrist’s upcoming “Queen of Heaven,” we're told in the book "a complex ritual developed at Delphi (the important sacred site in Greece). Anyone who wanted to know their destiny made offerings of a sacred cake and a goat or a sheep, before consulting the Pythia, the priestess of the shrine.
“After careful purification she sat on a tripod, a bowl of three legs, and fell into a trance-like state in which she received answers from Apollo (the top God for whom the Greeks dedicated the complex). When she spoke, her words were copied down by a group of priests who then interpreted them and delivered the results to the supplicant.”
Richard Jordan explains, “You’ve got to understand that the Dispensation of Grace began in the nighttime spiritually. It was a (global ‘winter period’) for spiritual understanding and Bible truth.
“The only nation in the earth God held relationships with was the nation Israel and they were fallen. They had joined hands with the Gentiles to crucify their Messiah. The Jews weren’t exactly the repository for great wisdom and spiritual insight.
"So the Dispensation of Grace was introduced to a world that sat in darkness. Israel was scattered and dispersed and after about 135 A.D., there weren’t any more Jews living in Palestine.”
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