All you Wiccans, Satanists, Hindus, we have our eyes on you!
Recently some American Christians have been shoved out of their
safety bubbles, and into close proximity with the practices of other faiths,
and they were horrified by the whole experience. Schools bowing to pressure to
teach Christian practices and then being forced to teach kids about Muslims
too, kneeling to Mecca five times a day. Native Americans suing for the right
to wear feathers to their graduations. Wiccans doing god-knows-what in the
woods at midnight. Just last week, pro-abortion activists, possibly affiliated
with the New York-based Church of Satan, hollered “Hail Satan!” at the Texas
legislators who are trying to restrict abortion rights. Just yesterday, Fox
News was ejaculating alarums about “creeping paganism”. Oh my God, one court
just demanded that our kids be exposed to….yoga! Oh my God, Hinduism, that’s
even further east than the Mooslims!
And I am here to tell you, that the worst fears of the most
timorous Christian fundamentalists….are true.
Recently, right in my home town, I found the site where one of
these awful cults does its dirty work. And I managed to sneak into one of their
terrifying rituals, with a cult member. I’m still shaking!
We walk into a building where the magical rituals take place. The
first thing we see is a basin filled with magical water. We look up and we see
a magic altar, and hanging over it is the magical effigy of a naked man, quite
bloody, who has been nailed to a piece of wood to die. Other practitioners of
this faith, already in the seats, wear tiny little copies of this nailed man
around their necks.
Along the aisles we see pictures of some of the hundreds of pagan
figures we can offer magical incantations to. One pagan figure can help us with
illness, another can help us with lost causes. Magical incantations for
travelers, incantations for fishermen, incantations for criminals. Some cult
members wear pictures of these people around our necks too, or keep idols in
their bedrooms, or even on the dashboards of their cars. For magical
protection.
We sit. Magical candles burn everywhere. Soon we see a procession
of people wearing magical robes and carrying magic candles, ringing magic
bells, burning magic incense, carrying magic wine. An old man in a dress,
followed by some little boys also in dresses. The boys look frightened of the
old man – I wonder why?
The chief cultist reads magical incantations from a book which was
at first written in three ancient languages and then translated into another
ancient language, Latin. Originally we were forbidden to hear the words in
English until the chief of the magical priests relented years ago. In parts of
the ritual, we ask for magical super-beings, one of them a ghost, to do magical
things on our behalf; in other parts we sing magical incantations.
The highlight of our visit is when we eat the flesh of the magical
man nailed to the piece of wood, and drink his blood. The flesh and blood have
been magically transformed. I’m still shivering! Although the “blood” tastes a
lot like a five-dollar Merlot.
Soon we will return so that a newborn infant can have magical
water sprinkled on him while magical incantations are spoken over him. In
winter cult members can do their own ritual at home, with four candles, one for
each week in December. Next spring we will return to the magical place so that
magical ashes can be smeared on our foreheads.
Unless they catch me and eat me, or something.
And the freaky boss of this cult isn’t even American! He lives in
some secluded castle in Italy, and even the Italians have no legal power over
him. And he has never had sex, nor have any of his key lieutenants. When he
dies, they will announce a replacement via a secret meeting and then a dramatic
ceremony involving a smoke signal rising into the sky.
Here in town, the elders of the cult also indulge in an intense,
bizarre ritual every Wednesday night, which involves calling out numerical
incantations, and then marking pieces of paper with colored ink. All night the
faithful wail out the horrible curse, over and over. “BINGO….BINGO….BINGO!”
This terrifying cult of cannibals is known as….Saint John’s
Catholic Church.
Oh, the humanity. Hide your children!...They have a proclivity for
child rape, by the way.
