In what is sure proof that the programmers of the matrix need to give the machine a swift kick, a 27 year old British man was sentenced today for assaulting the head of Britain's Jedi church. The assailant, dressed in a trash bag cape and yelling incoherently about Darth Vader, jumped a wall to beat the man with a metal crutch. Great Britain is home to nearly 400,000 self-proclaimed jJedis.

I think that claim can be made without reservation after a middle school teacher in (Seriously, where else?) Florida is accused of "wizardry" and relieved of his job after performing a simple sleight-of-hand magic trick with a toothpick. The only question is- will they be dunking him, or sending for the Witch-finder?

Zoroastrianism is the world's oldest revealed religion. A profound influence on Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, it was the first to teach a monotheistic faith of one God of light, Ahura Mazda. For all its contributions to the world's religious doctrines, Zoroastrianism is little-known in the West.

The three thousand year old faith is slowly dying out, having dwindled to less than a hundred thousand. Today's Zoroastrians, known as Parsees, are largely concentrated in India, where they have lived since they were driven from their Persian homeland by Alexander the Great (known to Zoroastrians as 'Alexander the accursed') more than two thousand years ago.

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The first of May has been a holiday the world over for millenia. Beginning sunset tonight, Zoroastrians celebrate the beginning of Ghambar Maidyozarem, a feast for the creation of the sky. There are seven Ghambars, each celebrating one of the 'seven creations.'

Tomorrow is also, of course, the feast of Beltane, an ancient Celtic fire-festival now mainly celebrated by Wiccans, Druids, and other Neopagans as one of two major yearly holidays.

In Norse and Germanic Pagan traditions, is Walpurgisnacht, the precursor to the traditional northern May-day festivities. According to German tradition, it is also the night of a famous gathering of witches on Brocken Mountain, and all over Europe there are folk traditions celebrating the night, most of which hearken back to ancient Pagan custom- lighting bonfires (and often jumping them), blessing fields and trees, burning brooms are just a few.

In Vodoun (Voodoo), today is the Mange-les-Morts, the feast of the ancestral spirits.

Let's see if you can follow the bizarre logic used to link an animal mutilation in rural England to witchcraft. A local stag was found mutilated and headless, a t-shirt stretched over its body. Common sense would seem to point to the usual suspects, but the village of Burley has a unique history: it was once home to Sybil Leek, one of the "Founding Mothers" of Wicca. Therefore...

This is of course, chckenfeed compared to the witchcraft panics in Jharkhand, India, where women accused of witchcraft are routinely slaughtered. I'm not sure that putting the head of a recent victim on display is going to stem the violence- when facing this level of superstition, the only cure is education.

Not surprisingly, the witches are also to blame for..enviromentalism, according to the Aspen Times. Reporters are Druids, too. I learn something new every day.

For balance, a story where the witches really are to blame: Tanzania's epidemic killings of Albinos, whose bodies are rumored to have supernatural powers. It's a little bit funny until you read how many people have been murdered for their "magical' body parts, then it's downright horrifying. Tanzanians also have a bad habit of blaming elderly 'witches' for natural disasters.

For a chaser to wash away all this depressing dreck, see Daniel Pinchbeck's excellent musings on the mythology of the occult conspiracy: Enlightenment Reason or Occult Conspiracy?

This is a hoot- a Catholic priest who claims that Rome is home to over 600,000 Satanists, a claim that's been made many times in the last few years, as Italy appears to be experiencing a full fledged revival of eighties-style Satanic Panic. Not to worry, this 81 year old exorcist will be happy to exorcise evil demons, as long as 'violent' possessees are willing to be tied down.

The Newspaper of record was also careful to present both sides of the story, by quoting Church critic and Satanist Marco Dimitri in defense of Satanism. They also casually mention Dimitri's 1996 child-rape conviction, but neglect to explain that he was fully exonerated and compensated after it was revealed the charges were the product of (you guessed it) Satanic hysteria, induced by visits to excorcists.

Believe it or not, though, it could be a LOT worse.

Despite the teaser having been yanked unceremoniously from Youtube last week, the interview with celebrity Scientology defector Jason Beghe has appeared in its entirety, and it's very interesting stuff. Beghe describes how he became a Scientologist, what being a Scientologist entailed, and discusses the costs of belonging, both financial and personal.

I grew up in the Northeast, and when I was young, I spent a lot of time on my grandmother's farm in rural Pennsylvania. Many of the neighbors were Amish, and it was not uncommon to see horse-drawn buggies passing the house. At the time, my curiosity about the local Amish (Or "Pennsylvania Dutch," as we called them) was limited to wondering how anyone could stand to be dressed in itchy head-to-toe wool in the summer heat. By the time I did become curious, there were no local Amish to talk to, and most of the available information was limited to dry descriptions of Anabaptist creeds or farming techniques. Recently, however, the Amish have been featured in popular fiction and television programs, especially in relation to the coming of age rite known as Rumspringa, wherein Amish teens are given more or less free reign to sample the outside world before becoming baptised and settling into the austere Amish community for good.

Internet columnist/podcaster Tom Binnal has a fascinating interview with Tom Shachtman, author of the book Rumspringa: To Be or Not to Be Amish, who discusses the rite and many little known facts about Amish culture.

I'm not sure how I missed this, but while poking about in the dark corners of Laura Mallory's anti-Harry Potter crusade site, I found this amusingly ignorant gem of a "confession," a screed against Harry potter and Paganism obviously written by someone who imagines he is familiar with both. In addition to the usual assurances that Potter is indeed real witchcraft, and that witches are, of course, really Satanists,* we learn:

• Hermes, Azkaban, and 'Erised' are the names of real, live demons
• Witches greet each other with "Blessed Be," but when departing, they say, "The force be with you."
• Simon and Garfunkel songs paved the way for the anti-christ
• Children really dig Voldemort

Besides confusing Wiccans with Trekkies Star Wars fans, the article pulls out that ever-present list of quotes supposedly uttered by children who read the Potter books, which of course are nowhere found but on sites denouncing the books as Satanic. Even better, the article appears to be one of a series by the same author, all purporting to be warnings issued from the same "former witch" against not only Harry Potter, but Tolkien, the Da Vinci Code, and the Chronicles of Narnia. With all these satanic books littering school shelves, looks like Laura has a long career of literary censorship ahead of her.

*When pressed by real life Wiccans, they'll tell you only the "high level" witches are Satanic illuminati, the rest just THINK they worship a goddess until they get inducted into the illuminati covens. Or something like that.

Over the last twenty years, I've watched numerous friends and acquaintances drift in and out of infatuation with the work of supposed anthropologist and would-be sorceror Carlos Castaneda, whose best-selling series of books about a caustic Indian shaman and his disciple set thousands of people on spiritual quests, inspired copycat works, and were responsible for at least a half dozen people I knew trying Peyote. The skeptic in me always told me that as pretty a picture as these books painted, something wasn't right about Castaneda- not that anyone at the time had much interest in my wet-blanket opinions, and in those pre-internet days, I didn't have any way to prove it. After all, wasn't Carlos a bona-fide anthropologist, who became involved in the Shaman's world in spite of his own scholarly detachment? My fellow anthropology students understood, Castaneda was a bad word on campus, even if he was a luminary to my friends- fans of the Don Juan books had pestered the Yaqui Indians into almost total seclusion, so the real anthropogists were not fans.

Eventually, though, word filtered down that Castaneda's Shaman was a work of fiction, but the fans just shrugged it off- Don Juan may not be real, they would tell me, but the spiritual teaching's in the books were unimpeachable. And so it never occcurred to me to go any further than a shrug- when one's friends are in the throes of spiritual infatuation with a questionable teacher, there's not much one can do about it, and overall, the whole thing seemed pretty harmless. I hadn't really given the Don Juan business much thought for a few years when I stumbled over Salon's recent piece describing Castaneda's death and its aftermath, which appears to have included the suicides of many of his close followers, adding a real Jonestown spin to the story.