A woman who was sacked from her job as a teaching assistant claimed today that she was given the boot because she is a witch.

Sommer De La Rosa, 35, told an employment tribunal that she had been unfairly dismissed from her job after school chiefs raised fears that she would indoctrinate students with her pagan religion. (more…)

Pagans in Dorset claim their growing popularity is making them a target for threats and abuse.

The Dolmen Grove, a Weymouth-based druid group, says a dead bird with a noose around its neck was left on the windscreen of its van. (more…)

It is a certainty in the United States that no one knows or cares to know the exact value of the ecclesiastic demesne. We can, however, guess. In 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant said that taxable church property amounted to $1 billion. One hundred and one years later, in a 1976 study that has never been replicated or updated, researchers Martin A. Larson and Rev. C. Stanley Lowell found that total ecclesiastical property by 1906 came to about $1.3 billion. According to Larson and Lowell, by 1936 it was $3.8 billion. By 1964, it had risen to a spectacular $79.5 billion. When Larson and Lowell tallied their figures for 1976, real church wealth amounted to at least $158 billion, with churches the owners of an estimated 10 percent of all U.S. property. The figure adjusted for inflation today comes to at least $560 billion, likely the greatest non-profit wealth expansion in history (with the real value likely much greater). The reason for the accumulation transcends the giving of the flock: It is due, rather, to a systemic political bias in the form of the generous tax exemption traditionally afforded religious property and income, an arrangement that in Western history is as old as the Sumerian kings and the pharaohs of Egypt. (more…)

Every band has been there: you’ve just had a hit album - then your Johnny Marr-esque guitarist quits. Meet the group that came up with a crazy solution … by Dave Simpson

Modest Mouse should have had it all made by the end of 2004. Their fourth album, Good News for People Who Love Bad News, had become their most successful yet, reaching No 18 in the US charts and spawning a big hit, Float On. That song was a gloriously uplifting pop single, built around a guitar pattern conceived by guitarist Dann Gallucci in the style of the former Smiths guitar player Johnny Marr. (more…)

An archaeological expert has claimed that two innocuous-looking stones at the side of a road in Berwick St James could hold clues to the secrets of Stonehenge.

Dennis Price, who is a renowned expert on the site and used to work with Wessex Archaeology, believes the two large stones standing at the side of a lane next to the B3083 could be parts of Stonehenge’s mysterious altar stone. (more…)

Apropos charting the ups and downs of certain dislogistic terms in the recent columns, I was reminded of a remark made by Richard Trench (1807-86) in a speech to the Philological Society of London that “the history of … the wrong ways into which a language has wandered… may be nearly as instructive as the right ones.” The Society, on Trench’s suggestion, decided to undertake the complication of A New English Dictionary that was eventually published as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), justly called `the mother’ of all English dictionaries.

As an example of the twists and turns of etymology, particularly the pejorative mantle that certain words took on in a religious sense, the last column traced the life history of `ethnic’. Ethnic was born, as it were, as ethnos (through Greek ta ethne), meaning “a band of people living together, nation, people”, then “people of one’s own kind”, but began to mean a heathen, a barbarous or unenlightened person, and was applied to all people except Christians, Jews, and Muslims until reverting to its ancient, original meaning only over a century ago. (more…)

New York - Before every dangerous mission in Iraq, Captain Richard A. Briggs Jr. stood on the hatch of his vehicle, drew a pentacle in the sky with his finger and recited the Wiccan Warrior Prayer for protection.

It was a quick, effortless ritual, but one that Briggs was thankful for in the spring of 2003 when his unarmoured cargo truck turned a corner on an Iraqi road and rolled right into machine gun fire. (more…)

Minnesota Wiccans and neopagans are stepping into the limelight as they push for inclusion of the pentacle on military tombstones.

Long before Elysia Gallo identified herself as a neopagan, she felt drawn to mystical, magical things. (more…)

Few bureaucrats can subvert a well-intentioned principal like the separation of church and state with the hypocritical bombast of school administrators. But when they actually succeed in making religious fanatics seem rationale, well now that’s an achievement worthy of an OFF/beat Idiot of the Year nomination.

Donna Brewer, of Willow Hill, Pennsylvania, is suing Abington School District, claiming that her 10-year-old son’s “rights to religion and free speech were violated” because he was not allowed to wear a Jesus costume during his school’s Halloween parade. The federal suit was filed on her son’s behalf by the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal group that believes in spreading the Gospel through “traditional family values.” It further claims that since costumes were mandatory and many students chose to dress as “witches and ghouls” (i.e., pagan costumes), Willow Hill Elementary violated the fourth-grader’s equal protection rights. (more…)

Murphysboro, IL - By the end of class, Denise Livingston of Carterville knew exactly what kind of house her instructor lived in simply by touching his pen.

Livingston and about seven others met with “Coyote” Chris Sutton of Godrey last week at New Ages Other Worlds bookstore to enhance their psychic abilities. (more…)