Diana Paxson, the Pagan Elder who will be leading the ritual at our demonstration, has written a statement on religious freedom and an article on the Founding Fathers which appear below. These articles will give you some background on the ritual and help strengthen the magic through informed participation. If you plan on attending, please be sure to read our Important Information page, too - it really is important!

If you would like to perform the ritual with us, you may download a PDF of the script here:
Pagan Rights Ritual

CELEBRATING RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
by Diana Paxson

On Independence Day, Americans gather to celebrate the ideals of liberty, justice, and democracy that define our nation, and honor the men and women who articulated and fought for those ideals. Our founders had faith, but they knew how devastating sectarian violence can be, and were determined that the new nation should guarantee religious freedom.

This July 4th, American Pagans will gather in Lafayette Park, Washington D.C., to exercise that freedom. In a ritual that includes adherents of many Pagan traditions, we will honor those who established our fundamental freedoms, especially Washington and Jefferson, and those who built on their ideas, from Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt and FDR, offering our energies to preserve the liberties they fought for and the land they loved.

For the past decade, the Christian Religious Right has been making a concerted effort to reshape America in its own image, using prayer to influence the American psyche as they manipulate politics to get their people into power, forgetting that the law that protects their faith is only strong because it protects others as well. It is time for those who understand the technology of visualization and affirmation to use our skills to return this country, not to the left, but to the balanced center which allows freedom in all directions. Pagans often see themselves as being on the fringes of the American mainstream, but rather than thinking of ourselves as rebels, we should see ourselves as striving to restore America to her original ideals.

The recent decision to allow the Pentacle to be placed on the grave- markers of Wiccan soldiers is a victory for religious freedom. In a time when religious conflict devastates the Middle East, it is all the more important that America honor spiritual diversity. In a time when our world is threatened by the effects of unchecked industrial development, those traditions that honor the earth must share what we know. As we gather in Lafayette Park we offer our energy and our will to carry on the work of our Founding Fathers and Mothers and help America become what they hoped it would be.

AMERICAN ANCESTORS: Invoking the Founding Fathers to Guard our Freedoms

It is late on a July evening in New York City. The war for American independence has been won, but the fate of the new nation still hangs in the balance. The candles in the silver candelabra gutter as a little wind off the river stirs the curtains of the opened window, but the humid air still holds the heat of the day. The man who sits writing at the table is in his shirt-sleeves, tie-wig set aside and stock draped across a chair. The scratch of quill pen on paper and the ticking of a clock are the only sounds in the quiet room. James Madison is thirty-six years old, though the stress of the War years make him look older. With neither the imposing stature of Washington nor Jefferson's flamboyant hair, his best feature is his intelligent dark eyes. He rubs them, feeling the fatigue, but knowing that before morning he must get this done. The states have accepted the Constitution only on condition that the rights of the people be explicitly safeguarded. The bonds that hold the new nation together are still fragile, and if Congress cannot come up with an acceptable Bill of Rights, the Union may yet revert to a collection of squabbling states. Notes cover the table. The committee, Congress, and the nation will judge, but in the end it comes down to this man, in this room, who must find the words by which the nation will live. The Virginia Declaration of Rights has given him a starting point-all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion Now that concept must be made law. He begins to write-- "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof Other rights will follow-freedom to speak and write and assemble, freedom to claim those rights when they are denied. But the first is the one that protects the right to worship as we choose.

Liberty is a plant that requires constant tending. When times are hard, people tend to seek security in a more rigid identity, to redefine the past to support their position, and to see a threat in any diversity. There is a paranoid fear that a jealous tribal god will smite the nation with disaster if he is not worshipped by all. The Veteran's Administration denies a Wiccan soldier's right to a pentacle on his memorial stone. Paganism is given as grounds for refusal of parental custody. As followers of a different religion, we cannot afford to take our freedom of worship for granted. For the past decade years, the religious right has been making a concerted and intentional effort to reshape America in its own image, using prayer to influence the American psyche as they manipulate politics to get their people into power, forgetting that the law that protects their faith is only strong because it protects others as well. The rights guaranteed by the First Amendment have been redefined as the right to practice their religion, speak and write their party line, and assemble to support their faith. This is the belief of a minority of Christians, but they have influenced the consciousness of the nation. As Pagans, we have a spiritual technology which is surely the equal of theirs. It is time for those of us who understand the technology of visualization and affirmation to use our skills to return this country, not to the left, but to the balanced center which allows freedom to both extremes. Pagans often see themselves as being on the fringes of the American mainstream, but the United States were never meant to be a Christian nation. Rather than thinking of ourselves as rebels, fighting to change the mainstream, we should see ourselves as conservatives, striving to restore America to her original ideals. It is always easier and more effective to go with the flow rather than against it-- we have only to ride the currents that are going our way. I propose that we identify those figures and images from American history that will help us, and use our energy to strengthen them.

A little history

In 1789, against all odds, the American Revolution had succeeded in separating the thirteen Colonies from Great Britain, but though the war was won, the Colonies were not yet a nation. The kingdoms of the Old World were waiting to squabble over the pieces when this insane experiment in self-government failed. In the decade that followed the war this seemed only too likely. During the war the political struggles of the Continental Congress had been scarcely less vicious than the Army's battles against the British, and the deficiencies of a system without a strong executive were clear. But how were the rights of the individual to be protected? Throughout the summer of 1787 the Convention struggled to create a Constitution that the States would approve and for the next two years they fought to get it ratified. Only the promise that the document would be amended to include a Bill of Rights convinced states such as New York and Virginia to sign on. Seventeen amendments were eventually added. The first guaranteed the rights belonging to the people, and of these, the first provision was for freedom of the spirit-the right of each person to practice the faith he or she might choose. The English Civil War and the sectarian wars that had wracked Europe ever since the Reformation were fresh in memory. Colonies like Massachusetts and Maryland were established to ensure religious freedom for those that founded them. But too often, freedom for one religion meant persecution of all others, a situation that could not be tolerated when the colonies were united into a nation. In the 18th century, new ideas were stirring. People sought a faith expressed not in words but in actions, based on freedom, equality, and natural law.

The Revolutionary Response

Today, some Christians praise the writers of the Constitution as models of Christian virtue, and call upon Americans to return to their original Christian ideals. However a closer look at the biographies of those same fathers shows that although they were certainly not Pagans, most of them were not entirely what Jerry Falwell would recognize as good Christians either. In belief they included Deists, free-thinkers, even Freemasons, who believed in the God of Nature and the brotherhood of man. In a handy anthology of writings called The Separation of Church and State we can see what they actually said.

As president, George Washington was careful to speak only of Providence, with no sectarian references. In a letter to the Quakers he wrote:

"While men perform their social duties faithfully, they do all that society or the state can with propriety demand or expect; and remain responsible only to their Maker for the religion, or modes of faith, which they may prefer or profess. " (p. 108)

Writing to a Jewish congregation, he said,

"All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent naturaal rights. For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support We have abundant reason to rejoice that in this Land the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition, and that every person here may worship God according to the dictates of his own heart. In this enlightened age and in this Land of equal liberty it is our boast that a man's religious tenets will not forfeit the protection of the Laws, nor deprive him of the right of attaining and holding the highest Offices that are known in the United States. (p. 110)

Thomas Jefferson, who at one point revised the New Testament to include only Jesus' actual teaching, wrote even more explicitly in his Notes on the State of Virginia.

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. Constraint may make him worse by making him a hypocrite, but it will not make him a better man.,,, Reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error.... It is error alone that needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself... is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than of face and stature... Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a censor morum over each other.... (pp. 51-53)

In 1786 Jefferson drafted the state of Virginia's Statute for Religious Freedom, which became the model for such statutes in many other states. When some wished to substitute Jesus Christ for the "author of our religion", the new wording was rejected and Jefferson took this as proof that "...they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination." (p. 74)

Inscribed on the wall of the Jefferson memorial in Washington D.C. are the words,

"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.,"

In the Treaty of Tripoli, signed in 1797, President John Adams approved the words,

"As the government of the United States is not in any sense founded upon the Christian religion..." (p. 123)

James Madison, who in addition to drafting the Bill of Rights also served as president, had already defended the separation of Church and State when he opposed a move to provide state support for Protestant sects in the state of Virginia. Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects? ...While we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess, and to observe the religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us.....the equal right of every citizen to the free exercise of his religion according to the dictates of conscience is held by the same tenure with all our other rights." (p. 63)

The Founding Fathers are our natural allies in fhe fight to preserve religious freedom. Pagan ideals of free choice and diversity, far from being counter-cultural, are part of America's spiritual mainstream. Law, political philosophy, and national symbolism provide all the elements needed to create a spiritual focus, deeply rooted in American culture and history, with which to strengthen and empower protection for our liberties and work upon the collective consciousness of the people of this land.

Invoking the Mighty Dead

Most traditional societies understand that the community includes both the living and the dead. All the ancestors are honored, but some of them achieve a greater significance, attaining the status of demi-gods. The cult of the ancestors is well known in the Orient, but it was equally important in Europe. In ancient Greece, people made pilgrimages to leave offerings at the tombs of the heroes, and when the heroes helped them, concluded that they must have been the offspring of a god. In early Denmark, offerings were made at the mounds of Frodhi and other famous kings in whose reigns the harvests had been good, and eventually they were identified as aspects of Freyr. In medieval Europe the place of the divine ancestors was taken by the cult of the saints. Wicca continues to honor the Mighty Dead every Samhain. We can see an example of how the dead become divine in the traditions of Haitian voudoo. After a year and a day have passed, the family of the dead person can hire a specialist to perform the ceremony to retirer d'en bas de l'eau, to bring the spirit, or rather the gros bon ange, which is a part of it, back from under the waters of Guinee, and enshrine it in a clay pot that is kept on the altar. If the spirit provides help when requested, it will continue to receive offerings, and possibly eventually be seen as a path of the head deity of the deceased (Deren, 1953). This desire to honor the dead seems to be instinctive. Spontaneous altars spring up where someone has been killed. When the deceased was famous, or the event notorious, as in London when Princess Diana died and in New York City after 911, the shrine building activity assumes major proportions. The practice is rarely conscious. Westminster Abbey, although ostensibly a Christian church, has become a shrine to the Group-Soul of Great Britain and a temple of the Mighty Dead of that land. Everyone whom the British feel to be representative of the best in their country-soldiers, poets, musicians, politicians-is buried or has a memorial plaque there. It is here that the most important national ceremonies take place, and each day hundreds of people make their way deasil around the church, pausing to read the memorial stones and in the process bring to mind the people they honor and energise the ideals they served. If, as many cultures believe, the soul has several parts, it is possible simultaneously for the dead to reincarnate, dwell with the gods, and watch over their descendants. I believe that the gods create us, but we also create them, or rather, to some extent we create the forms in which we perceive them. When posterity invests energy in the personality/identity of an ancestor, it can become the template for a demi-god.

American gods

Godforms can be invented, but they are more powerful and easier to invoke when there is something to build on. For instance, many modern Pagans have found in Lady Liberty an American goddess who can be invoked to protect the liberties which people seek in this land. Even in the 19th century, people called the Statue of Liberty a goddess. They may have thought they were speaking metaphorically, but their instincts were good. In Applied Magic, Dion Fortune states that:

In religions where the gods or the saints are freely represented in pictorial form, the imaginations of the worshippers are accustomed to picturing them as they have seen them represented. When a number of devout worshippers are gathered together, their emotions concentrated and exalted by ritual, and all holding the same image in imagination, the outpoured force of all present is formed into an astral simulacrum of the being thus intensely pictured When this process has been repeated regularly over considerable periods, the images that have been built up remain on the astral. Consequently subsequent worshippers need be at no great pains to formulate the simulacrum; they have only to think of the god and they feel his power. (p. 19)

This is the process that has transformed the Statue of Liberty from the personification of a virtue to a focus of enlightening energy. If what began as a statue can become the image of a goddess, then surely the figures of the Founding Fathers, who not only have personalities and images already, but possess shrines in Washington D. C. and elsewhere and in many cases national holidays, may be perceived as powers on whom we can call.

Deists and Deities

However before we blithely start invoking Washington or Jefferson in our circles, we should remember that the Founding Fathers began as real human beings. We should not assume that because they would respect our beliefs they would share them and recognize the differences as well as the similarities in what we and they believe. Although all of the founding fathers were born and baptised into one or another Christian denomination, as adults few of them were practicing Christians in the sense now understood by those who seek to define America as a Christian Nation. Many of them considered themselves Deists, and Deist ideas and philosophy are clearly visible in the language of the Declaration of independence and other documents. However Deism, as a philosophy, is in some ways even more antithetical to paganism than it is to Christianity. Make no mistake-the average 18th century Deist would consider a Wiccan magical ritual the height of superstition. Where Deism comes closest to Pagan belief (other than in a disenchantment with Christianity) is in its belief in Nature's God. This Deity is revealed by Reason rather than Revelation, and found in the world around us rather than in tradition. This sort of highest common denominator deity, often referred to as Providence, is rather like the higher power of Twelve Step programs. Men such as Jefferson would probably agree that Nature shows a divine plan, and that we can use reason and scientific observation to learn what it is. Neither they nor we believe in hell or predestination, and in general we all hold that our fate depends on individual choice and effort. Another shared idea is that everyone has equal worth and that each person should be free to find his or her own spiritual path, a concept that today has expanded to include all races and genders.

Deist and Pagan beliefs

Freemasonry

Some of the Founding Fathers were also Freemasons, but the Masonic symbols found on our currency were probably intended to invoke high-minded philosophical principles rather than to serve as focus for operant magic. However the approach that many of us take to magic today follows the principles of experimentation and logic that Benjamin Franklin developed for his research into natural phenomena. What I am proposing here is in one sense a cult of the Founding Fathers, but to make them into idols would insult their memories and (assuming that we actually make contact with them) provoke their opposition rather than incline them to help us. We should approach them as friends and allies, neither seeking to constrain nor distort them, but rather to understand and relate as free, equal, and reasonable beings who hope to continue the evolution of the United States towards a more perfect enlightenment and realization of the ideals they served. None of of these men could have seriously imagined Paganism as a competitive faith in America. But even the Christians were vividly aware of the dangers in allowing any single sect or religion to become identified with the State, and recognized that only the laws that protected other religions could be depended upon to guard their own. Connecting with ancestors from a very different time and culture is a kind of astral interfaith work, in which we appreciate and respect our differences and rejoice in those beliefs we can share. A creative tension between disparate opinions has always been both the weakness and strength of our system. E Pluribus Unum - From the Many, One, is the motto they chose for our national Seal. Our nation was founded on the principle that there is value in diversity.

Heroes and Holidays

The United States already possesses a full calendar of holidays that we can use to honor the ancestors. Memorial Day, Flag Day and the 4th of July are national holidays on which we can remember them as a group and reinforce the ideals for which they stand. Presidents' Day offers an opportunity to honor George Washington in particular and the other Revolutionary presidents, Jefferson, Madison and Adams, as well as those who continued the fight for human liberty, including Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (the second of whose Four Freedoms is that of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.). We can make contact with them as individuals on their birthdays. Nor should we forget the Founding Mothers, who kept their feet on the ground and provided the inspiration, support, and in some cases, the ideas that the men expressed. An American altar provides a good focus for ritual or meditation. The stores are full of patriotic-themed merchandise around the 4th of July. If you visit Washington D.C. you can purchase appropriate items at the gift shop of any of the monuments. My altar set-up includes a white damask cloth, an American flag, facsimiles of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and postcards with portraits of whichever ancestors I am honoring. For the elements I have a pewter platter and cup with images of the national monuments, a letter opener in the shape of a Revolutionary War sabre and a quill pen. I also have a statue of Lady Liberty. A simple ritual begins with some moments of contemplation in which to consider the symbols and their meaning, a reading of the First Amendment and/or the words of one of the Founders. Then I close my eyes and visualize the ancestor I am seeking, bringing up in memory the current situation and asking his help in safeguarding the protections he fought for. Then there are a few moments of quiet, when I wait to see if any counsel or insights wil come through. When I am done, I fill the cup with wine or brandy and drink to the Founder's memory. This procedure can be expanded for a group, followed by a feast featuring a 18th century favorites, perhaps from Martha Washington's cookbook. By changing God to gods, songs such as America the Beautiful, and God Bless America can be used as well. A group could also meet in a tavern (pub or bar) and toast each of the Founding Fathers in Samuel Adams beer. If you have the opportunity to visit Washington D.C. make a pilgrimage to the Founders' shrines. Beginning at the Jefferson Memorial, you can walk or drive to the FDR memorial and the Lincoln memorial, finishing at the Washington Monument. Take a flask of brandy or wine, and at each site, discreetly pour a little out at the roots of a shrub or tree and make your toast. From the Washington Monument you can see both the White House and the Capitol. Call on George Washington and mentally open the way for his wisdom to reach both places. In Boston, you may make a similar pilgrimage to sites associated with the New England Founders. Benjamin Franklin's shrines are in Philadelphia. The homes or graves of most of those who signed the Declaration of Independence are marked. Some, such as Monticello and Mount Vernon, have been preserved as monuments to the men who lived there. The people who created this country were pioneers and rebels, risking their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, to establish a nation in which everyone was free to find his or her own path. The least we can do, especially when it is so much to our own advantage, is to carry on the work that they began.

Sources and Resources:
Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen, London: Thames and Hudson, 1953 Part 4 of Chapter 1 provides a description and analysis of the process by which the dead become ancestral deities.

Dion Fortune, Applied Magic, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: The Aquarian Press, 1962 Chapter III, The Group Mind explores the theory behind artificial elementals and god-forms.

The Separation of Church and State, edited by Forrest Church, Boston: Beacon Press, 2004 A collection of writings relating to religious freedom from the period of the Revolutionary War. Available in the gift store at the Jefferson Memorial.

Vincent Wilson, Jr., The Book of the Founding Fathers, Brookeville MD: American History Research Associates, 1974 Includes biographies and birthdays for those who conceived and promoted the idea of independence from Britain, those who dared to think in terms of a single new nation, those who created a unique governmental system expressly for the new nation, and those who translated this new system into the first federal democracy in the world. (from the Introduction)

You will also find valuable information on the web under the names of the individual Founding Fathers, the Bill of Rights, etc. You can find the words to God Bless America and other songs online.

This rally and ritual is organized and sponsored by Caroline Kenner and Chesapeake Pagan Community. For more information, email: caroline@paganreligiousrights.org