This article is excerpted from the Rocky Mountain Pagan Journal. Each issue of the Rocky M

This article is excerpted from the Rocky Mountain Pagan Journal.
Each issue of the Rocky Mountain Pagan Journal is published by
High Plains Arts and Sciences; P.O. Box 620604, Littleton Co., 
80123, a Colorado Non-Profit Corporation, under a Public Domain
Copyright, which entitles any person or group of persons to 
reproduce, in any form whatsoever, any material contained therein
without restriction, so long as articles are not condensed or 
abbreviated in any fashion, and credit is given the original
author.!

THE HERETIC'S CORNER
(c)1986, Buck Jump

	Greetings, my Pagan friends; may your Gods be well disposed
to you.  May the rain fall gently on your rhubarb.  May the hail
fall in a lake or on a parking lot.  May our little six-legged
friends develop an allergy to your pickle patch.

	Now is the sweet season of our year.  Our Mother the Earth
is pregnant with the harvest to come.  The days are long and the
thoughts of the season are long, long thoughts.  In the soft
afternoon sky the white thunderheads sail serenely on like ships
of dream in dreamland seas.  Surely even such as I can be
forgiven for dreaming a bit, for letting the fancy roam free.

	In dreams I see a world set free.  I see the human race
living in peace, with each one going his own way but with
courtesy to all who go another way.  I see us as one species,
which we are, and all of us acknowledging that fact.  I see each
walking in beauty, with dignity, and respecting the other
person's dignity.  I see us loving one another, helping our
fellow men along their way.  When I dream, I don't mess around -
I rear back and dream up a doozy!

	So much for dreams; back to the world we live in, back to
the life we know.  Before I spring my question for the day, a
little background, a few facts:

	Every one of us must come to terms with his environment and
his heredity.  We all live on one Earth.   That is the main part
of our environment, or at least the location of it.

	We are all human beings, homo occasionally sapiens.  That is
the basis of our heredity.  
	
	Anything that is done to one of us is done to all of us. 
Anything that happens in one place on this planet has some effect
on every place on the planet.

	We are, all of us, stuck with our whole species.  Here we
are with a bunch of people we wouldn't willingly walk down a
country road with.  Indeed, we are as ship- wrecked mariners in a
lifeboat with a bunch we wouldn't sit down to eat a free meal
with.  To jump out of the boat is to drown.  To try to toss those
_______________s out is very apt to upset the boat and drown all
of us.  	These facts are self-evident, axiomatic.

	I have always held that we should all walk the path of life
with our hands outstretched in fellowship with respect and love
for all.  Of course, I have a caveat - keep a Bowie knife handy
in case they haven't all heard the message.

	As the Ultimate is reported to have said when the mountains
were made, "Now for the background".  The present situation is a
mess.  Violence is everywhere.  Not even foolish violence, but
violence without reason.  Surely a leopard is in our streets and
a shark loose in our swimming pool.

	An armed bandit shoots down an unarmed clerk who is
cooperating.  A litigant in court shoots down an attorney.  A
parent beats a child to death.  A driver gets cut off coming onto
the freeway and guns down the chap in the pickup who did the
off-cutting.  An otherwise reasonable young man is annoyed by the
sounds of traffic on a mountain road and starts shooting at the
cars passing.  Those are only a few examples culled from the news
in recent months.  In truth, senseless violence is loose in the
land.

	As it is with the individual, so with groups.  From the
racist fringe movement on to great governments. Violence for the
sake of violence is epidemic.  Each age of history has had a
plague - the plague of this age is senseless violence.  I have
friends of the "born again" persuasion who tell me that it is the
Devil doing it.  I don't think so.  As far as I can determine,
devils are a disorganized bunch.  Satan Mekatrig Lord of Chaos is
a confusion in terms.  Seen another way, that's organized
confusion.  As I see it, the flow of the power of the Universe is
organized and rational.  So it seems to me that any force opposed
to that flow must be disorganized and irrational.  That is to say
nothing of the personal devils within us.  They must have a hand
in at least some of this senseless violence.

	I have other friends who blame it on some as yet
unidentified virus.  Could be, but it's a rare virus that has no
fever, nor nausea accompanying its onset....

	Others hold that it is all explainable by Sigmund Freud and
others of that ilk.  Again I say could be, but what mental
discomboomeration comes on suddenly with no sign of
disorientation nor disturbance until it suddenly manifests itself
in the acute stage?

	For all I know, none of the above are correct.  The fact re-
mains that a wild unreasoning violence is loose among us, a
danger to us all.  The fact is, we are all in the same boat, and
the boat is encountering some heavy weather.  Don't you think we
should do something about it?  I personally can think of a whole
lot of folks who I don;t really care to rescue, but being as we
are all in the same boat, I am sure going to do my best for
them....... But what?

	In case this is all some psychosis, maybe we should engage a
firm of head shrinkers to drag in a trainload of couches and get
everyone to undergo psychoanalysis.  I refuse to consider the
logistics of this.  The idea by itself causes my mind to boggle.

	Or, suppose it is a virus.  In that case when the
virologists and immunologists have a bit of spare time from their
search for the cause and cure of AIDS, they could do the same for
the senseless violence virus.  In view of the fact that we are
all at greater risk from senseless violence than from AIDS, it
might be a worthwhile task.

	Or, just in case the gnostics have some truth in their
ideas, and it is Auld Clootie, maybe a mass general exorcism is
in order.  Once again, my mind refuses to consider the logistics.

	In view of the fact that the cause of senseless violence is
still unknown, we might get a government grant to study the
problem.  Considering the speed that such grants usually get
results, I would expect a definite answer by the twenty-second
century.  Of course, such a grant would have the added advantage
of keeping a large number of researchers out of the pool halls
and off the streets.

	Now I am going to go against my usual custom and make a
suggestion; only a suggestion, mind, and not to be taken as a
dictum, but only as an idea to be considered.  It has been my
observation that there are only two occasions when magic is apt
to work.  One is after all other methods have been tried and
found ineffectual.  The other is when there is no other method. 
Now I believe that I have explored the other methods and found
them impractical if not impossible.  So I feel that I am safe in
saying it's going to take magic to stop this purposeless killing.

	So how to go about it?  What spell, what charm, what
ceremony shall we use?  What power shall we invoke?  What power
evoke?  Magic works, the proper ceremony at the proper time, done
for the proper reason, will work.  True for you, you may well
say, but which ceremony?  When?  Why?

	I just told you.  The proper one.  The one that is proper
for you is the one you yourself believe is proper.  This is not
an essay on morals and ethics, so I refrain from putting in my
two cents worth on what is in my estimation proper.  When you are
fighting a grass fire is no time to discuss what sort of shovel
to use.

	In my dream we were all walking each in his own way, each
helping the others as much as possible.  So here let us not try
to all walk in one path.  No point in the universe can be reached
from only one direction.  Let us rather each from where it seems
most right and comfortable, try by magic means to stop this
senseless violence.  Not-ice I said senseless violence, not just
violence.  Some who follow the old Norse way could hardly be ex-
pected to endorse some anti-violent intention, but I know of none
who do not deplore reasonless violence.  We have our differences,
but surely no one objects to improving all our chances of kissing
our grandchildren.

	So, what I propose is this.  Sometime in the next quarter
year, whenever it seems most proper, let us in our various ways
by whatever means one believes in, try by magic means to stop
this epidemic of senseless violence.

	I have noticed a few things about power on the unseen side. 
For a ceremony to be more than a mere charade, everyone involved
in it must believe in the ceremony and in whatever power is used
in it.  Everyone must believe that the ceremony can and will
work.  Everyone must want the ceremony to work.  If anyone
involved in the ceremony does not so believe and want, that
person will be a dead weight on the others that do.  When I say
everyone, I mean everyone, all, each one with one belief and one
resolve.  What can be done by a group acting in true spiritual
harmony is indeed amazing, but first you must have that true
spiritual harmony.

	That is why I suggest we go at this not as some sort of
super- coven ecumenical pagan group.  I have seen a few of these
"lets all get together" bunches back in the sixties, and they
couldn't even get drunk.

	I personally am in favor of any religion that don't practice
human sacrifice, interfere in the private lives of the
nonbelievers, or use force in conversion.  I love 'em all, but
I'm not fool enough to yoke the ass and the ox together.  So
let's all go, but let's not try to make it a parade.

	That is my suggestion, and my question is why not?  I'd
appreciate your ideas on this, I truly would.  If you have any
ideas on the subject, please communicate them to the editors of
the RMPJ.  Even if the ideas are along the lines of, "You're
Nuts!!", just say why you think so.  I'd appreciate it.

	May your dreams come true; may the wind cool without
chilling, and may you reap a harvest even richer than the seed
catalogue said you would.  May your shadow fall long on the
Earth.  Go in peace, remember your fellows, and with these words
I do part now from thee.
       ________Buck Jump.       ....from RMPJ 8/86