Bele Chere
Help us break new ground for Wiccan religious rights -- and enjoy Asheville's annual Bele Chere festival! For the first time ever, a Wiccan non-profit organization -- Coven Oldenwilde -- has been approved to run a service booth at the Southeast's largest street festival, Bele Chere, on Friday, July 29, and Saturday, July 30.
Coven Oldenwilde will be one of the two or three non-profits authorized to sell the wristbands that allow festival attendees to buy alcohol. These non-profits will get 25-30% of the wristband proceeds at the end of the festival. Considering that Asheville's booming microbrewery industry has won the town the title of "Beer City, USA" for two years running, we expect to sell quite a few wristbands and raise a goodly amount of much-needed funds for Coven Oldenwilde to continue its educational, charitable, advocacy, etc. work.
Volunteer with Coven Oldenwilde during Bele Chere, and you'll get to wear (and keep) the Witchy t-shirt Lady Passion has designed (click t-shirt image at left to view larger). The 13 symbols represent Wiccan values and beliefs, a kind of shorthand visual aid for explaining the Craft of the Wise to non-Wiccans. The following weekend, we will hold a Lammas Sabbat/thank-you BBQ at the Covenstead for all volunteers on Saturday, Aug. 6, from 2 pm until.Like most area Pagans, we've long found it more than a little galling that Bele Chere -- whose name is an old Witch word meaning "hospitality, good cheer", as we noted in The Goodly Spellbook -- seemed increasingly saturated with evangelical booths and, worse, ranting street preachers who take over the Vance Monument every year and abuse the First Amendment by spewing hate against gays, women, Witches, Democrats, etc. Well, apparently we're not alone in that feeling: The new official organizers of Bele Chere, charged by the city with reforming the remote bureaucratic affair most locals complained the festival had become, made a point of inviting us to apply for a non-profit service booth.
So, this will be one time when all you really do have to do to change the world is show up and wear a T-shirt!
Meanwhile, you'll also be helping to look at each customer's ID to confirm they're of legal drinking age, take the couple of bucks or so that the wristband will cost, then snap a wristband around the customer's wrist. That's it -- pretty simple! We don't even have to set up the booth ourselves. Volunteers do have to be over the age of 21, and can't drink alcohol before or during their shift. (The rules say nothing about after.)
The more volunteers we have, the more spare time you'll also have to shop, people-watch, dance, gorge on funnel cake, etc. The booth will be open Friday, July 29, from 11:30 am to 10 pm, and Saturday, July 30, from 9:30 am to 10 pm. We especially need folks who can work either or both evenings, after 5 pm, since that's when we're required to have 5 volunteers present in the booth (during the daytime we need only 3).
If you would like to volunteer, please let us know before July 1 at oldenwilde@oldenwilde.org. Tell us the day(s) and approximate times you'll be available, and your T-shirt size.
Correspondence course
We just couldn't ignore the urgent pleas from all over the world anymore! So Lady Passion and *Diuvei are hard at work creating a correspondence course in Wicca. It's called "Coven Oldenwilde's Art Magical Academy," and we intend it to train students in traditional Witch skills far more effectively than the superficial correspondence courses that seem to be proliferating these days. It will include three levels: The first level will focus on The Goodly Spellbook, the second level will be the series of 13 classes listed below, and the third will focus on Lady Passion's new book Magical Mentor: Wise Ways to Counsel Anyone (not yet published -- we're working on that -- but it will definitely be available to COAMA students). This course will be an updated and expanded equivalent of the Outer Court series of classes we taught for decades to select students, and successful graduates will be eligible for formal initiation into Coven Oldenwilde. Here are the Art Magical Academy 2nd-level class titles (not necessarily in order):
