A Wiccan Memorial at Arlington:-

Independence Day draws many tourists to Arlington National Cemetery, but yesterday brought something completely different to the hallowed burial ground of presidents, solons and soldiers.

Wiccans.

America’s first Veteran’s Administration-approved gravestone containing both a Christian cross and a Wiccan pentacle was dedicated at the cemetery across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.

The gravestone marks the resting place of Jan Deanna O’ Rourke of Port Charlotte, Fla., a Wiccan who died in 2005, nine years after her husband, Capt. William H. O’Rourke, a Vietnam veteran, who provided the entry ticket to Arlington for the couple. The O’Rourke gravestone is the fruit of a religious discrimination lawsuit against the VA brought on behalf of Circle Sanctuary — one of the largest Wiccan churches in the country — by the activist group Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Energetic lawyers, tenacity and technology paved the way for the history-making headstone, which until yesterday had a Christian cross on the captain’s side and a blank where the Pentacle — a pentagram within a circle — now is engraved.

“The Internet provided a way for Wiccans, Pagans and others to find out about this injustice,” said the Rev. Paula Johnson, a friend of O’Rourke’s and a minister in the Wiccan church.

Wiccans — sometimes confused with witches or warlocks or even that goal thingy in the sport of cricket — follow an earth-centered religion that revolves around the cycles of nature. Wicca is duotheistic, following a God and a Goddess sometimes symbolized as the Sun and the Moon. A key belief is that the gods are able to manifest in personal form, most significantly through the bodies of priestesses and priests. And sometimes in the form of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.

Detractors have associated Wiccans with black magic and Satanism and categorized them as a cult, leading many practitioners to conceal their faith for fear of persecution. Revealing oneself as Wiccan is sometimes referred to as “coming out of the broom closet.”

Every manifest force is seen to express one of the four archetypal elements — Earth, Air, Fire and Water (not to be confused with the ’70s R&B band that recorded “Shining Star”). Some add a fifth element, spirit, which handily completes the five-pointed pentagram that serves as the Wiccan logo.

One line of Wicca does have a background in religious witchcraft (and even includes a broom as a magical tool), but this is not mainstream Wicca. As practiced by a retired British civil servant named Gerald Gardner, who popularized Wicca in 1954, it includes the practice of working in the nude, also known as skyclad.

But I digress.

Skyclad or not, Wiccans allege they have been discriminated against. A U.S. Army chaplain was dismissed from his post in Iraq earlier this year after switching his religious affiliation from Pentecostal Christianity to Wicca and applying to become its first military chaplain.

On Feb. 16, 2005, Jan O’Rourke, a successful businesswoman and probably the only Wiccan serving on the Florida State Democratic Committee, sent an e-mail to her friend Johnson. “At this point, if I was to die tomorrow, I would be eligible for a Wiccan service, just no pentacle on my headstone,” O’Rourke wrote. “Hopefully this will be changed before my demise.”

But she died eight days later, and her interment at Arlington next to her husband drew a blank on the headstone.

On April 23, lawsuits brought on behalf of an estimated 134,000 adult Wiccans in the United States ended in an out-of-court settlement with the VA. The O’Rourke gravestone is one of the first four markers with pentacles issued by the government agency, but the only one that displays a cross on one side and a pentacle on the other.

Yesterday’s ceremony drew about 40 souls, including Wiccan priestess-author Margot Adler and Wiccan Iraq veteran Capt. Richard Briggs and his wife, April Brennan. Speakers at the service all spoke on themes acknowledging the forces of nature.

Johnson was relieved and exhilarated that her friend was finally granted a dying wish. “I was not prepared for the blatant discrimination that we went through, so she had to endure two and a half years of non-recognition,” she said.

“I feel Jan is at peace,” Johnson added. “Her life was important, but her death had an impact, too. That makes me happy.”

(via silverwitch)