Before we proceed, we, as a group must confess that we have consorted with one of the darker powers. "You mean that you're devil worshippers?" Oh, no, our shame runs far deeper than that. "Drug traffickers?" Please, even they have their standards. "Then what?" OK, don't spread this around, but our publisher is a Gemini. We'll give you a moment to recover from the shock.

What is truly sad is that a large fraction of the "Reader Circuit" Pagan Community of Chicago wouldn't have assumed that we were being sarcastic a moment ago. Our story begins a few years before the Shrine was conceived. Our future publisher was feeling a little bit lost; uprooted, one might say. He wasn't adjusting to major city life very well, and didn't even have the comfort of faith to help him adjust to his unwelcome new surroundings. He had just left Judaism, but having left, did not know where it was that he wished to arrive. He knew that he sought a faith more world affirming than the Eastern religions which he had encountered, and less dogmatic than mainstream Christianity. By pure chance, one day, he picked up a copy of the Chicago Reader, and turning to the "notices" section, came across an announcement for a Pagan Coffeehouse event. "Why not?", he thought, never imagining how soon he would get his answer.

As he walked in the door to that first gathering, he couldn't help but notice something a little odd, given the ethnic mix of the city. It looked like a meeting of the Mayflower Society. OK, maybe the poorer relations of the Mayflower Society, but there was only one person of visibly non-Northern European ancestry there and he was waiting tables. No, make that two. Sam was a former Jew, or mishling to be exact, one of mixed ancestry, mostly Southeastern French on his father's side, from near the border with Italy, and mostly Spanish on his mother's side, with a small amount of Irish tossed in for confusion from both parents. And he wasn't enjoying the looks that he was getting, one bit. The fact that he had been out in the sun and was looking more Sephardic than usual probably wasn't helping. Nor would it, in the months to come.

All too often, he would sit down, and search the room for a welcoming look, seeing nothing but cold, hard stares. One one occasion, he heard somebody at a nearby table going on about how "you know what those Italian guys are like - and the French and Spanish ones are worse" ... as he turned and looked right at her. "Ma'am, racism isn't nice", he said. "Excuse me, do I know you?", she asked. "No, but you seem to want to. I'm sitting right here. How could I not hear what you're saying, about a group I belong to - a few of them, actually?" "It's not racism. Italians aren't a race", she insisted, adding that if he didn't like what she was saying, he could go elsewhere, as she launched into a monologue about "what whores the French and Spanish women" were. "Like my female relatives?", he thought. Yes, how strange that he'd take offense.

Not surprisingly, given the bigoted stereotypes being circulated, sexual paranoia would be a common theme. Usually, the rhetoric wouldn't be so direct in its hatefulness, but the glares from those who knew nothing about Sam but the way he looked were visible from the first time he stepped through that door. There would always be some, in fact, more than a few, who seemed to hang on any excuse, however feeble, to accuse him of the worst. And there was something else, a sort of unspoken racism, all too common during the 90s. "We are all equal, but some of us are more equal than others", as the saying went.

This was an era in Chicago when, while Anglo-Saxon and Black college students alike would describe what they wanted to do to their female classmates in the crudest of anatomical terms and many would think this was cute, male students of Southern European and Hispanic descent were getting nervous about the idea of even shyly glancing at a white girl (or a black one either) wherever Political Correctness reigned. All that it took was one paranoid, bigoted overreaction to a nervous request for a date, or even the words "good morning", and the radical feminist concept of "sisterhood" would kick in, with some of the "sisters" manufacturing stories of incidents of alleged inappropriate behavior in order to give the complaint added credibility.

Of course, the stories would often be loaded down with glaring inconsistencies, but when the accused (naively expecting a fair hearing) would point them out to the campus administrators conducting the proceedings, the admins would angrily tell him that they'd be the judge of what was inconsistent. The show trial would continue as before, inevitably continuing on to a verdict that had been decided before the hearing ever began. Not that they would have ever had much of a chance, with witnesses refusing to speak up on their behalf. "We don't want to get involved", was the refrain, conveniently forgotten if, as they clutched at straws, they could find even the most far-fetched excuse to back up the accuser's story. "Better a monk than a street person", the targets of the new racism would say. Better to be dateless than to be expelled.

And better to be silent too, it would seem, in these places where there was no mystery as to where each stood in the pecking order, even as the privileged dared to pretend that they were fighting for equality. If a woman or somebody more clearly "white" objected to what one of the current, slightly darker underclass said, no matter how reasonable the one complained about might have been, he was expected, no, pressured, to be quiet out of respect for the other's "feelings". Instant compliance with this demand was termed "good manners", the dissenter being shouted down and occasionally threatened with physical violence when he continued speaking.

The reverse was most certainly not the case. No matter how legitimately offensive the one higher in the pecking order was, whether she was calling somebody's mother and sisters "whores", or defending the murder of his relatives overseas, she was "entitled to her opinion", an entitlement that those lower in the pecking order found didn't apply to them. That, for some, was clearly the beauty of a system in which freedom of speech was negotiable: it allowed them to stifle complaints of the system's inequities, and to pass off the indulgence of their biases as enlightenment, even as their victims were left seething in impotent rage, with no route to justice left open to them but violence, a route they were too civilised to be able to bring themselves to take.

And that, Sam acknowledged, was a big part of the problem. "When black people complain that they're being treated unfairly, white men are afraid that they're going to be beaten up or shot, or their houses burned down, and white women are afraid that they're going to be raped. When my people complain that they're being treated unfairly, what are 'real white people' going to be afraid of? That we're going to spit in their chalupas? Maybe we'll do their tax returns badly?" Political Correctness was never about anything other than fear - the fears of their own that its supporters caved in to, and fears than they loved to instill in others, to make themselves feel powerful. And neither the Sephardim, nor the French or nor the Italians, were likely to instill fear in anybody.

How overjoyed some of our self-righteous rednecks must have been one day when they found that with a thin mythological overlay and a few of their pet superstitions tossed in, Political Correctness had now been made into a religion, allowing them to hide behind a complaint of "religious persecution" when their behavior was criticised. Better still, it gave them that most precious of things under the conveniently affected ideology that was PC - victim status, as members of an officially recognized "oppressed group", with a victimization myth known as "the Burning Times".

They claimed historical victim status based on a reference to the Salem witch trials, even though there was no evidence to support the belief that their newfound "religion" had ever existed prior to the 1950s, meaning that those who were born on the day when it was created were now barely in middle age, if they were even there. But these were the same people who would seriously argue that a rich Anglo-Saxon girl from Kenilworth was one of society's oppressed, while an Italian-American from Tri Taylor whose father had been killed in one of her granddaddy's factories and was now pounding the pavement looking for a job because he wasn't a member of the "old boys' club", or a Jewish grad student whose last vision of the Appalacian college town he had been in was the sight of a cross bursting into a full burning light on his front lawn, were among society's "privileged". Bizarre claims of victimhood were nothing new to them.

As Sam would put it, "Cain was trying to be Abel".

The name of their newfound religion was "Eclectic Wicca". One of the more convenient features of this religion was its emphasis on a belief in psychic phenomena. An even more convenient one was its casual equating of skepticism with persecution. Paranoid flights of fancy could now be declared to be matters of religious faith, those suggesting that much of this made no sense being accused of intolerance or even of "launching psychic attacks", by those who refused to notice that said critics didn't even believe in psychic phenomena. Good news for those who didn't want to have to grow up, but very bad news for those who had been on the receiving end of abuse. What better motivator has paranoia ever had than bigotry?

As Sam glanced briefly at the clock on that first night, wondering if the evening would ever end, one of the girls sitting under it told him to stop staring at her. When he went toward the bar, trying to get a drink, and politely asked to allowed through, people acted like they couldn't hear him, refusing to let him pass. A few of the women and some of the men complained to him about how close he was standing to them - in a crowded coffeehouse - even as they made way for the man who had just knocked Sam into a table.

"Oh, I'm sorry, were you there?", somebody said, smiling and turning away. "Watch where you're going", one of the people at the table growled at him as he tried to get up, turning a deaf ear when he pointed out that he had been shoved. Off in a corner, he could hear somebody defending the Holocaust, saying that it was payback for the Burning Times. "This was a mistake", he thought, and he got up to head for the door.

"Merry meet", somebody boomed, when Sam was maybe 2/3 of the way to the door. He turned to see an improbable sight: a man of colossal proportions above the waist, standing on spindly, almost spiderlike legs. Sam quickly noted the crutches on either side of him. His name was "Bloodaxe", or that's what he went by. Very few of those present used their real names, Bloodaxe explained, at least not until they felt trust had been earned, and this was not without reason, he said. One of them was facing the loss of her children in a custody battle due to her religion; others had mentioned problems at work when their coworkers found out that they were Pagans. "People here have good reason to be leery of strangers", Bloodaxe said, and Sam wanted to accept that, though it was hard not to notice that those good reasons didn't seem to apply when the newcomers were blond haired and blue eyed, or female. But he let it pass.

Seeing that Sam was feeling a little out of place, he introduced the newcomer to some of his friends, and a few of their interests; all things involving warfare in the case of Bloodaxe, who had picked up his injuries in Viet Nam and talked about his experiences during the war; another person talking about brewing with the crowd as they sampled his most recent batch of mead, a third was teaching people how to make incense and talking abouts its ritual use ... The place seemed to come a little more alive for Sam, and some of those present now seemed a little more friendly.

For a while, much seemed reasonably pleasant, at least by Chicago standards, though Sam was still getting hostile reactions from maybe about sixty per cent of the people he was trying to meet, many of whom were offended that he would dare talk to them. Most certainly didn't get any friendlier when they found out that he was a PhD student with a Physics degree. To merely use a big word which one of them didn't understand was enough to get a hostile reaction out of many of the master race, and this went well beyond that. But, Sam pointed out, there was that other forty per cent who weren't hostile, and it wasn't like he or his family could go back to a home which was no longer there to be returned to. Forty per cent was about as much as he felt he (or anybody he knew) realistically could hope for, when he was not plugged into the local social networks, and couldn't find a more pleasant place to be.

He found the Pagan community somewhat interesting from an anthropological point of view, though as he admitted, from the outset, nothing about this event seemed terribly religious or spiritual. As he put it, it felt "more like a Mensa meeting on amphetamines than anything else", and the only part of that perception that was about to change was that these people and Mensa should be spoken of in the same breath.