ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
October 20
Happy Birthday Selena Fox!
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On October 20, 1949, in Arlington,
Virginia, a woman was born who would go on to found one of America’s oldest
standing Pagan churches, win a genuine federal court battle over a fallen
soldier’s grave marker, and spend five decades defending Wiccan religious
practice in rooms where almost nobody wanted her there.
Selena Fox’s astounding résumé reads
less like a typical occultist’s biography and more like a civil rights lawyer’s,
which is, as it turns out, close to the point. Today, she is a living legend of
civil rights, environmental activism, Wicca, and modern Paganism…
Fox’s path into Wicca ran directly through activism rather than away from it. She helped organize the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, while still a psychology student, and began leading public Pagan rituals the following year. By 1974, she and her then-partner Jim Alan had founded the Church of Circle Wicca, one of the earliest Wiccan organizations to successfully secure federal and state tax-exempt status, a genuinely significant bureaucratic achievement at a time when most of American officialdom had no framework at all for recognizing Wicca as a legitimate religion. The organization's newsletter, Circle Network News, grew throughout the decade into what became, by most accounts, the highest-circulation Neo-Pagan periodical in the world. In 1983, Fox purchased two hundred acres of rural Wisconsin land and renamed the organization “Circle Sanctuary,” establishing both a nature preserve and what remains today one of the longest continuously operating Wiccan churches in the United States.
After Circle sponsored the 1993
Parliament of World Religions, televangelist Pat Robertson devoted a segment of his program The
700 Club to describing Circle Sanctuary as, in his words, a “1,000
acre sanctuary for witches” (what else is new?) The actual property was, and
remains, two hundred acres, a fivefold inflation that stuck around in
anti-Pagan rhetoric for years afterward regardless of the correction. It's a
small but telling detail about how numbers attached to minority religious communities
tend to travel: once a dramatic figure enters wide circulation, the truth
rarely catches up to it.
Fox’s most consequential fight
arrived in 2006, and it began with a death rather than a doctrine. Sergeant Patrick Stewart,
a Nevada Army National Guardsman and practicing Wiccan, was killed in
Afghanistan on September 25, 2005, when his Chinook helicopter was shot down.
When his widow, Roberta Stewart, requested a pentacle, the five-pointed star
that serves as Wicca’s primary religious symbol, be placed on his
government-issued memorial marker, the Department of Veterans Affairs refused.
Wicca simply wasn't on the VA’s approved list of thirty-eight recognized
religious emblems, a list the agency had been sitting on requests to expand for
nearly a decade. Fox, as senior minister of Circle Sanctuary, worked directly
with Americans United for Separation of Church and State to take the fight to
federal court. The lawsuit, “Circle Sanctuary v. Veterans
Affairs,” was filed on November 13, 2006, representing Roberta
Stewart alongside Circle Sanctuary, a second Wiccan military support group, and
two additional plaintiffs: Karen DePolito, widow of a Korean War veteran, and
Jill Medicine Heart Combs, whose husband remained in a coma at a VA hospital
throughout the proceedings. The pressure worked. On April 23, 2007, the VA
formally added the pentacle to its approved list of emblems, a genuine,
documented expansion of religious liberty on government-issued headstones that
stands today, available to any Wiccan veteran's family who requests it.
The spiritual tradition Fox built at Circle Sanctuary evolved considerably across those same decades, tracking her own widening studies. What she originally called Circle Wicca in the 1970s became Wiccan Shamanism through the 1980s and 1990s, as Fox incorporated cross-cultural shamanic practice and transpersonal psychology alongside older Wiccan folkways, before she renamed it again at the turn of the millennium to Circle Craft, distinguishing her specific synthesis from the many other shamanistic strains of Wicca that had emerged elsewhere by then. The tradition's stated core principles, Harm None, Be of Service, and Live in Balance, read as deliberately simple ethical commitments rather than elaborate doctrine, consistent with a priestess whose public work has always leaned more toward practical advocacy than esoteric theorizing.
Fox’s work didn't stop at legal
advocacy. She holds a graduate counseling degree alongside her ministerial
credentials, writing her 1995 thesis specifically on the intersection of Pagan
spirituality and twelve-step recovery programs, and later founded Circle
Cemetery, a twenty-acre green burial ground that remains in active use.
Robertson's inflated acreage claim turned out to be almost beside the point.
What Circle Sanctuary actually became, patiently, over five decades and one
federal lawsuit, wasn’t a sanctuary for anyone’s fears about witches. It was
simply what Fox set out to build from the start: a legally recognized American
church, with a cemetery, a recognized clergy, and now, a government-approved
symbol on its veterans’ graves.
Happy Birthday to Selena Fox—a true
hero and civil rights warrior!
The
Encyclopedia Of Wicca And Witchcraft
By
Raven Grimassi | Llewellyn Publications
Raven Grimassi’s The Encyclopedia
of Wicca and Witchcraft, published by Llewellyn, devotes a dedicated entry
to Fox, tracing her founding of Circle Sanctuary alongside the broader
landscape of modern Wiccan traditions, lineages, and terminology she's spent
her career helping to formalize and defend. Grimassi, himself a respected and
prolific voice in Italian witchcraft traditions and modern Pagan scholarship,
built the encyclopedia as a genuine reference tool rather than a devotional
text, covering practitioners, historical figures, ritual tools, theological concepts,
and organizational history across the full breadth of contemporary Wicca and
witchcraft.
What makes the book worth pairing
with today's post is the context it provides around Fox’s place in a much
larger story. Circle Sanctuary didn’t develop in isolation, and Grimassi’s
entries on the broader Pagan movement's organizational history, its
relationship to earlier occult revival currents, and its slow, often
contentious path toward legal and social recognition in the United States help
situate Fox’s own achievements, the tax-exempt church status, the pentacle
victory, within the decades-long institutional struggle that made them
possible. Readers who finish today's post wanting to understand how unusual it
actually was for a Wiccan organization to secure federal recognition in 1974
will find that context here, alongside entries on the dozens of other
traditions and lineages that make up the modern Craft.
This is a reference work meant for
looking things up rather than reading cover to cover, and readers wanting Fox’s
own voice directly should seek out her own writings and Circle Sanctuary’s
extensive online archive of her articles, including her firsthand account of
the Veteran Pentacle Quest. But for readers of this column who want a single
volume that places Selena Fox properly within the wider landscape of modern
Wicca, Grimassi’s encyclopedia remains a genuinely useful place to start.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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