Prison Book Project
Dear Readers:
While most practitioners of Norse/Germanic religion do not practice a form that is racist, white supremacist, or Neo-Nazi, a certain percentage still do — and a significant part of that percentage is currently or formerly incarcerated people. In fact, prison is the depressing and desperate environment in which many of them learn their racist beliefs. A large number of Northern religious practitioners who have committed violent crimes outside prison are former prisoners who learned violent versions of this otherwise healthy faith while incarcerated.
We can’t solve the whole problem, but we can take a good stab at one small piece of it. The book Candles in the Cave: Northern Tradition Paganism for Prisoners has been written just for this purpose: giving prisoners a manual for this religion that is nonracist, nonsexist, nonhomophobic, and in general promotes tolerance rather than hate. It is also specifically designed for the incarcerated person’s experience, with prayers to the Gods specific to their needs, rituals that can be done with nothing more than pencil and paper, walking meditations for the yard, and visualization exercises for spiritual journeying in a cell. It’s built for the purpose of giving hope rather than revenge, and assisting personal evolution rather than shoring up walls of smoldering anger. The book is available for prisoners to order at printing cost plus shipping—the author has waived all royalties for books shipped to prisons—and we even allow them to pay for them with stamps. However, that’s not enough.
Our goal is to get a free copy to every prison chaplain in the country who will accept it, and encourage them to get it into the prison libraries. As there are around three thousand prisons in the U.S., that’s a big goal and we need your help to do it. We’ll do the ordering and the shipping, but we need money to pay for that many books and that much shipping. If you want to help discourage racism and Nazi beliefs among Pagan and Heathen prisoners, please donate to our cause! We’ve already shipped out 54 copies as of this posting, and we have 40 more to send out, but that’s only a drop in the bucket. We need your help.
If you want to help further, you can find out where your local prison is, who the chaplain may be, and ask them if their Pagan population would be interested in a free copy of this book. We hope eventually to have a whole series of books specifically for Pagan prisoners. Heather Awen has already written the Celtic-religion counterpart to Candles in the Cave—Steel Bars, Sacred Waters. We’re also working on a Wiccan booklet for same-sex prison covens, and a book of spiritual resources for incarcerated Pagan transwomen. We’d like to put out books for Hellenic and Kemetic prisoners as well, but we need help there too, in the form of practitioners who would be willing to contribute writing to those books.
If you would like to help with any of these issues, please email us at prisonbook@churchofasphodel.org.
Just because someone is in prison does not mean that the Gods have abandoned them, and in fact they need the Gods more than ever. We want to support this, and if possible make a small change to Pagan culture on the “inside”. Every Pagan or Heathen who walks out of prison not filled with hate is a victory. Help us to create more victories.
-The First Kingdom Church of Asphodel
