Bright Blessings all
It’s been a while, I know but I’ve been busy with life and life is good :o)
You’ve probably already gotten some insight to the situation at hand if you’ve read Silver Crow’s blog -it’s dealt mainly with events leading up to the end of the long friendship/partnership with Uni.
Since the info posted in his blog also applies to how Uni has treated me once Silver Crow declined to take her side in her feud with Aleyna or to trade PPD for Pagan Fyre, I’m not going to repeat anything. If you’re interested in that aspect, you can read about it by visiting http://www.silvercrow.arkansaspagans.com
In this post you’ll be reading my personal dealings with the coven Nefer-per-Nejer (referred to as NPN from this point forward), by which I mean its officers and my experiences/impressions of them as a whole.
NPN is a small coven- and I mean no slight there- it’s a statement of fact. At the time we parted ways the only people in the actual coven were the officers themselves- 4 members total. Of course between April and October they may very well have invited and gained additional members- I wouldn’t know & don’t really care as it’s not an issue for me. (I have better things going on in my life & don’t lose any sleep about their current head count )
To recap from previous posts: we (both Silver Crow and I) had been charmed by Isis and grew very fond of her & the rest of the coven- who seemed warm and welcoming people. I began helping her teach a small group of students along with the senior members of her coven.
I thought I had found a kindred spirit and a friend in Isis.
After I agreed to help teach (one of the conditions of advancement set by my mentor Barbara of Amethyst Moon), Isis offered to give me the rest of my degrees if (and this is a loose quote) my own teacher wouldn’t- please understand that at that stage of my relationship with them, Isis had no real knowledge of what I had been taught and had not met my mentor. Silver Crow and I were both invited to join their coven. He declined courteously because he:
1. has no desire to be in their coven &
2. felt that NPN depended/focused too much on magick and practiced too little spirituality.
After much thought, I agreed to join even though I agreed with him. I talked to my teacher first and let her know that I was teaching and that I wanted to earn degrees from Isis in addition to what I was earning with her because of the depth of Isis’ knowledge of Ancient Egypt. Barbara was fully supportive of the idea of earning additional degrees and happy to know that I was teaching. After speaking to Barbara, I talked to Isis in depth about my decision but made it clear that I would complete training with Barbara first and that any degrees bestowed upon me by Isis would be earned. She agreed though it wasn’t long (3 lessons into me teaching with World Pantheon) before she gave a certificate stating that I had reached the level of 1st Degree. The funny thing is that Isis is not Wiccan and thus has no rightful claim to bestow Wiccan degrees on any student. She claims that she is a hereditary Witch and yet gives degrees…I have been taught that hereditary practitioners do not have degree systems because they don’t believe in them.
Isis, Nebkhperure and Psyche-Bastet had all been invited to be officers in TGR and Isis & Nebkhperure were also invited to be on the PPD board the same day Uni & Wiz resigned from PPD and tried to trade it for Pagan Fyre (Feb 2009).
They all accepted and all seemed very dedicated in getting involved in things (projects, community service ideas, etc) and voted me in as TGR Facilitator late 2008. However within 2 months of accepting their positions in TGR, Isis and Nebkhperure resigned publicly (on the TGR egroup) with no warning whatsoever. When I found out & contacted Isis the only reason I was ever given was the excuse of having too much on their plates- frankly? I think they panicked because of a brainstorming session we’d had at one meeting where we came up with several ideas on proposed community service projects. Let me stress here that these projects were only ideas at this point and no dates were ever decided upon to begin any of them. In fact, we had all agreed that more research was in order and appointed members to do so on only two of all the ideas presented to see which one was the most viable. At no time was anything ever pushed onto either of them to make them feel this way. And (as I informed Isis) had they bothered to speak to me about their feelings before doing what they did, the entire situation could have been resolved easily by postponing even the research until after PPD. Isis ultimately admitted that they had made a mistake in resigning but wasn’t going to recant the statement and by then the damage had already been done .
In typical Isis fashion though- she made up her mind, convinced the others and then they quit. She has a history of this behavior. She told me openly that she did the same thing to her Dragon Myste Coven. She just closed the coven and sent the members an email telling them that she was done. No debate. No chance for any of the members to even attempt to change the behaviors that prompted her decision. One day it was there, the next it wasn’t and a good sized group of people were left wondering what the heck happened. She told me that she intentionally dodged their calls and never returned their emails. Isis’ actions in dissolving the coven caused a rift in the friendship between her and the owners of Friendzco. (if you’ve attended PPD’s, Fall or Spring Fests you’ll know who I mean). A rift that was only healed in early March of 2009- ironically enough, not long before Isis pulled her best scheme yet.
I really should have paid closer attention. If I had I could have forseen not only the TGR event but the subsequent piracy of PPD just by remembering that old adage: leopards can’t change their spots.
To continue, the only thing that they didn’t resign from was the PPD board.
Uni at this time was busy showing her true colors: as zealous as she had been as our friend, she was even more so as our adversary. She decided to include Silver Crow and I in her vendetta against Aleyna and was actively doing anything she could to make things hard for us. It began with petty acts but quickly escalated when Silver Crow and I went to the hearing in March where her youngest son was convicted of his crimes and sentenced. (Again, please see Silver Crow’s blog for details.) It got to the point that Silver Crow turned over temporary group ownership of AAFCC to both Isis and Nebkhperure in order to protect it as Uni was busy deleting or pirating groups that she and Silver Crow had once co-owned or banning him from the ones she left open. It turned out to be a wise move as Uni eventually turned her attention to AAFCC and deleted the files section just because she had donated most of the information there. Please keep in mind that none of what she had there was original work (which she would have been entitled to delete with no fuss from us) but only what she had copied and pasted from other sources!!!
This would be a little like a person deciding to burn down the local library that they had donated books to because they decided they no longer liked the Librarian. One of Silver Crow’s last acts as group owner was in moderating Uni so that she was no longer able to destroy anything else and then he restored the files she had deleted. It was a short lived relief though because one of the first things Isis & Nebkhperure did was to restore Uni’s status as a group moderator even though they knew precisely what Uni had done to the group, was doing to us and to Aleyna which we equated to giving an arsonist a match after they had already torched the building you’d rebuilt once.
Looking back, I think that maybe the mistake was mine. After all, I was the one who told Isis (someone whom I -for some reason still considered a friend and mentor even after what happened with TGR) about the all the things Uni was doing to us and encouraging my husband to seek her advice. After all, they were also friends (even though they didn’t always see eye to eye all the time), he respected her & Isis was helping him with PPD. It could only help him to get another viewpoint on the situation from someone who wasn’t on the front lines so to speak. What a mistake that was. All she ever did was encourage him to let Uni walk all over him and then stab him in the back by taking information given to her in trust to Uni.
She, at some point unknown to us, decided that she didn’t like Silver Crow and couldn’t work with him. Nothing was said to us at all but she followed her pattern: she decided, met with her coven, convinced them and they acted in their own best self interests. All we got told was that Isis felt that if she worked with Silver Crow then she wouldn’t get the PPD event she dreamed of and took the contact information for our speakers (something given to her in trust) to Uni. Working together behind our backs, they promptly took over the speakers, the venue and the date reserved for our event: Which is how Central Arkansas wound up with 2 PPD events.
We’re not certain why she decided that she wouldn’t get the PPD event she dreamed of by working with Silver Crow. With only three PPD board members and two of them belonging to NPN how was that possible? They had the majority of votes!! Maybe Silver Crow didn’t speak to Isis the way she thought he should (not enough butt kissing) maybe she thought she deserved more respect than she had earned…whatever. The end result was the same.
We found out a few days following Ostara 2009 what she had done- an Ostara ritual that we were all at together and where no indication was given of how she felt. In fact, after she told us she wasn’t going to be involved in any other way with PPD planning I asked her straight out if she was still honoring her commitment to host the speakers in her home and she said yes. After much discussion between all involved in Nebkhperure’s living room, Silver Crow and I left Hot Springs thinking that all had been worked out & that things were back on track- Nebkhperure was going to make me owner of AAFCC, he and Isis were to become moderators & he stated that he intended to stay on the PPD board with us. Driving home that day, I decided that though I would honor my commitment & stay on with World Pantheon as a teacher, I was no longer remotely interested in joining NPN coven. I had planned on meeting with Isis face to face to tell her so but was unable (again) to get her thru phone or email. If you can believe it, I actually had to try to go through Psyche Bastet!!!
I can’t begin to tell you how betrayed I felt when I saw the announcement on Uni’s web page a few days later, especially when Isis wouldn’t return my calls or emails (again following her pattern). What really baked my noodle was that this was the same woman who was literally in tears on Ostara because she thought that she was ‘going to lose me/my friendship’. At the time I had believed that she was referring to withdrawing from the PPD board. I never dreamed it was because she had betrayed us the way she did.
Then the trouble with World Pantheon started: I was supposed to present a topic for World Pantheon. Isis usurped it, changed the date of the lesson at the last minute to one she knew I couldn’t make and used my own material as well as the material that I had researched and gave it herself without giving me credit or telling me why I was no longer giving the lesson. She refused to answer the email I sent her asking what was going on, she refused to return phone calls. I, again with no explanation, was removed from being a teacher with World Pantheon (though I later was told in an email from Psyche-Bastet that it was for the mere fact that I am married to Silver Crow). When I tried setting up a face to face meeting with Isis, she came up with excuse after excuse not to see me.
We’ve only seen her and Nebkhperure once more since Ostara: that was the day we went to Isis’ home to confront her about the announcement we had seen. Even knowing in my gut that it was true I had the hope that was a bad joke. The idea & decision to visit her unannounced was all mine.
I knew that if I called her to let her know that I was coming then she would leave or pretend to not be home. It may be an obvious statement but she was very surprised to see us. Nebkhperure was there with the flu & after dealing with the pleasantries we got right to the point. I think she was too surprised to see us to deny anything but realizing that the gig was up and that she had been found out, Isis grudgingly admitted that it was all true.
It wasn’t by any means a pleasant conversation as there were hurt feelings in abundance and a lot of righteous anger but contrary to what has been spread there weren’t any threats to any one’s jobs (on the contrary- we warned Isis that she needed to watch Uni for that behavior as she had tried getting Aleyna fired), no one was verbally abused, no profanity used, no names called and no one raised voice or hand to anyone else. The worst thing that was said was when Silver Crow told Isis that she had no ethics. If requested, we can email the entire conversation to you- it was recorded in order to combat that very sort of thing being said.
On 4/11/09, after coming to the conclusion that they were never going to face me, I sent the entire coven an email officially withdrawing from the school and declining their invitation to join NPN. I gave them my reasons and then did the unpardonable. I questioned Isis on several points of her behavior:
• For months she had been heard to say that she felt Uni’s actions regarding her treatment of Aleyna & her actions against Silver Crow were “unbecoming of clergy”.
• At one lesson for WP, Isis stated quite clearly that Uni had no moral code or ethics and didn’t follow the basic tenets of her faith- Asatru.
• Isis made no bones about her feelings for Moonie either: she thought that he was a charlatan and stated for months that she not only had no use for him but that he had “better look out” if he was ever in the same room as she was and yet she invited him to her home for at least one WP class. I was told by Bert of Seekers Temple, who attended that class, that the sole topic of conversation that day had nothing to do with The Craft & everything to do with slamming both Silver Crow and I. And when Bert tried to question Isis about her sudden change in attitude on both Moonie and I, he was ‘shushed’.
• Not content in ‘banishing’ me, Isis also gave Aleyna and two other WP students their walking papers for no other reason than because they’re friends of ours.
The questions I asked were never answered by Isis. Instead I got a reply from Psyche-Bastet where she told me that Isis “bid me tell you that she does not have to answer to anyone.”
That really raised my internal alarms. Without exception, we all answer to someone. I don’t care what your rank is. So when someone (especially someone claiming the title High Priestess) says something like that and acts as though they are above reproach, the laws of common courtesy and also above being questioned about things they’ve said or done- I start thinking cult. The Goddess helped me dodge a bullet with NPN and I’m grateful.
Isis finally broke her silence right before I sent her my email regarding my resignation. This is what she told me: “We have, as a group, chosen to work with others with whom we find like spirit and goals”
Some food for thought: if after months of deriding someone for having no moral code or ethics, of saying that someone was a fraud and that he “better look out” what does it say for NPN to say that they are of like mind and goals with them?
Just so you don’t think that the actions speaking louder than words thing is solely an Isis/NPN behavior, consider the following actions of several of the group leaders they associate with:
• Uni: for years she has been guilty of tormenting people she doesn’t like- prime examples would be Gypsie Dawn of Enchanted Moon and RiverFire of WytcheHaven. The first she reported to the IRS, with the second she sent law enforcement out to the property several times during their event because Wytchehaven allegedly practices nudism around minors. Uni is also numbering these days among people who support Daniel and Della – and is an active member of his egroup. She has personal knowledge of, knows and claims to be friends with people who suffered irreparable harm at the hands of these individuals over the years and yet associates with them anyway. For months Uni has used her PPD page and each meeting/event she has been involved in as a platform to misinform people about what caused the end of her friendship with us. Her advertisement for months has been that her meetings are a “Silver Crow and Kestrel free event” because of the things that we did to her. We’ve done nothing to her but decide to not take her side against Aleyna. End of story. Contrary to her feelings on the matter, just because we told her we were not taking sides/get involved with her crap did not mean that we were her enemies. She manufactured the entire thing and made it her reality.
• Debra Ravenswood (Heart of the Ozarks PPD coordinator): another member of Daniel & Della’s fan club. She has been told by several different sources (Uni, Silver Crow and numerous people in Fayetteville) about the way that they have conned people, ruined lives and left a trail of financial devastation in their wake and yet has welcomed them both to her PPD- thus giving them the opportunity to repeat past actions even though she has been told that there are outstanding warrants for Daniel’s arrest. Knowing that, she has not turned him in. She has also (to my face and in email) said that Moonie is a fraud on the basis of what she called his false claims of Reiki training and Romany heritage. She also told both Silver Crow and I that a law enforcement friend of hers advised her that Moonie was under investigation for insurance fraud in 2006 for the flooding of his home -this differs drastically from how she advertised him on her PPD this year. Although she told us these things about Moonie and the alleged insurance fraud, she never provided any additional information of the investigation or its outcome. We took it on faith that she was telling the truth- perhaps we shouldn’t have. Debra also told us earlier this year that she was done with Uni because of Uni causing unnamed problems for her in Fayetteville. Bad enough problems that Debra (supposedly) told her off and promptly closed her Multiply account. At some point in the early spring, Debra decided that she was also not going to be friends with us in a fairly rude email and told us that we were not to contact her. We didn’t hear from her again until just after CAPPD when she blasted Silver Crow and threatened us with a law suit if we didn’t remove what she called a slanderous statement from his blog. The statement? Silver Crow posted that we had people disrupt our event to hand him a piece of paper. The paper in question was a supposedly legal document from NPN, Uni and Debra telling us that we were not welcome at events that are supposed to be open to everyone. What this amounts to is that 2 PPD events were using those events to further a Witch War. Debra went one step further and used her PPD site to slam Silver Crow for making a true statement regarding her involvement in the letter.
• Moonie: bad mouthed & then supported those who bad mouthed Uni, Silver Crow and myself in 2007. He was himself victimized by Uni when she used his password to log into, read and delete his emails, unsub him from many groups and to change things on his own group (Phoenix Moon Star Rising. The only reason he even found out about what had happened was because I let him know about what she had done after he made a direct inquiry on AAFCC. He stated that he thought that he had been dropped because he wasn’t active. We corrected that assumption in a private email and told him what Uni had done. Moonie got angry at me for not telling him what had been done sooner and now? Now he’s friends with her. Proving yet again that some people have to keep touching the stove and getting burned before they actually believe that the stove is hot!!
What I’d dearly love to know is how anyone could believe a word that comes from the people listed above. What they do speaks far more loudly than what they say ever could.
I’m not saying that this will happen to you if you associate with any of the people in this post. Only to give another perspective and to educate.
I’m sure that at some point someone will take this post, pick it apart and make fun of it and me. They’ll call me names and say what a bad person I am for telling this to you and try to invalidate me by making themselves feel superior. Let them. It’s been my experience that when you’re attacked for what you say and that those doing it can’t provide a rebuttal with proof to the contrary only insults and name calling and then hide behind an alias then those individuals are afraid of the truth being told.
What they do, what they say are diversions and by them doing so they reveal their insecurities.
2 comments:
Let me leave you with a little message ...
I have heard both sides of the story. I dont take sides, I hear out both parties.
I'm sorry to say that your story is a bit too dramatic. You had way too much time to draw this all up and anyone with common sense, such as myself, could see through this crap.
If you are going to accuse anyone of anything, especially online, you best have physical proof of your ramblings or I will have to contact the right authorities and have both your sites shut down.
You owe this person an apology. You can be arrested for 'Deformation of Character'. Look it up, its in the law books. Personally if it was me ... I would have had you served already.
Syl: You need to get a job, a life and mind your own business. We don't need any more people like you in this world ... there are too many as it is.
Reality
Well said, Maybe now that it has been said that Kes,I and those others they have harmed can heal and prevent others from getting hurt.
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