Witchcraft weddings are all the rage in Australia now that all states and territories have repealed laws that outlawed the observances of witches, wiccans, shamans, goddess worshippers and druids.
Four people with experience of the occult have qualified as marriage celebrants and are offering witch weddings or "handfastings," news reports said yesterday.
"The calls are coming in thick and fast and we've all been inundated with inquiries for weddings since we've been appointed," pagan priestess Ann-Marie Cloke told Australia's AAP news agency.
In a handfasting, the hands of the bride and groom are bound together with ribbon and they are jumped over a traditional broom.
Pagan Awareness Network (PAN) coordinator Gavin Andrew said the shaft of the broom and its bristled head symbolized the joining of the man and the woman.
Melbourne-based Cloke said she had requests to perform legally binding handfastings from as far away as New Zealand.
"It's a thrill to do," she said. "We're not scary people. We might have our seasonal worship stuff, but it's no different from how other people celebrate Halloween or Christmas."
Last month Victoria became the last jurisdiction in Australia to legalize witchcraft by repealing the Vagrancy Act. On the statute book since 1958, the act had outlawed "fortune telling and pretending to exercise witchcraft" as well as "any occult of crafty science."
The act had threatened pagans with punishment for practising "any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration."
PAN's Andrew said that at the 2001 national census 11,000 had identified themselves as pagans with 8,700 declaring themselves witches.
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
Australians were downloading virtual private networks (VPNs) in droves, while one of the world’s largest porn distributors said it was blocking users from its platforms as the country yesterday rolled out sweeping online age restriction. Australia in December became the first country to impose a nationwide ban on teenagers using social media. A separate law now requires artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot services to keep certain content — including pornography, extreme violence and self-harm and eating disorder material — from minors or face fines of up to A$49.5 million (US$34.6 million). The country also joined Britain, France and dozens of US states requiring
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
STILL IN POWER: US intelligence reports showed that the Iranian regime is not in danger of collapse and retains control of the public, casting doubt on Trump’s exit Nearly every US Senate Democrat on Wednesday signed a letter sent to US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth requesting a “swift investigation” of airstrikes on a girls’ school in Iran that killed scores of children and any other potential US military actions causing civilian harm. Reuters reported on Thursday last week that US military investigators believe it is likely that US forces were responsible for the Feb. 28 strike on the school, as US and Israeli forces launched attacks on Iran. “The results of this school attack are horrific. The majority of those killed in the strikes were girls between the ages
RSS