Every minute of every day someone, somewhere is persecuted and even killed for their beliefs or behaviours. A depressing opening sentence, for sure, but so too is the news that eleven elderly people in Kenya have been burned to death for allegedly being Witches. The eight women and three men were aged between 80 and 96 years old, and the mob—it’s always a mob, amorphous, anonymous, cowardly, evil—dragged them out of their homes and burned them individually and then set their houses on fire.

As a bogeyman myself, that is to say as a Witch and a Pagan, I pray for the world. I actively engage with it, trying, through direct action both personal and collective, to make it a better place for everyone. Sometimes, I admit, I wonder why I bother. Especially when I hear stories like this one. I lose faith, I lose hope, if only for a few hours or a day before recovering all that is good by recognising a particular light in the eyes of my lover and my friends, a light I identify with, a light that shows me I am not alone.

But in those periods of depression and despair brought on by what some would describe as an excess of feeling, a terrible anger rises up inside me, an anger that wants to do things that run counter to my usual instincts and beliefs. At those times I want to scream and roar. I’m there, right now, as I type these words.

I grieve for those old people with all my heart. As for the bastards who murdered them, I hope they burn themselves, for all eternity. I don’t often feel that way. I won’t feel that way tomorrow. But I will still feel the burn of the injustice, the evil, and wonder why men do what they have always done and, it seems likely, always will. That burning has always been with me, as has the question. I think it will be until the day I die.

Okay, this has to be the strangest headline I’ve come across in a while: Hey nonny no, no, no: Goths and pagans are reinventing morris dancing, from The Independent, with the sub-heading, ‘Why the newcomers are putting the fear of God into the traditionalists’. The ‘traditionalists’ are those who perform morris dancing without any appreciation or awareness of its Pagan origins, which they dispute. The dance we recognise today was cleaned up and given a Christian makeover in the late 19th century, completing the divorce from its original celebratory and ecstatic Beltane purpose as a fertility dance. What’s remarkable is that it survived so many centuries in any form whatsoever when so many aspects of our Pagan past were eradicated by the Church.

But the Pagans (not sure about the goths) can argue they’re the traditionalists, because their claim to the dance goes back long before the birth of Christ. Now, surely there’s room in a modern pluralistic society for the enjoyment of morris dancing by those who wish to stick to the 19th century reworking, and those who wish to restore its sacred ritualistic function and approach it from a spiritual perspective? All sides, after all, seem to have great fun and for anybody watching it’s a lot of fun as well. The quest to claim victory over the definition of the ‘one true meaning’ kind of misses the point. Whether we’re Christians or Pagans or anything else, many of us might say, live and let live. Or, in this case, dance and let dance.

But I noticed in the article linked to above that the usual denigration of Paganism through denying it a capital letter P is in force. This is common, and another thing people passionately argue over to the absolute bemusement of anyone on the outside looking in. Personally I no longer have time for the lower-case (I used to use it myself) when Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and other faiths and their followers are all capitalised irrespective of how many sub-groupings they have. Indeed, some of those are capitalised as well—Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses…

Ultimately, this isn’t something that will change the world but is one of those little and subtle ways in which Pagans and Paganism (and Witches) are ranked lower in credibility. But from the simple perspective of language alone, the use of the lower-case in this context is a glaring inconsistency. You expect tradesmen and women to be referenced in the lower-case—plumbers, carpenters, cleaners—but not religious groups and believers. I’m open to other people putting forward a different take on this—I wouldn’t condemn you for choosing p over P, let’s not be silly—but words, like dances, do have meaning and history. And in most articles where we see the lower-case paganism, it’s virtually guaranteed that the writers are following a long-established convention without giving it any thought whatsoever.

I wonder, though, if a child at school wrote Paganism instead of paganism, would he or she likely be ‘corrected’ by the teacher, who nine times out of ten would be ignorant of the significance of the word to many of us? I know that if wrote christian, muslim, islam or christianity in an essay at school, I would most definitely have been pulled up on it. Rightly so. Because it looks wrong. And it is. Well, pagan and paganism and witch look wrong to me. There’s one exception of note to the lower-case imposition, and that’s Celtic—always a capital C. I’ve no idea why that should be, especially when you consider those we call the ancient Celts never referenced themselves as such. But it only goes to further strengthen the arguments of the ‘upper-case for all’ lobby, and all we who belong to that lobby can do is wilfully capitalise with intent…

So, what of goths? Well, goths are not defined with any essential reference to religion at all. They aren’t intrinsically, necessarily spiritual. They aren’t defined as a religious group; they are a sub-culture. A goth may or may not be religious. So I’d say lower-case unless starting a sentence with the word—same as with gothic, which is primarily a literary genre as well as a descriptive label (ie. the house had a gothic appearance). But maybe others out there want to argue differently where goths are concerned. Or maybe you agree with my reasoning? I’d apply the same to being gay, or vegetarian, or left-handed, or dyslexic, or disabled, or black, or… Well, the point is made, I hope.