Selena Fox

Taken from the Kitchen Witch Forum: Selena Fox is an ordained Wiccan minister and qualified psychotherapist, as well as influential and prominent public speaker on multifaith platforms. In 1974, she, along with others, founded the Circle Craft Tradition, based since 1983 at the Circle Sanctuary, a 200 acre Nature Reserve in south west Wisconsin. This site was specifically created as a pagan retreat. She was also one of the founders of the oldest nature spirit festivals in the U.S, the Pagan Spirit Gathering. She has founded many networks for the benefit of pagans throughout the USA and globally during the course of her work.Selena was born in Arlington, Virginia in 1949, she attended her first pagan ritual at the age of 21. Since then, she has become a well-known media spokeswoman. She graduated from the College of William and Mary with a BSc Psychology with honours in 1971, and with a Masters Degree in Counselling from the University of Wisconsin in 1995. Her thesis there was When Goddess is God: Pagans, Recovery, and Alcoholics Anonymous. She is a published author, and is the editor of the Circle Magazine, originally the Circle Network newletter, she also has several audio recordings with chants, meditations and discussions.Her style of spirituality, and that of the Circle, is very much geo-centric. She was raised in the countryside, as a child she learned the names for many of the plants and trees around her. At school she was introduced to the ancient Greek and Roman myths, and she began to compare these religions with the patriarchal Baptist faith in which she was raised, she became more and more disillusioned by the attitudes of the Baptist Church, especially in their views towards women and women as clergy. By her late teens she had begun to study paraphycology, psychic phenomena and the Tarot. It was whilst she was working on her post-gradute studies that she met with a practising witch, and was drawn in by the similarities between wicca and her own nature based spirituality.She studied with several traditions, and within a few years she had worked her way to a role as High Priestess. She met her first husband, Jim Alan, at a psychic fayre in 1974, and within a year they had founded Circle Wicca. By 1978, Selena had succeeded in creating an official non-profit Wiccan Church, the Church of Circle Wicca, changing the structure of the Circle from that of a coven, to that more akin to a regular church, with a board of directors and an ordained ministry. She was married to Jim Alan for ten years before they parted. She is now married to Dennis Carpenter, with whom she runs the Circle Sanctuary and Circle Magazine.The rise of paganism in the seventies meant that there were many people who were attracted to the pagan ideals, but were rather off-put by the Garnerian and Alexandrian style of Wicca. Selena and her then husband and high-priest had moved to fill that gap. Nature spirituality and environmentalism are the general themes. Her public-speaking engagements have covered talks to those in the pagan community, but she is also an activist for religious freedoms, environmental matters and civil rights, speaking on the international scale, with more than forty years experience in these areas. She is a member of several interfaith organisations, and has written and performed interfaith ceremonies, some held at the Circle Sanctuary, some at other venues. She continues to work in counselling on interfaith matters, from an individual and family level, right up to whole communities. She is one of the 250 members of the Assembly of Religious and Spiritual Leaders, which is itself associated with the Parliament of the World's Religions. She serves as a Wiccan consultant to chaplains in public service, including within the military, hospitals, prisons and educational insitutions. She has served as an advisor to the Pentagon and US Department of Justice. PERIODICALS:*Circle Network News. Editor, publisher and primary contributor of Circle Sanctuary's newsletter/newspaper from 1978 to 1997.*Circle Magazine. Editor and publisher of the quarterly magazine replacing Circle Sanctuary's newspaper in 1997.BIBLIOGRAPHY:* Circle Magick Songs (1979) with Jim Alan. Circle Publications.* Goddess Communion: Rituals and Meditations (1988). Circle Publications.* Planetary Healing Rituals: Meditations, Rituals & Prayers for a Healthier World (1991). Circle Sanctuary.DISCOGRAPHY:* Circle Songs and Chants - Jim Alan & Selena Fox (self-produced cassette)* The Magickal Movement: Present and Future - panel discussion with Isaac Bonewits, Margot Adler and Robert Anton Wilson (ACE cassette)* Magick Changing the World, the World Changing Magick - panel discussion with Bonewits, AmyLee, Jeff Rosenbaum and Robert Anton Wilson (ACE cassette)SOURCES:selenafox.comcirclesanctuary.orgcontroverscial.comWikipediaPICTURE:selenafox.comBlessed beBlaidd