Article Launched:10/30/2006 07:43:40 AM EST
Wanted: Witch Justice
Pagans seek to exonerate ancestors
Claims time off for religious holidays cost her job
ANTHONY SPINELLI  
tspinelli@ctpost.com
http://www.connpost.com/localnews/ci_4573684

This Halloween, Connecticut witches are seeking justice for Mary Sanford and others who shared her fate. Sanford, a 39-year-old mother of five children accused of witchcraft by neighbors in 1662 because she drank sherry in the woods, was hanged in Hartford on June 13 of that year for her alleged misdeeds.

Modern-day pagans such as Debra Avery, an eighth-generation descendant of Sanford, and her 13-year-old daughter, Addie, are trying to get official state exoneration for Sanford and others executed for witchcraft in Connecticut during the 17th century.

"She was a grandmother of mine. I'm not sure exactly what she did, but she didn't deserve to hang for it," Avery, a 47-year-old New Preston resident, said Friday.

Avery visited the SubRosa Magick shop on Foxon Boulevard in East Haven with her daughter, who is doing an independent study project on the subject, to talk about her campaign for exoneration with other pagans and Wiccans.

Avery is not a member of a formal pagan group, practicing her faith on her own. But members of the Panthean Temple are standing behind her campaign to exonerate the victims of the witchcraft trials.

"Absolutely, we want to see this happen," said Rapid Cabot Freeman, owner of the SubRosa Magick Shop and producer of the cable access show, "The Witchin' Hour."

Alicia Freeman, Rapid Freeman's wife, host of the show and high priestess of the Panthean Temple, also is supporting the cause.

"We hope we can get the word out by talking about it," she said.
Avery said she at first thought pardons would be a good idea, but learned otherwise and now thinks legislative exoneration may be the more likely action.

"Maybe a pardon is not the right thing. Maybe exoneration is a better word for it," she said.

Greg Everett, director of the Connecticut Board of Pardons and Parole, based in Waterbury, has been in contact with Avery's pagan friend, Anthony Griego, of Hamden, and said a pardon for those accused and punished for witchcraft is not likely.

"It's not in the realm of possibility because we don't do posthumous pardons. Legally, there was no state of Connecticut in the 1600s. The pagans may have to go the queen of England because there was no Connecticut, no United States of America. They've written to me and I've told them we don't do posthumous pardons," Everett said.

However, state Rep. Mike Lawlor, D-East Haven and chairman of the General Assembly's judiciary committee, appeared to have an open mind about it.

He said his panel would have to deal with any legislation aimed at exonerating the witchcraft victims.

"It's an interesting question," he said. "This is about a rush to judgment in that time, tyranny and mob rule."

The Puritans interrogated dozens of accused witches between 1647 and 1663 in Connecticut, and tried and hanged from eight to 11 of them, by various accounts.

Some of those from southern Connecticut include Goodwife Bassett, hanged in 1651 in Stratford, and Goodwife Knapp, hanged in 1653 in Fairfield.

Those deaths preceded by decades the well-known witch hunts of Salem, Mass., in 1692.

The accused witches of Salem have been exonerated in Massachusetts, Avery said. The next step is to win exoneration in Connecticut.

It would also be an act of religious tolerance, some pagans at the magic shop said Friday.

"Why should people be hanged for that?" said Jeannine Fisher, 29, of North Haven, who said she is a polytheist who grew up Roman Catholic.

"I knew from the age of 12 it was not right for me," she said.

Modern-day witches who are up front about their beliefs, such as Alicia Freeman, have their own battles to fight. She is gathering signatures to petition for more religious tolerance in the workplace, so that people of different religions can take their respective holidays off. She described Wicca, or witchcraft, as an ancient, nature-based religion with multiple female and male deities.

Samhain, pronounced "sow-wen," is the Wiccan basis for Halloween, one of the pagan religion's key religious sabbats, or holidays.

Her group has planned to celebrate the occasion with a drum circle and Samhain ritual at Schreiber's Farm in Oxford.

She believes most modern-day witches and pagans practice alone, like Avery has for years.

"For every one of us at the temple, there are nine more who are alone," she said.