Jeepers, Creepers, Where'd You Get That Stang?

The man they call Pope Francis was roundly mocked for the bizarre ferula he wielded for the opening of the Synod on Youth on Wednesday.

He was Gandalf. It was a slingshot, etc.

Some wag even modified a photograph to use the fork as a "V" for Vigano.

As far as I know, Catholic commentator Ann Barnhardt was the first to identify it as a stang or Wiccan forked staff.

The stang as such seems to have been invented by mid-20th English occultist Robert Cochrane. Cochrane led the life of an English eccentric, though it would end tragically. He founded two covens (the first broke up due to factional infighting), and maintained an ongoing feud with a rival pagan sect leader. Later he got into a tiff with his family over a claim that he came from a long line of magicians. His Wikipedia entry includes this priceless line:

His nephew, Martin Lloyd, has refuted that the family were ever Witches, insisting that they were Methodists.

Cochrane cheated on his witch-wife, who then threatened to hex him. A few months later he committed suicide by ingesting belladonna on Midsummer Eve. He was thirty-five.

But I digress. 

Sarah Anne Lawless, a contemporary self-proclaimed witch, describes the construction of a stang as follows:

Many make a stang according to Cochrane’s instructions – a tall forked piece of Ash wood with an iron nail in the base, two arrows crossed at near the top and a wreath circling them. This is tradition specific, a stang can be made from any type of wood and instead of being naturally forked one could top a staff with a goat or deer skull or bind antlers or bull horns to the top with rawhide to create the fork. A stang can be any height – from three feet to six feet. I use a three-foot three-pronged Hawthorn staff myself. 

To give it an added function, some witches put a candle between the tines or screw a hook into the wood to hang a lantern from. This is practical as well as representing the light of cunning and wisdom.

From Green Witchcraft III: The Manual, Volume 3

The Bergoglio stang incorporates the requisite iron nail as a crosspiece at the top. Perhaps it could be used to hang a lantern from, representing the light of cunning and wisdom.

Where did he get that stang?

Francis claims that it was a gift from "youth" to be used at the Synod on the same.

Miss Barnhardt posted a picture apparently verifying this.

But if you look carefully, there's another interesting detail. The woman on the left (who according to reports is a not so young thirty years of age) is wearing a red string bracelet, which Barnhardt describes "as a very common talisman in witchcraft/Wicca and Kabbalah, which is basically a hybrid of Talmudic Judaism and witchcraft."

Apparently, it's worn by all the youths.

Is Bergoglio a Satanist? I don't know. I mean it's not like he performs religious rituals wielding a stang or anything.

But to be serious, while in the face of this wicked circus, it's often healthy to laugh, it would be foolish to laugh this off. If the Catholic faith is true, and thus Satan and Satanism exists, if heresy and heretical prelates are on the move, and if Satan is ultimately behind this, as the Catholic Church teaches, why wouldn't we now be seeing such a link?

What do you think heretical antipopes do?

Or, more to the point, what does Satan do with them? 

Read the two recent pieces by Ann Barnhardt here and here.

I think she gets it precisely right:

As I have said and written before, one of satan’s most clever moves has been to foment, encourage and push mentally ill and demonically oppressed people to LOUDLY broadcast insane, ridiculous, totally false “conspiracy theories”. We all know the types and categories. Mind control beams, “chem trails”, shape shifting lizards, underground civilizations, flat earthers, the list goes on and on and on. 

What this has done is make it almost impossible to point out, discuss, and warn about ACTUAL sinister goings-on and actual, honest-to-goodness conspiracies that are very real . . . 

I am morally certain that Antipope Bergoglio’s carrying of a Stang with the iron nail so prominently positioned, into the opening of a farce synod whose entire agenda is the ratification of sodomy, is a clear case of manifestation of satanism. 

And if that makes me a conspiracy theorist, so be it. Some conspiracies are real.