Witch’s Wit Ale to Change Label After Complaints
She was not looking for controversy. Vicki Noble was just looking for a fine ale.
Ms. Noble, who is famous in the pagan and Wiccan communities for her astrology readings, shamanic healing and writings about goddess spirituality, says she discovered Witch’s Wit last week on one of her regular excursions to 41st Avenue Liquors, in Capitola, Calif.
“I like beer,” Ms. Noble said, and as a practitioner of religious traditions that revere the earth and women’s special powers, she also feels a special connection to brewing. “It was the women who brewed beer from ancient times right up to the Reformation,” she says. She thinks some were burned as witches to destroy “the ancient traditions of shamanistic medicine, which in every indigenous culture includes the brewing of medicinal fermented beverages.”
But one does not have to agree with Ms. Noble’s interpretation of history to share her offense at a picture on the label of Witch’s Wit, a limited-edition pale ale — “wit” means “white” in Dutch — produced by Lost Abbey, a division of the Port Brewing Company of San Marcos, Calif.
It was a painting of a witch being burned at the stake.
Ms. Noble went home and wrote to her e-mail list. “Can we stop this brewer from their hate imagery?” read the subject line, in all capitals.
“Can you imagine them showing a black person being lynched or a Jewish person going to the oven?” she wrote. “Such images are simply not tolerated in our society anymore (thank the Goddess) and this one should not be, either.”
Immediately, friends and followers of Ms. Noble began sending complaints to the brewery.
“We have been accused of inspiring violence against women, and we have been compared to the violence in Darfur,” said Sage Osterfeld, a spokesman for Port Brewing. “It has run the gamut from people saying politely, ‘This is offensive to pagans,’ to people saying we are responsible for all that is wrong in the world.”
One recipient of Ms. Noble’s e-mail was Cynthia Eller, a professor of religion at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Ms. Eller is known for her pioneering book “The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory,” which is widely loathed in the pagan community. According to Ms. Eller’s work, today’s pagans exaggerate the historical evidence for the worship of female deities in the ancient world.
The two women disagree on much. But Ms. Eller shared Ms. Noble’s disgust at the use of witch burning — the painting on the label is by the artist Sean Dominguez — to sell beer. This being 2010, she mentioned the matter on Facebook.
As it happens, Ms. Eller is from San Marcos, and her parents still live there. This week, her father, Eldon, visited the brewery and had a taste of the beer — a Belgian-style ale, spiced with grapefruit zest, orange peel and coriander. He enjoyed it very much, his daughter said, and met Vince Marsaglia, one of the co-founders of the brewery.
Soon after her father’s tasting trip, Ms. Eller got an e-mail from Mr. Marsaglia, a reply to one she had sent the brewery. He wrote that he was “totally in favor” of changing the label and that he and his co-workers had been “ignorantly unaware of the mistake” they had made.
And far from being an attack on women, Mr. Osterfeld said, Witch’s Wit is in a line of Catholic-themed beers, like Inferno Ale and Judgment Day, conceived in the spirit of gentle satire by Tomme Arthur, another of the brewery’s owners. Mr. Arthur says he is “a recovering Catholic.”
In his e-mail to Ms. Eller, Mr. Marsaglia also wrote, contritely, that he and his colleagues “would really like to have some kind of contest for a great label.” Mr. Arthur said the board would meet after Halloween to determine exactly how to decide on that new label.
But whatever the means, the incident has made allies of Ms. Eller, often derided as an enemy of modern paganism, and Ms. Noble, its defender. Ms. Noble looks forward to a time when she can, with clear conscience, sample a Witch’s Wit. “I think that would be fun,” she says. “Maybe we can make a ceremony out of it.”
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