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The Bench. I was a young man with round wire rim glasses and unruly brown hair that flared out past his shoulders.

He'd been a minister of Anton LaVay's Church of Satan at the age of 18 and authored the book Real Magic.

At just 25, he'd become a leading voice in another type of witchcraft known as Neopaganism.

For the past 2,000 years, the major religious forces in the West have been actively trying

to stamp out the people and the beliefs of indigenous pagan religions throughout Europe

and wherever they went in the world.

This is why Isaac Bonowitz had started one of the first civil rights organizations to actively defend people who were receiving this kind of persecution. He called it the Aquarian Anti-Defamation

League or A-A-D-L. Their logo was a fist, enclosed in a pentagram, with the slogan,

Never Again the Burning, in reference to the traditional method of executing

witches burnt at the stake. Two years after starting the AADL,

Isaac received a call from a fellow pagan who was in trouble, the owner of an

occult bookstore in Dayton, Ohio. He told Isaac he was being mistreated by

local police officers. They were accusing him of heinous and outrageous acts.

He said that he feared for his life.

After Isaac got off the phone, he promptly typed up a letter to the Dayton Field Office of the FBI to inform them about the man's allegations.

In the letter, he said that the owner of the occult bookstore went by his religious name, Lance Collins.

But during their phone call, the occult bookstore owner told Isaac his real name, John Todd.

...