The invocation that started the Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly's Tuesday meeting was a little different than usual: Instead of espousing the ideals of Christianity, it carried a message of Satanism.
It was the culmination of recent discussion at the Assembly around whether to keep up with the tradition of opening meetings with prayers, or whether doing so was excluding those who hold different beliefs.
In June, the Assembly discussed an ordinance aimed at doing away with invocations before meetings, but not enough members voted in favor of introducing it.
Instead, the borough has decided to make the reading of invocations more equitable. In the past, said Assembly President Blaine Gilman from Kenai, a group of pastors would usually give the names of members who would give the invocation. Now, it's on an open, first-come, first-served basis: someone who wants to give an invocation can contact the borough clerk and sign up to do so.
The woman who gave the invocation at Tuesday's meeting, Iris Fontana, called up Satan for Assembly members and the audience.
"Let us embrace the Luciferian impulse to eat of the tree of knowledge and dissipate our blissful and comforting delusions of old," said Fontana, who the Assembly identified as a member of the Satanic Temple. "Let us stand firm against any and all arbitrary authority that threatens the personal sovereignty of all or one. That which will not bend must break, and that which can be destroyed by truth should never be spared its demise. It is done. Hail Satan."
During Fontana's invocation, one Assembly member walked out of the room and returned when she was finished speaking. But others remained, listening, not much different than any other meeting. One staff member sat down during the prayer, and another staffer stood with hands on hips.
Aug. 15 marks the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, when the Catholic Church marks the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven. The same day, a group called the Church of Ahriman has scheduled a ticketed event at the Oklahoma City Civic Center Music Hall, which is run by the city government. The event involves the attempted corruption of a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary using sulfur, menstrual blood, and the ashes of desecrated and burned pages of the Koran. It involves the consumption of a pig’s heart and the “entrapment” of the Virgin Mary in a ritual triangle, in an attempted parody of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. The statue will be smashed.
Before the ritual, the group will hold a black mass. The black mass, often connected to witchcraft and demonic worship, is a sacrilegious ceremony that invokes Satan and mocks the Mass. It often involves the desecration of the Eucharist, generally by stealing a consecrated host from a Catholic Church and using it in a profane sexual ritual. Daniels (leader of the group) said that the event is legal.