By Kenneth Heard for the Arkansas Times
HERE TO STAY: Terry Riley founded the Southern Delta Church of Wicca, a congregation affiliated with the Aquarian Tabernacle Church, in 1994. The church is now based in Lake City, a town of 2,600 about 22 miles east of its original location in Jonesboro.
It’s taken giving away free garden produce and building supplies, the promise of housing for homeless veterans and a really neat Christmas parade float for Wiccan priest Terry Riley to be accepted in his tiny Delta town of Lake City.
Now, whenever Riley and his church members are spotted in public, the most vehement epithet is usually, “Here come the witches.”
It’s a far cry from when Riley, the priest at Southern Delta Church of Wicca, became a public figure in Jonesboro some 30 years ago.
Then, Riley was ousted from his business, faced death threats and was accused of being a Satanist, all while espousing his religion of peace and respect.
“It’s taken some time,” Riley said recently, reflecting on his more than three decades as a pagan in the Bible Belt. “They’re actually nice to us now. They don’t act like they did back in 1993.”
Origin story
Riley’s not an outsider who brought in an exotic-seeming belief system from afar. He was born in Jonesboro in 1954, but moved with his family to Rockford, Illinois, as a teen. He returned to Jonesboro in 1972, then moved briefly to Tupelo, Mississippi.
It was there, he said, he began his “journey into higher knowledge.”
“I had a lot of questions,” said Riley, 69. “I wasn’t able to accept the answer, ‘That’s just the way things are.’ I just wanted peace of mind. I didn’t want to live [Henry David] Thoreau’s ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’”
Riley and his wife, Amanda, moved to Pocahontas in 1985. He didn’t work because of an injury and instead spent his time pondering his spiritual life.
He said he took a King James Bible, closed his eyes and pointed to a verse as a means of finding some answer. His finger landed on Isaiah 47:13: “Thou art wearied in the multitude of thy counsels. Let now the astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators, stand up, and save thee from these things that shall come upon thee.”
It began his path into Wicca.
“I heard all the bullcrap that witchcraft was Satanism,” he said. “I was programmed the same way at first.”
At times, during his conversion to Wicca, Riley even surprised himself. He read astrologer Sybil Leek’s “The Complete Art of Witchcraft” and other texts about metaphysics and higher knowledge, and was struck by the idea that the conscious mind is ruled by a masculine entity and the subconscious is more feminine.
“I was thinking about that before I read about it,” Riley said. “Then, when I read it, I thought, ‘There’s a religion for what I believe.’
“I’m a witch and didn’t know it,” he said, laughing.
Out of the broom closet
Riley and his wife moved to Jonesboro, and he held his first Wiccan service in a cramped trailer along what’s now a service road of Interstate 555 on June 15, 1991. There were only a handful of people there, and Riley and the others kept it low-key so as not to draw attention. They whispered their chants and didn’t pound on drums normally used for such services to keep neighbors from hearing them.
“We were all in the closet then,” he said. “We had to meet secretly.”
That changed when his daughter, Amberly Jones, asked Riley if she could talk about their religious services at her grade school in Brookland.
When her father told her not to, she looked up at him. “Why? Is what we’re doing wrong?” she asked.
“I realized we should be able to speak about our religion,” he said.
His mother-in-law, upon learning of Riley’s conversion, told him he “was going straight to hell.”
Riley said his mother told him she disagreed with him, but just told him not to speak of Wicca to her.
As his group began to grow, Riley realized the closest occult store was in Memphis. In June 1993, he opened Magick Moon on East Nettleton Avenue in the eastern part of Jonesboro, where he sold tarot cards, potions, Wiccan books, jewelry and other items. The shop was tucked in an older part of town between a barber shop and a laundromat.
The timing was unlucky. Just six weeks earlier, West Memphis police arrested three teenagers and charged them with the slayings of three 8-year-old boys. Prosecutors hinted that the killings may have been part of a satanic ritual, and media coverage of the “West Memphis Three” began fueling fear of Riley and his store.
“KAIT [the Jonesboro ABC television affiliate] showed us associated with the murders. Once it came out on the news about that case, we were suddenly ‘Satanists who cut up babies,’” Riley said. “It got pretty scary.”
Shortly after Magick Moon opened, Riley’s landlord terminated his month-to-month lease and evicted him. According to Riley, the landlord was under pressure from local Christian ministers, who also appeared on television urging other building owners to avoid renting to him.
Rather than cowering, Riley filed a lawsuit against his landlord, creating a storm of coverage by newspapers and television stations in Jonesboro, Memphis and Little Rock. (The lawsuit was later dismissed.)
He also led a march for religious freedom through Jonesboro in August, after he had to close his store. Riley and about 70 of his followers walked nearly three miles, starting at the East Highland Walmart Supercenter and ending up at the Craighead County Courthouse downtown. Some wore shirts bearing the words “Salem Revisited! The Great Jonesboro Witch Hunt!”
Depending on the source, somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 spectators were in attendance to watch the march, with 80 to 100 police officers from around the state tasked with keeping the peace.
“We topped the hill [on Main Street leading to downtown] and saw the crowd blocking the road,” Riley said.
Police told Riley to line his followers in single file while officers walked on either side, parting the crowd. Many, Riley said, were there just to watch the march. But several carried signs and yelled Bible verses at him.
Riley said Steve Branch, the father of one of the three West Memphis boys killed earlier that year, was “speaking in tongues and saying he was casting out demons.” Riley said there were four Craighead County deputies flanking Branch to keep him from lunging at Riley and his group.
The crowd eventually disbanded, but police did arrest one person with a weapon who was threatening Riley and his church members.
Hostile territory
Instead of leaving for safer ground, like Memphis, Riley — an admitted showman — opted to stay in Jonesboro and continue his battle. In 1994, Riley founded the Southern Delta Church of Wicca and affiliated it with the Aquarian Tabernacle Church in Index, Washington.
“They said I should come up with a name for the church,” Riley said. “The first name that popped up in my head was ‘First Assembly of Goddess.’ They [the Aquarian Tabernacle Church] said ‘no,’ and I chose Southern Delta.”
In the summer of 1997, he moved to Brookland, about 10 miles northeast of Jonesboro, where he tried to open a new shop called Dagda’s Cauldron. Again, he was met with opposition; city leaders pressured the landlord to cancel Riley’s lease, and he was out of business once more.
Finally, in 2011, he and his church relocated to Lake City, a town of 2,600 about 22 miles east of Jonesboro.
CONGREGANTS: Riley, at center, with congregant and daughter Amberly Jones and garden coordinator Glenn Harrison.
A large yellow sign is affixed to a post outside the structure, which is both Riley’s home and his church. It draws gawkers who travel down Main Street and turn onto Lake Street to access the St. Francis levee road.
Surrounded by plants, the house looks like a witch’s cottage. Visitors may catch a glimpse of Riley outside, looking nearly the same as he did 30 years ago, with a long, flowing mane of white hair and a pointed white beard. A three-columned tattoo that some jokingly equate with a barcode is on his forehead. It represents three elements of wisdom.
A pentagram adorns a door leading into the part of Riley’s home that’s used as the church. Sometimes church members hold services outdoors in an open-air temple to thank the elements of fire, wind, earth and water.
About 20 yards east of the house, an arched sign alerts visitors that they’re entering Demeter’s Garden, named after the Greek goddess of harvest. That’s the field where Riley grows his tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, peppers and other vegetables to give away to the needy at his food pantry across the street.
Peaceful, mostly
Most members of Riley’s congregation come from other towns in Arkansas, Missouri and Tennessee, rather than Lake City. The Southern Delta Church of Wicca has attracted others from New York, Washington and Idaho, he said.
Wiccans frown on actively recruiting new members, so followers have to find the church themselves.
Riley and his members don’t have a clear answer to what Wicca actually is, only what it does.
“Ask 5 million Wiccans what the religion is and you’ll get 5 million answers,” said Woodbine Fraine, a former Baptist who has been a member of Riley’s church for five years now. “It’s eclectic. As long as you are doing good to others, you’re following our religion.”
The Wiccan church is nothing like she expected, Fraine said.
“As soon as my feet hit the door, I knew I was home,” she said. “When I first came here, I wondered if it was people waving wands in services. It wasn’t.”
When she met Riley, the first thing he asked her was if she was a Louisiana Cajun, Fraine said.
“Not many people knew that. Terry saw it in my energy. I realized he might know something. He may be a prophet.”
Kemberly May-Braun has been with the church for 12 years, despite great personal sacrifice.
“The family had no clue I was a Wiccan,” she said. “When they found out, my mother disowned me.”
Others aren’t as hostile. For the most part, Lake City seems to have accepted the Wiccans and their ways.
At first, neighbors called the police to complain about outdoor drumming services, but the Lake City mayor at the time, perhaps realizing Riley’s penchant for filing lawsuits, told people that Riley didn’t make any more noise than the loudspeakers at a nearby park’s nightly softball games.
Someone stole one of the church signs from Riley’s house last year, and members found a watermelon tossed into his yard. Undaunted by opponents, Riley has sought to help them.
When Riley discovered at least two-thirds of students in the local school district were on the free or reduced-price lunch program, he decided to create a food pantry.
KILLING WITH KINDNESS: Riley’s church gave out canned goods and fresh produce from their gardens to 230 families in October alone. With the help of a new grant, the church hopes to eventually grow enough produce to provide 4,000 meals a month.
Riley works with the Food Bank of Northeast Arkansas in Jonesboro, where he gets canned goods to give out at the pantry along with vegetables from his garden. The pantry is open on Thursdays. Last October, the church prepared and gave out packages of food to 230 families, which fed an estimated 700 people, the church said.
“When I first got here in 2021, people gave me the cold shoulder because of this,” garden coordinator Glenn Garrison said, pointing to a large pentagram tattooed on his neck. “But then we opened the pantry. I’ve gotten so many thank you's since then.”
The Wiccans plan to expand their ministry of feeding the hungry in Lake City and beyond.
Earlier this summer, the Southern Delta Church of Wicca was awarded a $300,000 Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It’s to be used to expand the gardens planted around Riley’s Lake City home and neighborhood.
Already, the church is farming one 20-by-80-foot lot. And Riley has purchased land in the eastern part of Lake City for more gardens. The grant will be distributed over three years, and Riley’s goal is to eventually grow enough produce to provide 4,000 meals a month.
“If we’re a church, aren’t we supposed to feed the hungry?” Riley said. “We don’t make you come to our services if you get food.”
Now, he’s applying for another federal grant to build small houses for homeless veterans.
Acceptance at last
Three decades after an angry mob met him at the Craighead County Courthouse, Riley’s watched tolerance for his religion grow.
The crowning moment may have come in 2016, when Lake City leaders invited Riley to enter a church float in the annual Christmas parade.
“I got a letter inviting us and immediately went to City Hall to see if it was real,” Riley said.
Riley posed as Father Time on the float, and his daughter dressed as Mother Nature. The float was awarded first place. In the 2019 parade, the church won third place, and in 2021 it took home another first-place award.
In 2022, Riley went “full Wiccan,” he said, and built a float that included a horned god, a “green man” and a bubbling cauldron.
“There were people freaking out about that float,” said Cameron Byerly, who lives on Lake Street a block from Riley’s church, and attended the parade.
“They seem like nice people,” Byerly said of the church members he’s seen. But, he added, “there still is some closed-mindedness.”
Lake City Mayor Cameron Tate said Riley’s church is welcomed in his town, although he does acknowledge there may still be some opposition.
“He’s doing just fine,” Tate said of Riley’s presence. “You’re not going to get everyone accepting anything. It’s just the world we live in. You could say the same thing about Christian churches.”
Years ago, Riley was asked by a network news journalist doing a piece on his struggles in Jonesboro why he didn’t just leave the South and move to a more tolerant part of the country.
“I thought if I can stay here, it says to every [Wiccan] church that you can do it anywhere,” he said.
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