Modern Pagans Practice That Old-Time Religion : Spirituality: Local adherents say it’s not easy to worship nature with traffic in the background. But all you really need is a patch of earth.

Despite what some non-Californians may think, it’s not easy being a pagan in Los Angeles.

The dark days of winter just aren’t so dark in sunny Southern California. Grocery stores brim with fresh fruits and vegetables, whether or not you pray to the gods and goddesses for a good harvest. And then there are the urban distractions.

“It’s hard to connect with the agricultural past when you hear traffic noise in the background or a police helicopter zooms over your ritual,” observed one devotee, Louis Rosas, 27, who goes by the name of “Guthorn.”

“Urban paganism requires a little extra effort,” said Guthorn, a Fairfax store owner who worships Odin and other Norse gods. “(But) so long as you have a patch of ground, you can connect with it.”

As their neighbors pack away Nativity scenes and menorah candles for another year, Guthorn and other Westside pagans are noting with satisfaction that the sun is lingering longer in the day after the low point of winter solstice.

During this season thousands of years ago, pagans of the cold and cloudy British Isles huddled during the short days and prayed to their Celtic gods and goddesses for the coming of spring.

Modern pagans worship those same gods, or others from the ancient Greek, Egyptian and Norse traditions.

But despite that link with the past, their rituals have developed only in the last few decades as people dissatisfied by mainstream religions searched for something more meaningful. With paganism unpracticed for so long, there is little firsthand knowledge of its ceremonies.

The new paganism represents “a modern reading of ancient texts and 19th-Century occult practices,” said J. Gordon Melton, director of the private Institute for the Study of American Religions and author of “Magic, Witchcraft and Paganism in America.”

Pagans say there is nothing satanic in their religion--a bad rap, they add, that dates from the Inquisition.

“Rhiannon,” a high priestess in the Venice group Circle of Aradia, said concern for the environment is one of paganism’s principal attractions.

“People want to integrate their religion with their politics and their lives in general,” said Rhiannon, 40, who asked that her legal name not be used because she has been harassed for her beliefs. “There’s so much of an awareness that the Earth is in danger.”

Jennifer Reif, a member of a pagan group in Venice called the Temple of the Goddess Demeter, said she grew up in a Reform Jewish family but was drawn to paganism by “the idea of a mother goddess being really loving.”

She didn’t relate to the Jewish ceremonies of her youth, she said.

“People were reading things out of books and standing up and sitting down,” she said. “I didn’t get any spirituality out of it.”

Guthorn said he didn’t find meaning in the Catholic ceremonies he attended as a youth. The human strengths and frailties of pagan gods make them easier to relate to, he said.

“Our gods do not want us to follow them the way Christians do,” he said. “They don’t want to be thought of as divine, in the Roman sense. Our gods do not want us to grovel at their feet. They want us to stand on our two feet and stare them in the eye.”

Melton, a Methodist minister, estimates that there are a few thousand practicing pagans in Los Angeles. They worship in homes and in outdoor locations ranging from the beach to a local community garden.

Religious practices and beliefs vary widely among pagans. They worship different gods and goddesses and perform different rituals. But they also share many values.

People who call themselves pagan generally have a reverence for nature and worship on an annual agricultural cycle. In this respect, their beliefs are similar to Native American religions. But unlike Native Americans, modern pagans have not passed down traditions through the generations.

The term pagan comes from the Latin word for countryside, where traditional religions survived as Christianity swept the cities of the ancient Roman empire.

“In olden times, this was a rural religion,” Melton said. “Today it’s almost totally urban. I’ve never met a pagan farmer in my life.”

Several pagan groups on the Westside mark the changing of the seasons in eight holidays a year--the summer solstice, winter solstice, spring equinox and fall equinox and four other holidays, including Halloween.

The names and the timing of the holidays vary. Possibly the most common form of paganism is the Wiccan tradition, also known as witchcraft.

Wiccan rituals developed among the Celts in the British Isles. The holidays are based on the seasons in that part of the world, where the days are particularly long in summer and short in winter.

In the religious calendar known as the “Wheel of the Year,” which symbolically links the seasons to the cycle of life and death, the next holiday on the Wiccan calendar is Imbolc, the banishing of winter and welcoming of spring. It occurs around Feb. 2, halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.

As part of the Imbolc celebrations, Wiccans fashion a small figure of a woman out of bunches of corn or grain. Called the Corn Mother or Harvest Mother, the figure is a symbol of prosperity, fertility and protection.

Despite common perceptions, Wiccan rituals have nothing to do with satanism or animal sacrifice, Rhiannon said.

“There’s a lot of intolerance and ignorance,” she said. “Witchcraft is very benign and nature-related.”

Both Guthorn and Rhiannon use their legal names in the business world, and Rhiannon says she doesn’t casually throw around her high priestess title. “It sounds so grand pooh-bah-like, and that’s not my attitude,” she said.

Rhiannon’s celebrations in the Circle of Aradia differ from other pagan ceremonies on the Westside in that the feasts are vegetarian, the group is limited to women, and alcohol is not served because some of the celebrants are recovering alcoholics. Aradia is the Celtic goddess of witchcraft.

The Temple of the Goddess Demeter is reviving a type of Mediterranean paganism more in keeping with the local climate.

“Here in Southern California, the sun is not a big, important thing to us because we’ve got it all the time,” said Reif, who teaches classes on paganism in her Venice home. “What’s important to us is the rain.”

While other pagans celebrate winter solstice, Reif’s group holds a festival called Haloa. For the festival last month, she and nine celebrants built a fire in her living room by pouring alcohol in a cooking pot and lighting it.

They then tossed barley into the flames while praying for rain and fertile soil on their sacred plot of land in a Mar Vista community garden. They will sprinkle ashes from the burned barley over the soil of the garden.

“(This) brings back an appreciation for the foods of the earth that sustain our lives,” Reif said.

Reif’s group subscribes to the ancient Greek belief that the rains come as the god Zeus is making love to Demeter, the goddess of agriculture and fertility.

“The child of this union is the maiden Kore, and you can see her emerging in the green sprouts of the cultivated fields, as well as the mountains and meadows,” Reif said.

When the grain is harvested, they believe, Kore dies and goes to the underworld, where she becomes the goddess Persephone. She then re-emerges as Kore in the spring, symbolizing the renewal of life, Reif said.

Guthorn’s Norse traditions also revolve around a complex mythology. He and his wife last month held a winter solstice feast with the traditional foods of Scandinavia, emphasizing fish, meat and grains. They wear jewelry copied from finds at Viking burial mounds, drink wine from horns and leave out an extra plate of food to remember their ancestors.

“We cry, we laugh, we drink toasts to them,” said his wife, Mary, 33, who goes by the name of “Rannveig.”

They sell pagan jewelry, books and music in their small Fairfax shop Rangarok, along with lighthearted bumper stickers proclaiming “Born-Again Pagan” or “1-Hour Broom Parking.”

Magic is an important part of their practices, and Guthorn said he had cast spells for protection and prosperity for his store. “Magic is a force of will,” he said. “It has worked quite well for us.”

But it’s a tricky business, he said. If you ask for too much prosperity, for instance, you can end up with too little. He did so once, he said, and his sales promptly declined.

“There was a time I did ask for too much, and it did backfire on me,” he said. “If you tip the scales too much, the whole thing will collapse.”

Both he and his wife were raised as Christians, and his wife’s mother now lives with them. Rannveig said her mother didn’t know what to make of paganism at first but that she’s getting used to it.

“She says it’s not for her,” Rannveig said. “She doesn’t want to jump around the bonfire. She says, leave it to the younger folks.”

Is it possible to be a Christian or Jew and share pagan beliefs? Reif said pagan values such as a reverence for nature are universal.