Their Guiding Light

It’s 7 p.m. in West Hollywood, and in the back room of the Goddess Shop on Santa Monica Boulevard, the witches have gathered.

Ruth is the personable, powerful instructor who co-founded Circle of Aradia, one of the largest and oldest witchcraft communities in Southern California. Ally is in film marketing and describes herself as a “baby witch” who embraced the religion, known as Wicca, two months ago after failing to find a comfortable home in Christianity, Buddhism or Transcendental Meditation.

Dawn is a glamorous blond in a black miniskirt who declares she intends to ask for Halloween off as a religious holiday and wears a pentacle to ward off bad vibrations. Linda says witchcraft has dovetailed with her lifelong passion for nature--the cycles of the moon, the shifts of the seasons. Her husband, a Christian, supports her spiritual journey wholeheartedly and even cackles, witchlike, into the couple’s telephone answering machine.

In the hands of these women--part of an estimated 60,000 witches across the nation--Halloween will be far more than a night of revelry, flamboyant costumes and trick-or-treat goodies.

They have gathered to study Halloween rituals, history and symbols, and for them, the eve of the pagan New Year that witches call Hallowmas or Samhain will be laden with deep meaning and transformative rituals to remember the beloved dead and commemorate spiritually the eternal cycle of death and rebirth reflected in the seasonal change.

The commemoration will entail a night of introspection to drop the negative baggage of the last year like so many falling leaves and plant the seeds, through affirmation, of new goals to blossom in the coming year.

“This is the night where the veil between worlds is thinnest: between this world and the spirit world, light and dark, the old year and new year. The symbol of this time of year is the crone, the old hag, symbolic of the old letting go to the new,” says Ruth, who agrees to the use of her last name, Barrett, unlike many other witches still fearful of public attacks.

The workshop--and a dramatic community ritual the following Saturday--sum up part of what life is like in a witchcraft community. For two Southern California witches’ groups--the all-woman Circle of Aradia and the mixed-gender Reweaving--Wicca offers rich rituals and powerful symbols to give meaning, wonder and poetry to the passages of life.

Personal growth through deep introspection and constant efforts at self-transformation are an important emphasis. Sacred nature is celebrated in eight annual festivals and rituals tied to the agricultural holidays of old Europe.

A Talisman for Earthly Love

Jim Buslip, a Venice engineer who turned to witchcraft four years ago, shares what many nonpagans secretly want to know: Yes, the witches learn spellcraft and magic to gain power over their lives and shape it in favorable directions. Some witches work spells for world peace, good health or better jobs; Buslip confesses he has cast them for love.

Over a seven-day period that ended on Valentine’s Day, Buslip fashioned a talisman by stuffing an orange with herbs and cloves, wrote in a journal and meditated on his desire during the planetary hour associated with Venus, the goddess of love. After a false start--he says he forgot to explicitly visualize a sexual relationship and ended up drawing in a host of platonic female friends--he met his girlfriend, Lynn, at a pagan festival. The two plan to get “handfasted,” the pagan commitment ceremony, in April.

But he and others stress that ethical witches don’t put a dreaded hex on others or attempt to control others through their magic. Wiccans honor one basic law: “Harm none and do what you will.” They also adhere to such guiding principles as the law of cause and effect and believe that whatever you send out, good or bad, comes back threefold. Such principles make altruism a matter of “enlightened self-interest,” Buslip says.

“I see Wiccans as re-mythologizing life--reclaiming magic to make life more interesting, creative, colorful and poetic,” says John K. Simmons, a religion professor and Wiccan expert at Western Illinois University. The growth of Wicca in the United States, he says, “is a response to 200 years of the scientific method that drains the magic, the mystery, from life.”

Not that all witches are ethical or altruistic. The Witches’ Voice Web site (https://www.witchvox.com) reports on several raging “witch wars” across the country involving battles over power, money and sex. People identifying themselves as witches have been collared for crimes ranging from murder in Texas to tombstone vandalism in Michigan.

And many Christian groups find witchcraft a disturbing descent into the realm of malevolent occult forces. Microsoft’s Encarta, the multimedia encyclopedia, defines witches as “servants of the devil” who gain their power in a Faustian pact with Satan.

That would almost certainly rile Wicca practitioners as not only grossly inaccurate but also a product of the patriarchal attitudes they say vilified witches in the first place--torturing and murdering untold scores of women and children during the witch burnings of the Middle Ages and the Salem witch hunts of the 17th century.

“Because this religion has been connected with women is the main reason it’s seen as evil: Women with power are to be feared, or power in the hands of women is inherently evil,” Barrett says.

Bringing Their Faith Into the Open

Harassment still exists, and many people remain in the broom closet, as they say. But since Wicca won legal recognition as a religion in 1985, it has cooked up a caldron of more accepting attitudes.

Courts have consistently upheld Wiccan rights to equal protection in cases ranging from job discrimination to child custody, said Gordon Melton, who heads the Institute for the Study of American Religion at UC Santa Barbara. Last year, witches successfully lobbied the makers of the CyberPatrol software--which filters out Internet content that is potentially offensive to children--to remove sites on paganism, witchcraft and Wicca from the category of Satanism and cults.

A new round of Hollywood portrayals of witches--including the film “Practical Magic” and the new TV series “Charmed”--has won general Wiccan satisfaction as being more accurate than “Rosemary’s Baby” and more sophisticated than the nose-twitching Samantha on the old “Bewitched” series. And witchy goods, from calendars to books, have captured the public imagination.

Witches are not above self-parody--Barrett and her friends have toasted their wrinkles and warts; cackled and danced in rituals. But ask them why they become witches, and many tell stories of deep reflection on the nature of God and of disillusionment with traditional religion.

A Religion That’s ‘About Real Life’

At a recent group interview of Reweaving members in Venice, Buslip, the engineer, says he found the Presbyterian theology of his upbringing “didn’t compute.” If God is omnipotent, how could Satan triumph in spreading hunger, poverty, starvation?

Linda McCarty-Blumenthal and Ilyana MoonFire say they were put off by the fiery, damning religion of the Southern Baptists that viewed people as perpetual sinners.

They did not explicitly set out to be witches, although people like Jim Blumenthal--Linda’s partner--say they were inexorably drawn to magic and nature from the time they were children. Seekers describe a process of spiritual search, of finding Wicca often through a friend and feeling a sense of “coming home.”

Witches also say that Wicca is relevant with its focus on real life--not the other world. Barrett’s first Wiccan ritual back in 1974 hooked her: a Hallowmas gathering where women ritually expressed and then let go of the black energy that pained them, sometimes for years, by stabbing a blood-red pomegranate. One woman unburdened her pain over an incest rape.

“It grabbed me because it was the first time that I saw [religion] was not just about being nice and nurturing. This is what got me thinking that religion has got to be about real life,” says Barrett, a professional musician and writer currently working on a book about rituals. “Child abuse, incest, rape--these kinds of things I had never, ever heard mentioned in a religious setting, much less allowed to be expressed in a supportive community.”

Many male witches also say Wicca’s embrace of life in all of its dimensions--the dark and light, the carnal and sacred--is a powerful attraction.

Research engineer John Yeretzian, 38, a former Seventh-Day Adventist pastor, says Christianity never explicitly addressed sex or other earthy issues that occupied him. Jesus Christ was never portrayed as having romance, getting rowdy, even laughing, he says--a role model he finds hard to connect with as a red-blooded man with the normal lusty appetites.

In contrast, the “horned God” of his Wiccan faith, as the consort to the Goddess, symbolizes “masculine glory.” Which is? “Sweaty, hairy, excited, loud, wild, tender, gentle, soft, protecting,” Yeretzian says.

The witch communities hold rituals and workshops. They perform community service. They offer one another support and what many women call “a safe place” to be who they are.

Circle of Aradia, for instance, boasts an extensive fall calendar that includes everything from a community forum on the ethics of charging fees for spiritual service to a dark-moon ritual for divination and a full-moon gathering for poetry.

The recent Crone Encounter ritual in Topanga was an extravaganza of theater, artistry and spirituality focusing on the seasonal transition between death and life. Women played out the Fates--spinning, weaving and cutting the web of life--and the dark goddess Hecate and six oracles who divined for each woman. The ritual also featured a labyrinth for moving meditation on the new year, the honoring of the beloved dead and the martyrs of the witch-burnings.

The community offers a food bank and circles for such areas as political action, White Women Against Racism and “sister’s care” to help women in crisis.

For once-Catholic Ramona, her Wiccan faith caused her to be laid off work, she thinks, and causes her to ask for partial anonymity to protect her from losing community work as a Big Sister.

But being a witch in the Circle of Aradia has also given her a community of fast friendships.

When she turned 40, she recalls, she was riven by angst because she felt she was a failure and had wasted her life. Her circle gave her a party and presented her a scroll lovingly inscribed with all the accomplishments her friends saw she had made. Then they lined up, one by one, and performed a song, dance, poem or other entertainment as loyal subjects of the queen for the day.

She still tears up remembering it.

“It’s a real sisterhood,” she says. “Especially in L.A., so big and spread out, community is what’s missing. “