By Jason Hancock

To the best of her knowledge, Carrie Pester has never turned anyone into a toad. She doesn’t spend her nights flying around on a broom, and she doesn’t have a green face.

But that doesn’t stop people from believing all those strange things are true when they discover Pester is a witch.

“There are a lot of misconceptions,” she says. “I’m a witch. It’s really not as weird as it sounds.”

Wicca is a religion deeply imbued with negative images. Many of the people contacted for this story were hesitant to give their names because they feared a hostile response. Much of that hostility comes from a popular misnomer about this Pagan belief system: that it’s a form of Satanism. Not so, says Jo VonStein, a practicing witch for the last 20 years and the owner of Ancient Ways, a store that sells spiritual items such as herbs, books and jewelry for the Pagan faiths.

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” VonStein says. “There is no concept of Satan in Wicca.”

Wicca, she says, is an Earth-based religion that celebrates a variety of goddesses and gods that are aspects of one Goddess and one God. The balance between male and female energy is key to Wicca.

“There was a time when ‘witch’ didn’t have negative connotations,” VonStein says. “Witches were originally the shamans of tribal Europe.”

Despite the negative images, times are getting easier for Wiccans, Pester says, as people become more educated about the religion. An April court settlement between the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and several Wiccan families will allow the pentacle, a circled five-pointed upright star, to be placed on military gravestones of soldiers of the Wiccan faith, something Pester called “a wonderful step forward.”

“There are a lot more Wiccans out there than most people probably believe,” Pester says. “Most just practice their beliefs in silence.”

According to the American Religious Identification Survey, there were 274,000 Pagans nationwide in 2001. Here in Iowa, Pester says most practice as individuals, or in small groups or families. An aversion to hierarchy is common among Wiccans, as it tends to attract strong-willed individuals who don’t fit in anywhere else.

“Most Pagans are against organized religion, so it’s hard to organize a group to get together,” Pester says.
A group on Meetup.com was formed nearly a year ago to create a stronger Pagan community in Des Moines. The group, of which Pester is the organizer, has had several meetings and plans to get together again next month.

“It feels like we’re starting to get some momentum,” she says. “We’ve had the same group of people show up now two months in a row, which is great.”

Out of the broom closet

Several years ago, CarrieRene Clark was working for a telemarketing company in southern Iowa. Everything was fine until she started letting people know she was a Pagan, an act called “coming out of the broom closet.”

“I was treated differently,” she says. “I had one lady try to get me fired because I was a Pagan.”

The company was close to firing her before Clark reminded them that Paganism is a religion protected under Iowa law, and what they were doing was a form of religious discrimination. Her bosses eventually backed off.

“There were four other Pagans who worked in the same place I did,” she says. “None of them had come out of the broom closet. I think they were waiting to see what happened when I did. They never did come out.”

She now works for an insurance broker in West Des Moines (the company requested that it not be named) where she says she is treated no differently than anyone else. She keeps a statue of the Goddess Bast on her desk and normally wears a pentagram as a symbol of her faith.

“I recently switched departments and wanted to make sure I had Samhain (Halloween) off,” she says. “I sort of did a Pagan 101 class for my new bosses. They seemed pretty cool, and they have even asked me a few questions.”

Still, Clark says she does encounter many people who have a misunderstanding of her faith. The reactions vary.

“Depending on where I am, it has ranged from ‘That’s cool’ to ‘Oh God, you worship the devil’ to ‘Do you run around naked on a full moon and have big group orgies?’” she says. “It used to bother me and I would get upset. I have now come to realize that people’s information probably comes from television and movies, and it has been distorted.”

VonStein says for many Pagans, the fear of what would happen if people found out their beliefs is unfounded.

“People don’t react as badly as most people think they are going to,” she says. “When you censor yourself, there is no way for a real dialogue to develop.”

What is magic?

Witches do practice magic, though it is not the type you see in the movies or read about in Harry Potter books.

“The portrayal of witches in popular culture is amusing to me,” VonStein says. “I actually kind of liked the show ‘Charmed.’”

Wiccans use a “natural magic,” VonStein says. Spells are simply tapping into the energy of the Earth. For example, VonStein says if you wanted to send a message or a feeling to someone, you could write them a letter and then burn it. The letter would be transformed into energy once burned, and with the help of a specific chant or ritual, a message would be delivered, usually in the form of a dream.

“When you are able to perceive energy, you begin to see how you can change it,” she says.

Allowing yourself to perceive all things around you also manifests itself in the Wiccan faith by way of speaking with the dead. Everything around us has a vibration or frequency, VonStein says, including our spirit.

“You can’t hear a dog whistle because it’s at a frequency that is beyond our ear’s capability,” VonStein says. “The spiritual metaphor of souls rising into heaven or descending into hell is actually the vibrations of the spirit that are either too high or too low a frequency for us to see and hear them.”

A séance is a method of letting the living pick up the frequency of the dead.

Wiccans believe in reincarnation and karma — and that what you do will come back to you threefold. So, far from casting evil spells on their enemies, they usually use magic to try to enlighten or help.

“It’s really not all that different from praying,” Pester says. “Magic is simply asking the Earth for help with something and then having faith that it will happen.”

Your typical witch

Despite what many might think, Clark says her life isn’t exceedingly exciting.

“I lead a normal life just like everyone else,” she says. “I take exercise classes, I sing in the community choir at Drake [University], I love shaken black ice tea from Starbucks, I watch movies, I do cross-stitch and I like to read.”

Only when she’s not doing those everyday tasks, she’s participating in ancient rituals and performing magic.

Pester says while just walking down the street, it’s nearly impossible to know people are Wiccans, just like it would be hard to tell if they were Christians or Atheists.

“We aren’t wearing pointy hats and robes,” she says, laughing. “Not to say that we don’t have them, we just don’t wear them out on the streets. Witches like to dress up, too.”

Like many witches, Pester says she was raised in a strict Christian home but didn’t like being told “what God was or wasn’t.”

“I’ve only been practicing Wicca for about a year now, but I’m pretty sure I was Wiccan before I ever knew what Wicca was,” she says.

She heard a little about the religion, did some research and eventually realized “Hey, that’s me.”

“It was an amazing discovery,” she says. CV

Do you know what this symbol means?

Originally found in ancient Greek and Babylonian times, the pentagram (or five-sided star) and pentacle (the five-sided star encircled) have been used as spiritual symbols in many cultures.

For the Babylonians, it represented Ishtar, the “Queen of Heaven,” forming the astrological paths of the five planets that were known at the time.

For ancient Pythagorean mathematicians, the pentagram meant mathematical perfection, symbolizing the “golden mean,” a ratio that was studied as one of the most perfect and aesthetically pleasing in nature.

In modern day, this symbol is commonly seen as a sign of Satan, however, that was not its original meaning. Some of the pentacle’s representations are: the five elements (earth, air, fire, water and spirit); the five senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste); the harmony in man, nature, the earth and the universe; and the unity between human (represented by the star) and the circle of life.

Source: The Iowa Pagan Access Network

The truth about Halloween

Key days for Wiccans are solstices and equinoxes — the most important being Samhain on Oct. 31. This is the Wiccan New Year and is traditionally a time taken to remember departed loved ones. It is said that the veil between the realm of the living and the dead is especially thin on this holiday. In Latin countries, the Day of the Dead is commemorated around this time of year. It is customary to do a divination on this day for what the coming year will bring. Magic is supposed to be more powerful on Samhain.

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