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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

Ritual or Treat?

Wiccans see spirits, not ghosts, on Halloween

The mother's motions are delicate and graceful as she picks up a can of carrots from an aisle in Kroger. Her curly brown hair twirls and springs off her shoulders encompassing her small round face with big brown eyes that mesmerize every passerby. The daughter wears a flowing ankle-length blue flowered skirt with a white T-shirt and short blonde hair. Her eyes sink into her face, and her thin crimson lips rarely speak. \nOr maybe the mother has long straight black hair, is 5-foot-4 with a pear-shaped body. Her eyes melt with all other features to give her a perfectly indistinguishable oval face. She is at a McDonald's drive-thru ordering a Quarter Pounder with cheese meal. Diet Coke. The daughter's stringy brown hair is loosely held away from her face by a blue elastic band. She has Umbro black shorts on with white trim and a gray IU T-shirt. She orders fries and a Sprite.\nBoth women could be anyone, anywhere. They are neighbors, friends, mothers, classmates, daughters, co-workers and wives. They are the people that you might interact with daily or that you might simply murmur a hello in passing. They participate in after-school sports, eat dinner together and go to the movies.\nBut there's one thing that you don't know and cannot see from the outside, and that's why they chose to be anonymous. And although no one is carrying a broom or wearing a black pointy hat, these women have been defined by society as witches. Witches whose unique religion would make Oct. 31 their most important holiday.\nEmily and Jessica are followers of Wicca, a neo-pagan religion that marks the beginning of the new year on Halloween.\n"The holiday is Samhain, and it is when the veil is most thin between our world and the spirit world," says 15-year-old Jessica.\n"It represents new life and death, allowing us to remember our ancestors that have passed before us," says Emily, a mother of two, who has practiced neo-paganism since she was a small girl. "It is easier for us to commune with the spirits on this day."\nAlthough Halloween is a holiday commercialized by costumes and treats, its tradition stems from an old English practice in which children went door to door begging for 'soul cakes' to feed the wandering spirits.\n"I'll go get candy with my friends," Jessica says. "I'll wear jeans and a T-shirt to go trick or treating just because I don't feel like dressing up this year, but I like celebrating it as 'Halloween' with my friends too (not Samhain)."\nJessica and Emily will celebrate their New Year, but it will not be visible to many.\n"Their beliefs are tied to an alternate states of consciousness," says Marty Laubach, a graduate student in sociology, who is studying neo-paganism. "They believe in a God but not in the Christian God or Jesus. They break their god down so that there are many different faces and aspects of their main god. They also have a goddess of equal status. Their religion celebrates eight Sabbats, the most important being the celtic holiday of Samhain because it represents the dead and the living, a cycle."\nLaubach says on Samhain wiccans believe that the souls of the dead are free to roam among the living. Most practitioners want to honor the dead on Halloween. A typical Halloween event for some wiccans might be having dinner with an extra plate and seat at the table for the spirits. The meal would be followed by a personalized ritual. \nEmily and Jessica are unsure of what they will do this year, but they do have a temple that honors their god and goddess where their rituals are usually held.\n"I was in Tawain once and saw this little oriental doll in a shop. There were many of them but this one spoke to me. What was unusual was that her head was broken," Emily says. "The goddess has many different faces. So now the doll is on the altar in the temple with her head next to her representing many different aspects of the goddess."\nTemples and sites of rituals are personal and connections vary from one wiccan's preference to another's.\n"I like the fact that I can feel it whenever I want to. I don't have to go to an organized place," Jessica says. "It comes to me in nature, I can feel the spirits all around me sometimes. It's a gust of wind, the smell of flowers. It's anything directly related to the universe."\nWiccans believe that all systems on the planet are interconnected, all is one. When one imbalance is caused in one area, the whole system is thrown out of balance. Acts of evil cause imbalances, and the work of witchcraft is toward balance and harmony.\n"The worst aspect of the religion is that the term has been greatly misused in the past," Laubach says. "Wiccans want to reclaim the term and honor the death of the witches burned during the inquisition because they were not evil people. To many wiccans the Burning Times, where many were persecuted because of their religion, is viewed by them as the Holocaust is to the Jewish people."\n"I want to stress that we are not Satan and do not practice satanic rituals," Jessica says.\nLaura Humpf, a senior majoring in psychology and a practicing wiccan, agrees.\n"The biggest misconception is black magic and Satan," Humpf says. "We don't not believe in Satan. We believe that life is great and creation and destruction are part of the natural cycles. It's a witches creed 'if it harm none do what you will.' Another thing people overlook is that if someone is practicing black magic we believe that whatever you do returns to you threefold. So if you were to curse someone you would get cursed three times."\nEven though Humpf has not been discriminated against on campus because of her beliefs, she does think a lot of people are still apprehensive. \n"We look like everyone else on campus. I mean, we have a life and do normal things so no one has ever really come up to me out of the blue and said something malicious," Humpf says. "But there are those people that automatically connect you with witches and evil."\nOn the other hand, Jessica only tells people she trusts about her beliefs. \n"I think my generation is more understanding, but I did have a boyfriend in sixth grade who came over to the house and saw my altar in my room with the pentagram," Jessica says. "He told me I was going to hell and then told my whole class that I was worshipping the devil."\nSince then Emily has been protective of her children, telling them to be very careful who they tell and asking them to cover their altars in their room when friends come over. \n"I don't want myself or my daughter to be identified because I work in a straight environment and people get very very paranoid," Emily says. "There is that fear in people that we are doing something dark and inappropriate. It's actually ignorance and it makes it unsafe. It's sad but when people can't accept us and are ignorant. I can't take a chance with my family."\nEmily and Jessica's names were changed to protect identity.

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