By April Robertson

In the midst of the season of lights, there is one religious group that celebrates a winter holiday in darkness. On Dec. 21, the shortest day of the year, Wiccans sit in total darkness outside and in the company of friends to reflect on the past year and celebrate the birth of the sun by experiencing its longest absence.

Courtesy Photo

Wicca is a belief system and way of life based upon the reconstruction of pre-Christian traditions originating in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, according to a Wicca.com.

The belief system places a strong emphasis on the importance of nature and calling to it for guidance and help. Wicca is a polytheistic pagan religion; it doesn’t limit worship to one god. A strong influence on Wicca is witchcraft, but the two are not the same thing, according to the Web site: “One can be a witch without being a Wiccan, just as a person can be a Christian without being a Baptist.”

Most Wiccan meetings begin with “calling the circle,” a term that refers to speaking with the deities of each direction. In Wicca, the directions are also the elements earth, fire, water and air, which correlate strongly with mythological creatures and embody a gender.

Tymythy Aieran, a local high priest of a Wiccan circle, said the pairing of these directions, elements, gods and goddesses usually depends on what region the Wiccan lives in.

“I used to live in California, where it seemed very natural for west to be water, since that was west of where I lived, and south was fire because it was closer to the equator,” he said.

There are two main services in which Wiccans worship: circles and covens. A circle is a group of people who practice Wicca and allow various people to join them for worship. This sets them apart from covens, which is a circle that is chosen by the high priest and is not open for others to join.

“There are probably somewhere between 50 and 70 covens in the Fayetteville-Northwest Arkansas region,” Aieran said.

The process of becoming Wiccan is not a conversion. Instead, it is a calling to Wicca by the gods, Aieran said. In fact, many Wiccans are active in a second religion simultaneously, usually their “original” religion, so to speak.

“There are a number that practice a Christian religion on the side,” he said. In fact, there are a few Jewish-Wiccans that attend both Wiccan circles and synagogue.

Common practices of Wicca include spell-crafting, tarot card reading, the use of a pendulum, calling to the gods and burning candles for various purposes. Aieran favors using a pendulum because he found that the answers to “yes” or “no” questions, revealed by the pendulum moving slightly to the right or to the left, to be accurate 98 to 99 percent of the time.

In calling out to the gods, he said that it is talking out loud to whichever deity the Wiccan chooses.

Because Wicca stems from Ireland, Scotland and Wales, many of the holidays have Celtic names, such as Lamas, Lughnasadh, Samhain and Yule.

Yule, the Wiccan winter holiday, is on winter solstice, Dec. 21, the longest night and shortest day of the year.

“A lot of our holidays are based on the lunar (cycles), but some are based on the sun, some on harvest,” Aieran said. Yule is based on the solar cycle, celebrating the birth of the sun god, which signifies the birth of a new year.

During Yule celebrations, Wiccans spend time outside in their circles and burn a “Yule log.” After a while, the Yule log is extinguished and people share stories and reflect on the year that has passed. Each year, a piece of the log is reserved for the next Yule celebration. Aieran said the story-sharing celebration is supposed to last through until the sun rises, but modern work schedules usually prevent that from happening. Instead, Wiccans celebrate a shorter form of the service.

There is a certain frustration in being Wiccan because there are many common misconceptions of what Wicca is, Aieran said. The most frequent idea is that Wicca is Satanism, but Aieran finds this idea ridiculous because Satan is a Christian invention or ideal.

“Wicca is a pagan religion. The first thing in Wicca is that there is no Satan,” he said. “That has nothing to do with us.”

The widespread belief that Wicca, witchcraft and Satanism are the same has caused a lot of terms for Wiccan practices to be changed. Aieran, for instance, prefers to use the term “spellcrafting” when he speaks about the spells he casts.

Another frustration for Wiccans are “the amount of young people that claim they are Wiccan just because they’ve read a little and agree with a couple concepts.”

Aieran encourages interested parties to do as much research about Wicca as possible before claiming a “calling” to Wicca.

Information about Wicca can be found on the Gale Virtual Reference Library through the Fayetteville Public Library Web site. Also, hard copies of Wiccan guides on starting covens, such as “Wicca and Witchcraft for Dummies” and “Teen witch: Wicca for a new generation” can be found at the Fayetteville Public Library.