Preaching Pan, Isis and "Om"

That witch next door may be just a friendly neopagan

As 250 fellow worshipers formed a circle around them and chanted the ancient Hindu mantra "om," the bride and bridegroom watched the priest and priestess and their helpers conjure into their midst the gods and goddesses of the four elements--air, water, earth and fire.

Among the other rituals: a "purification" by holy water and a "communion" of bread and wine. Finally the couple fastened blue ribbons around each other's heads--his with a gold medallion representing the sun, hers with a silver crescent symbolizing the moon--and jumped over a broomstick. With that, John Beasley, 26, and his wife Donna, 22, two chiropractors from Marietta, Ga., were declared man and wife.

The bizarre ceremony, performed in a scruffy campground outside Demotte, Ind., was not some stunt but a modern pagan "handfasting," or wedding. It was one of the highlights of the Third Annual Pan Pagan Festival, a four-day conclave that brought together a witches' brew of 325 paganists, occultists and, well, witches from 26 states and Canada.

Though the Beasleys had in fact been married earlier in a Roman Catholic church to please their parents, they wanted a handfasting, because for them it alone contained "the spiritual element," as the groom put it. A priest and priestess at the festival, Jim Alan and Selena Fox, members of a pagan commune near Madison, Wis., called the Church of Circle Wicca, did the honors.

The festival, organized by a group called the Midwest Pagan Council, reflected what some religious leaders find to have been a rather rapid spread of neopaganism around the country over the past decade. J. Gordon Melton, an Evanston, Ill., Methodist minister who heads the Institute for the Study of American Religion, reckons that there may be as many as 40,000 practicing pagans today. They constitute, says Melton, "a neopaganist movement, a modern revival of the rituals and faith by people who were not raised in them."

Originally, modern interest in ancient pagan practices was spurred by research early in this century by British Anthropologist Margaret Murray, who sought to dispel folklore that witches were invariably malevolent. But today's neopagan movement has its roots in the counterculture. Though many neopaganists live otherwise ordinary lives as, say, bank tellers or bartenders, others gather in communes. Psychologists say that neopaganism functions as a form of "folk therapy," a sort of ritualized search for self-worth in an increasingly complex society.

Modern pagan groups tend to be small (at most 20 members) and eclectic, drawing their beliefs from such diverse sources as ancient Egypt, the Druids, Greek and Roman antiquity and the American Indian religions. But the groups share some tenets. Most believe in reincarnation" and in a universe ruled by a supreme godhead comprising two parts: a male half, which includes the sun, and a female half, which includes the moon. The distaff side is frequently considered to have more status, which makes neopaganism especially attractive to some feminists.

Neopagans also believe in "magick," spelled with a k to distinguish it from stage illusionism; this is essentially a pagan way of working one's will through psychic means. Another neopagan staple is rites and festivals timed to the lunar and solar cycles or the seasons.

Neopagans are particularly fond of noting the similarities between such goddesses as Egypt's Isis and the Celts' Danu, which they believe show that paganism may have been a "world religion" in pre-Christian days. But believers stir with Bacchic indignation when people attempt to match up their male gods Osiris, Apollo, Pan or Lucifer with Satan, and thereby equate paganism as a whole with Satan worship. Impossible, neopagans protest: "In order to believe in Satan, you have to believe in Christ, since the devil is supposed to be the Antichrist. Well, we don't believe in Christ."

In fact, some neopagans complain that the only devil they have is the one they have been getting from Christians who are concerned for the state of their souls. Minerva Soiret, a member of the Parthenon West pagan temple in Richton Park, Ill., sometimes finds born-again Christians from a local church praying for her on her lawn. Rather than fight, she amiably joins them. Says she: "There we are, a bunch of Christians praying to Jesus on my behalf and me praying to Pallas Athena on theirs."

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