Minnesota Wiccans and neopagans are stepping into the limelight as they push for inclusion of the pentacle on military tombstones.

Long before Elysia Gallo identified herself as a neopagan, she felt drawn to mystical, magical things.

“From the time I was about 8, I loved crystals and charms,” she said.

Gallo, 32, of St. Paul, eventually channeled her passion into a vocation as acquisitions editor at Llewellyn Worldwide, a Woodbury company (www.llewellyn.com) that publishes Wiccan “spell-a-day” almanacs, tarot cards, love-potion recipe books and New Age spirituality guides.

The elegantly coiffed Gallo, who said she practices some Wiccan rites without embracing the Wicca religion, was part of a colorful group of about 150 who came together last Saturday in St. Paul to decry the absence of the pentacle on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) list of approved emblems for military gravestones.

Young and old women with flowing hair and bright capes; old men in graying ponytails, animal skins or faded military duds; young men in outfits that looked like something out of “The Lord of the Rings”; families in flannel, jeans and feed caps carting kids in snowsuits, and an occasional teenager with purple hair or a funky-smelling cigarette: The group defied definition except, perhaps, as a feisty, friendly, decidedly countercultural crowd.

Their chatter and ceremony reflected a reverence for nature that in another setting might have been called environmental consciousness-raising.

Tracie Ferris, 37, of Farmington, is a member of the Circle of Phoenix, a group (don’t call it a coven) of about 15 Wicca practitioners. She said that the faith allows her to indulge “my love for the natural world.”

Amanda Halder, 24, and Scott Tester, 39, of White Bear Lake brought their bundled 1-year-old son, Connor, to the rally. Identifying themselves as pagans has “freed us to be who we are and to focus on Mother Earth and her creatures,” Halder said.

No organized faith had offered them that “boundary-less world,” she said.

Hard to count

In 2001, the American Religious Identification Survey identified 274,000 American Wiccans, pagans or neopagans. Minnesota has several thousand, estimates Penny Tupy of the Upper Midwest Pagan Alliance. In his “Cityview Report 2006,” John Mayer, who tracks religious groups and trends in the Twin Cities area, lists 136 local pagan or Wiccan groups that he says can pull in up to 20,000 people.

Exact numbers are hard to come by because groups form and fold regularly, because some practitioners are shy about revealing their faith and because some identify themselves as Druids, shamans or followers of other very small practices, say neopagans and those who study them.

Wicca has fairly extensive recognition as a religion, including by the U.S. Army, which issues dog tags with that designation when requested.

Courtney Morton, 28, of South St. Paul, said Wicca honors “balance and harmony in the universe,”the wheel of the year” and “the rule of three: Whatever you put into the universe, you get back threefold.”

ReligiousTolerance.org, whose description of Wicca is admired by Tupy, defines it as an “earth-based religion” that draws from primitive pagan, Nordic, Celtic and American Indian traditions and occasionally worships a goddess or god whose features vary widely.

Rituals center around the movements of the Earth and the moon and invocations of blessings and luck. Last weekend, for instance, participants “swept” various forms of evil out of a circle of sprinkled birdseed on the State Capitol mall.

Pentacle pride

Since the September 2005 combat death in Afghanistan of Army Sgt. Patrick Stewart, a Wiccan from Nevada, the push for pentacle recognition has entered the national spotlight. The military cemetery where Stewart was buried would not allow a pentacle on his stone, but the state of Nevada stepped in and installed one, according to published reports.

The VA’s list already includes 38 symbols, from Christian denominations to Eckankar, as well as one for atheists, said Nels Linde of Menomonie, Wis. “It’s simply about religious freedom,” said Linde, organizational director of the Upper Midwest group, which organized the St. Paul rally.

The VA, for its part, has said that it neither endorses nor condemns the pentacle, but in the past rejected it as a fringe faith. A federal judge in Madison, Wis., recently denied the agency’s request to delay action on a Wiccan lawsuit and set a trial date for June.

The pentacle symbolizes the union of body and spirit and honors the elements of earth, air, fire, water and spirit, Wiccans say. “Some people misconstrue it as evil, but it’s the exact opposite,” said Jim Mosser of Minneapolis, a Marine Corps veteran who served in a “color guard” last week.

Such misconceptions may stem from Satanists, from whom most Wiccans recoil, and misinformed horror-movie makers who turn the pentacle upside-down, which is as offensive to Wiccans as an inverted cross would be to Christians, Mosser and others said.

Warm to the cold

Perhaps the strangest part of last weekend’s decidedly eclectic gathering was the participants’ enthusiastic embrace of the weather.

The weather was embracing them, too, but not in a nice way. As their ceremony-in-a-circle entered its second hour, temperatures tumbled and sideways sleet smacked faces and puddled into a nasty mush on the mall.

Here and there, a kid howled in displeasure, but most of the neopagans and Wiccans joyfully turned their faces to the spitting wind.

“You came here not in spite of the weather, but because of it!” Tupy shouted to whoops and applause.

“These are the happiest, nicest people,” said Judith Olson Linde, Nels’ wife, after the rally. “We stick up for our rights, and we look out for each other.”

Source

• Miller, Pamela. Women’s History Month begins with religion talk. (2007, March 2). Minneapolis Star Tribune. Retrieved March 3, 2007.

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