Victoria, British Columbia—(RNS) The winter solstice, which marks the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, is a sacred day to Heather Botting, a pagan chaplain at the University of Victoria.
It is Yule: the festival to celebrate light, the sun and God. On the winter solstice, which occurs Dec. 22 this year, Botting will lead dozens of students and staff through a series of joyous Yule rituals involving cauldrons, knives, wine, dance, cakes, holly, ivy and stag antlers.
…Botting is a pagan (also known as Wiccan) priestess in what might also be one of the planet’s most witch-friendly cities, Greater Victoria (population 280,000), where more than 1,000 people officially told Canadian census takers they were pagans.
Paganism is Canada’s fastest-growing religion, according to Statistics Canada. The number of self-declared pagans in 2001 grew by 281 percent from a decade earlier. There are now 21,080 pagans in Canada, with 6,100 in the province of British Columbia, of which Victoria is the capital. There are more pagans on the West Coast of Canada than there are, for instance, Salvation Army members.
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3 comments
This is pretty fascinating. I can’t for the life of me figure out why Wicca has such an allure! Of course, I’m more interested in Truth than deviant behaviors . . .
Jay
Jay, I think the attraction is basically that of communing with a pantheistic nature and the promise of way-cool magical powers combined with being free to do and believe basically whatever you want, especially in the area of–yep, you guessed it–sex.
“…I have great hots that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us (through not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy…If once we can produce our perfect work –the Materialist Magician, the man, not using , but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls “Forces” while denying the existence of “spirits”–then the end of the war will be in sight.”
Screwtape to Wormwood in the SCREWTAPE LETTERS by C.S. Lewis
Screwtape is wrong about the war but seems to have succeeded.