AUGUSTA, GA – ‘Tis the season for ghosts, goblins and, of course, witches. But erase any images you have of warts on noses, black cats and pointed hats. Modern witchcraft, Wicca, is an earth-based religion that emphasizes individualized spirituality. In fact, the beliefs of Wicca are much more akin to New Age than black magic.

Wicca is the best known of the NeoPagan religions.

“Paganism is not a religion,” said Joseph Zuchowski, a Wiccan high priest who resides in Augusta. “Paganism is a blanket term given to a whole series of religions that are mostly Reconstructionist, in the sense that we reconstruct as best we can within the contemporary framework of the world we’re living in the beliefs of our pre-Christian ancestors.”

Before moving to Augusta in 2007, Zuchowski and his wife were very active in the Pagan community in New York and participated in a festival called Pagan Pride Day. When they came to Augusta and found out there was no such festival here, Zuchowski’s wife, Jezibell Anat, who is also a local Wiccan high priestess, decided to create one.

Augusta’s first Pagan Pride Day will be held Saturday, Oct. 3, at the Lake Olmstead gazebo. The festival will feature a variety of workshops including Wicca 101, Kitchen Witchery and Ask the Wizard.

“Pagan Pride is an international organization and there are about 120 events worldwide,” Anat said. “There is a new one this year in the Philippines of all places, there are several in South America, there are a couple in Europe, some in Canada and 41 out of 50 states in the United States.”

There is a long history behind Paganism coming to the United States, Zuchowski said.

Gerald Gardner is the man credited with bringing attention to the religion after World War II.

A retired British civil servant who inspected rubber plantations in the Far East, Gardner was also a folklorist and an amateur archaeologist. He was a world traveler and drew from a number of sources including “The Gospel of the Witches” written by Charles Godfrey Leland in 1897. He was friends with Margaret Murray, an anthropologist, who wrote “The Witch Cult in Western Europe” and “The God of the Witches,” both in the 1920s.

Raymond Buckland, who studied with Gardner, is credited with bringing the Gardnerian form of Wicca to United States in the early 1960s.

“Wicca in the United States has transformed quite differently from the form introduced by Buckland, such as requirements for covens, no solitary practitioners and equal number of males and females in the coven. The growth of the religion in the U.S. included a significant number of women following a goddess-centered path,” said Michelle Boshears, a Wiccan high priestess who goes by Dawnwalker within the Pagan community.

“We try to all get along regardless of our personal focus,” she laughs. “It’s one of the cool things about being Pagan, to allow people to believe what is right for them. There are still Gardnerian covens here, [but] Wicca in the United States cannot be compared to Wicca in Western Europe. It has been transformed significantly by people like Starhawk who aregoddess-oriented, ecology-oriented, allow for solitary ritual and are accepting of flexibility in ritual style.”

Dawnwalker, a retired military officer, is the distinctive faith group leader for Wiccans and Pagans at Fort Gordon, and leads an Open Circle every Sunday. She works for the instillation chaplain at Fort Gordon and has to be approved every year. She ministers to all Pagan beliefs, not just Wiccan beliefs. She is endorsed by Circle Sanctuary, the oldest Wiccan Church in the U.S. She is also a member of the Order of the Pentacle, a group of veterans who supported the Pentacle Quest effort to get the pentacle recognized by the VA as an emblem of a belief for Pagan veterans.

“In the fall of 2007, after nearly a decade of trying and with the combined efforts of many, including Circle Sanctuary and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the pentacle was added to the list of emblems of belief for government-issued markers, headstones and plaques honoring deceased veterans,” she said.

The pentacle, or pentagram, depending on its use, is a five-pointed star enclosed in a circle that represents earth, air, fire, water and spirit. The points also represent the directions: north, south, east, west and center. It is a cross-cultural symbol and its origins trace back to ancient Egypt. But, perhaps where it gets its notoriety is the association with Satanism. In fact, some people associate Pagans with Satanism. But that’s not the case.

“Satanism is a totally different path from Paganism,” Zuchowski said. “There are many forms of Satanism. The most common is the practice formulated by Anton LaVey back in the 1960s. Wiccans do not worship Satan; there is really no concept of a god of total evil or an anti-god in Wicca. In many forms of Paganism there were deities that were particularly nasty, but even they had their benevolent sides, too.”

Wiccan high priestesses Jezibell Anat and Dawnwalker

The changing face of Wicca had a lot to do with the changing cultural landscape of the 1960s, Anat said.

“As it came to the United States, especially with the ’60s and the way the culture just exploded in general, Wicca was part of that movement,” she said. “It also became more eco-centric, in the ’70s, much more feminist. Early Wicca was not a religion that was goddess-centered, per se. Now many forms of Wicca center around the goddess. For women in particular, certainly for [me and Dawnwalker] who had been raised with a lot of Lord, God, father, master, son kind of thing, finding the power of the divine feminine was personally empowering and inspiring.”

In 1979, two books were published that also shed a different light on Wicca. One was “Spiral Dance,” written by Starhawk, which is the first “relatively mainstream” book on the subject.

The other, Margo Adler’s “Drawing Down the Moon,” is a survey of the Pagan paths in America.

“Starhawk’s got the widest acceptance because she broke down a lot of the Wiccan rituals, what the Sabbats are about, what the elements are about, practices, meditations and geared it for someone to practice solitary as well as defining Wicca as a path for personal growth,” said Anat. “It also added a psychological personal transformative dimension to the religion, as well as a lot of activism.”

“One thing that [Adler] stresses is the importance of diversity. Monotheism often leads to the idea of ‘one way for everything.’ Especially as our whole nation is globalizing, we’re meeting people from all different backgrounds and starting to work together and increase diversity, religious diversity is becoming important, [as well as] people choosing their own religion. There’s a lot people can choose from. They don’t have to accept a certain dogma that someone hands down to them,” Anat said.

It’s that diversity that makes both Pagans and Wicca unique. One’s choice of religion is up to the individual, not what society dictates.

“We are tolerant of all religions, but we do have some issues when other people seek to thrust their religions down our throats,” she said.

To mark their identity within the community, Pagans often take a “magical” name, like Dawnwalker, for instance.

“A lot of people choose a public magical name,” she said. “In many traditions, choosing a magical name that’s secret is part of [it]. It connects you to that tradition, that specific group of people and use that magical name within only that group and it lends power and energy to the groups, a uniqueness and it connects the people in the group.”

For Zuchowski, one of the paths he followed was a Saxon Wiccan path and took the name Bjornkin, meaning “kin to the bear.”

“Taking a name is taking an identification and, in some traditions and covens, once you step into that circle, you’re not allowed to use your public name, you use your coven name. It’s a way of reinforcing the magical connection,” he said.

In Wiccan paths and traditions, reading and studying histories and mythologies are all important to finding what is appropriate for your own spiritual growth.

“Most Pagans are scholars and there is no sacred text, there is no sacred one and only text,” she said.

The closest thing that Wiccans have to a sacred text is called the Book of Shadows. It may apply to a coven; it may be an individual’s. It may be an elaborate, handwritten book; it may be a three-ring binder.

“Your Book of Shadows may contain ways you honor your diety, your rituals, recording of names and births, initiations and spell work, if you do spells, and not all Wiccans do spell work,” Dawnwalker explained. “Spell work in my mind is focused prayer. The Book of Shadows is something that you follow through the year; it’s the manual for how to run your own church.”

Another misconception is the practice of magic. Some Pagan groups even feel that it’s superstitious. Sure, Wicca involves candles, incense and chanting in their rituals, but the Hollywood version of hocus-pocus ismisconstrued. Dawnwalker meets young people who often think that Paganisminvolves magic.

“They do have this misconception of, ‘Oh, I can learn magic,’” she said. “They don’t want me to teach them a religion, they want me to teach them magic.”

But for her, magic is a different concept.

“My definition of magic is focused prayer. If you take a Christian congregation of any size and there is a member that is very ill, what do they do? They have prayer vigils that last hours. That is a form of magic, it is raising positive energy in their way of doing it, but they’re all focused on the same intent, building energy and focusing toward this ill congregation member in an effort to help them heal. That’s magic. Magic is not what you see on ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer.’”

Dawnwalker and Anat were attracted to Wicca for different reasons, although both earned the title of high priestess.

“It was something I’d always been drawn to,” Anat said. “Initially, it was the study of history, of mythology and the centering on the feminine.”

But all Pagans are different and practice the religion in a variety of ways.

“There’s some Pagans that don’t like as much ceremony,” she said. “They may just want to go and meditate under a tree and that’s their practice, but I like a lot of the ‘stuff’ and find that there’s a lot of sacred items.”

For Dawnwalker, Wicca has always been something that was inside her since she was young.

“For me, it was something that I felt was just in me, I just never knew what to call it,” she said. “I was raised in an open and eclectic religious family; no religion was ever pushed down my throat as I was growing up. I’vealways been a very spiritual person so I was able to explore many different religions.”

“But I didn’t know there was something called Wicca out there until I was older. At the time of my exploration in the early ’70s, there were no published books, so I developed avery personal religion and uniquely though, to me, is that I had an immediate family that was open and allowing to that, even though they are all Christian.”

Statistically, the number of Wiccans is hard to pin down, locally as well as nationally. The reason being is a number of Pagans are still closeted, afraid of the repercussions their beliefs will bring them. But one thing remains true: The majority of Wiccans are women.

“The goddess is a strong factor, thehonoring of the feminine very much in there and, yes, there are trends of feminist in Judaism and Christianity, but it’s still hard to get around the masculine energy within those faiths,” Dawnwalker said of the appeal of Wicca to women.“It’s just a form where you can release what I believe is an innate connection to the feminine energies, pray to it and do everything else that you would do in Christianity, but do it with a nurturing, motherly thing.”

Dawnwalker is hoping to have more people educated and informed about the religion during Pagan Pride Day.

“My goal mirrors that of national, toprovide a venue for education for people, to show what Paganism really is, to provide educational material, not only to the Pagan community, but anyone who is interested,” Dawnwalker said. “The whole purpose is to show the whole face of Paganism. It’s going to be shocking to some people anyway, but at least it’s not… ‘Charmed.’”

For Pagan Pride Day, there will be storytelling, workshops and Anat’s dance group, Eastern Star Dance Theatre, will perform as well as the Celtic Crossing Players and Aurora Rhythms. The opening ceremony begins at noon and the festival closes with a Harvest Ritual around 4 p.m. Admission is a non-perishable food item.