In Southwestern Wisconsin, preparation is underway for Circle Sanctuary's 50th annual Yule festival. For the pagan members the church serves, it marks winter solstice, the longest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.
On Sunday night, High Priestess Selena Fox gathered spiritual leaders on Zoom to light candles and honor the full moon.
"We draw down the power of the moon into this sacred circle, into ourselves, and into this season," she said, before breaking into song. "Yuletide joy, Yuletide cheer, Yuletide spirit, welcome here."
She invited those watching to call to mind joy from sacred seasonal plants: evergreen trees, holly, ivy and mistletoe.
On Saturday, she and several dozen others will gather around a bonfire at the sanctuary's nature preserve and throw a decorated Yule log into the fire, symbolizing the returning sun.
Fox is a Wiccan priestess, but Circle Sanctuary is inclusive of a range of pagan traditions, focusing on a spiritual connection with nature. Amid the depths of winter, Fox said Yule is a celebratory occasion to plant seeds of hope for the coming spring.
"It's really a powerful time for personal renewal, for renewal of bonds with family and friends, for humankind and for the planet as a whole," Fox said.
Fox said you don't have to be pagan to celebrate Yule. Anyone can commemorate the day by going on a walk in nature and taking in the beauty of wintertime.
Paganism is growing in the U.S, particularly among young people, according to Helen Berger, a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School who studies pagan communities. In part, Berger said, that reflects Americans' movement away from organized religion and toward less-hierarchical spiritual practices.
"They feel that it's not meeting their individual or personal needs, and they are discovering alternative spirituality," she said. "We have a great deal of individualism in our culture, in our society, and here we have it within a religious or spiritual form."
Many pagans, including Wiccans, practice magic and call themselves witches.
Berger said solstice is a pivotal time in pagan communities.
"We're going into this really deep darkness," she said. "But we need to start focusing on the fact that the sun will start, slowly but surely, coming back. So, there's this outward joyousness about the light."
Circle of the Stag in Wichita, Kansas, a decade-old Wiccan coven with eight members, has spent this week preparing for the solstice.
At home in Wichita, High Priestex Orin Hart, is preparing for Circle of the Stag's annual Yule ritual. Hart, who uses they/them pronouns, holds up a long braided cord adorned with wooden charms.
"We call it a cingulum. We wear it around our waist when we do any ritual to hold our spirit in to us, but also keep things from hurting us," Hart said. "In a ritual, you could be in a … trancelike state. You don't want anything to get you while you're having an out-of-body experience."
For this year's ritual, the coven is joining with another local pagan group. Up to 30 people will gather around a fire. Through storytelling and dance, Hart and another leader will lead a reenactment of the Wild Hunt, a story about guiding souls who've died during the year into the afterlife.
"Sometimes we'll do meditations," Hart said. "This year, for this ritual in particular, we're doing a lot of movement."
Rituals start with casting a sacred circle: tracing its outline with a wand or dagger and cleansing the space with smoke and brine.
"Once we're in that circle, part of what we say is that we are in a place that is no place, and time that is no time, and we are between the worlds," Hart said.
This sacred realm, Hart says, is where members deepen spiritual connections with themselves and each other — and celebrate the return of the sun.
Like for Circle Sanctuary, the Yule log plays an important role in the coven's Solstice ritual. Members hold pieces of last year's log, which bear symbols of things they had wanted to carry into the new year.
"And then we will put them into the fire to release the things that we got from this year," Hart said. "Afterwards, we'll make a new (Yule log) to take with us through the next year."
Copyright 2024 NPR