Winter Solstice
Celebrating nature's annual renewal
As a child growing up in Sunnyvale, Bernadette Burns was always bothered by the dominance of Christian themes in December holiday celebrations at school. Although she was always appreciated the beauty of Christmas Carols, she wondered how some of her fellow non-Christian classmates felt when such songs were sung. And as she grew older, Burns realized she no longer identified with Christianity. So Burns was thrilled when she got to college and learned that many of her favorite Christmas traditions pre-dated Christianity. She soon set about rewriting the lyrics to many of her favorite Christmas carols, using words that made more sense to her. Now a resident of Modesto, Burns, 39, has become an expert on earth-based traditions and ceremonies after many years of study. She holds a ministerial credential through the Covenant of the Goddess, a religious group, and was interviewed for this months "Self" magazine about her spiritual views. She now celebrates the holiday season by following pagan traditions. Although Winter Solstice is Dec. 21 this year, she wil lead and early service in honor of the holiday on Sunday at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County in Modesto. Titled "Reclaiming the Reason for the Season", Burns will discuss the pagan roots of such traditions as evergreen trees and holly boughs and lead the congregation in the singing of "reclaimed" carols. Burns said she doesn't think she is being disrespectful of Christians by changing the lyrics of various Christmas carols to words appropriate for Winter Solstice. The way she looks a it, she is just providing other like-minded people the chance to sing favorite holiday songs they believe in. Winter Solstice, the shortest day and teh longest night of the year, was celebrated by cultures from Northern Europe to Mesopotamia, said Bill Hammond, professor of history at South Missouri State University. The roots of many Western Christmas traditions, such as the Christmas feast and gift-giving date back to Winter Solstice festivals. Like Christians who enjoy immense Christmas dinners, many of these cultures also indulged in huge feasts on Winter Solstice. They did that, Hammond said, as a sign of faith that the gods would give them enough food to get them through the winter. The holiday was important to ancient peoples because it signified the return of light and warmth, Burns said. Elders taught that on Solstice night, the Goddess rebirthed the light, the Sun Child, she said. Bonfires were lit to guide the Sun's return and great feasts were scheduled as villages welcomed the reborn sun. In ancient Rome, the Saturnalia festival was one of the most important dates of the calendar and was closely connected to Winter Solstice. The festival, which took it's name from the god Saturn, began Dec. 17 and often stretched through Dec. 23, and feast on food, said Brian Rose, an associate professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati. It was the precalence of these winter festivals- not Jesus' historic birthdate- that led Christianns to claim Dec. 25 as their most holy day, experts beleive. Historians don't really know when Jesus was born and some beleive he was born in the spring, said Rev. J.W. Langlinaias, a theology professor at St. Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas. Celebrating Christmas on Dec. 25 didn't take hold until the fourth century AD, when the Catholic Church was attempting to take over rival festivities of Mithraism, a pagan religion. The Christmas celebration first gained wide acceptance furning the reign of the Roman emporer Constantine. For Cecilia Woosley of Turlock, celebrating Winter Solstice came after years of spiritual study, including exploring Buddhism, and Hinduism. She said she was drawn to the celebration of Winter Solstice because it honors the time of rebirth. "It's a renewing of the vitality and focusing on the abundance that will come to us during the year", she said. Jerry Pickford of Modesto initiated Winter Solstice observations with her three children because she was tired of the commercialism of traditional Christmas celebrations. When her children were young, Pickford dressed as a Winter Witch, doling out gifts. She also decorated the house in blue and silver - blue for the midnight sky, and silver for stars. As a celebratory treat would make a chocolate solstice cake with white icing and hide a toy inside. The family would light candles and sing songs about the light returning and would talk about how Christmas traditions such as the evergreen wreath and the yule log were adopted from older, pagan religions. "It was a time to be quiet and to go inward," she said. "It was a time to slow down and reflect on the year." Her children, now 25, 19, and 16 never felt like they missed anything by celebrating the winter holiday. Pickford said. They celebrated Christmases with their paternal grandmother so they were able to experience a little of everything. Most Winter Solstice celebrations are introspective on some level. The Rev. Sandy Johnson, a leader of the Modesto group Friends of the Earth, will hold a private Winter Solstice ritual that will include burning of papers holding each participants goals for the past year. The group will write down new goals and fold the paper in a sage leaf, for rememberance. They will also meditate on an unlit candle , visualizing coldness and darkness, and on things that are cold and dark withing each of them. Then, they will light the candle to symbolize the return of warmth. Over the course f the new year, group members are encouraged to occasionally review their goals as a reminder of what they are striving for. "The celebration of the rebirth of the Earth is what it's about," Johnson said. The holiday is "also just a wonderful time to get together with friends and family and feel the warmth of the true spirit fo the holidays". -Lisa Millegan Religion/Culture Editor Modesto Bee 12/13/97
A GREAT article was written in my local paper about one of the spiritual shops in the area. I know the owner personally and was so happy to see she got some positive press! Here's the article and her picture as it appeared in the Saturday August 30th 1997 edition of The Modesto Bee.
'Double, double toil and trouble' By Dennis Roberts Bee staff writer When you run a New Age shop in the buckle of Central California's Bible Belt, you need to maintain your sense of humor. So Vicki Vetro, owner of The Cauldron in Modesto, keeps a box of bumper stickers among her neatly-shelved displays of ceremonial pipes and drums, tarot cards, incense sticks, candles, oils, medicine bags, jewelry and statuary representing gods and goddesses. "My other car is a broom," says one. "In goddess we trust." "My karma ran over my dogma." "Born again pagan." Vetro, ex-Mormon, former body-building competitor, 38-year-old mother of five, says The Cauldron is her calling, an inspired enterprise that has filled an empty spot in her being. "I kid around and say it was magic the way it happened," says Vetro. Just three months passed from the time the concept first occurred to her, virtually in her sleep, until the shop's grand opening. "Basically it was magic," she continues. "It took positive thinking and creative visualization to create this place. "And that's what magic is." Vetro says Modesto has been friendly since The Cauldron opened nine months ago. Her store attracts a fairly steady -- if not overwhelming -- flow of customers. Vetro usually greets them herself; on this day, she pads around the store in bare feet and a long, brightly patterned gauze dress. Her handshake is firm, a keepsake of her bodybuilding days from 1988 to 1991, when she earned three firsts and a second in regional competition before back problems forced her to retire. Flowing, prematurely-graying hair mingled with brown sometimes obscures a tattoo on her neck -- a pentagram in a circle, a sign Christians associate with Satanism. "They should do their homework," Vetro says, explaining that the five-pointed star has symbolized many things throughout history, including the five wounds of Christ and the five elements of creation: fire, air, water, earth and spirit. The circle represents the cycle of life. She says early Christians used it as a sign of protection against evil, and Satanists invert the pentagram as a sign of disrespect. To her way of thinking, Satan is a myth. Vetro got the tattoo a year ago as a visible reminder of her transformation to earth-based spirituality. Its visibility on her neck gives her opportunities "to explain to people what it really means," she says. Though Vetro was raised as a fourth-generation Mormon, she says the faith ultimately didn't answer all her spiritual questions or fit her independent spirit. She went her own way five years ago while facing back surgery. "Anytime a person goes in for major surgery, they start to question whether they're going to come out of it and what will happen if they don't," she says. "I just wanted some peace of mind. And I found this book called "Peace of Mind,' by Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman. That was the beginning." After her surgery, Vetro continued reading a variety of books about the spiritual journey, and she began forming a personal philosophy that is still under construction. The Cauldron's presence hasn't gone totally unnoticed by the Christian community, which generally associates New Age, Wiccan and pagan practices with Satanism. Recently, a rumor circulated that a group which meets at the shop was praying for the downfall of the community's churches. Surprise and anger flash across Vetro's face when she hears the accusation. "Oh! Why would we do that?" she exclaims. "I love learning about religions and different belief systems. I honor them all." The Cauldron doesn't represent the witch's pot, Vetro says, but a melting pot of spiritual and religious traditions. "This country was founded on religious freedom. For me, this store is how I'm helping humanity by helping teach religious tolerance and personal growth. And included in that is Christianity." While The Cauldron represents an entryway to the occult to some people, its presence provides a source of comfort for others who, for one reason or another, feel excluded by mainstream religions. "It's long overdue," says Susan, a Cauldron customer who didn't want her last name used. "People who don't fit into the normal religious background need a place where they can feel safe, because you're almost frowned upon. "People don't understand it. They say it's witchcraft, it's voodoo, it's satanic ... truly, it's none of that, but people aren't open-minded enough to stop and ask, "What does this really mean?'" "The Cauldron adds some diversity to Modesto," says Moon-tied Otter, a Modesto professional who practices both Wicca and the faith into which she was born -- a faith she doesn't want to name because she's concerned that information would give away her identity. "It's very hard as a Wiccan to have every religious store have nothing but Christian articles." Vetro has divided her store into three sections: the retail shop up front, a space in back where she does therapeutic massage, and a room in the middle for classes. The middle room provides a venue for events such as the recent "basic ritual workshop in earth-based spirituality" taught by Raven Bear, an Irish former Catholic who has been a Wiccan priestess for 11 years. "When I read books about this feminine divine -- books like Carol Christ's 'When God Was a Woman' -- I felt almost an audible click," says Raven Bear, who, like Moon-tied Otter and other Modesto Wiccans, prefers to keep her real name out of the newspaper. "I said, "This is my home. She has been my god all the time; I just didn't know it.'" In earth-based spirituality, male and female representations of deity are regarded as equally important, but the goddess tends to get more attention. That's a response, Raven Bear says, to the emphasis of God's masculine traits in other religions. "In church and Sunday school, they would try to say that, yes, God is male and female. But with our language being limited, they choose to use the male nomenclature to describe divine consciousness and power. And I found that as a powerful girl growing up as a teen-ager, having a powerful God was kind of paternal and wasn't complete enough for me. "When I found the goddess, I felt that everything about who I was as a woman was empowered, affirmed and cherished." Raven Bear is a round, gentle woman of 38 with the patient demeanor of your favorite Sunday school teacher. Dressed in a nearly floor-length blue and gold dress, an amulet on a gold band around her head, Raven Bear explained magic and earth-based religion to a group of 26 seekers -- 14 adult females, eight teen girls and four men, including Raven Bear's husband. As Raven Bear teaches it, Wicca is a benevolent religion that endorses only positive magic. God is not transcendent, but imminent -- within each person. Magic is a manifestation of personal faith and power, and the ritual objects -- altars, amulets, statues, knives -- are just tools for building and focusing that spiritual power. "An ye harm none, do as ye will," says Raven Bear, quoting the Wiccan law. Black arts and Satanic worship are renegade offshoots that give real Wiccans a bad name and are harmful mainly to its practitioners, says Raven Bear. "There is a three-fold or 100-fold law, depending on which tradition you come from, that whatever you put out there will return to you three-fold or 100-fold," she explains. "So to pray for the downfall of something is to ultimately pray for your own downfall. "But there are bad seeds in every religion. Look at Waco." After the workshop, Vetro says that, like many of the people who attend Raven Bear's classes, she's a seeker, not an expert. She admits that she doesn't know everything there is to know about every item she sells. And she herself doesn't pursue or promote any particular religion. "This is not a church, it's not a ministry," she says. "It's part of my contribution to my community, trying to bring love and acceptance for all people." If she has a doctrine, Vetro says, it's this: Everyone should have freedom of choice. She's exercised that freedom in her own life, not only in her spiritual philosophy but in her decision to open The Cauldron. "The evening of our grand opening, everything had fallen into place, and after I closed the doors I was there all by myself," Vetro says. "I turned out the lights and I just sat there in the back room looking around." Her eyelids quiver and tears begin to form. "And I thought to myself, "I did it. And it was all me.' The effort I put into it was totally from my heart.Back to The Craft page
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