c. 2006 Religion News Service

FAYETTEVILLE, Tenn. _ Rebecca Walkoff knows that she could never pass a psychological test. “I hear voices,” Walkoff, 47, said as she enjoyed a cigarette outside her store, The Moon Willow, just off the Fayetteville Square. “I see visions.”

Walkoff shrugged, her green eyes twinkling, and snubbed out the cigarette.

“Magic is everywhere you look, if you’re inclined to see it,” she said. “I’d rather be a person who sees it.”

She’s untroubled by an outside assessment of her sanity or what people think of her when she identifies herself as a Christian Wiccan.

Though she considers herself a believer in Jesus, Walkoff also embraces a label, “witch,” that was a death sentence for an estimated 100,000 people, mostly women, during the European witch-hunting period from 1450 to 1700. The mass hysteria by church leaders was “one of the longest and most bizarre delusions in Western history,” says Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of World Religions.

Walkoff is quick to assure questioners that she does not worship the devil _ Wiccans do not believe in a devil _ and that the Wiccan creed is “And it harm none, do what you will,” a creed that guarantees that she tries to generate only good energy and deeds.

“We don’t do black magic,” Walkoff said. “According to the Wiccan Law of Three, anything you put out, you’ll get back times three.”

Walkoff pushed open the door of the little shop. Inside, a spicy herb smell lingered around racks of greeting cards. Tendrils of steam wound out of the nostrils of a dragon perched over a decorative fog lamp. Halloween costumes crowded a rack next to a pile of chunky crystals. Somewhere a fountain splashed.

Walkoff’s store features some herbs, minerals and other basic equipment used by Wiccans for casting spells or making herbal potions. It also includes jewelry made of simple semi-precious gems, books about magic and herbs, but also house decorations, candles and the playful kitsch of Harry Potter, fairies and elves.

Walkoff believes that her prayers led her to the Fayetteville Square, a historic district with a thriving antiques clientele and shoppers from around the region. What she’s found in Fayetteville are a lot of friendly people, she said, even if her shop does raise a few eyebrows.

In case a visitor misses the possibility that the store offers Wiccan-friendly materials, a banner on the wall is emblazoned with a star inside a circle. The symbol, for Wiccans, symbolizes that the spiritual world, the point at the top, rules over the four elements of the material world: air, earth, fire, water. A Satan worshipper would reverse the pentagram, asserting that the material world controls the spiritual world, Walkoff said.

(A Nevada widow recently won a fight to have a Wiccan pentagram placed beside her husband’s name on a veterans’ memorial wall. Currently, the Department of Veterans Affairs does not recognize Wicca as an official religion.)

One grandmother, Walkoff said, wandered into the store with her grandchildren. When she glimpsed the pentagram on the wall, she reacted immediately.

“Come on, kids, we’ve got to go,” she said. “This place is evil.”

Joanny Simpler, Walkoff’s sister, manages the store most days. She said most people have been very friendly to her, and the customers they’ve attracted since opening last summer have been loyal.

“Everybody needs to meet them,” said Mary Ann Marsh, who sells advertisements for The Exchange, a local shopper, which takes her into every shop on the square. “It’s enlightening.”

Walkoff enjoys combining whimsy and witchcraft in the shop. The combination isn’t that unusual in Wicca. The religion is still defining itself after being recovered in 1939 by Englishman Gerald B. Gardner and his partner, Doreen Valiente, according to the Encyclopedia of World Religions. The two culled rituals from English folklore, world mythology and other writers on mysticism and goddess traditions.

As Wiccans get more comfortable identifying themselves, outright attacks from Christians have increased slightly, said Steve McManus, a witch in New Hampshire who provides security services for WitchVox.com, a Wiccan Web site.

“They kill a dog, even burn a house _ it happens all the time,” McManus said.

The best thing Wiccans can do, he said, is what Walkoff is doing: Let people see they are law-abiding, helpful neighbors.

“Wicca is essentially a very life-affirming religion,” McManus said. “We try to be decent and give people a second chance. With spells, witches try to take the energy that surrounds them and bend it, to work with nature, not against it.

“We’re dealing with quantum physics, but in old ways.”

It wasn’t the physics aspect that attracted Walkoff to Wicca, she said. It was the inclusion of a female divine force and the emphasis on letting people figure out things for themselves.

“They say in society one of the biggest problems we have is families with just one parent,” Walkoff said. “I say, in the church, where’s the goddess? Let’s put the mother back.”

Wiccan rituals, hinged on the changes of the moon and the seasons, celebrate the rhythms of life and a feminine appreciation of connections, she said. When she stumbled upon the system of beliefs that are part of Wicca, Walkoff realized that she had found the group she had been moving toward naturally on her own.

Walkoff said she knew early that she had psychic gifts. She said she gave her mother messages from her deceased grandfather when she was 2. She grew up with an Irish mother and part-Cherokee father and said her household was filled with folk knowledge about herbs and some shamanistic practices.

“It was never anything but commonplace with my family,” Walkoff said. “It was only when I got out into the world that I realized what other people thought of it.”

Walkoff wishes people would not fear Wicca. In fact, she thinks other believers, including Christians and Muslims, could even learn something from Wiccans.

“I think they could learn to relax, to stop being so serious,” Walkoff said. “And to stop killing people in the name of God. There never was a war fought in the name of Wicca.”

KRE/PH END CAMPBELL

Editors: To obtain photos of Walkoff and her store, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.