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.
In the Anglo-Saxon and Norse pagan traditions, Yule is the New Year."For many pagans it is truly the darkest day of the year," Botting says. "For that reason it's the celebration of the rebirth of the sun, and the sun is generally associated with God."
On Yule, the university's interfaith chapel typically churns with pagans marking the return of more daylight hours by swirling in a crack-the-whip-like dance, revering stag antlers because they signify the cycle of life, and dipping a ceremonial knife into a cast-iron cauldron of wine to symbolize the unity of male and female divinity.
After five years as an administration-approved chaplain, with the right to perform marriages at the 30,000-student public university, Botting can't prove she's unique. But, she says, "I haven't been able to find another pagan chaplain anywhere else in the world."
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.
But Inar Hansen, vice president, or "bard," of the university's 150-member Thorn and Oak Student Pagan Club, argues the census figures only hint at Wicca's rising popularity, especially in Victoria, a major tourist destination. The government data don't count, he says, the many witches who have yet to "come out of the broom closet."
Hansen maintains tens of thousands of residents of North America's West Coast--in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and California--practice paganism, often informally and eclectically. "The West Coast has a green, fertile energy," Hansen says, "that tends to attract pagans."
The University of Victoria's acclaimed poet and English professor, the late Robin Skelton, paved the way for sophisticated paganism in Victoria, Botting says. His daughter now runs a large pagan group known as Thirteenth House.
Botting, 55, follows in Skelton's academic tradition. With her Ph.D., she teaches religious studies, mythology and medical sociology. A former Jehovah's Witness who left the religion decades ago, Botting is also co-author of the acclaimed book "The Orwellian World of the Jehovah's Witnesses."
In a rare example of North American pagans moving into the mainstream, Botting and other members of the Aquarian Tabernacle Church won government approval in the late 1990s to legally conduct marriages, after being officially recognized as a religion.
Yule (from the Old English word referring to the winter season) is one of eight big pagan rituals each year, Botting says--even though not all pagans treat Yule as a New Year's celebration; many mark the new year on Halloween on Oct. 31, or what witches call Samhain.
A useful way to think about Yule, Botting explains, is as a celebration of God as "the Winter-born king," as an event which symbolizes the rebirth of the life-sustaining spirit.
In the fourth century, Botting says, Roman Emperor Constantine, a convert to Christianity, created today's Christmas event by borrowing from a highly popular pagan winter festival similar to Yule. Constantine chose Dec. 25, when sunshine hours began to grow longer in the Northern Hemisphere, as the time to celebrate the sacred birth of Jesus. "There are real parallels between the pagan and Christian traditions," Botting says. "In both paganism and Christianity, the winter solstice would be the celebration of the birth of light, of divine light, of regeneration."
Botting says many members of school's Thorn and Oak Pagan Students Club who take part in Yule festivities originally hail from smaller towns.
Before arriving on campus, she says, many tended to practice witchcraft on their own, with books bought from bookstores, which these days sport typically large sections on witchcraft. They might also have enjoyed witch-based shows as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "The Craft" or "Practical Magic." "As chaplain, the students come to see me with standard student issues: They wonder what they're doing with their lives. But they also want to know more about pagan tradition," Botting says.
"Some of them come to our community rituals expecting weird things to happen. Some might think witchcraft is used to magically control people. But they soon learn that's not what witchcraft is about. It's about the Earth and the cycle of life."
Hansen, a 27-year-old pagan leader in his last year of nursing studies, says he and his girlfriend, who helps lead rituals, find many students come to campus believing witchcraft is about casting magic spells. "They're insecure. They're looking for power outside themselves," he says. "But the key to paganism is to `know thyself,' to find balance within yourself and the universe, to feel the life energy, which is both male and female, and realize witchcraft is not about hocus-pocus."
While Botting hasn't witnessed serious discrimination against pagans while she's been on campus, Hansen regrets how the student pagan club's posters are often defaced with phrases such as "Christ is Lord."
Paganism is open to psychic phenomena, but Hansen says the last thing he wants is to revere evil spirits. Many conservative religious people are taught paganism is about worshipping Satan, he said. "But it has nothing to do with that."
