Wiccans Fight Spooky Stereotypes Tales of Sacrifices Total "Nonsense"
	Michael Cabbage

A Wiccan minister in the Church of the Iron Oak, she has heard the accusations over and over during the course of her ongoing zoning battle with the city of Palm Bay.

"There was a story going around the neighborhood that I was dancing naked in the back yard and that people heard the screams of children being tortured," Zaleski said. "We're really getting tired of hearing this kind of nonsense."

At the Wiccans' Samhain ceremony Saturday night, there weren't any human sacrifices. No satanic rituals. No torturing of animals. Not even a naked romp in the woods.

Instead, more than 40 men, women and children met at an aerobics studio in Melbourne for a ceremony that included prayer, singing, a religious play and the sharing of sacraments. Afterward, they had a barbecue.

Today, on Halloween, Wiccan ministers Zaleski and her husband, Roger Coleman, will appear before Palm Bay's Code Enforcement Board on charges they are operating a church in a residential neighborhood without a permit.

As founders of the Church of the Iron Oak, the couple host ceremonies for six of the Wiccan holy days at their home.

City officials insist the case simply is a zoning action unrelated to the couple's unorthodox religious beliefs, and is partially based on citizen complaints.

Zaleski doesn't buy it, and has filed a federal lawsuit alleging her First Amendment rights are being violated.

The Wiccans may not be mainstream, but they certainly are not sinister, members and others say.

The Iron Oak congregation of Wiccans follows ancient European pagan traditions that predate Christianity and hold a belief in the magic of changing attitudes.

They worship a Mother Goddess and believe the deity resides in people and nature. They also believe humans are spiritually interconnected with the Earth.

In the United States, Wicca is recognized as a legitimate religion by the Department of Defense and the Internal Revenue Service, and is accorded the same status as the more conventional Judeo-Christian faiths.

Religious leaders from virtually every faith have been quick to support Zaleski's fight, criticizing the city's actions.

"The church I'm pastoring now began in a home," said the Rev. Tom Pfaff, pastor of the Christ United Methodist Church of Palm Bay. "It's very common in Palm Bay and in line with our American heritage.

"Next Saturday we'll have 10 gatherings at people's homes with 15 people at each one. We're trying to drive religion into the home, not out of it."

Said the Rev. J.E. Myers, senior pastor of Palm Bay's First Pentecostal Church: "If the city can pass ordinances saying you can't have religious gatherings at your house, I think that's a dangerous thing. This is America, and they (the Wiccans) have the right to worship wherever they want.

Besides working full-time as an unpaid Wiccan minister, she is a 48-year-old mother of three, certified flight instructor and holder of a master's degree in systems management.

Her husband is a 53-year-old electrical engineer who has worked for the same company for 25 years.

Zaleski was raised in Florida and, like many children, received a traditional Christian upbringing.

"I grew up as a strict Roman Catholic and even spent a year in a nunnery," Zaleski said. "I just wasn't comfortable being less significant in my religion because I was a woman. My father raised me with two main ethics - - give back to your community, and you're as good as any man."

After a brief stint in the Unitarian Church, Zaleski studied Zen Buddhism in New York, then discovered Wicca at a bookstore in 1986. Four years later, she saw a flier for a Wiccan event on a co-worker's desk and asked if she could attend.

"She took me aside and said, 'You can go but you can't ever say anything at work or you'll get us both fired,'" Zaleski said. "My husband went and was incredibly excited. The group's teachers agreed to train us the next week."

After a year and a half as students, Zaleski and Coleman decided to start their own congregation and founded the Church of the Iron Oak in 1992.

In recent months, the church's membership has declined to its current level of 16 after reaching a high of 36 members.

The congregation rents a second-floor office in Melbourne where it holds weekly classes on subjects including Wicca, pottery and tarot card reading.

Zaleski said her former Zen teacher offered her a few words of advice about starting a Wiccan church in Brevard County.

"She said, 'It's one thing to bring Buddhism to New York, but it's quite another to bring witchcraft to Florida."

After the congregation gathered in a circle, one by one the Egyptian gods made their appearance. Circe, the mother goddess, came last [Webmeister's note: Circe is the Craft Name of the individual who took Isis' role in the circle, not the name of the mother goddess] and blessed the gathering, invoking the spirits of fire, air, water and earth.

Next, cakes and ale - a kind of Wiccan communion - were handed out to the congregation. This Samhain, Oreo cookies substituted for the cakes and apple cider for the ale.

The Samhain ceremony also included the "dumb supper," a ritual in which dinner settings are placed on a table in memory of relatives who have passed to the other side.

Members of the congregation laid personal items belonging to their deceased friends and relatives on the table, then said prayers for the dead and dying.

"We believe that on Samhain the barriers fall that keep us from being in touch with those who have died," Zaleski said. "The veil is thin, and all the spirits who have passed over are at their height of telling us what we need to know."

After the "dumb supper," participants danced, sang, chanted, exchanged hugs and left for a cookout.

Saturday's Samhain holy day marked the beginning of the new year in the Wiccan church and is one of eight festivals closely tied to the seasons. The holy day is intended to be a celebration of ancestors and a time to remember family members who have died.

"Later it was turned into a spirits returning to Earth kind of thing that eventually became Halloween," Coleman said. "It went through a big evolution from a very solemn time that people used to recognize their families and heritage."

In fact, the term witch originated from the word Wicca.

Most Wiccans are from the English or Gardnerian tradition, named after Gerald Gardner whose 1951 book Witchcraft Today is the basis for much of the modern Wiccan church. Other traditions, such as Egyptian, Alexandrian, Italian and Eclectic, also are common and often practiced within the same congregation, including the Iron Oak.

Some Wiccan sects still prefer to call themselves witches and refer to their groups as covens, but most have dropped those terms of more common ones with positive connotations.

"We use the term church because people know what it means," Zaleski said. "When you say coven, people start to get nervous."

The group worships a Mother Goddess and holds as its golden rule the creed "Harm None." Most Wiccans believe in reincarnation, and that acts in this life - good or evil - will be returned threefold.

"Conventional religions look at the deity as being distant; we look at the deity that is within people," Coleman said. "We say people are spiritually interconnected with the Earth."

Despite constant charges of rampant Satanism in Wiccan ceremonies, the religion doesn't subscribe to the Christian concept of hell or competing entities of good and evil.

In a sworn statement given on Zaleski's behalf, Dr. J. Gordon Melton, a Methodist minister and the author of the Encyclopedia of American Religions, said the accusations were false.

"It has been my experience that a few misguided Christians, repeating medieval fantasies originally generated by the Inquisition, have perpetuated tales of Wiccan child sacrifice," Melton said. "It is essentially the same story the Nazis used against the Jews."

"We don't even believe in Satan," Coleman said. "We don't have a devil and never have."

Although Wiccans and Satanists used the five-pointed star pentagram in their religious ceremonies, there is an important difference, Coleman said. "The Satanists use the pentagram and the cross, but they turn them upside down," he said. "It's an attempt to put down those who are religious."

In a recent issue of The Champion, an anti-abortion newsletter, Zaleski's home address was printed in an article titled "Child Sacrifice in the New Age." The story characterized Wicca as "the religion of witchcraft and child sacrifice."

Since her address was made public, Zaleski said she has been spied on and harassed. Guests outside her house were pelted with fruit.

Although the church meets at her house only eight times a year, neighbors have complained to the zoning board about Zaleski's backyard ceremonies and even circulated a petition asking city officials to stop her.

One of the neighbors, Elena McKnight, declined to comment when contacted Saturday, but previously said a church has no place in her quite neighborhood.

"It's not built for those powwows they're doing. This is zoned for residential-agricultural, and we want to keep it that way," McKnight said.

"I think somebody has nerve to come in here and start a church without asking anyone else. I have nothing against Jacque Zaleski. That's just not a place to have a church."

Some Wiccans are having problems directly related to their faith. A member of Zaleski's congregation claims she was fired from her job at a small construction company after the owners learned of her religious beliefs.

During a recent child custody case, a Wiccan had his beliefs brought up in court in an attempt to brand him as an unfit parent. Coleman said during a similar case in Orlando, an attorney went on television to label a Wiccan parent a Satanist.

Despite the fact that costly legal battles have driven her to the verge of bankruptcy and the loss of her house, Zaleski vowed to carry on. She hopes her lawsuit will help Wiccans throughout the country.

"People have to step back from the Saturday night horror movies and look at Wicca for what it is," Coleman said.

"I think they need to understand that I love my religion no less than they love theirs," Zaleski added, wiping tears from her eyes. "That's what drives us. Like any other ministers, we believe we were called on to do this. And when you're called, you can't turn your back on it."