dozen pagan events throughout the state each year, including pagan pride events, a ball and an educational convention called ConVocation.

To passersby, the Michigan Pagan Festival could easily be mistaken for a typical weekend art fair.

People perused the aisles where local vendors had set up shop, picking up candles to sniff. They ate hot dogs, let their kids play in a children's area and caught up with old friends.

But after looking at handmade jewelry, they'd have the chance to stroll over to a spiritual drum circle where a staccato beat reverberated inside a barn and people chanted completely uninhibited.

Nearby, tarot card readers predicted people's futures, several wolves roamed on leashes and a fire pit burned for the duration.

Women gathered in one corner of a barn to share burdensome experienceseducators, such as Curott, a New York attorney-turned-Wicca priestess who experienced a spiritual awakening in the '80s after having unexplained dreams and premonitions.

That prompted her to take a bus each week after work to a downtown occult bookstore, where she'd meet with women in a broom closet lit by a dangling light bulb, jars of herbs and statues of goddesses surrounding them.

It was everything her rational, masculine work world was not: a diverse group of smart, fascinating women guiding each other to see the sacred in themselves and in the natural world.

That's the same guiding principle today, she says, although witchcraft has since come out of the shadows of a bookstore closet and into the mainstream.

“All of a sudden, you have a generation of young women,” Curott said,