Happy Monday, Beagle fans! It's Airy Monday, celebrating the Element of Air and the realm of the mind. Today, we are concentrating on looking deeper at the "Halloween" witch, including Witch's hats; nude on a broom; reclaiming Halloween stereotypes; academic studies of witchcraft.
Where does the Witch's Hat come from? According to this essay at Salon, the high-peaked hat may have originally been a medieval attempt to identify Jews (who were then associated with devil-worshippers and witches.)
Happy Monday, Beagle fans! Today's Airy Monday post includes news from space -- Hayley's comet, GRACE satellite shows water cycles, building blocks of life in a distant galaxy -- plus an academic Pagan conference calls for papers and a scholarly collection of sources on witchhunting history.
First up: news from SPACE! (How much more Airy can you get?) October's skies will light up with some extra excitement 10 days before Samhain, courtesy of Hayley's Comet. Get the details here.
A lovely bumper crop of community news today at the PaganNewsBeagle! Heathens in politics, the New Alexandrian Library, Oberon Zell talks to Vice, changes at Cherry Hill, and a run at the world record for largest gathering of witches. Enjoy your day!
Wild Hunt staff member and Heathen polytheist Cara Schultz is running for city council in her hometown of Burnsville, Minnesota.
Erin Lale
Fellow faculty at Harvard Divinity School posted an open letter to Wolpe in response to his article. It's available on this page, below the call for p...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. The Wild Hunt has a roundup of numerous responses on its site, but it carried this one as a separate article. It is an accoun...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. This one is by a scholar of paganism. It's unfortunately a Facebook post so this link goes to Facebook. She posted the text o...
Erin Lale
Here's another link to a pagan response to the Atlantic article. I would have included this one in my story too if I had seen it before I published it...
Janet Boyer
I love the idea of green burials! I first heard of Recompose right before it launched. I wish there were more here on the East Coast; that's how I'd l...