Halloween is this week. The kids will be dressing up as ghouls and goblins, witches and monsters. The world will be on a sugar high for the next week or so. Mainstream America will be watching all the scary movies they can find and treating the paranormal as freakish.
During a car ride with my mother, I was making conversation with her when she said she didn't like this time of year. I said why not - thinking Fall is my favorite time of year and I adore the weather, the colors, the season. She came out with "all the talk about witches and other bad things." My immediate response in my head was - hey wait a minute.
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.
Ellen Dugan's Witches Tarot has become my go to deck and that is a special privilege in my deck collection. I wasn't sure anything could top the connection I made with my Steampunk deck but then the Witches Tarot called to me in a dream (I kid you not) and now it is the deck at the top of my pile. This is a deck I flirted with for awhile before it showed up in my dream. I made googly eyes at it on Amazon and even drooled over the images on facebook but I had not committed to buying it.
Then it happened, it came to me in my dream time. Yes this deck is that powerful, it will communicate to you while you sleep. I dreamed of the cards and each one spoke to me, literally, it was a dream what can I say! The images imprinted themselves on my mind so when I work up I had no choice but to ring my local Pagan Store, Well of the Moon and ask them if they had the Witches Tarot in stock. Of course they did, right!
Preparations for the great Samhain (Halloween) festival are upon us as the fall season sets in. A few centuries ago, before there were flashlights, our ancestors carried torches or lanterns. Those who lived in country areas also made use of a common wayside plant called Mullein (Verbascum spp.) to light their way on dark nights.
Jamie
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Hi I had a very similar thing today with a work colleague moaning about Halloween being just an 'Americanism.' I didn't have the h
