November 1, 2002
By Thom Fowler
Halloween - The Witches New Year
Halloween is synonymous with wild fun, merry feasting and spooking. The roots of the holiday are ancient and some say, deep within our psyche. The modern revival of European Shamanism, or Wicca has brought back that much maligned character in European history, The Witch. Often portrayed as an ugly hag who boils babies alive, the truth is that the village witch was often a healer and a vital, creative, active part of the community. And witches, while often portrayed as women, today are also men, often gay men. Today's Wicca is more about healing broken spirits and healthy living and returning to the magical wonderment of being a child and priest of Goddess/God than cursing the neighbors. And it is certainly not about devil worship.
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Not all pagans are Wiccan and not all Wiccans are witches and not all witches are Wiccans but all witches are pagan. It is good to remember that the word "pagan" is a word used by the Roman Christians to describe the traditional people of Europe. It means "country people." Heathen is a word with the same meaning. Calling traditional European cultures "pagan" is like calling Native Americans "Indian." And witchcraft and shamanism is found in many non-European cultures as well. While modern American Wicca is more about healing, this is not the case for witches throughout the world. In some shamanic cultures, a witch is seen as a crude magician with evil intent who is hired out for curses. They are seen as not understanding the forces they are trying to wield or accepting the full responsibility of being an intermediary with the spirit world for the healing and inspiration of the community.
"Shaman" is derived from a verb that means "to know." Most Wiccans think Wicca is a word that
means "to shape." The
Australian Flinders
University Pagan Association website says the word wicca (pronounced wikka) used
to be pronounced witcha and meant just that - witch. For the purpose of this
article, witchcraft will be known under the common assumption of the craft of the wise, because I am in no position to address this controversy. Witchcraft is the knowledge of shaping reality according to your will. Or as Starhawk, author of The Spiral Dance, a book that shaped the Reclaiming Tradition of Wicca, writes, "magic is the art of changing consciousness at will" because when you are "between the worlds, you can change the worlds."
For Witches, Wiccans and Pagans, Halloween is called Samhain (pronounced SOW-en) and is the New Year celebration. Actually, Halloween is the holiday we all know that is celebrated in a way we all know and I'm sure there are pagans who dress up, drink too much and watch ELVIRA movies. Samhain falls just near Halloween so the two are often interchanged. Many pagans, in fact, celebrate Samhain on Halloween but the actual time is astrologically based and changes each year. This year, Samhain falls on November 6th.
Most pagans believe that Samhain is a time when the invisible borders between this world and the spirit world are at their thinnest. It is a time of chaos and misrule, of honoring those that have passed out of this world and blessing those that are now coming in as newborns. It is also a time when divination or fortune telling is supposed to be particularly easy since the spirits are much closer and easier to make contact with.
Carl McColman calls himself both Christian and Pagan and is the author of several books on spirituality including THE COMPLETE IDIOT'S GUIDE TO PAGANISM said during a phone interview that, "Samhain is a celebration of death. Initially that might freak some people out but the Jews used to say that death is the center of a long life, not a morbid celebration, but an acknowledgement that death being part of life is sacred."
Even without all our decorations, there is still a spooky chill to the air during Halloween. The ghosts and witches we use to evoke the spirit of the holiday are distant memories of what was once a normal part of the year in pre-Christian tribal Europe. Thankfully, the barbaric practices of those ancient peoples have been left in the past while the underlying spirit of the holiday has stuck around. The association with death is an acknowledgement of mortality which makes every moment more precious and more important that you follow your star and do what you are really passionate about. Don't waste time. Time is a gift, the witches remind us at Samhain.
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"It is important to celebrate Death. The Celts are like the Sioux or the Lakota. They believed that one piece of the web is connected to another and you have to have strength in every part of the web for the web to function. Death is a part of that web," continued McColman.
While there are some basic themes such as belief in an immanent Goddess, the inter-connection of all things, and communion with the spirit world, like any religion, there are many different traditions under the Wiccan umbrella. Each tradition can have its own practices, myths, Goddesses and Gods, history, purposes, rituals and widely varying beliefs.
The startling diversity makes it difficult to look at Wicca from the outside. I learned that Wicca branches along two basic lines. The fertility traditions such as British Traditional Witchcraft and Gardnerian Craft which sees the year as a crop cycle of planting, tending and harvesting, and Ecstatic traditions which are more shamanic in nature such as Francesca De Grandis' Third Road tradition and the Reclaiming tradition, which are based on an older tradition, called Feri (or Fairy or Faerie) taught by Victor and Cora Anderson.
The Andersons mixed African, Hawaiian, Native American and Celtic religions in a process of rediscovering what Victor Anderson, who died in October of 2000, might call The Oldest Religion - the religion of the Goddess.
Perhaps because it comes out of cultures that had no written language, shamanism is generally taught orally and experientially. There are few books that can give you the experience of becoming a shamanic practitioner, which some see as different than a Shaman - who would sit at the center of the village - while many people in that village would be engaged in their personal magical practices. Francesca De Grandis, who I interviewed about television psychics in a previous OFF THE RADAR, wrote a book that is a year program of developing yourself as a Wiccan flavored shamanic practitioner. Called GODDESS INITIATION De Grandis informs me that the book can provide the substance of personal, oral instruction with you as your own teacher with her framing the year as an experienced guide.
There is more information about Wicca on the Internet than in libraries because of the controversial nature of the religion. During the research for this article, I discovered that some people routinely go to public libraries and destroy books about Wicca and Witchcraft. I had to request copies from the reference desk and read them only in the library. Witchvox.com was very helpful and Francesca De Grandis also has an online Wiccan and Faerie Grimoire with prayers, spells and links to other resources.
Many non-Wiccan pagans celebrate Samhain as the new year as well. One fertility myth, and there are many, related to Samhain is that God dies and is immediately reseeded in the womb of Goddess to be reborn again at the Winter Solstice. Samhain is a time to grieve, to harvest, to prepare for the long dark night of introspection, to focus on family and close relationships and to seek visions for the coming year. It is the darkest part of the year and Witches look forward to the child of light being reborn again in the dead cold of winter.
Witches believe it is just as important to explore the dark aspects of yourself as well as the light aspects. Self-knowledge is what helps you grow. There is a Wiccan saying, taken from a poem by Dion Fortune called THE CHARGE OF THE GODDESS, "If that which you seek is not in you, you will not find it without you." Rigorous self-examination is an important aspect of Wicca and Samhain is the time of year to look at the shadows of grief, guilt, shame and despair and heal the blocks that lead to joy and service. "Love is the magic," says Ms. De Grandis. An idea espoused as well by famed spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti.
You can celebrate Samhain as the witches do by leaving out a bit of food on a plate to feed the hungry ghosts or light a candle for a relative who has passed away to help them find their way back to you. If you ask the spirits a question, maybe when you least expect it, an answer will pop into your head.
"The celebration of death honors your ancestors which honors memory," McColman explains.
"Memory is an important part of not just Samhain but religious tolerance. If you look at Christianity, it's really a religion based on the memory of the suffering and death of Jesus. Modern paganism places a lot of emphasis on remembering the people who were suffering during the burning times, whether they were witches are accused Christians. A lot of the cultural identity of modern witchcraft is based on "never again the burnings." We are trying to create a world where the Goddess is honored and women and gay men don't have to worry about being killed for being witches."
[I'd like to see a world where women and gay men aren't killed for simply
being women or gay men. Even here in the San Francisco Bay Area, which
people assume is a bastion of liberality and is probably more so than most
places, a transgender teen, Gwen Araujo, was recently beaten and strangled
to death at a party when it was discovered that underneath her mini-skirt,
she had male genitals. There were thirty people at the party, none of whom
did anything to stop the killing. Who gave her executioners the right to
decide who should live or die based on his sexuality? I did and you did
for not speaking out enough and for tolerating transphobia and homophobia. -ed]
"When we honor our ancestors," McColman continues, "those of us who identify as pagans, we honor memory. You don't have to go back very far where our ancestors weren't pagan. They were Christian, Jewish, whatever. But if you go back far enough, their ancestors were pagan. Samhain is a time to honor our ancestral memory."
Wicca is not accepted by many as a real religion and is feared by some religions as satanic or evil. Modern Wicca is a complex religion with many faiths and practices. Today many witches elect to stay "in the broom closet" for fear of being misunderstood or worse, attacked for their beliefs.
"We all carry within ourselves all the seeds of the all the world's different religions. Part of tolerance is honoring
all those differences inside ourselves," says McColman.
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