The View From Kalamazoo
on Halloween, a rant
This is the time of year when requests for the origins of Halloween come out of the woodwork…there are so many terribly unreliable and terribly flakey neo-pagan websites, and so many people who play dress-up all of the time who love to give bizarre interviews and prattle on about this and that totally fictional “history” of neo-paganism, Halloween, blah blahdy blah blah. I mean, really…these folks are just as ridiculous as these, IMO.
It’s just so embarrassing. I figure it must be akin to how I would have felt were I a Protestant at the time of the Falwell Tinky-Winky thing…dunno. Anyway, for those who simply haven’t asked yet, this is a good site.
A good friend of mine recently visited Salem, MA and sent me an email about the visit, and asked me what I thought of it all…the following is an excerpt of my reply:
“…Salem. Ah. Pagans who play dress-up professionally. 😉 I haven’t been, and I have heard it’s very touristy (although so many destinations, especially in New England, are..) and a freaking circus at Halloween…Yes, I think it’s a popular destination for a lot of Wiccans, but I’m pretty atypical – I’m rather more (economically, really) conservative, I don’t often play dress up or wear pentacles the size of a hubcap around my neck so that I broad cast my (intensely personal) religious views to the whole freaking world. I’ve been doing my thing for well over 15 years now, and so it’s not my shiny new ideology to parade around until the next trend appears. (that sounds bitchy, I know, but I have meet a lot of folks who, unfortunately, fit that description) I keep my political views and religious views pretty separate, and I’m an historian, which further complicates matters as I haven’t been sucked into a lot of the really and truly shitty “scholarship” out there that makes claims of 9 million women killed during the burning times and stuff like that. Feminist “witches” who are just looking for something ritual-y that fits their politics rather than a deep spiritual need to connect with the divine (whether male or female, or polytheistic combinations) make my head hurt. I’m cranky. I know that. 🙂 As for Salem…honestly, the thing is that there were no witches, whether as defined now or then, killed – only innocents, largely devout xians. Tituba, the slave, seems to really be the only case where it can be argued that she practiced, personally, something other than xianity. It’s an example of a horrible thing in our history, it’s a great illustration of the power of misinformation, mis-education, and hysteria.”
