Who was it that said that a twisted truth is worse than an outright lie?
 The following was posted where I work, and has me so mad I could spit.  I'd
like to post a rebuttal.  Unfortunately, between a poor memory for the
research I once did, and a tight deadline that gives me no time to re-do the
research, I don't have the facts that I need on hand.  Can some of you help
me, please?

Mark, would you be wiling to post a cry for help on a folklore usenet
group, if there is one?  or do you have information (specifically about the
Jack story mentioned here) to help?

thanks,
Becca Price
ncr02!ncr02!bprice@ucs01!attmail.com
or ncr02!bprice@attmail.com

_________________________________________
THE HISTORY OF HALLOWEEN
(reprinted from some magazine, title illegible on my photocopy)

"Mom, can I dress up like Casper this year?  Dad, can we carve a
jack-o-lantern and put it on the porch?"

Halloween... costume-clad children happily skipping from door to door
shouting "Trick or Treat." expecting to fil their bags with candy, gum and
other goodies... houses decorated with jack-o-lanterns, pumpkins, witches
with broomsticks and black cats.  These are the most common sights of the
celebration of Halloween.  They are all make-believe and harmless... or are
they?

Each year at Halloween, parents are faced with the dilemma of what the world
calls harmless fun and their own concerns about the spiritual significance
of this holiday.  while we all have to hear God for ourselves concerning
these decisions, we thought the following history of Halloween might be
helpful to you and your family.

Halloween, which directly stems from Irish, Scottish and British folk
customs, was celebrated as the Druids' autumn festival.  The Druids were an
order of priests who worshiped nature.  This holiday was originally
celebrated to honor Sambain (sic), lord of the dead, on October 31  (the end
of the summer).  The Druids believed that on this date, Sambain called all
the wicked souls which had been condemned within the last year to live in
animal bodies.  He was believed to have released them in the form of
spirits, ghosts, fairies, witches and elves.

According to Druidic tradition, these souls of the dead roamed the city on
Halloween night and returned to haunt the homes where they once lived.  The
only way the current occupants of the house could free themselves from being
haunted was to lay out food and give shelter to the spirit during the night.
 If they did not, the spirit would cast a spell on them.  that is where the
phrase "trick or treat" comes from: they would be *tricked* if they did not
lay out a *treat*.

The jack-o-lantern was also part of this belief system.  The carved pumpkin
symbolized a damned soul named Jack.  According to the tale, Jack was not
allowed into heaven or hell.  So, he wandered around in the darkness with
his lantern until Judgement Day.  Fearful people hollowed out turnips (and
later pumpkins in the United States), carved an evil face on them,  and lit
a candle inside to scare him and other evil spirits away.

The Druids had other outlandish beliefs which

The Druids had other outlandish beliefs which have since turned into
tradition.  For example, they were afraid of black cats because they
believed that when a person committed evil, he would be turned into a cat.
 Cats were thus considered to be evil.  To scare them away, the Druids
decorated their homes with witches, ghosts and the like.  They also
decorated with cornstalks, pumpkins and other goods in offering of thanks
and praise to their false gods.

In addition to being Halloween, October 31 was also the New Year's Eve of
the Celts and Angelo-Saxons. To celebrate, they built huge bonfires on
hilltops to frighten away evil spirits, and often offered their crops and
animals to the evil ones as a sacrifice -- sometimes they even offered
themselves.

Some people believ that the only significance of Halloween was as All
Hallows' Eve, the evening before All Saints' Day.  But All Saints' Day was
originally celebrated by the Catholic Church in May.  About A.D. 834 the
Romans conquered the Celts, and moved All Saints' Day to November 1.  The
celebration remained the same, except for minor additions.  The Roman
Harvest Festival was then held in honor of the goddess Pamona, the goddess
of fruit and trees (the practice of bobbing for apples derived from this).
 They also wanted to honor the newly overpowered descendants of the Druids
in Germany and Scandinavia.  Therefore, All Saints' Day and Halloween became
unified, because of the same ties to reverencing the dead.
The combination of these customs eventually became the traditional
celebration we call Halloween.

**Information for this article was taken from several sources.... all easily
found at your local library.  Most encyclopedias even have information on
the origin and history of Halloween.**

 -------------------

Poster's Note:

Even if the facts stated in this article *had* been correct, referring to
"outlandish" customs and "false gods" is offensive.  Grrrrr.

 -becca 

60 responses total.

Yes.

*blink blnk*  For starters, I thought black cats were good luck in England.
*ponders*
Anyways, such tripe originates in small minds incapable of comprehending
rebuttals, so I'm not sure whether it would be worth it.
*builds a shrine to Sambain, then realizes such a deity has never 
existed, and trashes the shrine.*

AARGH!!!  No wonder some people are so close-minded when it comes to Pagan
religions...they don't have the facts straight!!!  Along what Brighn said,
some witches use cats as their *familiars*.  Hello?  How can a cat be bad luck
if it's your guide???  Sheesh...

If you think that's bad, you should check out how ridiculous the Chinese
idea of Feng Shui sounds to the western mind of open-minded people.

        This is sad.. really really sad.. what did you want help with?

  Distorted as #0 sounds, I find this even more frightening:
 
    Hell Night (Newsweek 10/30/95) "Many fundamentalists forbid their
    children to participate in what they see as Holloween's glorification
    of Satan.  But an Arvada, Colo., Pentecostal church, the Abundant Life
    Christian Center, is taking a different approach.  For $5 a person,
    visitors can descend into a 'Hell on Earth' where church members will
    enact scenes including an abortion, a human sacrifice and an AIDS
    victim's funeral.  At the end visitors will be offered a choice of
    'Christ over Satan.'  'Churches have to compete with MTV,' says youth
    pastor Keenan Roberts.  'We anticipate a swell of response.'"
 
  I wonder if the AIDS victim's funeral is supposed to teach the price of
homosexuality, or heroin use, or what?  <shudder>  And a human sacrifice!?
If I were closer, I would be *really* tempted to show up, just to loudly
choose Satan as my savior at the end.

<birdy's mouth is still hanging open>  Oh my word...

What sort of demented individual comes up with *hit like this and #0?
<now Starwolf remembers one of the main reasons he turned Pagan>
What I wonder is *how* they do the *abortion*?

Wouldn't it be ironic if it was these God-fearing Pentacostalists, and not
the Godless Communists, that turn people away from Christianity and towards
becoming Atheists?

Why use the conditional, Bruin?

this is why *I* stopped being a Christian.  It had nothing to do with my
moderate Methodist father, it had to do with the guilt and horror of
the Religious Right.

I talked with my mother this morning about these practices, and we both agree
that if we have to put up with this Religious Right crap in Heaven, we'd
rather be in Hell.  But then again, maybe what is Hell for me is Heaven for
them.  Anyway, to quote the late Frank Zappa, "If there's a Hell, it waits
for them; not for us!"

If there's a hell, I've already been there, for it exists in the physical
world.
Aren't Jack o' laterns really to help the poor spirit find his way?  That's
the way I learned about Jack's plight.

I believe that's right...I recently learned an incantation to welcome such
wayward individuals by candlelight...

Random thoughts on
Cats used to be considered evil in Europe.  People would kill cats if they
could get there hands on them and in France they used to throw them
out of the window of some large public building on some holiday <if i 
remeber my facts straight>  This is why the Plague got such a hold on Europe.
Cats were't welcome around residences, so rats flourished, and the fleas
on the rats then spread the Plague.

BUT, the witches kept cats, and hence didn't have as many problems with rats.
The witches were also poor, and hence ate a lot of old, MOLDY bread...
By "witches" I mean the folk who were social outcasts, who tended not to
be such devout Christians (when they were Christian at all...)

re: # 12- that's right.
re: # 13- would you post it, please, and the source?
re: # 15- bingo!!!  And of course, since disease came from demons, and 
witches were in league with demons, they wouldn't get sick, right?  Ick!

I agree that refuting that particular bit of misinformation (#0), which is
pretty close in many facts but chooses a warped interpretation, would be
kinda pointless.  However, I *did* write a longish refutation to a newspaper
in DesMoines, Iowa for a letter from a Lutheran minister of similar ilk.
I posted it to the Nemeton list, along with the letter to which I was 
responding.  I can go retrieve it if folks want.

I guess it goes without saying, but "Never underestimate the power of human
stupidity."

While channel-surfing last week, Kenn caught Pat Robertson saying that if good
Christians wanted to participate in Hallowe'en, they could _turn it into_ a
"celebration of the harvest of the great bounty God provides".
<still chuckling at the irony>

        More like they could go to it's true roots, and do that.
Still, I do like candy..

I caught the ass-end of a really *good* documentary on Wiccans on Lifetime
Recently.  Wondering if anybody taped it, I would kill for cpoies.
It affected mee so much, tan't evn type straight! ;}

I saw it too.  Sorry, no video recorder.

        Missed it. Sorry.

        It's a bit amusing, given the Christian slant of the author, to note
that many of the things that the author condemns are, or are almost parodies
of, relatively recent Christian additions to the popular holiday.  For
instance, the prejudice against black cats would seem to stem from the
Christian belief during the late middle ages and Renaissance that witches
could take the form of a black cat, and the subsequent massacre of relatively
(for no feline is ever wholly) innocent black cats.  Certain accusations
include enough information to positively identify a inclusion as
Christian, like the story of Jack of the Pumpkin, notable for it's Christian
heaven-hell-purgatory-walking condemnation ...

yep.

With all the problems of the world, these Bozos have to attack a c
harmlwess holiday...*sigh*

Never underesitmate the power of human stupidity: most of these
people are so convinced that they are absolutely right that
they create a self-fufilling propechy that anything the do being
conceived as 'wrong' as the 'evil' and 'delusion' of the observer.

        Yep.

Amen!...waitaminit...
<Starwolf attempts to force the wayward xtian out of his mind>

<bjorn was reading AEon Flux: The Herodotus File and found that the words 
Xian and Xross were used in fan mail to AEon, and other articles in the
graphic novel.>

<Starwolf has never cared for Aeon Flux--the characters are unattractive and
the animation mediocre.>

 and the writing deliberately surreal ... 
*shrug*  different strokes for different folks

<bjorn gigles at the sexual ineuendo of brighn's comment>
First the dinosaurs came and the world was very sticky.

That's why they went extinct... they didn't come enough...
set drift = off

Agreed.
(Drift Node 1, Power = Destroyed?!)

Brighn, i know I don't  need to say this, but that was *AWFUL*!!!!!!!!!!

Yes Brighn dear, com, come now you can do better than that!;)

Do I have to link this to After dark??

The T rex flirt item?  Hmmm.... 

Response in general to all:

re: Jack o'Lantern also was linked into the Will o'the Wisp/supernatural
light folklore.  Apparently, Jack was doomed to wander astray (and leading
others astray) with his ghostly light.  If you have access to the British
journal "Folk-Lore", there are some really good articles on this.  I have 
them, but in my files back in Connecticut.  My corporeal essence is here
in Michigan visiting Kami & Michael and then participating in ConVocation.

re: Hallowe'en: The earliest Christian church, brought into England by 
Roman legionary troops, was also very exclusivist.  Even back then, they
had a slight problem with intolerance :-(....and it's so amusing that so
much of Christian ways/customs can be directly traced back to Pagan or
the indigenous faiths!  Jesus was a good Jewish boy!  Now, think on the
differences overlaid upon Orthodox Judaism in order to create Christianity...
WHERE did all of that COME from.....  :-)...

re: black cats: cats are very independent beasties, as anyone "owned" by
a cat can tell you.  They don't take commands easily.  Their gaze was sup-
posed to see into the Otherworld; they could see the Faerie and (pagan)
supernatural beings.  They could hear them, too.  Anyone who knows cats
has seen Puff suddenly hop to her feet and stare at Something that we
humans don't perceive.  This scared the bejeezus out of your average
Medieval equivalent of a born-again, with the result that cats were per-
secuted as agents of the (pagan) supernatural.  Also, the color black
was associated with the devil/Satan/nasty-man, so black cats, especially
those who had not a single white hair on them, were literally hung from
little kitty gallows, or tied up (all 4 paws bundled together) and tossed
into a roaring bonfire, or boiled in oil (hold the garlic) or spitted on
a stake or some other form of death which involves torture/pain.  The idea
was, that by giving the cat a really hard death, that the pain would echo
to the pagan supernatural beings and hopefully either chase them away, or
make them sick, or (by sympathetic/association magic) get rid of them alto-
gether.  It sure was rough on the poor cat, though.  It's amazing what
bestialities have been (and still are) carried out due to ignorance and
fanaticism.
jt
oops.  meant to sign off   jts (my typing has room to improve...)

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss