Word: paganism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...medieval times, a series of customs developed around "Hallow E'en" (Hallow Evening), many deriving at least in part from the holiday's earlier pagan incarnation. It became traditional to eat nuts and apples; the nuts were especially important because young girls were encouraged to watch them as they roasted, interpreting their behavior as an omen of the faithfulness or inconstancy of their beloveds--if the nut cracked or jumped, one was thought to be in trouble. The relationship between this custom and the Celtic belief in the power of New Year prophesies seems clear enough. Other traditions of note...
...panic. All the chills, thrills and good clean pagan fun await you yet. But despite what you may have thought 10 years ago (wearing your Star Wars Storm Trooper costume and eager for candy) the monsters won't come get you tonight...
...midnight steak across the Yard that consecrates exams and ends reading period each year, began as a Radcliffe tradition that migrated from the Quad to the Yard as the College began to hold joint classes after World War II. Prior to that, Young says, Harvard men observed the pagan ritual from a distance...
...look beyond the eccentricities of Marshall Applewhite's creed is not to condone their odd assumptions--any more than one condones by saying, "I don't know how she could marry that spacey pagan." It is simply to acknowledge ignorance. "There is no one alive today," Arnold Toynbee once said, "who knows enough to say with confidence whether one religion has been greater than all others." And though the Heaven's Gaters' doctrine may seem as weird to us as ours apparently seemed to them, the wider tragedy of the cruel suicides would be if our own faith prevented...
...Pagan suckled in a creed outworn...