Word: samhain
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What do you fear? Midterms. Darkness. Death. Seventeen students and community members faced these fears at the MIT Pagan Students’ Group (PSG) annual Samhain ritual at MIT Chapel on Sunday night. The Samhain ritual celebrates the Celtic New Year by commemorating the dead while celebrating new life. Though Samhain is a pagan ritual, attendees were not all strict pagans. “I really like paganism and I enjoy hanging out with pagans. My own religion is something I make up myself out of many things,” says participant Jonas Roy, a 23-year-old Boston...
Halloween is the celebration of the Celtic New Year festival, formerly known as Samhain. But the meaning of the holiday, now most often associated with carnival-like costumes and candies, is best captured by childhood memories...
...describe, is a far cry from the historical facts of the trade. Let's start with some history. The ancient pagans of Ireland and England--not pagans as in the cannibals of Borneo, but simply non-Christians who worshipped nature--threw big parties every year on the day of Samhain, or "Summer's End." These were the first Hallowe'ens, according to The Origin of Festivals and Feasts by Jean Harrowven...
...Samhain meant a great deal to the Celts (the pagans who threw the parties): It was a celebration of the harvest, a way of thanking the gods for their help, and it symbolized the coming of Death to the world in the form of winter...
This is also one of the founding beliefs of Wicca. The modern witch sees the year as a great wheel, with a cycle of eight festivals that fall on the solstices, the equinoxes, and certain points at the heights of seasons. Samhain or the Hallows is still the most important one, the New Year celebration of the pagan cycle...