Last Rites For Halloween:
Candy Slaves & Ole Zombies

The origin of the bloodiest of all popular holidays is pagan. But church soon got into the action. It celebrates the dead and the dark side of the human experience, and the first frost in the Northern Hemisphere.
For sure, it’s a healthy and playful way to cope with the fact that the mysteries of the great beyond are usually fully disclosed, or not, only to those unable to report back to us.
Pretty much all ancient cultures had a day or time of the year dedicated to the diseased and the spooky, and even a place to do so, from the Celtics to the people who built Stonehenge, the Pyramids and everything else we hardly know much about these days.
The fact that now most celebrations congeal around the same time of the year, regardless of the hemisphere, may have a lot to do with primitive religion, which successfully inserted itself in many holly dates and cults to superior beings that pagans used to mark and worship.
It was a clever and effective form of domination, exemplified, for example, in the fact that to this day, many Catholic Church saints are loosely based in pre-Christian figures.
We could get here into demonology and the changing depictions and characterization of Satan, for example, or Lucifer and all that, but why Continue reading →