Now that the costumes are put away, note that Samhain calculated astrologically (Sun at 15 degrees of Scorpio) falls on Saturday, Nov. 6, at 6:42 a.m. Greenwich time, which would be roughly midnight on Friday here in the Mountain Time Zone.
Last year Peg and I had a little blog-discussion of the two dates.
Scott Monahan’s archaeoastronomy page lets you calculate to the minute.
Check his “In the Movies” link for archaeoastronomical critiques, such as this one of National Treasure.
I said that I was not going to post any more Halloween items. I take that back. Here is one more.
One decision we’ve made is to rebuff curious friends who ask to join our Halloween rituals. It seems like half the people I know want to be pagan on Halloween. I have no problem with a little religious tourism. I’m a bit of a spiritual slut. I have never turned down an invitation to a Seder. Bach thundering through a church transports me. But when I see visions of bacchanals dancing in my nonpagan friends’ heads, I get a little testy. Certain experiences are too comforting, too sacred to be spectacles. For me, Samhain is one of them.
This is what happens when the news media notice you only one week a year.
One last Halloween post, and then I’ll shut up.
Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry 
If you want to see something really scary on Halloween, come to my apartment around 9 p.m.I’m letting my kids eat unwrapped candy.
They can eat any homemade goodies they get, too, and that unholy of unholies: candy where the wrapper is slightly torn. And on the very off chance they get an apple, they can gnaw it to the core, so long as there’s not a razor-sized, dripping gash on the side.
There is more. Read the whole thing.
The upcoming sessions of the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting are mentioned in the New York Times.
Some of us have been joking about “the I-word” (idolatry). I wondered if that would catch some journalist’s interest.
Writing at First Things, an “interreligious” journal (“inter” as in Catholics and Protestants, maybe), Sally Thomas faces that annual hurdle of the Christian parent: What To Do About Halloween.
How can it be fun and still be doctrinally acceptable? She writes,
Halloween’s emphasis on darkness makes many Christians squeamish, but, to my mind, what my friend observed about the medieval feel of Halloween is more on the money.
I don’t especially encourage my children to dress as scary things for Halloween. We are taught, rightly, to avoid flirting with the occult, and the darkest character any child of mine has ever wanted to be is Darth Vader.
Don’t you love that “flirting”? It’s right up there with “dabbling,” as in “dabbling with witchcraft.”
Ducks dabble. Witches … do other things. But, who knows, maybe “the occult” will kick things up a notch and kiss them back, slip them a little tongue. That Darth Vader costume might be the first step into experiential religion. You never know.
On All Saints’ Day, our parish holds a children’s festival, hugely attended, at which children and adults alike dress as their favorite saints. This year mine will be St. Ursula, St. Walburga, St. Gerard Majella, and St. George. I probably will reprise my last year’s appearance as St. Helena, although the True Cross did keep whacking people every time I turned around.
Watch out for the boy who wants to be St. Sebastian: he’s probably gay.
Via Rod Dreher at BeliefNet, where the commenters actually display a wide variety of opinions about the celebration.
There is always the issue of sex with demons to consider as well.
When pre-writing the blog post on dining above the dead (something best done while walking the dogs), I was thinking about how it was perfect for Fate magazine.
Digression 1: Dog-walking is not all that meditative, because Something Always Happens, like this morning when they charged off through nine-inch-deep snow to try to catch some wild turkeys.
Digression 2: If the reporter were on the ball, she would re-write her story for Fate or another magazine. Get paid twice for the same work—that is the secret of freelancing.
So it occurred to me, crossing the gully between the county road and my house on Tuesday night pre-bed dog walk, that I had not seen a copy of Fate since last spring. Had it been sucked into the magazine death pool?
I checked the Web site, however, and it promised a new issue soon.
Editor-in-chief Phyllis Galde tells me, “The July/Aug is at the printer, and we will turn around immediately and get the Sept./Oct. one printed.”
She promises an “awesome” new Web site but complained that the Web designer and the printing plant crew were all sick with the flu.
So Fate is reanimated, I hope. I miss it. Where else can you get a good ghost story?
The graphic has nothing to do with the magazine. Just some Halloween cheer. You can get it on a T-shirt.
I opened the Cañon City Daily Record on Monday and learned that M. and I have been dining above the dead.
One of our two favorite cafes in the nearby town of Florence, Colo., is the Aspen Leaf Bakery, which, it turns out, is the second-most haunted locale in that county. (The first is the Prison Museum, a former women’s prison, in Cañon City. Funny about that.)
According to the article, local ghost-hunters say the basement of the Aspen Leaf’s building seems to be a “meeting space” for spirits. “No one’s died there,” said one ghost-hunter. “So they’re just hanging around.”
The Daily Record offers no link (typical!) but at the Cañon Ghost Trackers web site, you can follow their investigations and listen to their audio evidence.
NOTE: If all the audio recordings start playing at once (depending on your browser settings), that does indeed sound spooky.
My own experience has been more one of meta-ghost-hunting
I noticed a couple of instances in the past month where Colorado Pagans seem to be getting fairer coverage in the news. One was the item about the Pagan Student Alliance at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
(But as a former university professor, I have seen clubs come and go. Only clubs with strong support from a department or a particular professor last more than a year or two, typically.)
A Denver Post story today describes the work of a hospice chaplain and contains this paragraph:
Her patients come from all spiritual traditions and have included a Buddhist priest, a Druid high priest and a Sufi spiritual leader. But end-of-life spiritual care, she emphasizes, isn’t necessarily about religion.
So the Druid is one of the exotic Others, but at least the Post did not put “high priest” in quotation marks.
And Tina Dowd sounds like a true priestess herself.
UPDATE: Here is one description of running a university Pagan students’ club.
And apparently it is causing the Dallas Cowboys to lose football games.
How come ace Dallas religion blogger Rod Dreher has not been all over this one?