whiporwill-o
yet another thing that was never told to me before gonk .
This is where a solid grounding in comparative religions REALLY comes in handy.
Here's the thing - by and large, people like staying with what is familiar. New, strange, different things make us (not all of us, Tea) nervous, in general. So the tendency is to move into something new bringing as much of the old as we can, whether dressed up in new clothes or using some older form of address so it sounds different.
See: people interpreting karma as a shiny, new form of sin and creating the concepts of "good" and "bad"karma.
So a general grounding in comparative religions comes in handy. I knew about the use of shabbat among Jews because I had attended a shabbat one Friday night. The English derivation of shabbat is sabbath, which probably sounds familiar. A lot of the terms used by modern neo-paganism actually come from The Witch's Hammer, which was written by people persecuting people as heretics from Christianity, hence a lot of "witchcraft" being inverted Christianity.
But people don't like to admit that. It's a lot less cool that eight holidays (from two cultures - but who's counting anyway?) which parcel out the year in a neat manner.
For the record, the solar "shabbats" are Norse and the in-between "shabbats" are Celtic, primarily Irish if my memory doesn't fail me.
whiporwill-o
back on the subject of halloween specifically, i have always read (even before i became a witch) that it was the night when the spirits roamed in our world and so it is the perfect night for communicating with and honoring one's ancestors (please correc me if i am wrong).
Eh, it can be considered that, I guess. To some of the norse, the entire period of time between the fall equinox and the winter solstice was dangerous in terms of spirits and gods making away with you.
Other traditions hold that it's not times when the differences become porous, but rather places.
