(RNS) Ali Marie has long felt unconnected to the Valentine’s Day displays that bloomed each February at her local supermarket in Long Island City, across the East River from Manhattan. The candy-and-flowers tradition was more likely to fill Marie, 41 and single, with dread.
But this February Marie will breeze past the heart-shaped frills with a sense of promise. Instead of leaving her love life in the hands of fate, she has joined a growing number of Americans turning to magic to find true love. Ali will soon be casting her first love spell and she’s hitting the grocery store to do it.
Top 10 Things You Probably Never Knew About Witches
As the phrase ‘witch hunt’ still shows, the Witch Craze of the early modern period is now an infamous byword for superstition, hysteria and irrational cruelty. Yet witch beliefs and persecutions remain surprisingly misunderstood. When people talk about ‘witch burning Puritans’ for example, they wrongly assume that Puritans killed more witches than did High Anglicans or Catholics, whilst witches were almost never burned in England or America. The same goes for ‘medieval superstition’. The Middle Ages had far fewer witch accusations or deaths than the time of Shakespeare or Charles II, or indeed the Ancient Romans. Finally, although the British Witchcraft Act of 1736 outlawed official witch persecution, popular beliefs and popular violence ran on – and on, and on… Well into the twentieth century alleged witches were still in danger of their lives in Britain, Europe and North America.
8 Ways Magic Mushrooms Explain Santa Claus & The Christmas Tradition zerohedge.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from zerohedge.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
ONE of the most powerful, persistent fake news that has been around for many centuries is that December 25 is the birthday of Jesus Christ, the central figure of Christianity, the biggest religion today with 2.4 billion adherents. This is not opinion or conjecture, but has been a well-established fact, even by Catholic scholars.
Saturnalia (1783) by Antoine Callet: The first Christmas celebrations?
The only other competing thesis of course, is that the man called Jesus has never existed. Indeed, ancient religions all had similar man-gods born of a virgin, with a God as invisible father even born around December 25 or near the December 22 solstice, that marked the beginning of the end of the “dark and cold” period of winter.
Christmas traditions have always adapted – and 2020 will be no different
It may feel like all change this year, but, in many ways, Christmas has always been a movable feast
It ll take more than lockdown restrictions to extinguish festive cheer
Credit: Tom Merton/OJO Images RF
The need for cheer and light. That’s what a British Christmas has always been and remains about, even in the depths of Tier 4 lockdown. This is an impoverished Christmas, but you can never strictly-speaking ban it because it’s a spirit, rich in metaphor and history. I’ve been reading about Christmas past and thinking about how, when this nightmare is over, we might make it even better.