Happy Halloween!

Here's a question for you all - if Halloween is another name for Samhain, a cross-quarter day, why is it celebrated on October 31st? The zodiac moves into Scorpio around October 21st and into Sagittarius around November 21st, so if you do the math you wind up with a "real" cross-quarter day 15 1/2 days after October 21st. That's more like November 5th, which means that "real" Samhain is going to be closer to US Election Day than it is to Halloween.

At any rate, I came across this article on Slate which is a little too recognizable to anyone who has organized rituals for the Pagan community. While it's about witches organizing a ritual for Halloween, which is just about the biggest overlap between magick and popular culture that you're likely to find, I still think it's great to see some journalism in the mainstream press that touches on some of the things that actually happen in the course of practicing this sort of alternative spirituality.

Maybe one of these years we'll get an article about ceremonial magicians calling upon the cross-quarter days to power their spells and the various technical aspects that need to be considered in order to make it work, but I'm guessing something like that is a lot further down the road.