(San Francisco, California) Bay Area pagans are preparing for their biggest holiday, called Samhain, this weekend. Reportedly, it's a festival of harvest, renewal and communing with the dead."I wouldn't know anyone who conducts a seance," said witch Deborah Oak Cooper, a member of the Reclaiming collective. "At the Spiral Dance (expected to draw more than 1,000 celebrants to Kezar Pavilion on Saturday), there's a trance journey, where you go to the Isle of Apples and visit your beloved dead. It's a meditation period: You go and look around and see who wants to visit."I would suggest that Starhawk is not the best-known witch in the Bay Area. Nancy Pelosi and Cindy Sheehan are at least as familiar to people as Starhawk.
"You might create an altar and make an offering," said Starhawk, a political activist and the Bay Area's best known contemporary witch. "Then you can sit down and talk: 'Hey, Mom, sorry I was such a hard teenager for you to deal with. Now I understand how that must have been for you, and I wish you were here so we could sit and talk about it.' "
I'll confess to being largely uninformed about paganism but I do recall reading somewhere that pagans sacrifice virgins. If so, it would explain how Muslim martyrs can be met by 72 virgins in the afterlife. In effect, pagans are recruiting the virgins for the Muslim martyrs.
Knowing that the two religions are blending their desires is probably comforting to the tolerance-above-all advocates. Well, except for those who are virgins, of course.
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