Mystery And Superstition Of Halloween

Halloween has always been a holiday filled with mystery, magic and superstition. It began as a Celtic end-of-summer festival during which people felt especially close to deceased relatives and friends. For these friendly spirits, they set places at the dinner table, left treats on doorsteps and along the side of the road and lit candles to help loved ones find their way back to the spirit world.


Today's Halloween ghosts are often depicted as more fearsome and malevolent, and our customs and superstitions are scarier too. We avoid crossing paths with black cats, afraid that they might bring us bad luck. This idea has its roots in the Middle Ages, when many people believed that witches avoided detection by turning themselves into cats.
We try not to walk under ladders for the same reason. This superstition may have come from the ancient Egyptians, who believed that triangles were sacred; it also may have something to do with the fact that walking under a leaning ladder tends to be fairly unsafe.
And around Halloween, especially, we try to avoid breaking mirrors, stepping on cracks in the road or spilling salt.

Hidden Spirits Game
http://www.history.com/content/halloween/hidden-spirits-game


Mote about the customs in next post.

The not so frightening ghost illustration is available in my shop"
http://nursesnaturally.etsy.com

Origins Of Halloween

A few excerpts from The History Channel's wonderful site about Halloween.along with some information from S Wagner's About Paranormal newsletter..to tell about this second only to Christmas Holiday in favorite and Commercial recognition in America.

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HALLOWEEN ORIGINS

Whether one is a believer or a skeptic,(regarding the paranormal) Halloween in the U.S. might be the one time of the year that both stand united in simply having a good time in the shadow of such reported phenomena.
The origins of Halloween itself lay in supernatural beliefs and an ancient Celtic festival that dates back some 2,000 years. Originally called Samhain (pronounced sow-in), the festival originated amidst the region now known as the United Kingdom and celebrated the one night each year that the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became indistinguishable. On this night, the Celts believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to Earth for good or for bad and allowed Druid priests to additionally interact with them for the wellbeing of them all."
http://paranormal.about.com/od/paranormalgeneralinfo/a/aa102508.htm?nl=1


History.com
"The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom, and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1. This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31, they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort and direction during the long, dark winter
To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities.

During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other's fortunes. When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.

By the 800s, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands. In the seventh century, Pope Boniface IV designated November 1 All Saints' Day, a time to honor saints and martyrs. It is widely believed today that the pope was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, but church-sanctioned holiday. The celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints' Day) and the night before it, the night of Samhain, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween. Even later, in A.D. 1000, the church would make November 2 All Souls' Day, a day to honor the dead. It was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels, and devils. Together, the three celebrations, the eve of All Saints', All Saints', and All Souls', were called Halloween.

As European immigrants came to America, they brought their varied Halloween customs with them. Because of the rigid Protestant belief systems that characterized early New England, celebration of Halloween in colonial times was extremely limited there.
It was much more common in Maryland and the southern colonies. As the beliefs and customs of different European ethnic groups, as well as the American Indians, meshed, a distinctly American version of Halloween began to emerge. The first celebrations included "play parties," public events held to celebrate the harvest, where neighbors would share stories of the dead, tell each other's fortunes, dance, and sing. Colonial Halloween festivities also featured the telling of ghost stories and mischief-making of all kinds. By the middle of the nineteenth century, annual autumn festivities were common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere in the country.
Halloween: Pumpkins on steps

In the second half of the nineteenth century, America was flooded with new immigrants. These new immigrants, especially the millions of Irish fleeing Ireland's potato famine of 1846, helped to popularize the celebration of Halloween nationally. Taking from Irish and English traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became today's "trick-or-treat" tradition. Young women believed that, on Halloween, they could divine the name or appearance of their future husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple parings, or mirrors."

More in the next post about some of the superstitions around and about Halloween

After Death Communication

" Bill Guggenheim, an authority on after-death communication (ADC), discussed his thirty year journey into researching and documenting over 3,000 first hand accounts of communication with the dead, including stories from children, and instructions on inducing after-death communications. Guggenheim said he had his own instance of ADC, when a disembodied voice warned him to go check the swimming pool. He did, and found his young son on the verge of drowning and was able to save him. He believes the voice he heard was that of his own father, who passed away when he was 8 years old.

Guggenheim, who coined the term ADC, defined it as a spiritual experience when "someone is contacted directly and spontaneously" by a deceased loved one or friend. The departed seek to let the living know that they're OK, and want to help alleviate the grieving process, he explained. He described cases where children reported seeing deceased relatives-- one teenager knew names of antiquated plumbing tools that he said were told to him by his deceased grandfather, a master plumber. Another boy could recite statistics of the St. Louis Browns, a baseball team his departed Uncle played on, but was long gone.

He shared the story of Katherine Cochran, a woman who received an after-death communication from her brother-in-law during a vivid dream (dreams are a common way the dead may contact the living), and subsequently began to hear lyrics and melodies that she used to compose songs,even though she had no previous musical background.

While ADCs typically come unbidden, Guggenheim suggested that if people have a meditation practice, they will tend to be more open to intuitions."

The illustration,"Speak To Me", is an original work from an Etsy Artist.
See more of her work at
http://kellyharrisart.etsy.com

Questions About Hitler's Death

This should be fuel for the theorists.Perhaps you saw the History Channel special last week?
"Tests reveal skull is a woman's

Adolf Hitler's suicide in his Berlin bunker has been called into question after American researchers claimed that a bullet-punctured skull fragment long believed to belong to the Nazi dictator is, in fact, that of an unknown woman.
a History Channel documentary programme broadcast in the US called Hitler’s Escape claims the skull fragment belongs to a woman under 40 and not Hitler, who was 56 when he died. It quotes Nick Bellantoni, an archaeologist and bone specialist who took DNA samples from the skull in Moscow and had them tested at the University of Connecticut. He and his colleagues are sceptical that the skull fragment could belong to Eva Braun, Hitler’s long-time companion, since she is thought to have committed suicide by cyanide rather than with a gun.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/world-war-2/6237028/Adolf-Hitler-suicide-story-questioned


Interestingly enough while not related this appeared as a strange aspect of history just last
Wednesday
"On this date in 1918, the course of history was nearly averted when British soldier Henry Tandey allegedly spared the life of an injured Adolf Hitler, while fighting during World War I. Tandey would tell his compatriots that he aimed at the future German dictator, but did not pull the trigger because he could not shoot a wounded man. While the veracity of the encounter remains debated to this day, Hitler, himself, claimed the tale was true during a meeting with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938."

Leaves a lot to wonder about....
The illustration is from an Etsy shop http://retrochique.etsy.com
"vintage clippings of Nazi Propaganda from FBI Story for your altered art"Visit her interesting shop for more of the work available.

Is Your View Of Aliens Outmoded?

Blogger and Fortean researcher Mac Tonnies argued that the ET hypothesis (that aliens are visiting our world from other star systems) is somewhat of an outmoded concept, and the truth may be stranger than we can imagine, involving a myriad of overlapping explanations. The notion of parallel worlds has gained credence in the scientific world, and the aliens could represent a kind of symbiosis with beings from another dimension, he noted. The so-called ETs could be a species of intelligent non-humans, or "Cryptoterrestrials" (the title of his forthcoming book) who covertly share our planet with us.

Because aliens are typically described as a bipedal and human-like species, it suggests to him they have developed here on Earth.
Yet, the prototypical alien-- the spindly, big headed 'grey,' has the physique to be an ideal astronaut with few physical requirements-- perhaps they were designed for space travel, Tonnies commented.

Cultural associations also influence how the aliens are perceived. In Zimbabwe for instance, entities wearing silvery suits associated with metallic craft have been described as the "ghosts of ancestors," he detailed. Regarding the alien's reported hybridization program, we could be dealing with something beyond the understanding of our neurological hard-wiring, he said.

Tonnies sees humans themselves in a kind of transitional state, eventually merging with technology and becoming more evolved and compassionate. He also talked about how some of the artifacts on Mars, such as at Cydonia, are a genuine scientific mystery. While not yet definitive proof of ET presence, they merit serious study, he said.
http://www.mactonnies.com/

"Tricksters"Program C2C

The Tricksters:

On Sunday night's Coast To Coast AM program, George Knapp was joined by author and paranormal investigator Christopher O'Brien, who discussed the legendary tricksters of mythology and how these entities may be manifesting in a myriad of ways that contemporary society describes as "paranormal." According to tradition, he said, tricksters are amoral entities whose main function is to both break down the status quo and to introduce "novelty and change into a static system." As its name suggests, O'Brien explained, the trickster is more often mischievous rather than evil, drawing confusion from those who encounter it.



Having examined the historical descriptions of tricksters in cultures throughout the world, O'Brien uncovered one prevailing trend: that the entity possessed the ability to shape shift. Based on that observation, he theorized that the trickster may be behind many of the staples of the paranormal world such as cattle mutilations, "elementals" like fairies and dwarfs, and even UFOs. Rather than an entity, per se, O'Brien speculated that the trickster is a force within the collective unconscious that takes on different characteristics depending on the culture observing it. He noted the bizarre airship wave of the late 1800's as a potential case of the trickster in action.

O'Brien also voiced suspicions that that "certain elements within our culture" have discovered the nature of this trickster energy and are manipulating it for nefarious ends. Suggesting that this agenda has been ongoing for centuries, O'Brien noted that the emergence of monotheistic religions resulted in the trickster being "cast as a demon" so that it could be marginalized by those in power. However, he said, the trickster may actually be beneficial to mankind as its confounding nature could result in observers "thinking outside of the box" and coming up with revolutionary ideas which could change the world.

http://www.ourstrangeplanet.com/

Ancient Egypt & the Pyramids:

This is a different consideration about this topic.Wonder what your thoughts are about it.
"Professor at the University of Calgary, Carmen Boulter presented accumulated evidence and research, which suggests to her that levitation and advanced knowledge were used to construct the numerous pyramids in ancient Egypt. Her past life recall as a child led her to seek physical evidence for her visions of temples, pyramids and ceremonies. This quest brought her to Egypt 23 times, where she conducted extensive academic research, and field work around the Great Pyramid. The Great Pyramid, she noted, is a monumental building that spans over 2 acres and is made up of 2.3 million stones.


Yet near the Great Pyramid, there are six distinct sites, encompassing a total of 22 pyramids, and these structures worked together as a kind of energy system, at a time when the Nile River ran along side them, she explained. This puts their construction date much further back than what is typically thought. Further, these pyramids couldn't have been made with chisels but rather were constructed with superior light and sound technologies that made use of levitation in moving the blocks, Boulter said.

The pyramid builders were living in a Golden Age, when humans had expanded senses and higher levels of consciousness, she contended. 2012 marks the time in the 26,000-year 'precessional' cycle when humans begin moving back to this Golden Age, she commented. The Temple of Seti at Abydos contains many symbols that show the understanding of the ancients, including blue, yellow, and red beings that could represent travelers from Sirius and Orion, she added. "

http://www.pyramidcode.com/

The illustration is from the Etsy shop ButtonDivas "Egyptian Papyrus Painting 2 1/4 Inch Bottle Opener or Keychain or Pocket Mirror or Pinback Button or Magnet" See more of the interesting work at:
http://ButtonDivas.etsy.com