Halloween’s History: The Origins (Part 2)

           Hi! Today I’m going to talk about “Halloween” in our days and the role that accomplished this celebration in the creation of the “Feast of all Saints” (November 1st ) and the “All Souls” day (November 2nd ), so this post is considered as the second part of this topic and it starts like this…

          At the last post, it was mentioned that the Christian Church wanted to substitute the Samhain with another holiday so that’s why they decided to create the “Feast of all Saints” or “All Hallows Day”, assigned to November 1st. This holiday was formed to celebrate and honor all Christian saints but especially for all that saints that don’t have a special day to be celebrated; however, finally, this holiday didn’t achieved to replaced Samhain but something started to happen: the Celts deities started to be substituted for fairies and leprechauns. Later, the church tried again to suppress the Samhain by creating a new holiday that is the “All Souls Day”, assigned to November 2nd. This holiday was meant to pray for the souls of all those people who have already died, however this didn’t worked again.

          Time passed by and the “All Saints Day” became the “All Hallows Eve Day” but with ancient Celtic traditions. People continued to celebrate this day but as a time for wandering dead and evil supernatural beings. Later, it began to be celebrated the “All Hallows Evening Day” which is considered as the “Halloween” that we already know today. This day started to be used to transmit the message that death is part of life, it started to be said that the souls and fantastic creatures such as fairies, witches, and demons were roaming that day and that’s why it began the use of costumes in order to ask for treats.
          Well, that’s all for today! I hope you enjoyed this post and I wish you to return next week!

Note: All the information shown above was taken from the work that is at the bibliography....

Works Cited

Santino, Jack. Halloween: The Fantasy and Folklore of All Hallows. September 1982. 22 September 2011 <http://www.loc.gov/folklife/halloween.html>.

Halloween’s History: The Origins (Part 1)

                Hi, dear readers. Last week I talked about “Harry Potter Series” and how its huge impact in literature and our society. As stated in the last post, I was thinking to talk about Halloween, a holiday that is celebrated on October 31st. We already know that during this day people decide to get dressed with unusual costumes such as: devils, witches, angels and vampires among others; little kids knock doors to ask for candies, TV channels transmit scary movies, and houses are decorated with pumpkins or scary objects but, how this celebration started? What was the purpose of creating this holiday? Well, these are just few of the answers that are going to be solved today. I have found a very interesting article that is called “Halloween: The Fantasy and Folklore of All Hallows” written by Jack Santino, he shows very interesting facts about this holiday, so all the information that I’m going to display here is from this source.

                First of all, it is very important to know that “Halloween” was created by the Celts, the same tribe that started to use wizardry. This pagan celebration had also the name of Samhain, it was considered as the “festival of the death”, and it was the most important holiday for the Celts. This tribe believed that, during the day of Samhain, the ghosts or souls of people who had already died were allowed to travel to our world. It was a tradition to sacrifice animals, collect fruits and vegetables, and even to turn on bonfires to honor dead people in order to keep them away from the people who are still alive. But how does this celebration became the Halloween? Well, it started to be Halloween when missionaries of the Christian churches tried to change the religious practices of the Celts.

                The missionaries considered this festival as a pagan practice and that it was related to the devil, so that’s why they decided to place Christian holidays at the same time as the Celtic holidays. Pagan Celts, which later started to be called as “Druids”, began to be considered as evil people that were part of the “Christian hell” and this is the part where it gets involved the wizardry topic because Christians started to tell them that they were “witches” for the fact that they believed in supernatural creatures and practiced sorcery.

                Well, that’s everything for today. Next week I’m going to continue with this topic and I will talk about Halloween in our days and the role that accomplished this celebration in the creation of the Feast of all Saints (November 1st ) and the All Souls day (November 2nd ).

Works Cited

Santino, Jack. Halloween: The Fantasy and Folklore of All Hallows. September 1982. 22 September 2011 <http://www.loc.gov/folklife/halloween.html>.

Magic in Harry Potter

Hi, everybody! Well… I was thinking last week about a topic that it would be interesting to talk about here in my blog. I thought that it would be nice to talk about Halloween, a celebration that is very common in the United States, but then I decided to change that topic for the next week ;) Today I’m going to talk about… Harry Potter! One of the most famous book series in our times and even it is a great example of fantastic literature in which wizardry and magic is involved but first of all I’m going to talk a little bit about Joanne Rowling (known as “J.K. Rowling”), the author of this magical story.

            J.K. Rowling is a British author who was born in 1965, she started to be interested in literature when she wrote “Rabbit”, her first short story that was about a rabbit that got the measles and some of his friends went to visit him. The shocking thing of this is that she wrote this story when she was five or six years old so she showed her interest of writing since she was very little. Rowling came up with the idea for Harry Potter when she was twenty-five years old while delayed on a train that was going from Manchester to London, she didn’t had anything to write but she tried to remember the idea and finally, five years ago, she started to write all the ideas that she wanted to show in each of her books (Bloomsbury Publishing, harrypotter.bloomsbury.com).

            Probably everyone perfectly knows what Harry Potter series are about but I’m going to give a quickly review about it: Harry is a boy who lived with his terrible uncles and his cousin Dudley, aunt Petunia and uncle Vernon told him that his parents died on a car accident but, when Harry turns eleven, he receives a letter from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Since that moment, Harry met Hagrid who tells him that he is a wizard, that his parents were wizards too but that they were killed by a dark wizard called “Lord Voldemort”. Harry goes to Hogwarts, meets Dumbledore and his best friends (Ron and Hermione), learns how to be a wizard, and he gets in charge of defeating Voldemort (Barnes & Noble, barnesandnoble.com) through all the seven books.

            In my opinion, the most amazing thing of all this story is that J.K. Rowling created a whole new world based on that myths and knowledge that she knew about wizards, witches, and magic. She created new characters with magical abilities and even adopted some characters that were already known on history (for example: Nicolas Flamel); she created a huge list of spells and fantastic creatures; Rowling also created a new sport for her story and it’s called “Quiddich”. All that facts can be considered as important because they give value to Rowling’s work, that’s why I think she has a huge amount of followers: her creativity involved several human minds. I really recommend you to read them if you are a lover of fantastic literature. In my opinion and with my personal experiences, I can say that this kind of books are really good to develop our imagination (:

            Thank you for reading my blog! Next week I’m going to talk about how wizardry and magic had had an influence in cultural aspects…

Works Cited

Barnes & Noble. "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone ." 2011. Barnes & Noble.com. 14 september 2011 <http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/harry-potter-and-the-sorcerers-stone-j-k-rowling/1100036321>.

Bloomsbury Publishing. "Biography." 2011. Harry Potter: J.K. Rowling. 14 september 2011 <http://harrypotter.bloomsbury.com/author>.

“Witchcraft” and “Magic” in Literature and Fantasy Genre's role in Education

As already mentioned before, witchcraft is a topic that has been a great influence in literature, history, and even in our culture; but today I’m just going to focus in literature…

I consider literature as a form of art in which the human expresses ideas that are product of his mind and creativity. Literature can also be seen as a huge world that is divided by genres, for example: romance, fantasy, science fiction, horror, crime, mystery, etc. I was reading a web page from the University of Florida called “Genre Fiction as Literature”, where it said that the fantasy literature was the one where elements such as witches, wizards, and magic can be seen. Matt Sanchez also says that fantasy is the richest type of literature in which characters are introduced into world or places where unexplainable and unexpected situations occur, and that it is the only one that can erase the boundaries between children’s fiction and adult fiction (iml.jou.ufl.edu).

There are a lot of examples of fantasy works in which the main topic is “wizardry” or “magic” but some of the titles that I know are the “Harry Potter” series by J.K. Rowling (one of my favorite series), “One Thousand and One Nights”, “The Lord of the Rings” books by J.R.R. Tolkien, “The Eyes of the Dragon” by Stephen King, and “The Chronicles of Narnia” by C.S. Lewis.

Witchcraft and magic in fantasy literature also plays a role in education. According to an article called “Children's Literature Across the Curriculum: An Ontario Survey”, it is said that the genre of fantasy is used by a 45.6% by teachers and librarians in Canada to give classes to children that belong to primary grades because it has a strong influence on student’s attitudes, values, and beliefs; also the use of this genre helps to see the emotions and themes that come from other human’s mind and how all this had an influence in the author’s work (Pantaleo). In conclusion, according to all the ideas that were explained before, it can be said that magic and witchcraft have a great influence in literature and even in education. Maybe this topic about magic does not exist but, in my opinion, it helps to develop creativity and critical thinking skills. That kind of literature is the one that kids prefer because it results interesting for them.

Well, that’s all for today! I hope you enjoyed it… Check this blog next week because I’ll write about “Harry Potter” series and its impact in our society.

Works Cited:

Pantaleon, Sylvia. “Children’s Literature Across the Curriculum: An Ontario Survey” Education (2002): 211-30. ProQuest. Web. 30 August 2011.

Sanchez, Matt. “Fantasy”. Genre Fiction as Literature. Web University of Florida Interactive Media Lab, 2005. Web. 30 Aug. 2011 < http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/Spring05/Sanchez/fantasy3.htm>

*Doubts of how I cited the article? Check http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/02/ at the electronic source section.

"Witchcraft Persecution"

The last time that I wrote something in the blog was about the terms of “witch”, “wizard”, and “witchcraft” but now I’m going to talk a little bit about: witchcraft persecutions. This persecutions started around 1233 when the Pope, called Gregory IX, charged a tribunal, nowadays known as “The Inquisition” which had the purpose of suppress or eliminate non-Christian activities, for example: the practice of witchcraft, satanic rituals, etcetera; but then in 1320, Pope John XXII declared that paganism was everything considered as a hostile or aggressive threat to the society. Later, in 1484, Heinrich Kraemer and Jacob Sprenger wrote the “Malleus Malificarum” and they even published with the help of the Pope Innocent VIII. The “Malleus Malificarum” was a manual dedicated to witch hunters and it became used for about 300 years in order to destroy paganism in Europe (Occult 100, ocult100.com).

During this period, a lot of people died (women, men, and even children) but not all of them were pagans, witches or satanists. Inquisitors used torture, rape, forced sodomy, and mutilations as a way to destroy paganism. Propaganda and the fear of communities became used to realize that kind of murders and it became spread to other parts of the world, not just in Europe, for example: in the United States where the Salem witchcraft trials took place (Occult 100, ocult100.com).

Some facts that are known as a result of these persecutions were that, from 1500 to 1660, Europe had between 50,000 to 80,000 suspects that were classified as witches; all of them became executed: 80% were women. A curious fact is that Germany had the highest rate of executions with 26,000 in comparison with other European countries such as France with 10,000 executions, England with 1,000, and Ireland with 4 executions (Linder, law2.umkc.edu).

Now I would like to talk a little bit more about the Salem witchcraft trials, just to show you what happened. The Salem witchcraft trials took place in the United States from 1692 to 1693, where several men and women became accused of practicing witchcraft. Some of them became hanged on Gallows Hll, others went to jail and died there, and other ones became tortured (Linder, The Witchcraft Trials in Salem: A Commentary, law2.umkc.edu). Well that’s everything for today… Next week I’m going to talk about how the wizardry and magic had an impact at literature .

Works Cited:

*Linder, Douglas. "A Brief History of Witchcraft Persecutions before Salem." 2005. University of Missouri: Kansas City. 24 August 2011 .

*—. "The Witchcraft Trials in Salem: A Commentary ." n.d. University of Missouri: Kansas City. 24 August 2011 .

*Occult 100. "The Burning Times & Basic History of Witch Persecution." 2010. Occult 100: Search and Archive. 24 August 2011 .