http://blogs.news24.com/damonleff/the-dance

"Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child-mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after-years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth - often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you can not get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable."
Hypatia. (b.355-d.415) Pagan philosopher and mathematician.

In October / November South African Pagans gather every year to celebrate a religious festival popularly called Beltain.

Beltane or Beltaine is an anglicisation of the Irish Bealtaine, the Gaelic name for both the month of May (in the northern hemisphere) and for a pagan religious festival that occurred (and still occurs) on the first day of May. In Scottish Gaelic, the month is known as (An) Cèitean or a' Mhàigh, and the festival is known as Latha Bealltainn or simply Bealltainn.

As an ancient Gaelic festival, Bealtaine was celebrated in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man, though there were similar festivals held at the same time in the other Celtic countries of Wales, Brittany and Cornwall. Bealtaine and Samhain were the leading terminal dates of the civil year in Ireland though the latter festival was the more important. [1]

In the southern hemisphere the feast of Beltain is celebrated on the last day of October and the first day of November around a celebratory 'May'-pole. The dance of the Maypole is a symbolic act of fertility magic in which male and female partners, each holding ribbons attached to a central pillar, dance in opposite directions whilst weaving toward and away from the pole, around an erect pillar of wood decorated with flowers. Maypole dancing is an ancient (pre-Christian) and wide-spread form of western European folk dance. [2]

This year, as every year in living memory in this country under the fascist white Christian Nationalist government, amidst the Beltain celebrations, venerations, joy and laughter in covens and Pagan gatherings across the country, the feint reek of Christian agitation against Pagans once again focussed on Halloween. The agitators? Fanatical followers of Peter Hammond's Africa Christian Action network. [3]

Christians opposed to Paganism in all its forms began sending out their usual and not unexpected e-mail alerts - religious spam - warning Christians and non-Christians alike to protect their children from Pagans and Witches on October 31. They urged that parents everywhere not only take extra caution to prevent their children from participating in the worship of "demonic forces", but actively encouraged Christians to "engage in spiritual warfare" against Pagans.

"This 31 October, take a stand against Halloween by mobilising your family and congregation to celebrate the Reformation, and to engage in spiritual warfare... ...particularly [against] those who may be unthinkingly participating in this occultic celebration of divination, necromancy, human sacrifice and cruelty to animals." [4]

Another e-mail alert reads:

This is a official notice.. On 31 October will be Blood and sexual rituals performed by Satanic covens around South Africa. There will be sexual orgies with demons, animals and humans AND THERE WILL BE A HUMAN SACRIFICE - KEEP YOUR CHILDREN SAFE ESPECIALLY YOUNG BOYS.
October 22-29 - Ceremonial planning and kidnapping of sacrifice.
October 28 - Human sacrifice to enter into Halloween
October 31- Human sacrifice & sexual orgies with demons and animals and children - to attempt to enter the gates of Hades (hell)
November 1-3 - Human Sacrifice end of Halloween.
December 22 - Summer Equinox - Human and animal sacrifice - The birth of the sun god - through the goddess of the moon
December 25 - Male and female sacrifice
Wednesday 28 October - a Christians response to Halloween.
Do you realise the spiritual implications of Halloween? And do you realise curses will be pronounced by Satan and his cohorts from 22 - 31 October? [5]

The South African press, as usual, has been only to eager to jump on the Christian bandwagon to trumpet the paranoid fears of the delusional as they set about their annual farce; promoting fabricated and provable lies against Halloween and against Pagans and Paganism, in an attempt to sabotage and harm the reputation of Witches, Druids, Paganism and everything else they do not consider to be Christian. [6]

Instead of reporting on the Pagan Maypole celebrations of the season, a topical subject, reporters set about interviewing Pagans on the controversy of the moment - Halloween. Isn't it time journalists in this country started looking at Pagans as something more than just a centre-piece of Christian controversy? Or do we Pagans only exist in so far as we "affect" the Christians among us? South African reporters and editors tend to ignore the Press Code when it comes to 'not denigrating peoples religion'. They do it all the time when covering Paganism and Witchcraft.

Halloween is not a Pagan religious holiday! For those who know, the Christian festival of Halloween evolved from the Catholic festival celebration of 'All Hallows Day' and has no direct connection with the original pagan celebration of Samhain, the ancient festival of ancestral veneration still practiced by Pagans today. In the southern hemisphere we Pagans celebrate Samhain (meaning summer's end) - the feast of the dead - in May, at the start of Winter.

quote: Father Joan María Canals, the director of the Spanish Bishops Conference Committee on Liturgy, condemned parents for permitting their children to go to “un-Christian” parties when they should be focusing on All Saints Day today and All Souls Day on Monday. “Children dress as witches, vampires, ghosts, masks, corpses, skeletons, and parents favour this type of festivity which plays with elements of death,” Father Canals said. “But when a relative dies they prevent them from seeing the dead relative.” José Sánchez González, the Bishop of Sigüenza-Guadalajara, in central Spain, went further, suggesting that Hallowe’en parties had a “background of the occult and anti-Christianity”. He said that he saw the dark influence of Hollywood playing with the young minds of Spanish children as they danced innocently around pumpkins, little realising that they were attending a pagan festival. [7]

One might be forgiven for thinking that this is a temporary lapse of sanity and reason on the part of the agitators, until once remembers that the same zeal for 'war against heresy at any cost' has been waged by Christians against pagans since as early as the third century of the current era.

quote: THERE WAS a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time. Having succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. On account of the self-possession and ease of manner, which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not unfrequently appeared in public in presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in going to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more. Yet even she fell victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed. For as she had frequent interviews with Orestes, it was calumniously reported among the Christian populace, that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop. Some of them, therefore, hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter, waylaid her returning home, and dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles.* After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them. This affair brought not the least opprobrium, not only upon Cyril, but also upon the whole Alexandrian church. And surely nothing can be farther from the spirit of Christianity than the allowance of massacres, fights, and transactions of that sort. This happened in the month of March during Lent, in the fourth year of Cyril's episcopate, under the tenth consulate of Honorius, and the sixth of Theodosius. [8]

Civil groups in Spain recently protested against the release of a new film dubbed "anti-Christian" called 'Agora'. Agora, which stars Rachel Weisz, is an epic film that recounts the story of Hypatia, a pagan woman who was killed for her political beliefs. [9]

Christians don't like to be reminded that they too are capable of the greatest evil - ignorance and sheer stupidity!

Theon, the father of Hypatia and a noted mathematician and astronomer of Alexandria is recorded as teaching, "All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final. Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all."

References:

[1] Beltane origins
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltane

[2] Maypole origins
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maypole_dance

[3] Africa Christian Action
http://www.christianaction.org.za

[4] The Bible and Halloween
http://www.christianaction.org.za/downloads/BibleAndHalloween.pdf

[5] Christian e-mail alert against Halloween. October 2009.

[6] 'How Halloween splits the faithful' by Melanie Peters
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=139&art_id=vn2009103107...

[7]Hallowe’en is the devil’s work, Catholic church warns parents
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article6897422.ece

[8] The Life of Hypatia
By Socrates Scholasticus, from his Ecclesiastical History
http://cosmopolis.com/alexandria/hypatia-bio-socrates.html

[9] Civil groups protest new anti-Christian film
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=17335