All Hallow's Eve (the Celtic Samhain) was about fears. The dead roamed the earth as the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead was thinnest on that night - the last night of the ancient Celtic year. One put food out to placate the restless spirits. One decorated one's house with malevolent faces (often candle-lit carved gourds) to frighten the restless spirits away. From that, we got modern Halloween.

Modern Halloween is about exorcising one's fears - scary costumes, scary movies, and scary decorations. The costumes are less scary these days as we no longer fear the spirits on the other side.

Modern Halloween has also become about indulging one's fantasies; it seems every costume for women and girls has a "sexy" variant, whether appropriate or not.

As for the witch trials in Salem, early colonists still believed in the Devil. They believed he worked through people. The Native Americans in the woods beyond the cleared areas scared them: painted, howling, and with rites and customs alien to the Europeans. Native American hunters had learned to walk silently through the woods and could appear "out of nowhere" to an unwary colonist. At least some tribes had to be in league with the Devil, right?.

That witches existed among the colonists, too, was taken as a matter of fact and not dismissed as absurdist fantasy. How else did you explain then-unexplained diseases, crop failures, and other events?

Cotton Mather and his father, Increase Mather, made their livings investigating and documenting the practices and deceits of witches. Increase was an early president of Harvard University, then mainly a divinity school. Increase served as a liaison with the English government, often shuttling back and forth to England to deal with Parliament or the King on behalf of the Massachusetts and Plymouth colonists.

Cotton, a prolific pamphleteer, left a scientific legacy with his defense of a then-radical inoculation process for smallpox, but is mostly remembered for his involvement in the Salem Witch Trials - an involvement that was, in reality, largely peripheral.

Puritan Massachusetts was then a hotbed of theological and political intrigue, the two often intermingling in the minds of colonists in the outlying areas, like Salem. Religious leaders in early colonial Massachusetts were frequently political leaders as well - e.g., the Mathers. Their fears were the colony's fears, their devils the colony's devils.

It's true that the people who are killed for witchcraft today are not killed for dressing up in a costume; they are killed because of intersecting economic, political, and social factors. Silvia Federici, a leading voice in witch hunt analysis, considers these factors to be largely connected to colonialism, gender hierarchy, economic inequality, and Christianity.---

What BS! The people being killed today for being a witch or a witch-equivalent come from some cultures in places like Africa where they still have belief in magic. They didn't get the belief that there is bad magic in the world from colonialism.

"Silvia Federici, a leading voice in witch hunt analysis, considers these factors to be largely connected to colonialism, gender hierarchy, economic inequality, and Christianity."

*Sigh* Isn't everything?

Of course, Silvia Federici (and others like her) seem intent on replacing one scapegoat with another. "Look, it's a wealthy, patriarchal, colonialist Christian! Burn zer! Burn zer!"

So let me get this straight. You can be cancelled by the SJWs for "appropriating" culture from an imaginary ethnicity. Witches don't exist, people. (And I am always amused at the ones who mock Christianity on the one hand, and spend their free hours trolling used book stores for spell books on the other.)

"We live in a world where people are murdered on a regular basis because others in their communities believe that they are witches."

No. We do not live in that world. Some people in certain benighted regions of the world do. But that's not our problem.

I wonder if there would be chin-strokers like this one, and Twitter campaigns if the show "Bewitched" debuted in 2019. Or would it be seen as what it was -- a lighthearted comedy that indirectly addressed mixed marriage?

And I'd aver that Elizabeth Montgomery and Agnes Moorehead brought people more pleasure than anything this tiresome writer could dream of.

Dick York was the better Darren. Fight me.

Dick York was the better Darren. Fight me.

But who was the better Gladys Kravitz? Alice Pearce or Sandra Gould?

Alice Pearce.

But I can't tell the Darrens apart.

If anyone is offended by anything you can't do it or say it, and some people are crazy, so just don't speak. Of course, if a Christian is offended by a witch costume, that doesn't count. I'm sure some doofus would be offended if you dressed as a toaster (some people don't have toasters waaaaaah!).

Listened to a history podcast this afternoon about the infamous 1644 witch hunt in East Anglia led by Matthew Hopkins, self-appointed "Witchfinder General."

I guess witch hunts are nothing new to East Anglia.

On another note, one of the familiars named by the falsely accused woman at the heart of one of the more infamous trials was Pyewacket. If you're a fan of old movies and plays, you might recognize the name. It belongs to Gillian Holroyd's familiar in Bell, Book, and Candle. She was played by Kim Novak in the movie.

> But I can't tell the
> Darrens apart

WTF???

Dear God, child... Hie thee to the nunnery

> Dick York was the better
> Darren. Fight me.

You lose!

York was a sexless, scowling alcoholic, never convincingly grateful for TV marriage to one of the most beautiful women in postwar America.

How dare you.

How dare you.

I still say he was funnier than Sargent. Whether York was smiling or shouting.

He was cuter-looking, too. It made him look more innocent, which I think helped the character.