NEWSLETTER

PHOTOS BY DANA GOLDSTEIN
PUMPKINHEADS BY SEMEN SPERMS
INTERVIEW BY ROCCO CASTORO

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Vice: Do you view Halloween as completely separate from Samhain?

Nicole Cooper: I tend to. It’s kind of like what happens around Christmastime. We celebrate the winter solstice, and then a lot of us who have relatives who are not Wiccan will do a Christmas dinner with the family as a cultural thing. It’s the culture that we grew up in so we can engage with it as well as our chosen spiritual beliefs.

Give us some background on Samhain and its significance to Wiccans.

Samhain is the last of the three main agricultural harvest festivals. It originated as a Celtic New Year festival. For modern Wiccans it’s the beginning of what we call the dark half of the year, which lasts until Beltane on the first of May. It’s often referred to as the meat harvest, because back in the days when everyone was a farmer it was impossible to feed and sustain all their animals throughout the winter so they were slaughtered. For this and other reasons there are a lot of connotations of death during this time of the year, which has definitely carried over into the modern definition of Halloween. Wiccans celebrate people we love who’ve died—it’s a time when we can honor them and do rituals to strengthen their presence in our lives. It’s directly tied to what the ancient Celts did. They believed the changing of seasons to be a time when the boundaries between this world and the other world were very thin.


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