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Some new agers take the holiday seriously as well. Wiccan/pagan groups DO celebrate this time as “Samhain,” which has its roots in the harvest festivals of Europe. This feast commemorating “summer’s end” marked the beginning of winter in the northern hemisphere; and there is evidence that some ancient peoples considered this to be potent time for magic and communion with dead spirits. It was a time when the “veil between the worlds” of the earthly and the supernatural was at its thinnest. Since the 1970s, the spreading popularity of the new age movement, and the revival of Wiccan belief systems, has again rendered Halloween to be a mysterious time. |