Hallowe’en is just around the corner and the stores are filled with hideous masks for children, and not only children to wear. I thought it might be of interest to readers who didn’t know about it to see where these commercially made monsters originated, and how they connect with today.

It all began with ergot. This is a fungus that grows on rye, under certain circumstances. It needs a special set of weather patterns for this to occur. These include a rainy spring, so that it can germinate on the young rye, a windy summer so that the spores can be blown around the fields, and a damp harvest time to fix the ergot on the grain.

As an Inter Faith Minister and an Elder in several Magickal practices I often get questions from people who have left orthodox Christian churches for other religions that are less focused on guilt and sin and allow for the feminine expression of the divinity. A typical question was this one asked at a meeting of a pagan group. It applies to many.

Q: I used to be a churchgoer because my family thought it was the thing to do. Now I am a pagan and my group sometimes gets together and talk about the bad old days when we were Christians. But although I really enjoy my religion and think it’s the way for me to go, I don’t feel any more spiritual than I did before. Does this mean I’m not making any progress, or what?

It is a common complaint among pagans, Buddhists, Hindus and New Agers that whenever the U.S. media mentions "religion" it always refers to Christianity as though that's all there is. Even the existence of other religions has been erased from much of the public mind unless you count Muslim extremists, as a religious group.

Similarly when someone says "God" everybody thinks they know what is meant. But if you said "Goddess," those who weren't freaked out would say "Which goddess?" The existence of Goddess has been erased from the public mind. So when Dar' Shem, for example, is described as the "Reiki of Sophia" it is, to many people, a case of two unknowns in the same sentence.