COLUMBUS-For most people, the New Year won’t be celebrated until Jan. 1, but for at least one group at Mississippi State University, the new year’s festivities have already taken place.
The Wiccan/Pagan Student Alliance held its second annual Samhain festival Nov. 1-2 at Lake Lownes State Park in Columbus. Festivities included a costume contest, a pumpkin-carving contest, several workshops, and a ritual.
According to Steven Bragg, a founder of the WPSA and the organization’s first president, the WPSA was established as a community for people to share and discuss views and perceptions in matters of religion and spirituality.
The Samhain ritual, part of one of the biggest pagan holidays, involves allowing participants in the circle to call upon or honor their ancestors. Paganism, according to Bragg, is an umbrella term referring to newer religious ideas that center on nature in spirituality.
Bragg described the ritual as part of a modern pagan festival taken from ancient Celtic festivals that honored the dead. Samhain, meaning “Summer’s End,” was a celebration for the new year while allowing for reflection on the passing year.
The ritual was completely voluntary and symbolic, with WPSA members choosing whether to participate in the ritual or abstain if it contradicted with their individual religious beliefs.
Kit Garrison, also a WPSA founder, described the Samhain ritual as “the New Year; the summer is a time for relaxation, to live off the bounty of the earth; Samhain represents the winter, the time at summer’s end during the final harvest when people had to begin planning ahead in order to survive.”
Garrison refers to the pagan idea that two parts of the year exist, with the light part of the year-spring, summer-being followed by the dark half-fall, winter. The coming of the year’s dark half was significant to agrarian societies because it represented a time of preparation for surviving the winter months and the changes that would be brought for them.
“While this is not so important now in modern culture, it is still important to remember ancestors and the sacrifices and considerations they had to make,” she said.
The ritual itself involved several parts, including people cleansing themselves of negative energy for the ritual and calling upon divine spirits, the goddess and god, to preside over and protect the meeting.
Other parts of the ritual included the blessing of ritual tools which the participants use to focus energy and call upon spirits. The ritual also includes chanting, taking of wine and bread (symbolic of taking in life and a part of the earth), candle-lighting and taking time to privately honor and/or communicate with the people of one’s past.
In addition, a new priest and priestess of the group were appointed for the coming of the new year.
Bragg said that the ritual was important because “people could learn that the dead can be honored and remembered, helping people deal with their grief by recognizing that the deceased can still be accessed, learned from and remembered.”
The weekend also offered several other activities and events, including games and workshops. Games included an egg toss, three-legged race, bobbing for apples, pumpkin carving and costume contests.
Workshops offered during Samhain included ancestry recognition, tarot card reading, tool making and drum circles. The ancestry recognition workshop included information on how cultures honored their ancestors and the dead through various rituals, such as modern-day funerals.
Tarot card reading dealt with what the cards meant and the differences in several types of decks.
Tool making covered the uses tools play in ritual, and how they can be selected and cleansed. The drum circle workshop showed how drum beats, rhythm and dancing are used to mentally prepare people for rituals. Several members of the WPSA regarded the weekend’s festivities as a success, with something to be enjoyed for all.