It's HALLOW, not HOLLOW !!

I just Googled the spelling "HOLLOWEEN" and came up with TWENTY NINE MILLION citations with this mis-spelling and yes,  I do think my head is about to explode...

I started public school as a first grader in the fall of 1959, as part of the first generation of American children growing up under continual exposure to television. The suburbs of Pittsburgh then spoke a very middle of the road, almost neutral American accent, sounding neither of New England, nor was it Southern, nor was it Appalachian. And, in listening to the adults around us or the actors and announcers on television, never did we hear the word Hallowe'en pronounced oddly in those days.  

It was simply always pronounced "hal - oh", rhyming with shallow...

Yet, the mis-spellings we see are basically a secondary effect. This is of course indicative of the huge shift in the standard pronunciation since the first time Americans had ever (ever) experienced a large scale exposure to the "hollow-een" pronunciation back in the 1960's... I really believe this whole mess can be traced to a single, primary source:  1966, in one of the early animated Charles Shultzs' PEANUTS features...

"It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown".

And, to quote good ol' Charlie Brown:   "Sigh..."

Now, a decade into the 21st Century, the general American news and video mediafolk have almost completely converted over to the Post-Peanuts Pronounciation (PPP). Survival of the Lowest Common Denominator, eh? Remember, these are the same Einsteins who lead the world in the New Years Eve celebrations of the "Millenium" at the dawn of the 1999th year of the Common Era...

It's wrong, just wrong, and worse, it's stupid.

Pumpkins are hollow,  HALLOWEEN is NOT !

ALAS, the size of the phenomena indicates there's probably no going back - UNLESS the issue of the pronunciation itself actually makes it back into the big-time media, somehow. Great Mother of us all! If we could -just- get someone on NPR or The Daily Show or Colbert to mention this issue - even once... But beware, there are apologetics afoot now, historical revisionists, who are trying to contrive justifications and false histories to support a pre-Peanuts history for this huge piece of pop-cultural inbreeding...

WHAT CAN YOU DO ??

You can make a difference.
You can Facebook it.
You can Twitter it..
You can re-blog it.
You can post it to The Daily Show
and the Colbert Report  via Comedy Central.

Before it's too late...

 - EARRACH 

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PS - (rant not quite over...) And by the way, in a couple weeks you're going to start hearing a lot of "SOUL-STICE" again too. That pronunciation has been going through much the same shameful de-volution. The New Age-ish pronunciation "Soul-stice" is an erroneous californication of SOLSTICE. 

The Sun is "SOL"... not "SOUL", Mr Winters.

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From a related rant of mine: 

More on the Ruination of Hallowe'en...

• Through the self-referential dynamics of the media and marketing, our Halloween imagery is becoming severely culturally “inbred”. The result is frequently so brutal that it is virtually obscene in its violent, heartless and vulgar content. What began as a time for the honoring of the Spirits of the Departed and an opportunity for children to shuffle through the Autumn leaves in fantastic garb begging for treats at the doors of their neighbors, has become a theatre of blood, butchery and inhumanity. Halloween may once have been meant to be atmospheric and “spooky” but never was its true spirit upheld by the horrific and brutal.

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More Halloween and Samhain content HERE...

The SOLAR APOSTASY

GREAT, GLORIOUS, GOLDEN SUN…

So obvious it’s

as if invisible.

This most brilliant blind spot

in human experience,

this most profoundly absurd

irony in all of our lives…

The Sun,

upon which are we

utterly dependent

for our sustenance

and very existence

yet to which, 
somehow,

we remain

utterly unthankful.

After all,

it’s only

“a thing.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- e.o.p.

POSTULATE:

“The Sun is worthy of our veneration.”

Right?

Oh? Perhaps you personally don’t venerate “things”?

You only venerate “spirits” – beings with whom you can interact?

That’s your choice.

Regardless though, many of us who are inspired to the point of worship by the Natural World actually become comfortable with worshiping* “things” too and not just spirits… Things like places, mountains, springs, rivers, trees, The Sun, The Earth, The Moon, etc.

[ * “worshiping” / “venerating” / “ritually giving honor-to” (-whatever) ]

When you think about it, the Sun is at least as-worthy, if not more-worthy, of our veneration than is the The Mother (a.k.a. the Earth Mother / Mother Nature). Without the Sun, the Earth would be utterly irrelevant and, of course, there would be no “people” to perceive it anyway. Astronomers’ origins-theories posit the Sun as parent of the Earth; or at the least, related to the Earth as a vastly superior sibling. How is it that we modern pagans are so easily worshipful of the Earth as being "more than just a thing", yet not-so with the Sun?

Hmm… Is The Mother Herself a spirit (a being), or a “thing”? It could very legitimately be said that everything that exists, from subatomic particles to beings themselves, are processes rather than "objects"… Object; thing; spirit; being? Where does “you” fall on that spectrum? Are you really “you” to anyone else in the world than you? Even unto yourself, are you anything more than a selectively groomed set of memories and idiosyncratic reflexes? It seems, my notion of “you” is simply a representation; a model I’ve constructed of you through which I filter new perceptions, which I attribute to my sustained model of “you”. In that sense, outside of yourself, you are mainly composed of me; yeah, over here: you exist over here…

Well, back now to that most astonishing thing in our world which we spend 99% of our lives managing to not even notice (the ADF "Two Powers" convention not withstanding), it remains that there -are- two great poles of existence for humans and other living creatures:

--THE SUN ABOVE --

and

-- the EARTH BELOW--

---------------------------------------------

But why then is the SUN continually excluded from

any sense of primacy in our Neopagan symbol systems ?

The roots of our apostasy *

Don’t you dare start reaching for Reconstructionist “scholarship” at this point; the REAL reasons afoot are more modern, psychological and illogical than anything to do with our understanding of the ancient world. 

Unfortunately, getting Neopagans to admit to their true motivations can be like nailing jelly to a tree... and yet, from my point of view, it requires no psychic ability to read their patterns of reflex and cultural conditioning. 

Yes, yes; of course, you are not like them. You are not driven by such transparent and trivial patterns of reasoning. Androphobia, patriphobia and deeply conflicted familial relationships have no bearing on the formation of your system of spiritual symbolism whatsoever? Ok…

And so concludes the current preamble to the actual essay;  
the essay itself is linked HERE...

Sun salutation by Earrach / photo by Lassair