The first witches were medieval healers

🕯️ Hello, yes, it’s Halloween. I’m going as Paul Mescal holding the Sweetgreen bag.
Issue #197: drinking the Kool-Aid and the paradox of control
By Harris Sockel

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As we mentioned on Monday, Halloween is a mélange of multiple holidays: (1) the ancient Celtic agricultural festival marking the beginning of winter, and (2) the eve (“e’en”) of All Hallow’s Day, a Christian holiday honoring the lives of saints.

Most of the (very adorable) mayhem that may descend upon your block tonight has its roots in that 2,000-year-old Celtic festival. The Celts believed that, tonight, spirits rush back to Earth to welcome the darker half of the year. A costume is a shield from these demons. Or, as Rayne Fisher-Quann writes: “i think halloween really is an extremely useful holiday for making the world your psychosexual stage and using overt artifice to disrupt the ever-present, everyday artifice that keeps you shrouded from yourself and others.”

Maybe that’s your cue to really go for it this year? Engineer this giant DIY spiritwalker costume. Or go as a witch, the easiest costume of all time — but not without reading Olivia Campbell’s excellent story about why the first “witches” were actually healers persecuted in medieval Europe for practicing medicine, a field dominated by men. “Churches were opening universities, professionalizing medicine to be practiced by book-learned men, so they needed to wipe out the competition,” Campbell writes.

So, actually, if you go as a witch, that’s a pretty revolutionary choice.

If you’d rather stay in, Summer Block, who’s writing a book about Halloween, generously shares 23 pandemic-inspired ways to say hi to your local demon(s) from the comfort of home. Number 19 is an homage to witches, too… I did not know until reading this that you can carve witch faces into dried apples as a family bonding activity (?).

What else we’re reading

• This Halloween coincides with Diwali, or Deepavali, the Hindu light festival. It’s a very different holiday than Halloween, but the core idea of “turning up with family and friends while the weather gets all depressing” feels the same. Diwali marks the darkest day of the year, the New Moon in late October or early November, and poet Priyanka Sinha reveals its name’s origins: “the row (avali) of clay lamps (deepa) to symbolize the victory of truth (light) over evil (darkness).”
• Brie Wolfson, author of my all-time favorite blog post (fodder for a future newsletter), created a beautifully designed zine series on work culture. It’s called The Kool-Aid Factory. I recommend starting with The “Operating As One” Issue. It’s about getting a bunch of humans, each with their own motivations and histories, to work together toward a shared goal. One tip: Define exactly what you want your audience to feel, and note when they feel it. Pinpoint the moment when someone goes from “oh, I kinda like this thing” to “I LOVE this thing,” and rally around that as a team. Shopify defines it as a seller’s first sale. Facebook once defined it as “7 friends in 10 days.” At Medium, maybe it’s… the first time 10 people applaud your story?

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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Harris Sockel

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