Happy Walpurgisnacht!

As is my wont, I am extending happy Walpurgisnacht wishes to all of my readers, particularly to the witches in my readership. If you can't get to the Brocken, you can still be rockin' on Walpurgisnacht, though the one Walpurgisnacht carol I know is a slow, contemplative number:





For old-time cinephiles and those with an anthropological bent (though the film says as much about early 20th Century attitudes as it does about the traditions of witchcraft), there's always the film Häxan:





For my part, my favorite local "witch" has got to be Mother Hulda, an herbalist and "wise woman" who lived in New York's Hudson Valley. Besides being known as a "witch", she was a crack shot, even as an aged woman. She is reputed to have lost her life in the Revolutionary War- local legend has it she led a group of Redcoats on a snipe hunt, and picked them off one-by-one as they blundered after her in the woods. One of the soldiers finally put a musket ball in her, and the grateful populace buried her in an unmarked grave outside of the sacred ground of the churchyard.

Just goes to show you, fundamentalist conservative jackasses have been with us since before we were us.