Pagans Pagans Everywhere!

What do you fear?

Midterms. Darkness. Death. Seventeen students and community members faced these fears at the MIT Pagan Students’ Group (PSG) annual Samhain ritual at MIT Chapel on Sunday night. The Samhain ritual celebrates the Celtic New Year by commemorating the dead while celebrating new life.

Though Samhain is a pagan ritual, attendees were not all strict pagans. “I really like paganism and I enjoy hanging out with pagans. My own religion is something I make up myself out of many things,” says participant Jonas Roy, a 23-year-old Boston resident.

Others were more dedicated to the cause: Natalia N. Chernenko, an MIT senior and president of the PSG, has been studying various forms of witchcraft for six years.

Samhain is a time when pagans celebrate the cycle of death and rebirth, explains Phoenix, the priestess of the ceremony, who declined to give her real name. Participants are cleansed at the beginning of the ceremony with a bell and fruit-infused water. They stand in an unbreakable circle protected by the four elements—Breezes, Fire, Oceans and Mountains.

The “Green Man,” wearing a muscle tee and fishnet wrist warmers, reenacts death after dancing around the circle. In the crux of the ritual, participants walk down through a black veil into a symbolic world of the dead to meditate and say farewell to deceased loved ones.

“It was sort of like going down to death and leaving something behind—the fears,” says Roy. “It’s gone, dead.”

Returning from the proverbial underworld, participants partake of the “fruit of life”—apple slices—before ending the ritual with a dance to raise energy in a “Cone of Power.”

Despite the ritual’s focus on death, the realm of the dead doesn’t feature any red horns or pitchforks: “We have nothing to do with the devil,” says Phoenix.

­­­—Esther I. Yi