America’s Forgotten Occult Origins

An hour south of Cleveland, as my rented Kia crosses into Canaan Township one afternoon this October, I pass a farm that’s home to a herd of goats. I turn toward the passenger seat, which is empty, and exclaim, to no one: “Goats!” I am not from around here. For many years, however, Wayne County, Ohio, was a place I thought I knew.

We have all been there before. Before a big momentous event, we think of what we’ll do, what we’ll say, we have it rehearsed to the last detail, but once there—Well, once there, it’s not quite the same. Somehow, our little rehearsals had missed out on the atmosphere, the sense of responsibility, the people around us who make things quite different from what we had imagined alone. Sometimes, that big momentous event is an election, and every one of us who ends up making up (or changing) our minds in the final days of the campaign could be responsible for the results being subtly—and sometimes not so subtly—different from what polls suggest. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Despite what pundits say, the 2024 U.

The nine-week voyage of the Puritan ship the Arbella in 1630 is almost as mythologized as the Mayflower landing at Plymouth Rock. The Arbella was the ship on which Massachusetts Bay Colony’s governor John Winthrop would deliver a sermon where he declared America to be a “city on a hill.” Rediscovered by scholars in the 20th-century, Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity,” with its imploration that the colonists must “labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community,” has long been interpreted as a foundational text of American identity, a veritable birth certificate for the idea of this as a redeemer nation.

In songs and music videos, Megan The Stallion is authoritative, audacious, unbothered, self-possessed to the point of arrogance. But this larger-than-life persona masks a deep well of trauma: For the past few years, the rapper, born Megan Pete, has struggled with grief, PTSD, depression, and suicidal thoughts. This fraught duality is the driving force behind Nneka Onuorah’s new documentary, Megan: In Her Words, which premieres on Oct.

Almost two centuries ago, Irish immigrants brought a festival called Samhain to North America. Samhain had ancient pagan roots. It was celebrated as a harvest festival at the end of October, but also marked a day when the veil between this world and the next was at its thinnest. The Irish brought Samhain to the New World in the late 1840s when a devastating potato famine forced millions of them to leave Ireland.

Moon Alert: Avoid shopping or important decisions from 12:30 p.m. to 2 p.m. EDT today (9:30 a.m. to 11 a.m. PDT). After that, the Moon moves from Libra into Scorpio. Happy Birthday for Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024: You are steady, reliable and trustworthy. However, you are also spontaneous and entertaining! This is a year to work hard to create foundations in your life.