The Boston Globe looks at Salem’s preparations for the upcoming Halloween season, when Witches, Pagans, curious tourists, and people who just want to party, all gather in the small New England city. This year Salem is selling a new discount card (called a “Haunted Passport”) to help offset the city’s expenses.

“In an effort to manage the Witch City’s biggest moneymaker – the Halloween season – the city is offering a $13 discount card to the hordes who descend on Salem every October for Haunted Happenings, a local celebration of everything witchy, ghostly, and ghoulish. “It’s almost like a diner’s card where you buy it and you get a discount,” Mayor Kim Driscoll said of the card, which is called the Haunted Passport. She said proceeds from the card will help the city coordinate and pay for public safety efforts, such as sending out extra police patrols, positioning portable bathroom facilities near attractions, and getting street-closure notices to residents.”

Among those participating in the program is the Salem Witch Museum, and local Witch Christian Day, who is throwing his annual “Festival of the Dead”.

“Christian Day, a local witch who puts on several events collectively called the Festival of the Dead, said he already has seen customers making use of their cards when ordering tickets through his website. Day said he decided to support the program because it promotes the city while helping him to advertise his festival to a wider audience.”

As more Pagans get formally involved in Salem’s tourist preparations, it seems like only a matter of time before the large and growing number of Pagan residents in the city help elect one of the first openly Pagan politicians. In a city where Witchcraft is big business, anything can happen.

The Boston Globe reviews the work of conceptual artist Cameron Jamie, during a retrospective show at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Arts critic Ken Johnson, who was once greatly skeptical of Jamie’s vision, now feels he understands the underlying message of his work.

“What you have to realize about all this is that none of it is to be taken at face value as traditional art. It only starts to make sense if you think of Jamie as a sort of amateur anthropologist-philosopher who studies the persistence of myth and ritual in modern society … From Jamie’s perspective, paganism in many different forms continually percolates just below the supposedly rational surface of modern society … If there is a lesson to be drawn from Jamie’s art, it would be that however rational and commonsensical we think we are, we are all subject to the power of archetypal images, irrational fantasies, and mythic narratives, often when we are least aware of it.”

One of Cameron’s works singled out in the article is his collaboration with Mike Kelley for a series of photos called “Gothic”. The photos document young people in the goth subculture, and according to Johnson, they show how ’shared fantasies create alternative worlds’. But then the links between “paganism” and the goth subculture (among others) no longer “percolate” beneath the surface, so much as they harmoniously co-exist alongside it. Our society’s “paganism” has been leaving the realms of the subconscious and entering the literal for decades now. Which if anything makes Jamie perceptive of a growing trend (one that several artists are picking up on) instead of a pioneer of our subconscious desires.

Johnson does bring up an interesting larger theory, that our shared pagan past has never left us, and was always waiting to come back to the surface. I agree with scholars who believe that polytheism is the natural state of human society, no matter how far we run from such a reality. It only stands to reason that artists would be sensitive to this impulse and desire to portray it in their works.