First Healthy Habits Day held at Dixon Rec Center
The first annual Healthy Habits Day is here. Come explore what health means to you and the community. Different information about all types of health: mental, physical, emotional, environmental and more will be provided by the OSU campus and the surrounding Corvallis area. The event takes place May 16, and is hosted by Dixon Recreational Center and OSU Community Service Center. Entrance to Healthy Habits Day is free from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. It takes place at the Dixon Recreation Center.

Talk on brain and arousal featured in zoology talk
Dr. Donald Pfaff from Rockefeller University will be coming to give a talk as part of the Zoology Department Seminar Series on May 18 at 3:30 p.m. in ALS 4001. His talk is titled “Waking up the brain: Generalized and specific CNS arousal”.
Pfaff has been a leader for several decades in research exploring how the mammalian brain receives and processes hormonal signals to construct both simple and complex behaviors.

20th century history of oceanography explored at conference
A conference at OSU on May 14-15 will focus on the emergence of oceanography in the mid-20th century as a critically important science. The event coincides with the 50th anniversary of oceanography at OSU.
Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science known for her role in demonstrating scientific consensus on climate change, will give the keynote address, “The Crucial Experiment that Wasn’t: Acoustic Tomography of Ocean Climate,” 4 p.m. May 14, in the Memorial Union Journey Room. The conference is free and open to the public.
The conference, “American Oceanography at Mid-Century,” will examine how oceanography emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as an important discipline. Speakers from several institutions around the country and abroad will present sessions on May 15
Craig Biegel, a scientist from Florida State University, will open the May 15 session with a presentation titled “A Visionary at Work – Wayne V. Burt, the Early Years at Oregon State University,” in which he describes the origins of oceanography at OSU and one of the pioneers who helped establish the nationally recognized program at the university.
The conference is sponsored by the Horning Endowment in the Humanities and the OSU Department of History, and supported by the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. The conference schedule is available online at: http://oregonstate.edu/cla/history/lectures/horning/conf_08_09.php

Witches on broomsticks were a late arrival to Halloween lore.

No “eye of newt and toe of frog” for Anita Guerrini’s gurgling caldron this Halloween. With an apology to witch 2 in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, try pagans, Irish Catholic immigrants, and the chance to visit with your deceased relatives instead.

Guerrini, the Horning endowed chair in history, shared her recipe for Friday’s festive and frightful holiday Thursday at the TRIAD Club’s luncheon.

Despite the “spooky stuff” and associations with witchcraft that have become a large part of Halloween in the past half-century, the late-autumn holiday originated “as a way to remember and honor the dead,” said Guerrini,  the newly arrived professor of science and medicine history .

In pagan Ireland centuries ago, as the abrupt transition to winter descended upon communities, people extinguished their home fires and came to the sacred flames kept by their Druid priests. In that northern latitude, with the darkness, cold and dampness of the season intensifying as October drew to a close, the priests relit the bonfires as a ritual passing from the season of life and light to a time of darkness when nothing grew.

In those near-lifeless setting, families and their Druid priests believed the spirits of the dead could pass through the thin veil that divides life and death, giving the survivors the opportunity to see and honor them again.

“You have to remember,” Guerrini said, “death happened frequently in communities in those times.” It would not have been uncommon for several members of a family to have died during any one year, she said.

In those years before the 8th century, the family custom was to leave food on the hearth for the spirits who returned while the family slept. “They were not afraid to acknowledge them,” Guerrini said.

Anita Guerrini, the holder of the Horning endowed chair in History, has unearthed a brief history of Halloween for the TRIAD Faculty Club. (photo: Ed Curtin)

After Christianity secured its footing in Ireland in the 700s, some 300 years after St. Patrick, the Church created All Saints Day on Nov. 1 and All Souls Day on Nov. 2. Saints were referred to as hallowed, hence the evening before became All Hallows Eve and later Halloween.

The Druid festival and Christian holy days kept low profiles until the 19th century when Irish Catholic immigrants arrived in the United States, Guerrini said. Until then, Protestants, especially Calvinists and Puritans who set the tone for life in the colonies, eschewed celebrations, tended to distained the idea of miracles such as the return of the dead, and did not recognize saints. Halloween remained a parochial event, she said.

Even witchcraft, debatably the surviving remnants of an ancient religion, had little to do with Halloween, Guerrini said. And the persecution of witched through the 17th century was more of a community responding to those seen as outsiders.

Since the mid-1800s, Halloween has been associated with jack-o-lanterns, bobbing for apples, trick-or-treating, adult costume parties before World War II, haunted houses, and, of course, candy, Guerrini said.

~ by Ed Curtin