Trip or Treat: Happy Helloween!
APPENDIX A
Darkness preceded the light of Creation and night begins the day. Likewise the Jewish calendar begins in the Fall, although things were different before the Exile, when barley cakes were still offered to Astarte, the Queen of Heaven. James Ussher, the seventeenth century Archbishop of Armagh in the Church of Ireland, dated the Creation to October 22, 4004 BC. This late harvest period has always been celebrated throughout the northern hemisphere as a time of magic and ritual, when the souls of the deceased returned to us for one night and day, to eat and drink together and share the never-ending story that is life. Many of the customs are similar to earlier (in the year, that is) harvest celebrations and also share many elements with modern Christmas---this is all related to the symbolism of the harvest, fertility and marriage, averting death and disease and bringing prosperity in to the new year. The Celts in particular celebrated four annual fire festivals, each around the middle of the fixed signs (Aquarius, Taurus, Leo and in the case of Halloween or Samhain, Scorpio) in the second decan of the sign.
This is a time of the agricultural year symbolizing death, death of the earth's produce and death of the sun. We wear costumes and light fires to frighten off the spirits of death and disease, or hide from them, or at least make our peace with their world. Before the confusion of Christianity, long before science and capitalism set us on a linear track of desperate accumulation and never-ending consumption, the pagan farmer of Europe lived with the duality of nature: hot and cold, light and dark, life and death...she knew that life was a wheel that turned always, that she would one day lay down in the same hollow earth from which all things grow and bid a last farewell to the star-spotted heavens, but that those wailing babes who had survived the harshly bright emergence from her womb would continue this mystery in a world that could somehow still persist without our eyes present to believe in it.
On the other hand, in our modern technocratic city-state of Motley Cow, when death is more and more an economic, rather than spiritual and community affair, and the moment of passing is measured against a life's fulfillment of media-induced desires, rather than salvation and immortality, the Church is one of the few hallowed institutions still rooted in an understanding of the cyclical rhythm of life and death, even if as in Buddhism the final goal is to halt that cycle, to put a final stop to the grinding wheel of sex-death-rebirth and the consequent suffering it necessitates. As I have said, I was raised without religion; also without the community of a large extended family, as my parents had both come from different parts of the country, leaving home behind, not growing deep roots in the soil of one's birth. Marrying into a Catholic family has brought me in touch with family and community in a way I never knew. Sometimes the constant judgment and bickering of so many relations in a small space can be overwhelming to my more sensitive and pacifist nature, but having that communal gathering for marriage, death, and feasting really opened me to a new world.
At a recent Catholic funeral Mass the Mystery of the Sacrament and Eternal Life really made sense to me. The Original Sacrament, to wit, psilocybin mushrooms, and later the mysterious potion of barley (and rue in Palestine and Syria, mint at Athens) would allow one to access the Other World, i.e. to be in the Undying Lands beyond death without physically dying, although the experience feels incredibly dangerous, and perhaps is...there was at one time a human sacrifice on Samhain, as at other Celtic (or pre-Celtic) Fire Festivals...a cultic tradition that persists in the English custom of immolating Guy Fawkes in effigy, in memory of a political act that perfectly enacted the ancient myth which it superseded: the sacrifice of a male to ensure and prolong the reign of the King, decreed by Providence. Originally the King died himself, according to Graves originally at alternate year-ends of Midsummer and Midwinter, St John's Day and Christmas; but at least yearly...then, frightened at this terrifying prospect and powerless in the face of Death, yet possessing great power through cunning and physical coercion usurping the sacred rites known to the Holy Mother among the Priestesses of Dionysus, Lilith the pre-Babylonian Queen of the Israelites...the King cheated Death by offering another in his stead, his sons or viziers or captives of war, annually, to prolong his reign to four, and then eight years...in like manner our own Executive Branch is "peacefully" (as long as it's fair, that is...) transferred to a new representative ruler every four or eight years...the Red King vs. the Blue King (or Queen this year!) the Ass of Set vs. the Elephant...I digress; and yet, the crazy vibes in the air around Halloween are only amplified by the political anxiety and hatred and the global power plays designed to sway your vote if they don't end all human life first...I first took acid in high school on Halloween in 2000, watching replays of the televised debates between Gore and Bush, an election I was too young to vote in and which I actually did watch, before my constantly tripping eyes over the next two weeks, get STOLEN, and the world just let it happen, albeit with a lot of bellyaching from Gore...but as bad as Bush would be, and getting us into Iraq is still worse by far than anything Trump has done, I just saw through Gore's melting alien face on the TV screen: another phony dissolving into pre-pixelated tube-projected dots...
To be continued...(after next year's Harvest)
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
Be safe...
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