Not the Oscars

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I could blame this week’s Time magazine for declaring that one thing we don’t need to worry about is an end to the zombie craze, but in truth I really have no one to blame but myself. Having watched White Zombie a few weeks back, I decided to see Revolt of the Zombies, its sequel, this weekend. With holes in the plot large enough for a small planet to pass through, it leaves a great deal of creativity – and imagined continuity – up to the viewer. It’s a movie bad enough to make you want to slap the television in frustration, but it did bring a number of my standard (read “tired”) themes on this blog together.

In this confused romp through sci-fi horror, excused only leniently for having been filmed in 1936, the terms robot, zombie, and automaton are used interchangeably. This is one of the technically redeeming features of the film. The term “robot” was coined to indicate a mindless servant, and in their religious origins zombies shared exactly that function of the automaton. Today’s robots are machines, and the future of the Singularity (posted on a couple weeks back) revolves around this very point: machines will complete the degenerating biological frame. Somehow the zombies will save us.

The zombies of 1936 were surrounded by swaggering, stereotyped caricatures of the helpless female who has very little mind of her own (perhaps less than the zombies who actually do something to better their state). Racist images including a wizened Scot called MacDonald and subservient Asians make the film uncomfortable for present day viewers. One glimmer of intelligence in the film, however, comes from an awareness of the classics. After a rat’s nest of a plot that is essentially one man wanting another man’s girl, old MacDonald gives a commentary on the assassinated master of the zombies. He takes his line from Euripides’ play Medea – an original strong female that the Greeks so feared. “He whom the gods destroy, first they make mad.” Second, I would add, they make watch Revolt of the Zombies.

Devils and Mooncussers

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New Jersey is an easy state to caricature. Some of the most remarkable aspects, however, are those that seldom find their way into the popular media. An unseasonably warm spell led my family to a sudden awareness of cabin fever that sent us seeking diversion over the weekend. We ended up at Tuckerton Seaport. To get to the museum from our location meant a long drive through the pine barrens. This unique ecosystem is impressive for its size (over a million acres) as well as for its unique plant-life and relative lack of population. And, of course, the Jersey Devil.

A relatively harmless Jersey Devil

Even serious museums such as the Seaport can be expected to play up the heritage a bit. In a corner of the wildlife diorama is tucked a little sculpture of the Jersey Devil. The diabolical aspect comes only from the folklore of its birth as an accursed child. Far more dangerous were the human elements in the maritime history. Mooncussers were those who set out false lights for ships, hoping to lure them into the shore where the vessels would run aground, leading to easy plundering. The lighthouse has long been a religious symbol, a metaphor ready-made for illumination, safety, and solidity. This very reputation led the way for mooncussers to steal the signs of security to enhance personal gain.

The devil of personal gain unfortunately haunts more than the remote pine barrens of New Jersey. Those who use religion to attain that gain are the modern mooncussers who draw the unwary too near to the rocks and shoals. And mooncussers encourage others to participate in their sham, as long as there are gullible captains who are uncertain of the shore. The early church liked to compare itself to a ship. This image inspired many a nave ceiling to be designed as the hull of an upturned boat. Unfortunately, the hull often appears to have been capsized and the mooncussers appear in the role of diabolical captains set on wrecking the very vessel they command. Who needs a devil when human greed is far more than adequate to lead even the upright to opt for easy gain at others’ expense?

Terror Able

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Saturday afternoons were made for B movies. After a hectic week, nothing soothes like grainy picture quality and poor dialogue. This weekend offered a chance to view The Terror. This 1963 Roger Corman film won its bad marks the honest way – by earning them. Nevertheless with Jack Nicholson playing against Boris Karloff and a plot so convoluted that I had to draw a chart to figure out what I’d just watched, the movie lived up to its grade. Throw in Francis Ford Coppola as an associate producer and it’s party time. Corman’s legendary cheapness and fondness for disproportionate claims of scares that never materialize only add to the charm. After watching the opening sequence one gets the distinct impression that Franklin J. Schaffner had watched this film before setting up the climatic scene of Planet of the Apes.

In keeping with a recent trend on this blog, the plot involved a witch. An old woman from Poland resettles in France to avenge her murdered son. The crone casts a spell transforming a bird into a beautiful young woman. The first words of the spells sent me fumbling for the “rewind” button. “Tetragrammaton, tetragrammaton,” the old woman intones to begin her spell. In a movie fraught with dialogue problems, this might be considered simply a choice of foreign-sounding, mysterious syllables to be uttered for an audience not expected to know that tetragrammaton is the title of the sacred four-letter name of Yahweh. By this point the plot was so convoluted that making God the agent behind a pagan curse seemed almost natural.

The analog with the Bible soon became clear. The Bible holds its sway over many because of its often beautiful rhetoric. Sparing the time to study what the rhetoric might have meant in its original context is an exercise few believers can afford to undertake. Our world has become so full of things that taking time to explore the implications of one’s religion must compete with ever increasing Internet options, thousands of channels of television, and plain, old-fashioned figuring out how to get along. Religion is a luxury item and, as experience tells us, it is best not to look too closely at luxuries – their flaws too readily appear upon detailed inspection. Allowing religion its exotic sounding mumbo-jumbo preserves its mystery and power. And if a witch says a theologically freighted word we can just chalk it up to entertainment. We are too busy to examine what our religions really say. Roger Corman may have unintentionally discovered a real terror in a movie that will keep no one awake at night.

Witch World

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Little did I realize when I posted an entry on witches two days ago that the news this week would itself become bewitched. Tuesday’s New Jersey Star Ledger contained a piece entitled “Catholics publish guide to witches and wizards.” Then the next day a former student posted a link to CBC News article headlined “Witches to face prison for false predictions.” Last week the Jehovah’s Witnesses left an issue of Awake! at my door that reveals “The Truth About the Occult.” Coincidence or black magic? Are we really in the twenty-first century? If only employment had the same staying power as superstition there would be no jobless rate to complain about!

The Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales is concerned about all the interest Harry Potter is generating. Afraid that tweens and teens might tiptoe into the dark side, the Catholic Truth Society has produced a booklet called “Wicca and Witchcraft: Understanding the Dangers.” The booklet, written by a former Wiccan, is a strange answer to J. K. Rowling given that Potter and friends are not members of the Wiccan faith. They are simply fictional witches that haven’t been grounded by the constraints of the Enlightenment. Fantasy grants them their magical powers, not the Devil. In Romania, meanwhile, witches beset by income tax laws are now facing hard time if their predictions don’t pan out. New laws in the economically depressed nation would require witching permits to be obtained and receipts to be given to customers. This is not to sweep out paganism, but to gain some lucre from it. The Jehovah’s Witnesses are just concerned that occult practices, often seen as mere entertainment, might lead the younger generation down the road to sex and violence.

I was disabused of belief in witches before I failed out of kindergarten the first time. Teaching religion and mythology classes at two major universities, I see students from many different backgrounds trying to improve their minds. But once the sun goes down a backlash against the empirical method is nightly unleashed. I’m not sure whether to pick up my Kant and Descartes or my mugwort and rosemary. Religion breeds these darker manipulators of magic, a force against which many fear God has no recourse. So in our world of high tech gadgets and space stations and cyclotrons, we still have to worry about witches. Theirs is a metaphor yet to be fully appreciated.

Weird sisters or strange attractors?

Two Ghosts

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To escape the harsh realities of a fractured career, I turn to celluloid. Lest Hollywood distract me too much, I strictly limit my movie viewing to weekends when I can let down, for a few moments, my constant anxiety. Since my religious antennae are always prickling, I notice implications sometimes in unexpected places. So this weekend’s fare included two ghost stories. Both of them utilize religion to resolve the haunting, but in very different ways. An American Haunting purports to be based on real events involving the putative “Bell witch” of Tennessee. The movie takes many liberties with this scant folktale, including a church condemning a seemingly upstanding member and a Bible being dismembered as the angry spirit attacks the Bell family. In the end, the plot is confused by a revelation of family abuse and the viewer wonders who it is that tears apart Bibles.

The second part of my double-feature was The Screaming Skull, a 1958 horror film that fails to raise a single follicle in fear. Nevertheless, the moody movie does provide the Dies Irae for Stanley Kubrick’s opening theme of The Shining as well as a sense of isolation that would also inform the latter exemplar. The religious element comes in the form of a priest who is a close friend to a clandestine murderer. With the help of a ghostly screaming skull, the priest is the one who eventually solves the murder and rescues the intended victim of our erstwhile protagonist.

Nearly half a century separate these two ghost stories, and the role of religion in them has reversed. In the 1950s the clergy were society’s protectors. Even though Rev. Snow is the only main character who does not actually see the ghost, he is a safe haven for the victims of evil. Fifty years later, it is the church that sets up the haunting of the Bell family by its unyielding laws. The family quotes the Bible at the spirit and the ghost tears the Bible apart. There is no sanctuary here. Films, no doubt, reflect social attitudes. When the foundations have lost their hold, confusion results. Who is to blame for the suffering of Betsy Bell? The movie leaves that up to the viewer. There is no solid Rev. Snow to whiten the sins of this world. Only ghosts remain.

New Age Present

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Okay, so I admit I’m curious. As my “six month” subscription to TAPS Paramagazine continues into its second year, itself somewhat paranormal, I get the feeling that I’m witnessing the birth of a new religion. I’ve been in this business long enough to know that new religions are hardly rare, but this one seems an accidental entry into the field. Now ghosts and religion are natural enough as corollaries. Both involve afterlife concerns and the unknown. Having watched TAPS Paramagazine feature fairies, tarot cards, and zombies, however, I wonder if the distinctions are becoming blurred. In this latest issue (January/February) many of the articles make explicit mention of God. God and ghost in the same breath, with the exception of a particularly holy spirit, is an odd combination, given the biblical injunction against mediums.

Spiritualism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was descried by famous debunkers such as Harry Houdini and accepted by famous intellectuals like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It is that liminal area that stays out of the reach of traditional Christianity and Judaism, but strays into the afterlife-prepared psyche. If the dead are out there, they should be able to communicate. Right? And with God’s full approval, so it seems. This latest issue alone suggests that UFOs may be demonic, that clergy may be legitimately interested in ghosts, God may speak through dead children, and that one may become addicted to paranormal investigation. Sounds like a recipe for a New Age mythology. Throwing in light-hearted contributions about the Walking Dead, and suddenly zombies become real as well. Oh, and skunks have a special wisdom.

Traditional Christianity cautions against all of these things (except skunks). When it comes to the supernatural, it claims, there is only one super, supernatural being. The rest are charlatans and wannabes. The Bible certainly does not encourage consorting with ghosts, and yet, in this New Age milieu it is possible to find any remotely spiritual entity touted as proof of reality beyond reality. As Bader, Mencken, and Bader observe in Paranormal America, citizens of this country are inclined to believe. Where does belief lead when there is no pole-star to guide the ship? I sense that we may be steering into uncharted waters. Anyone want to volunteer to be captain? Religions always get to make up their own rules, so feel free to devise your own compass.

Black and White Zombies

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One of the sweetest privileges of a school-year weekend is the Saturday afternoon movie. The advent of relatively cheap, boxed sets of old films has opened the realm of many forgotten classics for me. My wife recently purchased one of those 50-movie boxes of classic horror films for me, and I’ve been making my way through it weekend-by-weekend, and occasionally there is a gem among the tailings. Yesterday I saw White Zombie for the first time. Back in the days when Bela Lugosi claimed a faithful following after his trend-setting interpretation of Dracula, he played a voodoo doctor with the power over zombies in this widely panned movie. In these days of the Walking Dead, it may be hard to appreciate that White Zombie was the first full-length film about our undead friends.

With the exception of the always professional Lugosi, the acting in the film received a well-deserved trouncing. Interestingly, the “van Helsing” of the drama, the doctor who overcame the monster, was a missionary. White Zombie is authentically set in Haiti, and it is never made clear whether the undead are really deceased or simply mindless. But the goofy, pipe-smoking missionary is the one who defeats evil at the end of the day. As noted elsewhere on this blog, monsters frequently emerge from the dark realms of religion, and the zombie especially so. Today, however, the zombie is all the scarier for being secular, unaffected by God or human deterrent. Originally it was a case of voodoo versus Christianity.

In what is perhaps an unintentional irony, the character who comes across the most sympathetically in the film, apart from the fetchingly pouting Madge Bellamy, is Murder Legendre (Lugosi). The missionary wins out by dim-witted happenstance, while the character responsible for the actual death of the zombie master is a partially aware zombie fighting against his fate. It may be assigning far too much credit to assert that the film had intentional social commentary, but White Zombie has had an often unrecognized impact on what has today become the symbol of corporate America: the once humble zombie.

A typical zombie

Which Witch?

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Witches have been flying all over the Internet the last few days. A story from AP Online, picked up by several websites, reports that witches in Romania are planning to cast spells on the government. Now, I have to admit to having been tempted to cast a few spells myself during the Bush years, but since I don’t believe in magic the desire simply fizzled. These witches, however, are serious. Cat excrement in hand, the carcass of a dog nearby, these witches are outraged. Perhaps even more surprising is that some government officials are taking it seriously too, according to the article. The reason for the hexes? Romania has just started charging witches income tax.

Romania is a nation that evokes the darkness of primal forests haunted by werewolves and terrorized by vampires. The one-time domicile of Vlad the Impaler, the region has retained this mystique into the twenty-first century while elsewhere rovers roll around the surface of Mars and instantaneous world-wide communications are available at the press of a button. I am nevertheless encouraged by this display of activism. These supernatural citizens are challenging what they perceive to be unfair government practices. Statesmen wear purple on auspicious days to mitigate the effects of enchanters who are in touch with the financial struggles of the vast majority of religious specialists. Most of us just sit back and take it.

Meanwhile, as thousands of blackbirds fall from the sky, members of our own government are posturing to take back the modest health care improvements President Obama has helped to institute. Emotional Republicans are getting ready to strike back at programs designed to help those less fortunate than they are (apparently so they’ll have someone to pray for at grace over meals). “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father” (Mt 10.29). Never mind casting spells, the government will always find ways of making life less comfortable for those they see as threats. Which witch would you choose? I’d select the one with a moral compass, even if she has cat excrement in her hand.

Frankenstein’s Monster

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“We are about to unfold the story of Frankenstein, a man of science who sought to create a man after his own image without reckoning upon God. It is one of the strangest tales ever told. It deals with the two great mysteries of creation – life and death.” So begins Universal’s 1931 classic Frankenstein (a movie that my wife kindly indulged me with for Christmas). Watching the film as an adult highlights many nuances unnoticed by even many a childhood viewing. The theatrical introduction of creating a man “without reckoning upon God” was heady stuff in the pre-atomic world. It was a simpler time before men had embraced god-like power (I use “men” intentionally here; even the credits for the movie ironically cite the noted feminist author as “Mrs. Percy B. Shelley”), and audiences were indeed shocked in theatres just 80 years ago.

The now tame movie was originally subjected to heavy censorship. Even the liberal states of Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania censored the line where Dr. Frankenstein cries out, “Now I know what it feels like to be God!” A divine thunderclap was dubbed over the words to obliterate the blasphemous line. In Kansas (perhaps not surprisingly, given recent political developments) 32 scenes were cut, paring the movie down to half of its original 70 minutes. I suppose all that would have been left would have been the scenes of dancing Germans; the Lederhosen would have been frightening enough. The accidental drowning scene was overwhelming for many sensibilities in a pre-concentration-camp footage world.

I read Mary Wollstonecraft’s novel long before I ever saw the movie, and I was struck at how sad the story was. Of all the classic monsters, Frankenstein’s creation easily garners the most sympathy. A creature that did not seek to be brought to life, forced into destitute and desperate circumstances by a population who could not, or would not try to understand, Frankenstein’s monster retains the potential to be any one of us. Although audiences today rarely blanch at blasphemous words, we still permit a society that creates Frankenstein’s monsters through crafty politics and tax breaks. Perhaps when taking authority public officials should add a line from the movie to their oaths of office, only it could be demurely obscured by a well-timed thunderclap.

Didymus Haunting

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Now that winter is nearly here, the season of reading the autumn books is nearing its end. Each year, in my scant free-time, I seek the perfect book to capture the essence of the dying of the trees, the chill in the air, and the growing length of night. Autumn generates an emotion that is difficult to replicate or even describe. Many people respond by watching spooky movies and those of us old enough to appreciate printed literature turn toward moody books. One of my choices this year was Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry. At the constant urging of one of my former Gorgias Press colleagues, I’d read Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife this summer. It was well crafted and left me with enough sadness to want to see if this New York Times bestseller might capture the feeling of the season. I was drawn into the book by reviews that mentioned it centered on Highgate Cemetery in London, the scene of a real-life vampire fracas back in the 1970s.

No vampires graced this novel, but ghosts abound. Often Niffenegger’s characters are either wealthy or have managed to obtain fulfilling jobs, features that make them inaccessible to me. Nevertheless, she is able to draw in the supernatural in a way that makes it seem normal and believable. By tingeing her novels with romance she is able to tap into an inexplicably huge readership, but her story development is intriguing even to those who read books with a paranormal slant. It took me a couple hundred pages to really feel much sympathy for many of the characters, but the ghosts eventually take over the story and it becomes very creepy indeed.

For those who’ve ever wondered about the secret lives of twins, Her Fearful Symmetry will provide hours of fascination. The title may be drawn from Blake, but the story is older than Esau and Jacob. The struggle of twins ranges far back in literature and raises questions of what a soul might actually be. Is it possible to share one? What happens when one twin predeceases another? What is the nature of individual identity? Even the Gospels take pains to inform us that Thomas is a twin. I finished the story last night feeling a twinge of autumn, but still hungry. Perhaps it is good that I completed this bedtime reading just in time to get ready for the more Dickensian ghosts of Christmas.

Where Are the Wolves?

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Spend a leisurely hour at your local commercial bookstore and you won’t be able to avoid seeing vampires. Just yesterday I noticed that a neighborhood bookstore had an entire section entitled “Teen Paranormal.” Zombies also continue to grow in popularity, now having their own line of undead Christmas products. And where is the humble werewolf? Not gone, just lurking in the shadows.

This weekend I finished the third werewolf book by my one-time co-Wisconsinist, Linda S. Godfrey. (She’s still there, but I’m not.) Lest any of my readers think I am casually lumping her work together with the fictional fantasy monsters, I must declare up front that The Michigan Dogman is not a work of fiction. Linda is a careful researcher, a former journalist, and a woman who possesses something many researchers lose over the years: an open mind. The problem with occasional phenomena is that they are almost impossible to test in any empirical kind of way. Since even before the Beast of Bray Road story broke in 1992 occasional reports of bipedal canines had stumbled into the news once in a while, causing headline-happy journalists to push the werewolf button. Underneath the current monster hype, however, is an intriguing question of origins.

Where do all these similar stories originate? While not even close to the number of reported Bigfoot sightings, the dogman/manwolf sightings that Linda has pulled together are impressive for their overall uniformity. Witnesses who’d never heard of the creature repeatedly report fine details that mesh with accounts of individuals otherwise unconnected. The standard answers of hoaxes and misidentifications just don’t cover the three volumes worth of material she had compiled. Few would stand by the assertion that these are shapeshifting humans, but for those with an open mind the werewolf trilogy gives pause (paws?).

The universe is large beyond human comprehension. Simply because we’ve evolved very complex brains doesn’t mean we’ve found all the answers. I’ve never seen a werewolf or any other popular cryptid. But having studied the strange world of religion all my life, I know better than to declare, ex cathedra, that very strange things cannot exist.

Hunting Vampires

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The Mercer Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania is a treasure trove of Americana from the turn of the last century. Henry Chapman Mercer, in addition to being wealthy, had the foresight to realize that society was rapidly changing, even back then. He undertook the collection of everyday artifacts from many human industries, poured himself another castle-like concrete building, and housed the baubles there. It is a fascinating walk through nineteenth-century America. And if you visit on a cold day it feels as well as looks like Currier and Ives have just passed through. My main draw, however, was a vampire hunting kit.

If only I had a polaroid lens...

Prominently displayed, the kit includes a Victorian Protestant’s tool chest for any blood-sucking eventuality. A cross (sans corpus), a pistol with “silver” bullets, glass vials with various apotropaic ingredients, even a little stake, all in custom-cut green velvet. Unfortunately, the kit is believed to be a forgery, although the items in it are from the Victorian era. The silver bullets are, for example, pewter. As the placard notes, vampires do not exist, but that doesn’t mean people didn’t believe they might have existed. The museum, naturally enough, hoped that the Victorian era kit might be authentic. Scientific analysis has revealed otherwise despite the fact that many people continue to believe in something that has no basis in reality.

Belief constitutes reality. Otherwise, how could it be that thousands, if not millions, of people don’t accept the fact of global warming? Brash barons of unhindered industrial progress insist that humans can’t harm the planet – it’s just too big. We can suck out all the resources that billions of years have deposited in intricate recesses and that nature has sprouted right on the surface. For, they say, God has given them to us. They believe that. If we held a mirror up to them, what would we see? Maybe we would be forced to change our minds and go after that vampire-hunting kit after all.

Holy Horror

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Back in October, in the spirit of the season, I attended a local lecture by a ghost hunter at a nearby public library. This sincere young man struck me as perfectly normal, but haunted by his ghostly encounters. During the question session someone asked about TAPS (The Atlantic Paranormal Society, of “Ghost Hunters” fame). The lecturer indicated that TAPS is not above fabricating evidence for ratings, a disappointing but not unexpected factor when it comes to television. He even gave some evidence to back his assertions. Nevertheless, my wife’s whimsical six-month subscription to the TAPS Paramagazine has continued on well past its expiration date, and when the November/December issue arrived, I was interested to see a piece entitled “Sacramental Horror: What scary stories can tell us about what is real.” Well, this was too good to pass up.

The article, written by Presbyterian minister Jonathan Weyer, discusses the value of horror films. The juxtaposition of a clergyman and horror films is a little unexpected, but believable. After all, many horror films feature religious ideals clothed in monstrous form. Dividing horror films into Uncanny/Unsettling horror, gross-out horror, and torture porn, Weyer goes on to explain how uncanny or unsettling horror underscores the moral order of the universe and is therefore appropriate for Christian contemplation. He even draws the Nicene Creed into it. Gross-out horror serves the function of making the viewer contemplate death and perhaps even helps to make fun of it. This is a less noble, but still acceptable Christian enterprise. Torture porn, on the other hand, simply has no redeeming value. Sacramental horror really didn’t enter the discussion. Douglas Cowan’s Sacred Terror takes this issue on more directly.

I really don’t expect much insight from a fanzine that treats the reality of fairies and the prognostications of tarot cards next to the genuinely mysterious, such as ghosts. Finding morality in horror films is often a matter of eisegesis. The fear in such films often emerges from the sacred, either in pure or distorted form. Even if “the pure of heart or, often the virgin” survives while “Wrongdoers get put to the axe,” as Weyer states, seldom is that the intended point of the movie. John Carpenter denies that there was a moralizing message in his Halloween, often cited as the movie that established the “good girl survives” motif. The fact is that horror relates to the sacred in the element of fear. If people were not afraid, there would be little for religion or horror movies to accomplish.

All You Zombies

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Not being a cable subscriber bears a burden all its own. Not only would paying the extra monthly fees for television prove a hardship, but the constant temptation to watch it would rate as a deadly sin. So on this “All Saints Day” I find myself wondering if the world is still out there after last night’s much-touted “The Walking Dead” premiere. The new AMC series has been written up in local papers and this week’s Time magazine. The latter calls it “a zombie apocalypse.” The fascination with zombie goes beyond holiday-fueled monsters. As James Poniewozik states in his Time article, zombies symbolize society’s insecurities: pandemics, terrorism, economic instability. The unrelenting undead remind us that death is perhaps not the worst thing to fear.

The religious side of this trend is fascinating. Revenants have no place in traditional Christian, Jewish, or Muslim theologies. Perhaps the closest semi-sanctioned version is the golem, a soulless protector of persecuted medieval Jewish communities. Traditional zombies are inextricably connected with magic, a means of manipulating the physical world through supernatural means. Like modern vampires, modern zombies have shifted from supernatural to biological, or at least scientific-sounding, explanations. Even Night of the Living Dead had an errant satellite to blame. The zombie has been reborn in a secular context, making it safe for religious believers to add it to their repertoire of fictional ghouls. And yet, the religious aspect has not completely vanished. The “apocalypse” that accompanies “The Walking Dead,” whether it is Armageddon, 2012, or Ragnarok, is a religious concept. Humans simply can’t face the end of the world without religious implications.

Audiences feeling a little let down after October’s terminal scare-fest, however, might find some cheer that Halloween is an end, but also a beginning. It is the start of the darkest time of year. Very soon not only do we drive home in the dark, but light will not have dawned by the time we start the car for work. In northern reaches of the globe, people can’t help but feel a little stress at finding our accustomed visual assessment of our world a little bit impaired for months at a time. And when we see that shoddy-clothed stranger straggling along in the half-dark, it may be time to remind ourselves that despite the naturalized zombie, there are still those who prey on their fellow humans. They may not be the undead. They may dress well and drive expensive cars and live off what they can legally draw from that stranger on the street. They may be the true harbingers of the apocalypse. They are the ones we should really fear.
Whose apocalypse?

Origin of Halloween

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Perhaps the most misunderstood of holidays, Halloween has grown into a major commercial holiday. Outsold only by Christmas in the United States, Halloween now supports its own seasonal stores that cash in on the massive public interest. A few years ago a wrote a book explaining the holidays for teens/tweens. The book was never published, and I’ve been putting excerpts on this blog on appropriate occasions. For the full story of Halloween, please check out the Full Essays page (link above).

Accusations of a demonic origin may fit in with the popular creatures of the holiday, but they are far from the truth of the matter. A cross-quarter day, Halloween comes in the opposite side of the year from May Day (remember Walpurgis Night) when spirits make their way back into the mortal world. It represents the passing of fall into winter and the shades of death that accompany it. How much more religious can you get?

From ancient times people have been aware of how weak our control over our lives really is. We depend on the sun and the weather to cooperate for our crops. We fear the darkness when our eyes can’t compete with those of our predators. As the year descends into longer and longer nights, we secretly fear that eventually night will not end. The dark time of the year belonged to the spirits.

Just as all ancient people celebrated the vernal equinox (if you missed it, check out the Passover-Easter Complex for more), they marked the autumnal equinox with festivals. Although Halloween is six weeks after the equinox, it seems to have inherited some of the ancient associations of that season. One of the ancient feasts of the equinox was for Pomona, the Roman goddess associated with fruits and seeds. There is more of Thanksgiving than Halloween in this festival, however.

Halloween, as we have come to know it, is usually traced to the same people who gave us St. Patrick’s Day – the Celts. The Irish calendar was divided into four quarters, marked between the solstices and equinoxes by the cross-quarter days. The fall cross-quarter day was Samhain (in case you don’t speak Gaelic, this is pronounced “sow-win”). Samhain can be understood as “summer’s end” and it was the traditional marking of the onset of winter; it actually comes just a month before meteorological winter.

The Celts, as well as other ancient peoples, believed that spirits of the dead were active as the trees lost their leaves, the grass began to dry and, and the world itself seemed to be dying. Huge bonfires were lit to ward off evil spirits, and perhaps bloody sacrifices were made to ensure the safety of the living.

No matter what modern Halloween critics may say, the Celts did not worship Satan and the origins of the holiday are not satanic. Pagan, maybe, but who isn’t somebody else’s pagan? The idea was to fend off evil, not worship it. The shamans, or “medicine men” of the Celts were a class of priests called Druids. Samhain would have been one of the festivals overseen by the Druids. These guys were priests of a religion that focused on nature, not the Devil. They did play a little rough though. They seem to have practiced human sacrifice once in a while, but Samhain was more often about killing off livestock before the winter. Either you can keep your animals alive and they will eat the little food you have, or you can butcher them and add to the little food you have. After all, not much grows in winter.

[See Full Essays for the rest]