Halloween

Alberti, Sandro; 31 October, 1998 [text40]

During a large interval of time, the Celts and their druids celebrated Halloween by protecting their reality from death. At the time, in an oral tradition, the great reality was the present, represented by the living culture. The possibility of death returned with every time-cycle (the seasons) to test the reality of the living culture (non-living culture= in Museum of Art and Technology. the form of skeletons and spirits).

Museum of Art and Technology.

The underlying focus was on the evening of October 31st, since it is the evening which designates an ambiguous point in-between day and night (thus the celebration is marked with the denotation of ambiguous potential; the bifurcation point where things may flow in any direction).

Primitive.

For a similar, yet later, time-span, about 2000 years AD, the Christians and their priests celebrated Halloween by protecting their reality from death. At the time, in a written tradition, the great reality encompassed the present and the past, represented both by the living and the dead culture. The possibility of death returned with every time-cycle (the year) to test the reality of the culture (non-culture= in the form of other cultures). The underlying focus was on the night of October 31st, since it is night which designates the end of that day, and points to the morning of the next (thus, a night-morning continuum is assigned which unifies Halloween with All Saints’ Day).

Banal-postmodern: at home.

** The Celts did not believe in demons or devils, but in Pu’ka (fairies), who were resentful of men taking over their land. Faeries were those angels who did not side with either God or Lucifer. The dead lived with them in Sidhe (countryside mounds).

** During the Middle Ages it was believed that witches could turn themselves into black cats. Thus when such a cat was seen, it was considered to be a witch in disguise.

** Ducking for apples was a Celtic marriage divination. The first person to bite an apple would be the first to marry in the coming year.

** Apple peeling was a Celtic divination to see how long your life would be. The longer the unbroken apple peel, the longer your life was destined to be.

** Celts would place stones in the ashes of the hearth before retiring for the night. Anyone whose stone had been disturbed (broken) during the night was said to be destined to die during the coming year.

** Frightened Celts tried to appease wandering spirits by offering them gifts of fruit and nuts.

** Wearing masks and other disguises and blackening the face with soot, the Celts attempted to hide themselves from the spirits of the dead who might be roaming around, and blending in unnoticed among them.

** In the Middle Ages, beggars would go from village to village begging for soul cakes made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. At the time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for a time after death, and that prayer, even by strangers could guarantee a soul’s passage to heaven.

** In many parts of Britain and Ireland this night used to be known as Mischief Night, which meant that people were free to go around the village playing pranks and getting up to any kind of mischief without fear of being punished.

** In the 7th century, Pope Boniface IV introduced All Saints’ Day, on May 13. In 834, Gregory III moved All Saint’s Day from May 13 to Nov. 1

** Nuts have been used for divination: whether they burned quietly or exploded indicated good or bad luck.

** One way of looking for omens of death was for peope to visit churchyards, because the spirits of those who were going to die during the coming year were thought to walk around the churchyard during this night.

** Originally the Irish would carve out turnips or beets as lanterns as representations of the souls of the dead or goblins freed from the dead. When the Irish emigrated to America they could not find many turnips to carve into Jack O’Lanterns but they did find an abundance of pumpkins.

** Pumpkins were cut with faces representing demons and was originally intended to frighten away evil spirits. It was said that if a demon or such were to encounter something as fiendish looking as themselves that they’d run away in terror.

** Bats, owls and other nocturnal animals, also popular symbols of Halloween, were originally feared because people believed that these creatures could communicate with the spirits of the dead.

Since the beginning of time, the various cultures have come into co-existence. Individuals now form part of any culture and beliefs are valid only for their specific space-time. The Postmodern now celebrate Halloween-Samhain-All Saint’s-Feralia-Wicca-etc. Simultaneously, forever a part of the present-future. Rituals are no longer of specific importance, beyond time. Space and time do not hold meaning; they simply reflect it. Meaning exists beyond decay. Monads continue their representation in the realm of reality, although Fluxion continues to alter their signifiers (Gottfried Leibniz Monadologie; Gilles Deleuze Le Pli). The fact that instructors in Latin America (and the world) focus on NorthAmerican aspects of Halloween is not appropriate, as it furthers the association of globalization with Americanization, limiting the potential available to recipients of the process.

The following point has been made by John S. Couch, writer for Wired Magazine:

“Corporate pop culture is anything but a unilateral emanation. (Americans) export Mickey Mouse and import Hello Kitty; (they) swap Nikes for Tamagotchis. Even the archetypally American McDonald’s hamburger takes on subtle new flavors overseas: a “Bigu Maku” in Tokyo’s Roppongi district, for instance, is topped with shredded cabbage”.

Although the Postmodern Halloween exists as a continuum, rather than any specific instance of a previous ritual, it is true that the tendency is toward the Celtic rather than the Christian. This is probably due to the fact that the underlying focus of the Celtic is based on an in-between, rather than a specific extreme. Thus, in the Celtic representation of the Halloween ritual, night is not better than day (both have potential of representation). This is simply a world-view which many people find preferable to one where specific preferences lead to constant attempts at domination (where white is better than black, Christian better than Muslim, United States better than any-other-country). Major and Minor, Prime and Other. Do we need this? And the Celtic, in its primitive vision, also avoids the expression of history as a time-line. The specific Halloween evening exists in its own space-time, between day in some space and night in some other space. It is not the Christian Halloween night which continues straight into the All Saint’s morning and, later, into Christmas and the end of the Millenium and etc., while avoiding what may exist beyond this line. The Celtic appropriation of the ever-present, beyond a historical specificity, is a necessary part of the Postmodern world-view, where problems must be resolved in-situ-tempora. The Postmodern does not require the Christian hypothesis of a special divine creation to escape the ghosts of the ‘I’.

“In fact, civilization and aducation have managed to establish controls which are accepted voluntarily by the majority of human beings, without the need for legendary fantasies, or threats of eternal damnation. It is in the relationship with the other members of our society that moral and ethical norms are derived, allowing us to lead a more or less safe and pleasant life, without great risk of being attacked spontaneously by our peers”.

[Mario Mendez Acosta, IPN, November-December 1997]

The Postmodern, like the Christian and the Celtic before it, has an avant-garde representation, closer-to-the-Prime, as well as Simulacra and Minors which aid in its development. The Digital Citizenship, New Age, Techno, Complexity, Neo-goth and others, all participate in the representation of the Postmodern. Specific strengths and weaknesses of each of these segments contribute to the whole, but do not necessarily represent it.

Digital Citizenship

(Wired Magazine and Merrill Lynch Forum; December 1997)

Its members are representative of the new political sensibilities. They are connected (using either a beeper, cell phone, laptop, or home computer). The more connected they are, the more confidence they have in democracy, free markets, the future, and diversity. On the whole, they are much more likely to identify public figures and events than their unconnected counterparts. Also, they understand the powerful effect of non-political figures such as Bill Gates (church or state are no longer of specific importance). They believe in their ability to control change and feel they should be allowed more decision-control. They oppose extra-spacetime symbols, such as marijuana= bad (where, in contemporary space-time, marijuana= medical aid). They feel a need to reform education (and, thus, world-view as it has operated until now). They believe who-you-know is better than what-you-know (Attention Economy). Yet, they still fear change-Fluxion (for example, they would prefer to hold one job for 20 years, over four 5-year jobs).

New Age

It focuses on nature, as a source of creative inspiration (nature has been the Other of religion since the 18th century, when it replaced creative force in the arts; back then, in the invention of a new aesthetic of nature, the sublime was removed from the realm of saints, virgins, heavens, and purgatories; recall the 19th-century shrines, raised to nature, by Goethe and Caspar David Friedrich).

“Goethe attempted to write thrice about Prometheus. Goethe thought of Prometheus as a kind of man, and at times as a kind of titan. And the third time he attempts to depict him is in the case of Pandora (Return to Pandora), which is when Goethe already begins to feel old and thinks that, although in the beginning there was action, nevertheless the poet has much to say, and so he gives more worth to the poet”.

[Carlos Garcia Gual, Universidad Complutense- Madrid (Greek Philosophy)]

However, New Age is an unfortunate continuation of gnosticism. Whereas rationalism, followed by the mechanical-scientific tasks of denotation and labeling, has led to a contemporary understanding of time-space-energy as a continuum, New Age insists in the anthropomorphism of these energies. Its divinization of nature avoids complexity. It seeks metaphors.

It is no different in its stance from any orthodox religion. It is simply based on different Text. It is an alternative religion, which, in the sense of the Postmodern, explores alternatives in an orthopraxic manner. Oddly enough, although opposed to Christianity (in its tendencies to the pagan and natural), it is likely to arise with force within the Christian sphere of influence. This is the case in Mexico, for example, where the original pagan beliefs were never eliminated, but blended with the dominating Christianity. The Church’s choice to step back into the realm of images, in order to diffuse its message post-1550, allowed it powerful and unprecedented access into the indigenous mind. Images of saints and the Virgin Mary multiplied throughout the country, in many cases actively displacing local deities. The case of the Virgin of Guadalupe (matron saint of the country) is representative:

“A native painter is hired by the Church to represent the Virgin Mary. The image is then placed, in relative secret, within an ancient temple at the Hill of Tepeyac (raised for the worship of Toci, the Mother Goddess). The mysterious appearance of the image allows it to enter the realm of the divine. The natives and the local Spaniards begin to worship it. The Church allows it to enter the cultural realm, but does not actively accept it until 100 years later, when it is defined in text. It is then that Miguel Sanchez’ Imagen de la Virgen- Madre de Dios de Guadalupe diffuses the idea of 3 miraculous apparitions (at the Hill of Tepeyac) to Juan Diego (a native), by the Virgin Mary, and of her request for a Christian temple to be built at that place, as well as the miraculous imprint of her image on physical surface. Thus, the Church benefits of stepping back into an ideology of images (where text was even destroyed or carefully edited) during the century between 1531 and 1648, only to return to the realm of text (where even a myth has power, against a history which is actually a progressive sedimentation of devotions and images where nothing can be fixed or specified)”.

In most cases, the reliance on images has been replaced by textual representation on the part of Christianity. However, the native ideology of images was allowed to blend with the new ideologies for so long that it continues to express itself, albeit in a modified manner. Who is to know if, since 1600, the native culture has been worshipping Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary, and Saint John, or Tonan, Toci, and Tezclatipoca in the local imagery? Most likely, Morphs of the two realms have yielded new Combinatories most appropriate for the Postmodern. And the imagery itself has expanded to include

“the jar, the package, the dry heap, the decorated shred, the piece of string that ties together apparently useless leftovers; in short, anything”.

[Remo Guidieri, Cargo, 1987]

It is not surprising that New Age should give root, with such fertile soil. Healers and fortune tellers have coexisted with Christian priests in this society for a long time, in the same way that mass communications now connect us all to modern Los Angeles, czarist St. Petersburg, and revolutionary Bilbao. The difference is that, now, everything one level of power removed. The static Sign is now in motion, velocity is acceleration, the dimensions escape the limit of three. Even the church has opportunities for Legitimacy in the next millenium, if it joins the ranks of authors who manipulate flows instead of elements.