We are slowly reaching the night of Halloween, and I bet most of you are being bombarded by reruns of horror films, skulls, blood cocktails (I’m serious – there is a huge amount of Halloween themed cocktails and mocktails out there, and some of the best recipes can be found on Pinterest, so if you want to host a party on the eve of the 31st, start reading 🙂 ) and cobwebs. (Unconnected, but still interesting – did you know that cob in the cobweb is just another word for spider?)
In short, the Halloween look of today is spooky, gory and sticky… at least if you have kids that trick or treat or if you bake for Halloween.
Traditions, as we can see well from Halloween, change all the time. The apparent consistency is often erroneous, with the changes being incorporated and deliberately overlooked, or grumbled over to show one’s hierarchical position within one’s aura of factuality. In reality, the change is simply the part of the process of existing as a fluid society, and even rigid societies rarely manage completely unchanged behavioural patterns, even if they tend to pretend they don’t exist. Even the withdrawal of religious from the festivity (or the seeming withdrawal, as many festivals traditionally held a far more social than religious note, with the religious part forming more of a background than the core) is a part of the natural process of events.
It is not odd that Halloween gained this note through time. Initially a Celtic festival (with a light element, given the presence of fire; this aspect is still strongly present in the modern-day Pagan religions), referred to as Samhain, Halloween (or, with the full name, All Hallow’s Eve, referring to the Christian calendar of the 1st of November being the All Saints day… in other words, this is the evening before the all hallowed – so sainted – folks day) became a logical transition – with the worship or remembrance of the ancestors that used to pop over during the night of the 31st being replaced with a very similar belief in the religious antecedents, ie a form of ancestors, being revered on the day following. It is, I believe, unclear as to when exactly the NIGHT of the 31st became the source of fear and uncertainty, but it is very likely that, given the blatant syncretism and yet distaste for pagan rites, the distinction would be made by the church and the believers both, to distance, and make clear and their own THEIR belief, thus effectively rejecting and demonising the night preceding to their own preferred festival, and at the same time transferring the more lunar orientated practices into the solar ones. (*It is difficult to overcome the syncretic belief, so much in fact that you will find, even in reputable sources, a clear feeling of negativity towards Samhain that obscures any other possible connection it could have. However, given that the Celtic-related stories, even from later ages, do not seem to consider death and the dead as necessarily evil by default, I would contest that belief, and would consider it a matter of overlaying syncretic later notions over old sources, often partial and poorly represented. The most that could be said is that, like with all religions, a duality of good and evil is possible (cf. Dr. Sabine Heinz, Symbole der Kelten), but a purely dark aspect is highly unlikely. The festivals of Celts have also been so intermingled with the modern-day Pagan, Druid and Wiccan versions of them, that they have become almost inseparable in context and in perception, scientific and otherwise. So what we have is a tangent that focuses purely on the “goodness” of the old religion and a tangent that, stemming mostly from Christian sources, focuses purely on the “badness”, thus creating very murky waters indeed for serious research.)
From there, if everyone starts adding a story, if more ghost stories are told, if the celebrations of the old religion become obscure or banned, if stories of witches are attached, in a few hundred years, with the development of modern technology, we get Halloween that we know and love (at least I do) today, with all its fake vampire blood and eyeballs in cocktails. The development of film has definitely latched on to the belief, and Halloween has slowly become or reverted to what it had probably been to those who began telling the ghost stories rather than accepted religious differences – a festival of fear.
In anthropology and in human culture, fear is a crucial part of behaviour to observe and to study. It involves our most primal feelings, the wish for self-preservation at all costs, and the feeling of powerlessness that comes through what we can almost call SCR based Stockholm syndrome, with the society, culture and belief dictating everything, including one’s most basic responses (such as self-defence and flight). The more rigid the society, the more this is true; and even in relatively fluid societies, festivals especially may keep an essence of that rule of and through fear for a goodly amount of time. Among the Maya, the new king had to spend time isolated in a cave with no light and no input other than his psychology, strained to the max, would give him… and with the priesthood conveniently around to lead his experience and mould him into the image they wanted. While in the West, this may not be as intense for most people, and not via Halloween, a certain amount of trained-in responses are still expected when in contact with Halloween-related things, such as blood, death, spiderwebs… in short, things we are supposed to fear and feel disgusted by.
Interestingly enough, it is perhaps because of that that we have become, in a way, almost connoisseurs of gruesome. In a fabulous act of adaptation, we have mostly transcended fear that is expected and teased from us every year and we fearlessly walk the stores draped in Halloween-themed imagery, eat suspicious looking snacks we would not actually touch on other occasions (if for no other reason, then because they do often look funky and unhealthy… Logical, given that they represent death and decay, and that many fall very much into the category of uncanny valley – so a thing that looks something like but not enough to be sure; this is especially true of death and life, and is all a response based on that instinct we all have – pattern recognition, which would have, in the past, and still does, to a certain extent, help us survive by spotting danger around us. This pattern recognition is known as gut feeling to most.) and throw back cocktails that should frankly said frighten us for a lot of reasons, including the actual ingredient list (yes, this is your liver speaking 😉 ).
If pattern recognition can, in a state of fear, lead into pattern seeking, which is hyperarousal’s way of keeping things going on red alert, making sane pattern recognition almost impossible at times, and is the chief part of keeping someone in constant suspense and therefore, in the long term, controllable, then we have actually reached the other way out, the part where the fear has been so familiarised that we can, again, look at a thing and see it without pattern seeking and freaking out. In other words, we have countered fear by recognising it, and deal with it by treating it as a dare. This, too, is a natural behaviour, an adaptation to difficult, lengthily dangerous situations that require that cold blood and calculation that is deemed impossible at first contact with what makes us frightened. It is an experience of the fact that what seems frightening isn’t always perilous, meaning that it is no longer necessary to fear it at all.
Humans are heavily visual creatures, and we draw most of our impressions from what our eyes tell us. While our other sense are indeed far more involved than we give them credit for, it is still what we see that we find to be the deciding factor for our action and reaction that happens next… and that is why the visual representations of frightening can actually work against our fear. In other words – once you have seen something, and clearly, the possibilities that your mind can conjure up are gone, and the seemingly worst has already happened… And it was not followed by anything actually bad. So the fear slowly ceases.
I would posit a very tentative theory that perhaps this is why we like scary things so much – that in a world that can be very frightening, what with all the messy stuff humans can do to each other, a visual certainty, a stimulation of fear that is controlled and can be overcome, is actually therapeutic. This is, of course, something that would be a brilliant topic of long-term study, but it definitely has potential.
So in a way, Halloween as we know it these days has taught us that there is, indeed, truth in the words “You have nothing to fear but fear itself.”