A talk for Halloween/Samhane by Rel Davis, minister of the Unitarian Fellowship of South Florida, 1812 Roosevelt Street, Hollywood, Florida, on October 26, 1997.Texts:
Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen, We daren't go ahunting, for fear of little men.
From ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggedy beasties, and things that go bump in the night, good Lord preserve us!
I see the moon. The moon sees me.
God bless the moon. God bless me.
We are a culture based on fear. We are taught at an early age to be afraid -- to fear authority, to fear the afterlife, to fear the anger of our elders, to fear the unknown.
We scare ourselves half to death watching horror movies based on the Christian concept of evil as residing in dead spirits and in the Christian god of death (the devil). Science fiction movies have become nothing but a projection of our fear of the unknown onto the cosmos around us.
And we have turned Halloween, the ancient festival of Samhain, into an excuse to frighten our children.
Fear is not the ancient message of this season. Our distant ancestors were not afraid of ghosts or elves at all. Rather, they looked upon the departed as the friends and loved ones they had always been, and they saw the little people as fellow travellers upon the earth.
Samhane was originally a celebration of the end of summer. In one respect it would have been a solemn time for our ancestors, for the long winter lay ahead, along with all the uncertainties that entailed, but it was also a time of joy, for long-gone loved ones could be expected to pay a visit, and the Little People could always be expected to play their customary tricks.
When did it change? When did the "season of fear" come upon our species?
It began, of course, with the rise of the warrior cults between the fourth and second millennia before the common era. Born of the nomadic cultures which flourished among the outcasts of society, these male-dominated warriors gradually overthrew the peaceful agrarian civilizations which had directed the lives of humans for more than 20 thousand years.
With them, they brought war, of course, but they also brought the first bureaucracies, the first centralized governments. Organized along the lines of armies, the new civilizations arranged for power pyramidally, with powerful males at the top and the masses of the populace at the bottom.
They also brought slavery, genocide, tyranny and famine due to unequal distribution of resources.
Paradoxically, along with all the death and destruction brought by the warrior cults, they also brought an intense fear of death. While they worshipped death, they also feared it.
They were almost exactly opposite the civilizations that preceded them.
Excavations around the world have revealed that humankind lived for an incredibly long period (many scholars estimate for up to 30 thousand years) in peace and harmony -- first as hunter- gatherers, then as settled farmers, and finally in stable city- states. Up to the fourth millennium BCE, there is no evidence of fortifications anywhere in the world. Implements of war do not begin to appear in the archeological evidence until the rise of the patriarchal societies.
All over the ancient, pre-patriarchal world are found statues and images of the female figure. Scholars are convinced this reflected a religious principle of respect for the feminine in nature. Other religious symbols included the snake, the bird, the spiral image of the tree of life and the triangle as symbol of the female.
The dead were buried -- often within the living quarters themselves -- with the implements of life, implying an acceptance of a future life for the departed. And men and women were dressed and accoutred identically -- no distinction. On the island of Malta was discovered early this century the Hypogeum, an ancient burial chamber cut from solid stone. The chamber was equipped with "lying-in" beds for pregnant women, implying that women would enter the chambers so that the spirits of the dead could be reincarnated within their wombs.
Death was nothing to be afraid of. It was a natural stage in the process of life. And it was an opportunity to return to life again in another place and another time.
The warrior cults changed all that. Instead of peace, they brought war. Instead of stability, they brought terror and uncertainty. Instead of equality, they brought slavery and injustice. And instead of the worship of the female principle in life, they instituted the harsh worship of male ancestors. (The word Yahweh is a proto-Semitic word meaning "he was.")
Perhaps because the quality of life became so poor after the patriarchal invasions, reincarnation ceased to seem such a desirable option. So new stories were invented. The afterlife would be a place where there was no death, and where warriors could continue to fight and kill each other -- in the presence of the warrior god -- through eternity.
Another thing the warrior cults brought to civilization was the cult of the individual. The single male leader was all-important and the clan ceased to have any value. Each person, then, lived only for the gaining of power in this life, and for the leaving of offspring who would exercise similar power in the future.
The life of the individual -- to the individual -- became all- important and the lives of others became meaningless. To this way of thinking, the death of the individual (to the individual) is the worst possible occurrence, while the deaths of others are not worthy of consideration.
So we were taught to fear our own deaths while at the same time participating in actions -- war, police tyranny, destruction of natural resources -- that led to the deaths of other individuals and of other species.
We glorify war and we glorify the powerful male who kills other people. We glorify progress and the destruction of ancient ways of life and of ancient forests. We glorify the "saints" who renounce the joys and beauties of life itself.
And we teach our children to be afraid of the dark, of departed spirits and of the people who reject the patriarchy -- the witches and shamans and houngans and santeras who have traditionally suffered at the hands of the patriarchy.
Halloween today has become a time to watch blood and gore on the TV screen and to preach sermons against satanism.
Luckily, the people will have their own way despite the patriarchal overlords of society. Most people see the holiday as a time to dress up and have a party. Children get to wander the streets and collect candy. And pagans can blend in at this time of year, do our own thing and society is none the wiser.
If we look at the "ancient traditions" of scary apparitions, we find them really quite modern. The word "ghoul" (in the supposedly ancient prayer above) didn't come into the English language until the end of the eighteenth century. It was originally Arabic.
The Little People were originally helpful little fairies or sprites who lived around the home. In Scotland, they were called Brownies and in England, hobgoblins or Puck or Robin Goodfellow. It was customary to put out milk and bread at night for them, and at Samhane, of course, you would give them treats when they came to visit.
Just remember, when you finish giving treats to all the costumed children who come around this Halloween, that during the evening at least two or three of your visitors were probably really elves checking up on you.
Goblins were mischievous elves. The word comes from the Greek word kobalos or rogue. The German version was the kobald, a sprite who inhabited mines and would mix in a form of useless and poisonous ore along with the good silver ore miners wanted. When the element cobalt was later extracted from this waste product, the name of the sprite was immortalized in the table of elements.
A lot of our names for spirits are actually names invented by adults as a means of scaring children. When I was young, we were frightened by stories of the "Wampus Cat" that stalked outside houses at night ("wampus" is just a variation on "swamp.")
This is also called a bogey or bogeyman, based on the Welsh word bwgwl, "terror." We also have the words bugbear and bugaboo from the same root. In England, this became the barghest, a large black dog which portended doom. The barghest had different names in different parts of England: The Demon of Tidworth, the Black Dog of Winchester, and the Padfoot of Wakefield.
But these creatures were not serious creatures of the night: they were inventions to scare little children.
Most of the frightening stories we now know of were inventions of the patriarchy.
Originally, Samhane/Halloween was a time for peaceful communion with the peaceful dead. A time to remember the departed loved ones and perhaps to have a few last words with them.
It was also a time for playing games and pulling tricks on people. And it was a time to dress up in all manner of costumes -- so the dead would not feel out of place when they visited us and so the elves and Little People could wander at will among humankind.
This Friday, when the Celtic festival of Summer's End is upon us once again, let's forget the morbid fears of the Christian conquerors and embrace the holiday as our forbearers did.
Death is nothing to fear. It is only one more stage in this grand drama called life. The dead are not frightening. They are simply our friends and loved ones as we choose to remember them.
And the Little People are really just ourselves -- when we allow ourselves to play.
Blessed be!