A Most Unhappy Halloween

Halloween is particularly well placed in the calendar this year, shorn of its festive cloak due to what the Pontifex Maximus, for reasons unclear to me, referred to as "the lady" Covid.  Perhaps ladies are generally pestilent to the Catholic clergy--except, of course, for one Lady in particular.  Barely festive at all, in fact, for the children who benefit from the holiday in its largely secular form.

But what could be more appropriate at this very unfestive time?  Fear stalks the land in the form of someone as orange as a pumpkin, though not great in any good sense, along with the pandemic which seems to be growing.  Fear fostered by many for the most cynical reasons.  By politicians, that is to say, or at least those of them who are motivated primarily is not exclusively by the desire to retain power.  Fear also of uncertainty.  Fear of people wielding guns at polling places; fear of what might come of a Supreme Court whose latest member has minimal experience in law and seems to have been chosen for purely political reasons; fear of violence; fear of fraud in the election; fear that voting will be repressed.

Yes, Halloween will be scary this year if only due to the harrowing and hectoring political advertising to which we're exposed and the proximity to election day, which may or may not decide our fate, or which may or may not merely prolong the period in which we wait to know our fate depending on what options are available in the courts (I won't call them "legal" options for fear--what else?--of giving them more dignity than they merit).

Unfortunately, we can't take comfort in the wise, gentle and humorous traditions of this time of year, like the celebrations associated with the Day of the Dead.  There our deceased loved ones are thought of as still living and parts of our continuing families.  But imagine what our ancestors would feel if they could truly share our time with us.  They could only be angry of what we've become, or full of sorrow for us in our sorry state.  As for the saints of All Saints Day?  Well, perhaps they could at least intercede for us, assuming they would be heard.

Perhaps a mass exorcism is in order.  Priests brandishing the Rituale Romanum and reciting its text on exorcism should be walking among us, or perhaps driving among us in vehicles sporting loudspeakers, together with fundamentalist preachers casting out devils as some of them do on television.  Why not give it a try?  What do we have to lose?  Certainly not our dignity, which is long gone.

Jonathan Swift's Gulliver, in one of his travels, encounters the Houyhnhnms, a race of talking horses, wise, reasonable, and benevolent who rule over deformed, ignorant creatures resembling humans called Yahoos.  Though taken in, he's eventually banned by the Houyhnhnms for being too much like a Yahoo, or even a Yahoo himself.  He despises Yahoos, though, and when he returns to England can't stand living among his fellow humans.  He becomes a recluse, and spends his time in the stables talking to the horses.

He also more famously encounters the Lilliputians, a tiny people who are concerned with trivial matters and are obsessed with displays of authority and power.

I'm not certain whether we're more Yahoos or Lilliputians, now.  A combination of the two, perhaps.  If we could celebrate Halloween traditionally, we should dress up as both.  Or it may be no costumes would be required.

 

Some Thoughts on Modern Paganism

The word "pagan" is derived from the Latin paganus, which was used to refer to someone from the countryside, someone rustic, unsophisticated, unlearned; something of a bumpkin, I suppose.  As Christianity came to take hold in the Roman Empire, it began to be used, by Christians, as a term of disapproval or contempt, referring to those who were not Christians.  This may make a certain kind of sense, as those who recognized the old gods came to avoid urban areas which Christians came to control or where Christian intolerance was prevalent (except, perhaps, Rome itself, where the aristocratic old families remained stubbornly attached to the older religion).  The old beliefs and rituals survived in the countryside, it's said, for centuries after the advent of Christianity.  They may survive even now, in modified, Christianized form.

Halloween may be considered a particularly pagan time of year.  By Christians, that is.  I'm not sure, myself, just how pagan it may be.  I suppose Christians think it pagan because they associate it with Satan and his minions, and Christians have long thought pagan gods to be demons of one sort or another.  But Satan himself isn't much of a figure in traditional paganism.  There is no Satan among the Greco-Roman pantheon, for example; no Satanic figure at all, really, except physically in the form of Pan.  Pan, though, is otherwise not very Satan-like.  The Devil seems to be a peculiar fixture of the Abrahamic religions.

What's referred to as Modern Paganism, or Neo-Paganism, seems to be groups of people who for various reasons practice what they think to be ancient pagan rituals and hold what they think to be ancient pagan beliefs.  It's claimed that it's growing.  Some modern pagans are adherents of Wicca, a kind of witchcraft revival hatched in the mind of a retired British civil servant in 1954.  Some follow the Norse gods, or certain of them.  Some think of themselves as Druids.  Some are followers of a goddess or the goddess, and are convinced that such worship is in effect the original religion, when society was, it's claimed, matriarchal long before the advent of the sky gods.

Some hold various beliefs which involve nature-worship, theistic, polytheistic or pantheistic.  Some may be considered Deists.  Modern Paganism has been around for some time, I believe, and is in some respects a phenomenon of the late 19th-early 20th century when many became interested in occultism or spiritualism, or became enthralled with ancient Egyptian religion after the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen, when Madame Blavatsky and others sought to resurrect Hermeticism or something else which could be said to have a pagan pedigree.

It would seem that Christianity, though otherwise remarkably successful in quashing paganism for centuries, hasn't managed to destroy it utterly.  Nor has its efforts to assimilate it been entirely successful.  It retains its magic.  This shouldn't be unexpected, as it existed and flourished for thousands of years.

I doubt, though, that the pagans of our times live, or think, or believe as did the pagans of the ancient past.  It simply isn't likely that they could after all that's happened.  The picture at the beginning of this post is of a relief showing Marcus Aurelius making sacrifice.  Animal sacrifice was essential in Greco-Roman paganism, performed in complicated rituals.  Livers of animals were perused by haruspices in ancient Rome, a form of divination the Romans learned from the Etruscans.  Who today could honestly ascribe to such ceremonies the significance they were accorded by the ancients?  Who, indeed, could perform them?

Who knows what the Druids did, really, or what they believed?  Our sources of information about them are Roman and so unlikely to be sympathetic or entirely accurate.  How many moderns believe, sincerely, in witchcraft?  How many while joining hands and chanting at Stonehenge or some other ancient site can really claim to be believers of the kind who did the same, if indeed they did the same, so long ago?  None of them knew or had experienced what we know and experience now.  Given that knowledge and experience, would they believe now as they did then?  How could they?

There's no reason (unless we accept the view that they were deceived by demons) to think ancient pagans were not sincerely pious, and it must be assumed the beliefs of many of them were fervent.  But that piety can no longer be shared, or even imagined.

I suspect there's a great deal of Romanticism involved in the efforts to recreate paganism, as well as what may be a longing which cannot be satisfied now by Christianity as an institutional religion.  But we fool ourselves if we believe we can be what pagans were.  They were different from us in matters of faith, in mystic belief, in ways too profound for them to live again in us, or for their beliefs to be shared by those living now.