The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Welcome to my blog. If you are reading this, I am sorry. Since this is my blog, it will probably deal mostly with my obsessions, so I don't really expect anyone else to find it terribly interesting. Plus, there will be a lot of profanity. So with my best passive-agressive Eeyore impression, "Thanks for noticing me." Recently I joked on Facebook about Halloween being the most wonderful time of the year (and in a different post I said Xmas is for pussies). As I ponder both of those assertions, however, I realize that I'm pretty serious about them. I have therefore decided to provide the first of many answers to questions no one ever asked by explaining why Halloween is the most sacred time of the year for me. As some of you know, I identify as pagan, whatever that actually means, although my actual personal beliefs probably do not align with the majority of people who also identify as pagan. The pagan umbrella is quite broad. I'm not going to define it here because other people have done so exhaustively and much better than I possibly could. I ask that you take the fact that I am one, whatever it may be, as a given. I think I can also safely assert that Halloween is a holiday with pagan roots. Many pagan practitioners celebrate separately or concurrently something called Samhain (supposedly pronounced SOW-en). Although the antiquity of Samhain as it is celebrated today is debatable, it (very) generally has come to include the following features: honoring/communicating with the dead/ancestors, honoring dark/death deities, celebrating the pagan new year, working with the dark/shadow side of the self, and divination. Now that I've made that thoroughly boring and simplistic for you, let's move on. The very first pagan ritual I attended was a Samhain ritual. I'm sticking to this story even though my memory is unreliable. But it's useful to think of it as my first ritual because Death brought me to paganism in the first place. Two things: My boyfriend's father had been murdered. I had dreamt about it before it happened (quite a bit before, a couple of years, I think). To this day, some seemingly prescient dreams scattered across my life are the only potentially paranormal phenomena I believe I have ever experienced. These things combined upheaved my already shaky spiritual situation to make me think that paganism might have answers. So I jumped into some meetings and attended my first ritual at the Altar in Old Town Kern. I brought the edition of Linda Goodman's "Love Signs" that my boyfriend's father had gifted me, as a token to place on the altar for Samhain. It's a common practice to bring something representing a departed loved one. I don't remember much of the ritual except a part where we were supposed to tune in and "listen" for messages from the departed, as supposedly the "veil" between the worlds of the living and dead are thinnest at Samhain. Fair enough; I closed my eyes and my boyfriend's father's face drifted across my mind. I tried to quiet my mind as best I could to try to be receptive. But the face was a silent picture and no message was forthcoming. Fast forward through every subsequent Samhain ritual in which I have been involved, some of which I helped write. I fucking love every one of them. Samhain is my jam. I love the dark deities and the deities of death and dying and rot and carrion (believe it or not I was not a Goth kid). But they have always been my deities. The dark myths, the ones of pain and sacrifice and torment but ultimately renewal have always been the ones that stuck for me. And I'm foolhardy and dense enough to mess about with them, whereas many pagans I know shy away for their own quite sensible reasons. Underneath this is a longstanding and unflagging love of Halloween. Here's the strangeness, though: as much as I love Samhain and Halloween, as much as the imagery speaks to the core of my being and the words and stories move me to tears and harrow my soul, I do not believe in an afterlife. In all my ritual experience, I have never found any evidence that the spirits of the dead were present or in any way cared about what we were doing. Which of course is problematic in practice. Most of the Samhain rituals in which I have participated presume that you accept life after death in some form or other. No hell or heaven necessarily, but some continuation of the spirit. For various reasons, this is something I cannot accept in any way. The main reason is probably the dreary insistence of my Seventh-Day Adventist upbringing on this world as just a brief stop en route to Christ's bosom. I find few things more disheartening than religions that dismiss the experience of incarnation as worthless and illusory. Seriously, fuck those guys. If I'm throwing the afterlife baby out with the end-of-the-world bathwater, so be it. It's my choice. This has resulted in an awkward conflict for me. I don't hold many things sacred, but Death, as a fact and a principle, is something I feel is numinous down in my very bones. This is the power of Halloween and Samhain for me. I've been around my share of death, and I feel it is a holy experience that humanity just loves to cock up in the worst possible ways. I know I'm probably going to get some shit for this, but I deny the afterlife. I deny the possibility of communication with the dead. I think there is one life, with a lot of weird shit packed into it, but that's it. Moreover, I don't even have respect for the remains of the dead. As much as I love ancient Egypt, I am horrified by embalming practices. I detest the way we (mostly) treat cemeteries, as untouchable and apart from the course of human life. So am I just a giant hypocritical asshole for celebrating Samhain and Halloween with such gusto? Probably. But I'm going to do it anyway. Here's why. I am dead serious about it, pun intended. I am more serious about my reverence for death and dying than almost anything I could possibly discuss with you. Death unites every living thing. Death inspires us. Death makes life precious. The process of dying is the most individual and intimate and most ignored basic fact of the human experience. As I said before, I have been around my share of death and everyone is woefully unprepared for it. Not just the dying themselves, but all of us (of course, some cultures moreso than others). Even at our most smart and compassionate we are utterly impotent. We don’t have the right words. We don’t have the right actions. We need Halloween, Samhain, whatever you want to call it, because we need intimacy with death. We need to be able to keep it close, feel its power, recognize it, reverence it, but also laugh with it without undue fear. I personally, feel no need for an afterlife, communication with dead relatives, or connection with unknown ancestors. But I need Samhain because I need to reaffirm death not as something separate from life, but as something that is happening constantly, in the face of cultural denial. I need to face it, face my ultimate death and the death of everything and everyone I love, because it is not an evil. A great evil would be to deny each other the reality of our temporary existence and the fervor that fact should excite in each of us to love and live harder. This is getting way fucking longer than I wanted it to be, so there may end up being more parts to this entry. And I’m not going to edit this shit, so get used to it. And apparently the shitty computer I'm on won't let me format this properly, so sorry for the single long paragraph.