“Heaven and Hell” on Day of the Dead

   On campus today I saw ghouls and animal spirits and glamorous vixens, young people who assume public fantasy lives for a night or two each year around Halloween, also commemorated as the Day of the Dead.

   Santa Ana, California, hosts this nation’s largest display of Noche de Altares, altars honoring the departed. Each booth takes up merely a few square feet, but collectively they command many city streets open only to those arriving on foot. The photograph shown here is one of the hundreds of altars displayed last year.

   The idea of departed loved ones with whom we might communicate may seem like a holdover superstition. Admitting that one has had a brush with a discarnate, beloved or not, tends to peg us as incredulous. But for the many people of all backgrounds and education levels who have had such an encounter, including myself, the experience stands out as a personal (and usually impossible to replicate) fact.

   Scattered throughout his books, Aldous Huxley said quite a bit about what he called the “posthumous state.” For example, in his novel Time Must Have a Stop he wrote an extended scene portraying a character disoriented after death, unsure of where he is, half grasping for a different state of being, half clinging to his past.

   Huxley’s Heaven and Hell was published in 1956 in the form of a slim hardcover book. It was also the sequel to his Doors of Perception. At one point in Heaven and Hell, Huxley writes:

   “If consciousness survives bodily death, it survives, presumably, on every mental level—on the level of mystical experience, on the level of blissful visionary experience, on the level of infernal visionary experience, and on the level of everyday individual existence.”

   I look forward to being one of the black-clad participants among face-painted, costumed celebrants when Noche de Altares rolls around this year on November 7. I relish the dark carnival of absorption into the swirling crowd, simulating a loss of the wall of self.