The Eve Is the Edge

I find myself occasionally called on to defend Halloween. When it is attacked, I, too, am attacked, for Halloween is sacred to me. Its armies of ghosts and ghouls, of monsters and mad scientists: these imaginary beings populate my sacred cosmos. In the last week my devotions have consisted of viewing Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Son of Frankenstein, The Ghost of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Dracula, The Son of Dracula, The Return of the Vampire, The House of Frankenstein, The House of Dracula, and Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Today and tomorrow I hope to add to the list Dracula's Daughter, The Mark of the Vampire, and Brides of Dracula. For me Halloween is not merely an annual reminder of something not otherwise on my mind. No, in its shadows and starry voids, its open doors to unknown voids, there I live and move and have my being. It began early in childhood as I experienced both the Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans, not of the Holy, but of Horror. Once, many years after reading H.P. Lovecraft, I read Rudolf Otto, too, and realized they were the same, and that all that mattered was which one you granted priority to, i.e., which you defined in terms of the other.

I have had to defend Halloween against ignorant and superstitious claims that Halloween is a Satanist holiday (though Satanists are welcome to celebrate it, too). By contrast, the very name denotes its ecclesiastical character: its occasion is the eve before All Saint's Day. The logic and symbolism of Halloween is perfectly depicted in Mussorgsky's piece Night on Bald Mountain (especially as made visible in Disney's Fantasia). The powers of evil know they must hasten from the scene (like Trick-or-Treaters who must get up early for school the next morning) when the dawn of All Saints' Day comes. For then the light of godliness will eradicate every nefarious shadow. And it is this futility that reduces the evil powers to mere shadows who mime and cavort, paper tigers and bristling pussycats hissing at the moon. And it is such monsters that children portray so convincingly as they drift from door to door demanding tribute lest a trick follow. That practice is the dim echo of ancient superstitions that demanded the poor householder make some offering so as to avoid the vengeance of malevolent entities. Halloween defangs the meanies and the monsters because, Christian mythology tells us, Christ has already nullified them, as when Jehovah boasted to Job that he had reeled in Leviathan and tamed him as a plaything for his children (Job 41:1-8) Oh how sad that modern fundamentalists never learned the theological background of holy Halloween! In their fear of it as "Satan's holiday" they have only rebuilt the castle of fear from which Christ once liberated them (Colossians 2:13-17; Galatians 4:8-11).

But lately I find myself defending my sacred day against a different assault, that mounted by priggish, brain-dead schoolmarm types who pooh-pooh Halloween for its excesses. We spend fantastic sums on Halloween accoutrements, costumes, decorations, and candy. It would be more prudent not to. And remember the disapproving disdain of the nanny state we live in, where the only allowable way to observe Halloween is to dress up as Michelle Obama and be glad if you get a goodie bag full of asparagus. The real Halloween is excessive, immoderate, tending toward gluttony and obesity. And that the finger-wagging block-heads cannot allow! But they are missing something. Something essential to human culture. Something they teach in Freshman Anthropology. Victor Turner called it "liminality."

Turner studied rites of passage among African tribes (though the same things go on the world over), and he noticed that the function of these rituals was to conduct the individual through the end of one life stage into another. Each stage has its own integrity as a "life." Each is a defining period of life: childhood, adolescent, marriageability, career, retirement, death and passage to the Next World. In each case it is a matter of crossing over a social boundary, setting aside the privileges of childhood for the quite different privileges and responsibilities of adulthood, for example. The symbols used in celebrating these rites (man-animal masks and such) partake of the character of hybrid mythical beasts or gods, ontological fence-straddlers, because they are the symbols of the social lines we are crossing. Each life period will be stable because of the built-in role-expectations and norms of one's society. If a man refuses to work for a living and wants to sit around and "play" all the time, his neighbors look askance at him because he has not made the complete transition from adolescence. He is still acting like a child. Once a man marries, dating is over. If a husband forgets that, he earns shame and disapproval.

But in the short time during which one is crossing the boundary into a new life-stage, one may (or must) pause on the boundary. In that interstitial vacuum, that twilight zone, certain behaviors, ordinarily forbidden, are now allowed, even customary. Why? Because they, too, serve to punctuate the process of transition. One example observed in New Guinea (I think) is ritual homosexuality between nephews and uncles (don't ask me why!). Or it may be orgies. This element survives today in the form of wild bachelor parties. You're not supposed to mind this behavior, ladies, or to feel ashamed of it, gentlemen. It's like the slogan "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas," which conceives Las Vegas as liminal to the workaday culture and its mores, an amoral "safety zone" where ordinary rules do not apply. (I'm not advocating this one, mind you. I believe engagement vows of fidelity trump this particular excess. But that is the why of it, anyway, in case you wondered.)

The Eve of All Saints Day marks the cusp between the Dionysian night realm where dreams and nightmares caper through one's head with wild abandon, and the Apollonian day world of law and culture and order and responsibility. The Eve is the edge. The prescribed behavior is liminal, and therefore excessive. When we forget all this, the deep structure of human cultures, culture is "secularized" in the worst possible sense: everything is flattened out. The world is disenchanted, emptied of meaning, and every day xeroxes the one before it. Oh, I know all meaning is fictive play. But that is just what is being bleached out, grayed out, when the schoolmarms warn us not to have too good a time. The Eve is the edge, and I intend to keep walking along it, tightrope though it is.

So says Zarathustra.