Flutterby™! : Halloween 2002-10-30 06:12:58+00

Halloween

2002-10-30 06:12:58+00 by Dan Lyke 24 comments

So I'd hoped to avoid that most Christian of holidays, but Charlene said "we've been invited to a party on Thursday: Come as a Tarot character." So tonight I spent a little time at the sewing machine throwing something together, and a few moments on Google figuring out enough of a backstory that when I'm asked about irregularities I can say "Oh, that's because in the Rider-Waite Deck...". At first I thought I was terribly clever, now I'm starting to feel trite. But I thought it'd make a a good Flutterby conversation: Which bit of the Tarot deck are you?

I'd see me, at the moment, as the hermit but that could be from reading Bogan and then Roethke over the last coupla days.

if Minor Arcana is allowed, I am somewhere between the 'Knight of Swords' and the 'King of Swords'.. Maybe we need a new card.. the Prince of Swords? But Dan did not mention what card HE is... Although I'll guess the Magician?

I went for the Seven of Swords though I'll only carry 5, which will be a good conversation opener.

I'm not sure of the exact symbolism, but many times I feel like the 7 of cups from the Hello Kitty Tarot.

Cool! How many other good Tarot decks are there out there, especially those that go completely separate from the standard, like the Silicon Valley Tarot?

Dan, are you making some sort of joke I don't get about Hallowe'en being that most Christian of holidays? As possibly the least-reconstructed of the pagan holidays the Christians incorporated into their mythos, I would have to call it possibly the least Christian of major holidays. Yule (winter solstice) got subverted by the clever trick of putting the birthday of their major religious figure in the same month; no one remembers Beltane anymore and its emphasis on sex runs counter to Christian prudery anyway - but Samhain retains its essentials, under all the trappings.

There are about fifty billion Tarot decks. When I was researching them for a novel , I think I looked at about forty billion of them. A better question, to narrow the field a little, would be "What kind of personality do you want in a deck?" The Thoth or Crowley deck, for example, is bitter, cynical, and misanthropic. Actually, misogynistic, which is true to Crowley form.

I tend to associate with the High Priestess. Watch out, though; she's a bitch. And she doesn't understand sex; the card is essentially virginal. If she gets laid, she immediately becomes the Empress.

Actually, Todd, I've read and heard many good arguments that Halloween in its modern form is the least like the rituals which it might have evolved from, and the most steeped in mythology that Catholicism specifically and Christianity in general can uniquely claim, a few neo-Pagans who've been trying to reappropriate Samhain aside.

Certainly it's more Christian than Easter, where we've still got the bleedin' eggs and rabbits, fer deities' sake, and it'd be easy to argue moreso than Christmas, where we've got the trees and candles and the gift-giving up against a few verses from Luke which aren't even well supported because of the whole "shepherds watched their fields by night" thing.

I may be colored by the fact that I don't think of Hallowe'en in the haunted-house sense. I'm no neopagan but I sure as heck have flirted with the ethos, and that's probably tainted me.

Nice point about the bunnies and eggs, heh. I told someone once that the easter rabbit was a transplanted Beltane fertility symbol and he flat-out did not believe me.

Check out Salon's article Primeval terror (since 1929) for some more along these lines. Once again, it appears to primarily be a holiday invented by Hallmark..

And personally, I'm somewhere in between the Queen of Wands and the Queen of Swords, depending on my mood.

Dan, I'd be interested in seeing these arguments. I had the same reaction that todd did on reading your initial post. Samhain/Hollow's Eve has always been my favorite holiday of the year, in large part because I felt it was the most untainted in the manner to which you refer. (Although the closet Drama Queen in me also rejoices at the opportunity to throw open the flood gates.)

But then I, like todd, have probably been influenced (subverted? ;-) by all the pagans and neopagans around me in my life. While I love the holiday itself, I'll admit to being annoyed at the emphasis on "scary" and "scaring". (I remember watching a Halloween episode of Home Improvement - where everybody is trying to out-scare everybody else - once and not "getting it".)

It has been a long time, and I no longer care about religion enough to go back and dig through the sources heavily, but if I remember right "All Saints Day" came about in Catholicism in the mid 300s (although being fixed to try to take the harvest festival spot was in the 800s or so), Samhain was a minor folklore character who got puffed up by Gardner et al in the mid 1900s, and I'm way fuzzy here, but much of what eventually got attributed there was actually dragged from eastern Europe.

The hard part about history surrounding Halloween is trying to find any sources which don't eventually drop back to parrotting the whole Gardner, Crowley, and so forth, crowd.

And really, who cares? We build rituals and customs to be satisfying to us. The successful celebrations are successful because they appeal to humanity. Take what works, discard what doesn't.

Yep, that pretty much sums up the joy I take in Halloween every year. Except maybe this one - my SCA clothes are buried in a storage locker and a recently misplaced bill means we don't even have enough money for hair coloring at the moment :-(

Heh. Hallowe'en was always, to me, the one day of the year I could actually dress the way I wanted to without being ridiculed. Fortunately at that time I was going through jobs rapidly enough that no one ever questioned why my Hallowe'en costumes ALWAYS involved female clothes, every year ....

My flirtation with paganism (and my first novel, never to be published, which involved a lot of research into this - it's the same one that needed the Tarot research) leads me to think of Samhain, even to this day, as the new year. The early-agrarian legacy that apparently provoked a holiday in the first place was the idea of slaughtering any livestock that were too weak to make it through the winter, of storing up for the long siege ahead. (And Yule is a celebration of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel - look, winter WILL end one day! Winter must have been damned scary back then.) Anyway, in latter paganism this turned into the idea of getting rid of weaknesses in yourself. Like New Year's resolutions in reverse; the usual ritual practice is to write down the bad stuff and then burn the paper.

In the old Celtic ritual calendar, or so I'm told, they solved the lunar-float problem by making Samhain an indistinct period several days long, which was neither a part of the new year nor the old. I like that idea too. It happens that this is precisely the time of year when I tend to take long meditative walks, thinking about what I am doing right and what I could be doing differently. Yesterday night I started dusting off some of my old unfinished fiction fragments for the first time in months. It's a good time for resolutions, I think.

I'm not a pagan but I like to celebrate(borrow) holidays or rituals I find interesting and being of celtic decent, pagan celebration is especially interesting. Samhain, a celtic word and is pronounced a bit like 'sow-ain'.

Samhain marks the final end of the dying summer and the start of the dark time of year that lasts until the first snowdrops appear again at Imbolc. Samhain is actually the Irish name for the month of November and literally means 'Summer's End'. For the Celts, dusk marked the boundary between days, rather than at midnight as it is now. Therefore, the festival starts at dusk on the eve of the month of Samhain, which is the 31st October. Samhain is the Celtic feast of the dead, and offerings would be left outside for the 'wandering dead' and soul-cakes would be made and eaten in memory of ancestors. Since it is believed that the veil is thin at this time of year, many forms of divination would often be practised. Young women would look into mirrors, hoping to see the reflection of their future husband. This could be considered to be a form of scrying. A variation on this is to peel an apple, so that the peel remains in one piece. When dropped on the ground, it was supposed to form the initials of your future partner. It is said that the druids would cast thirteen hazelnuts into a circle and read the patterns that they formed. Samhain is considered to be a liminal (or in-between) time, sometimes called a 'time that is no time'. We say that the 'veil is thin' at this time of year, or that the gateways between the worlds may open. It is a time when we may be able to cross the boundaries between the worlds. Liminal times and places are where the most powerful and dangerous magic exists. It has been said that Samhain-eve is a time when only the very brave, the very foolish, or those close to the gods should venture outside. The main pagan deity associated with Samhain is the Hag. In Ireland she is represented by the Morrigan, a goddess of battle who often takes the form of a raven or scald-crow. In Scotland, she is the Cailleach (pronounced coy-luck or call-y'ack), which simply means 'old woman'. It is possible that she is the oldest goddess in the British Isles. Whilst the Cailleach was a hideous blue-faced, one-eyed hag who ruled Winter from Samhain to Imbolc, it was said she could transform into a beautiful maiden, or into a grey rock until the summer was over and Samhain again came around. She also represents the spirit of the harvested corn safe. In Scotland, the last sheaf of corn cut is often made into the form of the Cailleach. This custom is also found in Wales, where the last sheaf of corn is called the Hag. In Old English, one word for a witch was a 'haegtesse' or hedgerider and this is the origin of the word 'Hag'. The hedge would have been the boundary between the safety of the village and the wild world outside. The witch would, therefore, be someone who could ride boundaries and thresholds, which is to say, walk between the safe known world and the dark underworld. The gateways between the worlds are always guarded and, at least for witches, it is no surprise that the guardian is the Hag. This ancient tradition has, of course, lingered on in the form of children dressing up as hag-like witches for Halloween.

other_todd: I have one "word" for you: NaNoWriMo! Get thee over there right away, it's almost November 1!

Sorry about the double post, folks - funny, I didn't THINK it had been doubled when I first looked at it ....

Diane, I refuse to work on a novel on a timer, but thanks for the suggestion. I'm flattered. Though, actually .... hmmm.

This was also my understanding - mostly from Pagan/Wiccan friends. I was a bit confused by Dan's reference to the "folklore character" of Samhain, but a quick visit to ReligiousTolerance.org helped clear that up. I've only ever heard of "Samhain" referred to as a person when humorously depicting (clueless) metalheads passing urban legends: "Dude! Sam Hain was like this guy who murdered his whole family..."

Yep, I've seen it both ways, and both of those from neo-Pagans and Christian fundamentalists. Back when I dug into such things I quickly learned to mod down anyone referencing "Celtic mythology" without giving specific sources, because the Romans et al did a much better job of destroying and recreating that mythos than us North Americans have with Native American mythology, and we've been pretty damned thorough. That there was that one story with a character called "Samhain" who got tricked out of a cow or somesuch was what sent me down the path of believing that the "character" description was probably more apt than the "season" one, but as I said I don't remember anything more than that.

And, Diane, if anyone doesn't need the outside impetus to turn out 50k words a month, it's this Todd. I'd be surprised if he's not already turning out that much.

I quickly learned to mod down anyone referencing "Celtic mythology" without giving specific sources

Which is one of the reasons I love Religious Tolerance. I'm not typically in the habit of checking references, but they've got gobs of 'em. Okay, it's not so much the references themselves that I love, but rather the result of them - a[n apparently] complete and unbiased explanation of religious topics.