Haloween #2 With A Bullet

Now, it has been a few years since my favorite holy day surpassed Easter as the second largest holiday based on consumer spending, but here at The Otherfish Wrap it has been noted that major media outlets have no qualms about reporting twenty or even thirty year old information as "news". At first it seemed unsavory to rehash old information and present it as news, but the more we thought about it, the more we realized that people rarely pay attention to information that makes a difference in our lives, or forget it once it is heard, so we forgive the major media players for their untimely coverage. Now we must humbly ask that you do the same for us. Fact is, several years ago, The Otherfish Wrap was still a dormant fanzine. So, please allow us to turn the wheel of time back to a time when some of the best news we have heard in a while came to light.

In our consumer culture, people often judge things by how much money they generate. Halloween, on one level, is just one more thing that has commodities associated with it. When it surpassed Easter as the number two holiday, pagans were elated. Because the Christians co-opted so many of our holy days, the thought of Hallows Eve making such a strong showing was both comforting and exhilerating. Now don't read too much into this, because the gaudy and skull infested celebration that passes for Halloween has about as much to do with the pagan calendar & pagan values as Christmas has to do with the rebirth of the Sun. In our day, we have lost sight of many of our traditions because it is economically expedient to have us just buy things without asking why. The fact that the veil between our world and the other is thinnest at this time makes no difference to the majority here in the U.S. but to ancient people it was a time of ancestor appreciation and recapitulation. Celebrations included the give away, revelry and the release of self in honor of greater forces that we wished to invite back into our lives and psyches.

We all know the power of costuming in creating characters. Who wouldn't want to be a superhero, princess, witch, or zombie? Heck, it seems that any and all manner of beings come to life on this night, many of which we fantasize about all year long. When I was a child, I was Captain Hook to my sister's Tinker Bell, The Tin Man to my sister's Dorothy. The heartless, or villainous characters are, for some, the most fun to try on because they are the most different from our normal selves. For many years now I have transformed myself into Jacob Marley's Ghost for Halloween. You may know him as the famous character from A Christmas Carol who says the immortal line, "I wear the chain I forged in life." For him, each link was a chance that he had to help someone else, that he passed up in his diligent quest for wealth. Each of us bears the burden of the opportunities overlooked, friends not made, promises not kept, and ignorance based in pursuit of money, so in this way I remind myself and hopefully others to make the best choices we can in our daily lives, being the best we can be day in and day out, in honor and respect of our fellow humans. Jacob Marley knew that we all deserve it, he just learned a little too late!

The repressed or neglected part of ourselves is free to take center stage on this holy day. Inexplicably, we are drawn to these dark recesses of self, looking for release from our ego-induced captivity. Who hasn't felt the release of putting on a mask, channeling if you will, the disembodied spirit of some one or some thing else? As you may have seen, this is the one night that folks can mix humor with seriousness, desire with abhorrence, and beauty with disgust. For many, this night of the living dead, or fright night is looked forward to much more than Christmas or for that matter, their Birthdays! Pagan rites serve deep human needs. That's why the conquerors used so many of our sacred sites, virtually all of our equipment, so many of our rites, and nearly all of our practices to dominate and subjugate us. Bell, Book and Candle to name just a few. The fact that Halloween may one day surpass Christmas as the biggest holiday makes some quiver with fear, while others quiver with expectation. I for one am of the latter camp.

It is a bit ironic that the number three holiday is Easter. For pagans, Oestara may be the rite most clearly stolen from us by the Christians. It is one of the only Christian holy days that is based on the moon cycle, and it is all about the fecundity of the earth being coaxed out of hibernation by the returning Sun. The fertility symbols associated with it are the egg and the rabbit, one, the essence of reproduction, the other one of the most prolific creatures known to humans. I'm sorry for lecturing, but the time has come for us to reestablish ties with our ancestors, to get in line with earth centered approaches to our lives and to begin again with a new perspective, recreating relationships with people, profits and our planet.

A wise friend told me once that the environmental crisis would be over when folks from Florida eat oranges and drink their juice rather than eating apples and drinking apple juice and folks from around here (the Western Great Lakes Region)enjoy the apple and drink it's juice rather than that of the orange. Appreciating what abounds where we are is the first step in bio-regionalism. Interestingly enough, most of the costumes that you see out on this night will be fashioned from whatever we have on hand. Why else would bobbing for apples, or oranges, be so popular? How else to explain the great traditions of the season? We use what we have in new ways and create something bigger and more profound than we ever though possible in our daily slumber.