By Wayne Allensworth
October will be over soon. In my part of the world, the weather will noticeably change as November begins. In October, we have Indian Summer days that are very warm, but the temperatures gradually decline. The sun is not as bright, and mornings and evenings are crisp and clear, one’s sight enhanced by the diminished glare, increasing the depth and sharpness of one’s vision.
In the opening lines of his very Octoberish novel, Something Wicked This Ways Comes, Ray Bradbury waxed poetically on his favorite month, harkening back to the wondrous days of his childhood, writing that October was “a rare month for boys.” Not that all months weren’t rare then, but “around October twentieth” everything was “smoky smelling and the sky orange and ash gray at twilight” with Halloween approaching. The ghoulish costumes of our youth were, I think, a manner of confronting and defeating our fears of death and enhancing our love of life. Bradbury delighted in the spooky and the macabre, but particularly in that novel celebrated life, and the passage of time, youthful exuberance and aging as an opportunity to acquire wisdom. A passage we should not only accept, but welcome, even as with sweet sadness we commemorate the past.
Halloween is, of course, All Hallow’s Eve, the day preceding All Saint’s Day. The saints being hallowed, commemorated for their special status. All Soul’s Day follows, a day when in the now receding past, across Christendom, we remembered those who had gone the way of all flesh before us. Especially those we had loved and lost, those who had special places in our lives. What remains in our hollowed-out civilization and commercialized mass culture is merely a time for children to dress up and mouth words they no longer understand, “trick or treat.”
The words are linked to age-old traditions of subordinates, in this case children, turning the tables on their superiors, adults, and making a faux threat of mischief if a treat was not offered. Servants performed a similar ritual on their masters after harvest or at Christmas, the role reversal ritually affirming that both sides had obligations and duties to the other. The custom was extant in Europe for centuries, as were prayers and homage paid for and to the dead. Pagans had dressed in scary attire to ward off spirits, and in later times, ghoulish costumes were retained in the Halloween ritual, as elders warded off “tricks” from the young. There was likely a psychological aspect in performing rituals that warded off ghouls and monsters. A prayer acted out asking for deliverance from evil.
But all of that is largely forgotten now, supplanted by what is in effect another commercial holiday. In a recent substack post, the recommendable Rupert Sheldrake, author of Morphic Resonance, reminds us of the faded traditions that we must revive.
Sheldrake reminds us of how important it is to remember those who have died, especially all those who have helped you, guided you, and supported you in your life. The saints in your own life. It reconnects us with them. The dead and the living are linked. I would add that the dead, the living, and the yet to be born are linked in a chain of being, gratitude, and obligation. We have obligations to the dead and to future generations. The severing of those ties, of that inter-generational compact, was a key break-point in the dehumanization of the postmodern world. G.K. Chesterton once wrote about “the democracy of the dead;” that is, giving due regard to our ancestors. In it is an implied promise to due regard for future generations.
Burying the dead is a cultural marker in human evolution, a sign of humanity, of our distant ancestors’ deepening awareness. The dead received due regard in a ritual acknowledging their humanity, and that they passed on to another plane. Burials in the not-so-distant past frequently took place in family cemeteries or in parish church yards. Grieving was normal, a cathartic expression of loss, especially the loss of someone close. We would have to carry on without them, holding them dear in memory. Grief marked the gravity of the situation, the value of life and the inevitably of physical death. There was a time for celebrating someone’s life, for laughter and sharing of memories, but a funeral was a solemn occasion. Each life left an imprint on eternity and was duly acknowledged. Funerals were another marker, another passage, in our lives, a ritual that like others invested life and death with meaning and purpose.
The industrialization of burials signaled a sharp shift in our lives, detaching us from the tasks families had performed earlier: dressing the dead, then burying them in a family plot. A burial plot became a commodity, death another occasion for exchange in the marketplace. We now seem to be losing the grave, a place we can visit and tend, as well as a sense of the gravity of life and death, as burials have become so costly. As Iain McGilchrist wrote in Volume II of The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World: “And finally, there is the mechanical disposal of the body in a modern crematorium. The burning ghats would be quite another matter: It’s the clinical, mechanical efficiency invoked. And the loss of the grave: in both senses.”
I do not demean undertakers or those who handle funeral arrangements. It is simply a fact of our lives in a post-Christian society that that aspect — the assembly line, mechanistic and exchange aspect — has taken over so much of what was done by families. As modern life became more complex, it became more regulated and bureaucratized. It became commodified. Industrialized burial was not the only thing responsible for eroding the foundation of a now fragmented society, but it was a worrisome crack in that foundation.
Post modern people fear death and suffering so much that they often seem to dispense with living a full life. Risk — and the risk of suffering and death — is an element in personal development and living a full life. Nowadays, safety and security often trump the exhilaration of living. On the other hand, pleasure and self-indulgence leave open an alternative, equally dehumanizing avenue — throwing life away on selfish hedonism. Life and death have lost their sacred status. Postmodern nihilism has become something of a celebration of rage and self-destruction.
On my daily walks, I frequently see the departed in my mind’s eye. I remember them and cherish those memories. Memory and ritual deepen our regard for the living and for the yet to live. I think of my children and my grandchildren, and I hope for more of them. How we pay attention to such things, the gravity we lend to them is an element in expanding our awareness of the sacred blessing of life. Resacralizing our lives is up to each one of us. We have grown spiritually shallow, fearful, or selfish, detaching ourselves from a disposition to life and death that deepened our humanity and life’s gravity and meaning. So, mark the Days of the Dead. Remember them. They are always with us.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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