The bonfires are lit, and everyone gathers

We are primitive, aren't we? We need to celebrate the dying of a year, 

in hope of appeasing the dark forces of winter, and allowing the spirits to dance 

with us around the fire. 

Do you remember the lights being turned out, candles lit, perhaps in 

the head of a pumpkin, and being told ghost stories by your grandfather

or grandmother?  Like Sally Ann Howes in Dead of Night, 

Who then goes off to play hide and seek, and finds a ghost...

the unexpected ghost of a child....

Not scary at all, but then part of a longer darker older story.

Why are we so keen on still keeping the fires of the supernatural burning?.

There was a time, when the church tried to wipe out different beliefs. 

They failed, and now science is trying to do the same,

but the fact is that magic and the inexplicable

still feed our hunger more than dry facts and technology can.

We are that little ghost boy, or girl,  who hides in the old empty house, 

at Halloween, ourselves! The fact is that when we die 

where will our inner child go, then?

They had a torchlight procession for Halloween on Saturday in Littlehampton, 

A feast of fire and torchbearers and a night carnival.

Pagan West Sussex.

halloween

Halloween

Has the boundary between this and the other world thinned yet?

According to wikipedia, my conjecture that other

root vegetables than the pumpkin were formerly used as jack o lanterns, 

seems to be agreed. The mummers would travel the streets with a hollowed out 

turnip or wurzel to announce their coming.

Maybe they themselves were meant to be the returned spirits of the dead

begging to return to human life to join in

the festivities.People would always make sure that a place was left

vacant in case such a visitor dropped in.

A little like the leaving of food and drink on the doorstep, to keep

ghosts away. Another way of appeasing them is to invite

 them in under the rules of the special time, 

to befriend them just enough before the dark sets in.

After all, the following day is All Saints Day, and they could be driven out

should they stay. As I understsnd it Pope Gregory IV  changed the day 

set aside for All Saints Day so that it would coincide with Halloween. 

Halloween celebrations Dorothea Lange, 1938

Associations with the Latin American version: The Day of the Dead.

Mexico -- El Día de Muertos

    Yo, Netzahualcóyotl, lo pregunto.
    ¿Acaso de veras se vive con raíz en la tierra?
    No para siempre en la tierra.
    Aunque sea jade se quiebra,
    aunque sea de oro se rompe,
    aunque sea plumaje de quetzal se desgarra.
    No para siempre en la tierra:
    Sólo un poco aquí.

    I, Netzahulacóyotl, ask this.
    Do we really live with roots on earth?
    Only for an instant do we endure.
    Even jade will shatter,
    even gold will crush,
    even quetzal plumes will tear.
    One does not live forever on this earth:
    only for an instant do we endure.

    —Netzahualcóyotl, Aztec warrior, architect, poet and ruler of Texcoco (1402-1472)

More to come........

halloween gets closer

I spent yesterday polishing a short story for a halloween competition.

So busy,, mostly trying to get a computer to sort the fee requirements out.

If there's a real monster on the loose at Halloween it's this one.

The Great internet wen.

Halloween, All Soul's eve, or Hallows Eve,

There is a three day observance, called Allhallowstide afterwards,

so the sprites, goblins, witches, forces if darkness like the demons, 

Ghosts, all the other wonderful denizens of our shadow worlds are thronging

to get their rites in, and seduce as many followers ss possible

into their arcane worship.

 Jack o' lanterns may be more recent symbols,

 but halloween masks go right the way back  to the pagan

origins of the festival.

A "pagan" mask used at the period of Halloween in ireland.

What then would its origin be? When Christianity swept into England,

it rather cleverly built its observances around the sacred places

and mystical customs of the indigenous peoples.

Samhain, "summer's end, 

How do we draw in supernatural beings? 

Dress up, light bonfires, and play all those riotous games 

so beloved by the "fairies",  - call them the Good People - carousing,

 strange rites, mummery, wassailing...

Fun, games, sexual romps and lots of alcohol..

halloween

Halloween

Here is a blog for Charlie Brown fans.

The Great Pumpkin.

The Great Pumokin

 

There was a ghost of halloween, and, as Linus knows,

it walks at this time of year.

You go sit in a pumpkin patch, and see if it comes......

The jack o'lantern. 

In  some versions of the story of Sleepy Hollow, the ghost threw a pumpkin's

head at Ichabod Crane.

Samhain, it's called really, a festival leading from harvest into 

the dark land of the dead, e.g. winter.

When it was begun presumably more common root vegetables

were used than pumpkins to make a face. 

They would needs be a large one, say a huge turnip.

The tradition of the Halloween pumpkin doesn't really emerge 

until the early nineteen hundreds.

The Jack o'lantern is perhaps earlier.

I read that the pumpkins were "sacrificed" to bonfires in the fields, 

so what more natural than that the spirits dancing in the flames should take

pumpkin shape. Maybe Linus was right after all?

The Wendigo

It belongs in the dark wild woodlands of Native America and Canada

They nest in damp dark places, and are said to be cannibal?

What does that mean, as they'd be no threat to people if they 

ate themselves? Blackwood's story is about a man being carried off by 

the Wendigo. However he may have become the Wendigo himself.

Like werewolves, if they are taken by the spirit, they become transformed.

The idea is that if people lost in the wilderness resort to cannibalism, 

then they will become wendigos.

A little like werewolves.

"Simpson for the first time hesitated, then, 

ashamed of his alarm and indecision, took a few hurried steps ahead; 

 the next instant stopped dead in his tracks.

Immediately in front of him all signs of the trail ceased;

 both tracks came to an abrupt end. On all sides, for a hundred yards or more,

he searched in vain for their continuance. There was -- nothing."

He hears the guide crying out in the distance far away.

What is it that drives man to extremes, in order to survive, in the 

immense, tractless and terrible wilderness?

The Were

I have to go to that other great horror of modern life

for Halloween, the dentist.

It looks as if i have to have three teeth extracted, so 

I may not be in a fit condition to blog.

I'll mention today werewolves i think, as it ought to include them.

Our primitive nature.

Is a werewolf a person with some mental health issue, somebody 

retreating into the primitive, or is our affinity with dogs

contagious in some way?

I sometimes get the feeling that really the human race is another

pack animal. That's why we and dogs get on so well. 

We aren't really civilised. Is it more like our societies 

have a similarity to, or grew out of, the Pack.

The mob, as struck London a short while ago, 

Hitler's Germany, examples of a state, where members of a group become

primitive within the allowance to do so by a large wild pack.

If so, why are werewolves so often loners, like vampires are?

Do you know the legend of the Wendigo? These tales of the Were resemble that.

I would recommend the story of that name by Algernon Blackwood,

as the best way into the lore of the Wendigo. 

It is again an ancestral spirit, or a strange wild force, a personification

of evil, within the elements. a legend of the backwoods....?

Algernon's work was uneven, and his novels generally sound trite, 

but his short stories are very haunting sometimes.

One of my favourites, especially The Willows.

Jewett City

Where else but Connecticut?

Well, New England, the witches, H.P.Lovecraft, Dunwich and Innsmouth?

In Jewett City, Connecticut, though, 

in 1854, townspople had exhumed various bodies, 

who were believed to belong to people who had become vampires.

How does a person become a vampire? Is he one to begin with?

Anyway, upon the death of a number of members of the Ray family,

a scare began. It's believed now that the mortality was due to Tuberculosis.

There was evidence in the placing of bodies.Bones were displaced, 

which is a means of preventing a whole dead body from walking...

Obvious really.

In the early 1990s an unmarked grave site of the assiciated Walton family

was opened, and one of the bodies

there showed its head displaced. 

It was very common practice to turn the skull around,

so that it would then stay dead and buried.

The practice still continues I believe, 

and not just in eastern european countriesl

 the same fears probably exist in the west, after Bram Stoker,

and Hammer horror, Buffy Angel, and the Twilight stories?

I recently watched Josh Gates on the travel channel

Expedition Unknown: watch out for that one!

 interviewing a man who had opened a grave to kill a vampire.