FROM THE BEREAN CALL (SATURDAY OCTOBER 29, 2011)
HALLOWEEN PAGAN THEMES
FILL WEST'S VACUUM [Excerpt]*
Seems like Americans just want it
to be Halloween all year. The holiday just keeps getting more popular. Seven in
10 expect to celebrate it in some way this Oct. 31, up from about six in 10
last year, according to a National Retail Federation report.
This is the most in the nine
years the NRF has been tracking. In 2011, Americans are also planning to spend
more than other years, an average of $72 each. Total outlays by consumers are
expected to reach $6.86 billion this fall.
Why the surge in popularity for an
ancient harvest ritual? Some of the factors that account for it are as harmless
and loveable as a new 12-pound pumpkin from the farm. Others have the capacity
to spook.
Unmask Halloween, however, and
you'll also find some disconcerting features. People value Halloween, like
Valentine's Day, because they can tell themselves that it's not merely
secularized but actually secular, which is to say, not Christian, Jewish, Hindu
or Muslim.
But as much as we'd like it to
be, Halloween isn't secular. It is pagan. There's nothing else to call a set of
ceremonies in which people utter magical phrases, flirt with the night and
evoke the dead. One of my family's favorite Halloween props was a hand that
moved, as though from the netherworld, when you reached to collect a few pieces
of candy corn. Necromancy is a regular part of Halloween games. Zombie masks
are one of this year's top- sellers. As grouchy theologians used to point out,
the origin of Halloween was most likely Samhain, an ancient Celtic holiday on
which the dead, in some accounts, supposedly returned to visit.
There's a reason for the pull of
the pagan. In the U.S., we've been vigorously scrubbing our schools and other
public spaces of traces of monotheistic religion for many decades now. Such
scrubbing leaves a vacuum. The great self-deception of modern life is that
nothing will be pulled into that vacuum. Half a century ago, the psychologist
Carl Jung** noted the heightened interest in UFOs, and concluded that the
paranormal was "modern myth," a replacement for religion.
**[TBC: Jung himself was heavily
involved in necromancy and wrote /Septem sermons ad Mortuos/ (/The Seven Sermons to the Dead/) to mollify ghosts he claimed were harassing him
(http://www.gnosis.org/library/7Sermons.htm).]
Children or adults who today
relish every detail of zombie culture or know every bit of wizarding minutiae
are seeking something to believe in. That church, mosque and synagogue are so
controversial that everyone prefers the paranormal as neutral ground is
disconcerting. There's something unsettling about the education of a child who
comfortably enumerates the rules for surviving zombie apocalypse but finds it
uncomfortable to enumerate the rules of his grandparents' faith, if he knows
them.
*(Shlaes, "Halloween's Pagan
Themes Fill West's Faith Vacuum," Bloomberg Online, 10/19/11).
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