Other states, other lives, other souls

We live in a townhome complex in Minneapolis where NOONE comes trick or treating on Halloween!  At first it was sad, but now it has freed us to pierce the veil between life and and the underworld, and commune with the dead our own way.  Three years ago we started inviting our friends to celebrate Samhain on November 1. Samhain is the original pagan holiday celebrating the change in seasons from light to dark, the new year, and the time to remember the dead. (www.newgrange.com/samhain.htm) In India, Diwali is celebrated on November 1, the Hindu new year, as well. Like many pre-Christian earth celebrations, Samhain was converted into two Christian celebrations: All Saints Day and All Souls Day, as Christianity took over in Europe.   If any of you have seen the movie Coco about El Dia de los Muertos, you get the gist. Halloween is a further evolution of the original seasonal celebration that is peculiar to the US in its focus on children and trick or treating. Ghost costumes, zombies, and skeletons are what is left of what was essentially a celebration of the coming winter, darkness and remembrance of the dead.

In the US, we gringos don’t like to think about death. The healthcare industry has made millions offering one more expensive month of a miserable existence to stave off the inevitable death that we all face as part of the life cycle.  Halloween is the bastard child of these very spiritual celebrations, like Santa Claus and Christmas lists and elevator carols are to Saturnalia, Winter Solstice and the birth of Jesus.

Being the secular humanists, atheists, pantheists, and lapsed monotheists that we are, we enjoy recreating All Hallow’s Eve to meld the best of the earth celebrations and the mask-making and merriment of modern day Halloween.  This year’s theme is transitions. In Catholicism, there is purgatory. In Buddhism there is the bardo. In Netflix there is The Good Place, which is really the Bad Place, and then there’s the Medium Place. In the Celtic tradition Samhain is a time when the veil between life as we know it and death as we don’t know it is thin, allowing us a glimpse of the beyond, and even a visit (hence this is a travel post).  There have been best sellers written by people who claim to have died and come back to life. When my brother-in-law nearly died by drowning, the Dominican nurses in the closest hospital to Jones Beach wanted to know if he had seen the other side. Sadly, he had not.  The trilogy His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman offers a counter story to Heaven and Hell in the Christian faith, with Heaven presented as a kind of purgatory.

For our celebration we are fortunate to live in walking distance from a magnificent wild park on the edge of Minneapolis. Two plus years ago two friends of ours bought a lovely home that sits on the edge of the same park and faces out to woods on two sides. That inspired us to evolve the tradition from the first year where we created a nighttime loop through a section of the park to serve as a taste of the underworld and a plunge into the darkness of the coming season. The last two years, we asked people to park in the lot behind a local middle school, where we assembled two groups to lead through the dark but decorated path to the end point.  The weather has been crisp and dry, so people did not need to cover their costumes with parkas or raincoats. At the end there was a bonfire and a chance to cook beef on a stick and sample the potluck dishes most guests brought to the gathering.

This year the veil between life and what comes next will be even thinner.  The other couple purchased the empty lots adjacent to their house and the park, leading down to a natural pond.  We have fashioned a raft where Charon the ferryman will take groups across the pond from the end of the self-guided path to the underworld.  As in the Aeneid, this is not a death sentence, but only a chance to visit, explore ancient myths of life after death, and return to the living.  This year we will have a fortune teller at the house as well. Samhain celebrations included fortune telling, as part of envisioning the new year.

Gotta go! We have 40 pumpkins to carve, lighted balloons to float, a tombstone to cut and shrines to erect before next weekend. A joyous and thoughtful Halloween/Samhain/All Hallows Eve to all of you who partake.