Halloween, Magic, and Belief

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“I was born with magic”—in the words of the protagonist in my fave TV series The Adventures of Merlin (which I shamelessly view over and over again on Netflix). We’re all born with magic. It’s the innate human ability to dream and imagine and have fantastical experiences that, for some, result in glorious creativity and innovation and advance humankind. Humans are the only beings on Earth that can build castles in the sky—and convince themselves and others that those castles are “real.” Wonderful and perilous. Right? What my personal foray into magic and mysticism has taught me is that the human experience of the magical, mystical, supernatural, occult, spiritual, and religious is real and valid, but the explanations we give for our “otherworldly” (or more accurately “innerworldly”) experiences are largely conjecture—a big creative guess about what weird thing just happened.

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The explanations get jimmied up into a belief, a doctrine, and then into a ritual, a standard, a paradigm. This works in many ways, but take, for example, the child terrorized by things-that-go-bump-in-the night. When I was a child of about age 10 years, I was a given my own bedroom. It was a small room in which was a door that led to the attic and a steam radiator. It was a decent space with groovy, optical-illusion black and white wallpaper that my parents put up as a decorative treat for me (it being the early 70s), but I spent weeks that first winter being absolutely terrorized by a phantom knocking on the attic door. I finally got the nerve, late one night, to go into my parents’ bedroom to alert them to the situation. My snoozing mother opened one eye when I whined about my predicament and growled in cruel exasperation, “It’s the radiator. Get back to bed!” (Not only did the steam radiator hiss, it made knocking sounds.) Boy, did I feel stupid. . .

But perhaps my mother felt that way about 7 or 8 years prior when I was old enough to speak and kept blabbing, in fine detail, about a guy named Guy who my mother feared was a dude shadowing us. She was understandably feeling terrorized until an artist friend came for a visit and began sketching a pic of a man who he announced was Guy—“Little Niecies” imaginary friend.

Tarocchi

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Where am I going with this? Well, Halloween is approaching—as well as some other holidays. That means, in this free 21^st century ubermulticultural, anarchic American society, that everyone comes out of the woodwork to impose their beliefs and values on others and also reframe and impose rules on the beliefs and celebratory traditions of others. As for Halloween—a mardi-gras–like harvest festival in which the macabre and diabolical are spoofed—what we get is an eyeful of missives from fundamentalist Christians on how Halloween is a Satanic orgy plucked from the pages of the Malleus Maleficarum (the book that, despite popular understanding, was never given credence by the medieval Catholic Church and whose authors were denounced by it . . . just sayin’). We also get stories, by and for Muggles, about the rise of the modern witchcraft and pagan movements, whose adherents celebrate the antique Northern European cultural festival of Samhain (from which Halloween was adapted) as a religious one. For more information about this, I refer anyone reading this to an essay by historian Ronald Hutton, which was published in The Guardian last year. 

Is it OK to revel in and also spoof our superstitions about and fascination with magic and the supernatural for Halloween and also laugh in the face of death and the ugly unknown it represents ? Sure. It is a bonding human experience. Seeing traditions in that way makes them poignant and memorable for me beyond whatever beliefs we construct as their rationale.

The images are all photos from my magical still lifes series, with the image below being an example of digital photo manipulation.

The Spell