At this time of year on this particular blending of day and night, the troubles and terrors of other worlds come by.
At the crossing point of summer and winter there is a bridge that we all have to cross, like it or not.
Traditionally, Halloween or All Hallows Eve is celebrated, if that is the right word, all over the world, each in their own way for different reason and sometimes, the same.
The spirit worlds are occupied by all kinds of colourful folk and the nearest and perhaps dearest are the departed. If you wish to say one last thing to a recently departed loved one, now is the time to say it. For the two worlds are separated by little more than a thin curtain at this particular time and we can whisper what we wish to those we cared for.
Apart from these dearly departed there are other spirits. Some on the wild side have never left the pull of the earth’s gravity, wishing instead to experience life’s promised pleasures – even from a tantalising distance. The great show of human kind must be fascinating to watch from above, below and sideways. If you wish to demonstrate a tantrum of feelings and send down a little abuse to those who cannot usually see or hear your footfalls, then tonight is the night.
Evil of a greater kind is naturally also present and not so far off as many ‘good folk’ would wish. It bends a curled line of finger tips through the intervening space and grabs unlucky souls from behind, twisting their lives in directions no sane person expected. Whether it is a war or a car crash or a boat disaster of the clashing of people in normally loving families, the great long bearded shadow comes down harder than people fall.
And all of this has become Walt Disneyised. While Celtic folk are keeping their doors closed for the passing of Samhain and the Witches Sabbath, curiously dressed children wander in the streets knocking on doors. The inhabitants are invited to give them fear or favour, in the expectation that nothing could possibly go wrong, and usually, thankfully, it does not.
But you have to ask, what do these children think they are doing? And the older ones who arrive in each others houses for a ‘party’ dressed as ghouls and fools and everything in between.
As if the spirit world and the horror of it’s separation that we call death, is entertainment. In a society where everything is ‘rock solid’ and ‘safe as houses’, materialism blinds the sixth sighted ( as we all are ) from the more gaseous reality of our forefathers and fore mothers. Perhaps they believe the energetic world of the disembodied was jno more than ‘once upon a time’. Despite the ‘Faerie Stories’ of childhood when distant memories of ancient archetypes are explained to the very young ( at their repeated insistence ), despite this grounding in the aerial worlds, they have forgotten or lost the ability to believe.
Like Wendy and Peter Pan, you only have to believe, to fly and live for all eternity. But instead we settle for rattling the bones of the unloved and invisible from the comfort of living rooms and television screams.
In my humble view we should tread carefully on graves and respect what we do not know and would not wish to know if we knew. Horror is not just the jingling of the vertebrae of the spine. It is as real now as it ever was, in fact more so, for the skin of the world is unpeeling before our eyes. Like lava pouring from the cauldron of La Palma and climate change, we risk being overwhelmed by what we summon up through ignorance.
LEAR 270Howl, howl, howl, howl! Oh, you are men of stones. Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone forever. I know when one is dead and when one lives. She’s dead as earth. Lend me a looking-glass. If that her breath will mist or stain the stone, Why then, she lives.
KENT Is this the promised end?
EDGAR Or image of that horror?
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