All Hallows' Eve (Hallow'een)

It is October 31 and I've just been out for an evening walk. Along the way I encountered a great many gouls and goblins, witches and warlocks, ghosts and zombies, along with many a house decorated with cobwebs, spiders, and jack-o-lanterns.  The festival of Hallow'een simply did not exist in the Australia of my youth. The evening before November the 1st passed by simply as the evening before November the 1st. For a Baptist family in an almost entirely Anglo-Australian rural town there was, quite simply, nothing to be celebrated.

But Hallow'een is now quite a big thing. Even in my home town. The change has come because of the power of global capital. There is a great deal of money to be made out of annual celebrations. And so the festivals of other countries - in this case, the USA - have now implanted themselves in the Australian psyche alongside the consumer festivals that were already here: Christmas and Easter, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and Father's Day. The annual spend in richer countries around all these festivals is said to be so large that it is able to keep flagging economies going pretty much on their own. 

Of course, Hallow'een, just like Christmas and Easter, has its roots in a Christian festival that began early in the 4th century as a twin commemoration of 'all saints' and 'all souls'. Today, in the more liturgically catholic Western churches, All Saints is celebrated on November 1 and All Souls on November 2. All Saints invites believers to remember and give thanks for the dead who have most clearly and consistently followed in the way of Christ, those who have most inspired others to imitate Jesus. All Souls invites the same believers to remember and give thanks for all the baptised faithful who each, in their own very ordinary ways - and with varying quality! - also sought to follow Christ. 

The Christian festivals of the dead assume, following the teaching of St Paul, that the dead are really and actually dead. Their bodies have ceased to function, their hearts and brains have stopped entirely, and there is no longer anyone to talk to or communicate with. There is no surviving 'soul' or 'spirit' that has slipped into another metaphysical room or dimension, for the spirit - the essential character or personality - cannot survive without the body. All that is left of a dead person is the objects they possessed, their representation in word or image or textile and, most importantly, the precious memories of their loved ones and of God. But the person is simply no more. She, he or they have ceased to exist.

The consumer festival of Hallow'een apparently finds this sober Christian realism just a little too dull. A more exciting story is apparently necessary to sell all those costumes and sweets. The Hallow'een marketers have therefore revived certain northern-European ideas about the dead still being alive in some sense: dwelling, perhaps, in another realm or dimension which can be accessed via certain rituals or on certain days (especially at Hallow'een). On Hallow'een one can therefore pretend to be such a dead person - a ghost or goul or zombie - or else one can pretend to be one of those who can help the living access the dead: a medium, a witch, a shaman, priest or priestess. On the other side of this ritual transaction, one may pretend to be an ordinary representative of the living who is terrified of what the dead may do if they are not placated or bought off: you can offer a 'treat' - in eurofolk mythology an 'offering' or 'sacrifice' - to buy the dead's favour. In either case, the usefulness of this revived eurofolk metaphysics to marketers is twofold. You can sell the appropriate costume to represent the unfriendly dead. And you can sell the remedy for encountering the unfriendly dead: lots of lollies and other forms of sugary candy. Genius really. And incredibly lucrative.

The whole thing is built on ritual and, like all rituals, it teaches a very particular version of the way things are. In this case, the lesson is clear: there are ghouls about, so be ready to pay them off lest they do you harm.

As the tiresome bore I probably am, I tend to avoid the consumer festival of Hallow'een (along with those associated with Christmas, Easter and Valentine's Day). I am not inclined to fall for the consumer trick of creating a problem that buying a product will solve. Nor am I inclined to import a metaphysics of death that is entirely redundant to both the Indigenous ontology of my mob or the Christian faith of my church. 

For Aboriginal people, death is a return to 'country', to the ongoing ecological transfiguration of all that is dead into all that is alive. The individual self does not survive, but is transformed into compost for the perseverance of life itself. And, for Christians who have read and inwardly digested the New Testament, the dead are dead. They survive only in our memories and in the memory of God. We can mourn their loss, we can give thanks for their influence in our lives, but they are no longer alive in any individuated sense. 

So what of all that talk in Christian circles about a future resurrection of the body? Well, to summarise a much longer discussion, my own take on the notion of bodily resurrection is that it is the body of the cosmos as a whole that rises. All its constituent parts are, as a matter of public record, constantly passing out of life, through death, into life renewed and reconfigured. Resurrection is not, therefore, about the survival of individually identifiable bodies. In death we do, quite literally, die to our/selves. But then we are resurrected. Not as indivividual selves, but as de-identified participants in a cosmic 'Christ'. Or a cosmic 'country'. Take your pick. I recognise that this is a rather heterodox approach, but it's the one I have taken as I recontexualise Christianity within Aboriginal knowledges. I don't expect everyone to agree with me.

May your Hallowtide be blessed by the knowledge that divine love cannot be bought but is simply given, unconditionally.

Garry Worete Deverell