Brace yourselves out there, people, because tonight, unruly hordes of kids will be descending upon your neighborhood in a delirious pagan frenzy of candy-fueled madness. Halloween is upon us once again!
I've been fascinated by all things uncanny and macabre since I was a little kid. Horror, dark sci-fi and fantasy, true crime stories, legends and mythology, I loved it all and I still do, several decades later. Even now, all these years later, I still experience the thrill of that primal fear response when I read a particularly good story or watch a well-made horror movie; I will always love that crawling, electric tingle you get in the back of your brain when you're getting freaked out by something that you can't rationalize away. It's a genetic holdover from an evolutionary period long in the past, when the cover of night brought out all manner of terrestrial terrors, and the slate sky above contained a million points of ghostly light, each one its own fathomless mystery. In modern times, we've learned that the dark is nothing more than an absence of light, and the ethereal objects that hang menacingly in the heavens above are not gods or demons, but merely super-dense clumps of dust and gas. Even still, knowing what we know today, humankind fears the dark, and we continue to gaze at our night sky with superstitious wonder in our hearts and minds.
Halloween is the watered down and commercialized evolution of several millennia of harvest rituals. In colder climates, harvest time signaled the decline of long days and gentle nights; winter was not just another season, it was a direct threat to life and limb. A successful harvest meant that most of the community would probably survive to see the green shoots of spring. An unsuccessful harvest meant certain death for many, and perhaps for all. The door-to-door panhandling for candy could arguably be symbolic of the starving unfortunates of yesteryear, wracked by hunger and the agonizing ailments of malnutrition, resembling specters as they shake in the cold and beg for whatever scraps that might be spared.
I'm just spitballing over here. I like to do that. Whether we are aware of it or not, all of our traditions are an evolutionary product of some ritual from the long-forgotten past. As the years become centuries, and then millennia, the original intention is lost in an ever-morphing series of interpretations, until it is lost forever. In this manner, begging for food in times of desperation eventually becomes a disorganized street masquerade for children. Jupiter becomes Yahweh and shamanistic magic becomes modern medicine. The never-ending battle between the sun and the moon becomes the rotation of the Earth. But the fear of the unknown and unknowable always remains. We have taken photographs of an atom, but we still experience that crawling tingle in the back of our minds when we step into a darkened room and the light switch doesn't work.
I find it very interesting. It's almost as if we, despite our large brains and scientific prowess, are still hardwired to fear the phantasms that haunt our imagination. What does this mean? Why hasn't evolution gotten rid of this strange little nervous tic of ours? I mean, we no longer required a prehensile tail, so we lost it. We know longer needed massive jaws to grind up raw vegetation, so we lost it. As far as I can see, it serves no purpose to be afraid of something when we know damn well that it doesn't exist. Doesn't it?
Or ... maybe there is a damn good reason to fear the dark. Maybe there is a reason the night sky makes us feel so small and vulnerable and uncomfortably exposed. Irrational fears may not be an evolutionary mistake, after all, nor may they actually be irrational at all. Who knows? Like I said, I'm just spitballing over here. It's a habit of mine.
Regardless, I hope you all have a great Halloween night. Be safe, and please, don't eat those stale Halloween caramels that come in the black-and-orange wrappers. You'll lose a filling in one of those things!
Happy Halloween!
