Happy Holy Eve. Today/tonight is the time to honor and remember our departed loved ones. We do this with hideously carved pumpkin heads that remind us of our past when we were head hunters in Europe and used to display the severed heads of our enemies around the house with candles lighting up their empty eye sockets, and with costumes of witches and devils so that we don't forget how scary we are supposed to believe the natural religion of our ancestors tonight is/was.
Today/tonight is another reminder that the last two thousand years of Christianity, and the false peace it expounds upon is just a speck in our long cultural history. The "Auldthing" guided us for a hundred thousand years and more and it's still running in the background of our memories. After this "civilization" falls and another "Dark Age" comes, the old beliefs will come back to guide the ones who come after us. Imagination has always given us the masks of gods, but that long, hundred thousand year tradition and experience of living gives us truth, and the collective human culture that fuels our intellectual reality. We have been dreaming and remembering for a very long time and handing down the lessons of life orally for a lot longer than we have known how to write about it.
About twenty-five thousand years ago something happened. We started recording the things we know so that we could remember beyond the span of a single human life. We started painting on cave walls, scratching cyphers on bone and shell, sculpting images of ideal women and animals in clay, building huge stone edifices, using symbols to represent tangibles, and eventually to develop writing styles to record our existence and to hand on our thoughts to those around us and for those to come after us. That something that sparked this long renaissance remains a mystery to us and has been speculated about for generations. We come closer and closer to understanding why or what caused us to start recording so suddenly after seeming so silent for so many thousands of years. Yet, I wonder if there isn't something we are leaving out in our quest for the understanding of the phenomena. I wonder if we really understand how ancient the fairy tales are with their goblins, ogres, kings, princesses, bakers, and spinners are? I wonder if we know that we are hearing the voices of the ancient ones from tens of thousands of years ago as they tell us our familiar bedtime stories about witches, gingerbread houses, dwarfs and princes? The symbols we have made up help us to remember when we can understand them, but we also remember individually deep inside our human souls. That deeper memory is much older than the symbolism of painting, sculpture, oral tradition, or writing. It has been with us far longer. That inner knowing has been with us ever since we first woke up and became human and apart from other animals.
The tales we are all told as children, and our mostly misunderstood holidays are the voices of thousands who have gone before us over thousands of years reaching out to us so that we may remember who we are and where we come from, but most importantly; how we survived these untold generations and how we may continue to survive, no matter what. Every pumpkin head glowing with inner candle light, every jolly fat man who comes in the winter to cheer us up with presents, every beautiful maiden who comes laden with flowers in the Spring, every harvest of thanks in the Fall, every part of the fabric of that inner core of humanness comes from those many almost forgotten voices who lived and dreamed and experienced life for a hundred thousand years before us to remind us of where we have been and what makes us homosapien.
We are the animals who record our thoughts and hand those thoughts down to generation upon generation of others of our kind, and one way we do that is through the ritual of holiday festivity. We remember the old ways by acting out in the ceremony of costume at Halloween, by bringing trees into our homes in the dead of winter and lighting them with candles or the modern equivalent during Christmas, by presenting prospective mates with candy hearts in the spring for Valentine's day, and countless other traditions all over the world of man. We do these things in order not to forget what it is that makes us human even though we may have forgotten why. It is what sets us apart from the other inhabitants of this planet. It keeps us in the mystery that we all know exists, but cannot really understand in its mysteriousness.
Science is searching for the answers to the mystery, but the mystery is so huge, so all encompassing, that the answer is elusive. The question itself is mysterious to the point of unanswerability. The "big"questions themselves are often forgotten in the mystery itself. We have so many questions and so many answers age upon age, that we sometimes forget everything around us and descend into periods of know nothingness, war, and ignorance. Yet even in those seeming dark periods, some of us remember in our bodies through the ritual of the Holy Day/Holiday even if our minds seem to have forgetten, and the collective wisdom of our ancestors is preserved and handed on to future generations. Sometimes, one of us stops and wonders why and we find deep comfort and edification directly from the hearts and minds of our ancient ancestors.
Happy Holidays,
Michael
ok, sweet man...hard to comment on this because much of what you write I agree with. I'll look at it hard copy first.
ReplyDeleteYour writing reminded me of something of mine from 5 or 6 years ago....so I just posted it http://loose-associations.blogspot.com/2010/11/intimations-of-mortality-draft.html