Memento Mori

Like Halloween - a vaccine from fear of otherworldly - helps to survive and become people

It would seem that today America needs fear least of all. It is enough to turn on the TV and watch the reports from the front, which have been chilling for eight months. But even they do not cancel the psychological need for artificial horrors that replace and replace the present in the masquerade mystery of evil called Halloween.

On this black and red day, on the eve of the old Christian holiday of the day of all saints, America is immersed in the madness of a much more ancient pagan Halloween.

In essence, this is a holiday-exclusion. The only day of the year when we pay tribute to the night side of life.

Laughing and playing, Halloween masks the fear of otherworldly secrets, who make us all with shy children peering in the shade under the bed.

Before my eyes, for the half century that I spent in America, this holiday of the devilry turned from children's fun into a universal festival of alternative reality. Moreover, Halloween easily stepped over the boundaries of his traditional Celtic and Anglo-Saxon lands to win other peoples and countries, including (I don’t know, however) and Russia, where carnival traditions sung by Gogol had long forgotten.

Is it because Halloween is a festival of death that was ideologically incompatible with the Soviet regime? Death rudely crossed out all the plans of communism, so communism did not know what to do with it. The best monument of this confusion is the Mausoleum, where the Lenin’s body continues to today Leninist business. Unable to avoid death, the government loaded it with social functions. Most often, death was overcome in work. The gulag became the apotheosis of labor reincarnation: here life was clearly and mercilessly melted into industrial facilities.

But the worse the everyday life, the brighter the holidays. (Recall at least the film "Kuban Cossacks" .)

Halloween came from the contrary. Death in him went down from the tragic peaks to the monastery of the grotesque, parody, black humor. Its presence - noisy and annoying Mempento Mori - brings an ironic shade to our relationship with reality. This ambiguous nuance, extinct life, prevents her from dissolving without sediment in everyday concerns.

The cascade of festive nightmares, which fall on us every Halloween, serves as a kind of initiation. During this rite, as anthropologists explain, the teenager is passing by fear.

Only having learned to overcome it in the game with death, he can enter on equal terms not in the otherworldly, but in adulthood, where there is always a place for superstition.

About how universal our prejudices are said, the data of a special study. According to surveys of an authoritative sociological center in the United States,

Every fifth American believes that he met with ghosts, every seventh consulted with a psychic, three out of four believe in parapsychological phenomena.

To explain the durability and ubiquity of faith in otherworldly activity, scientists turned to evolution, which can explain the nature of this faith with our internal structure. So, Anthropologist Pascal Boyer considers fear of an infernal important protective mechanism introduced into the human psyche at the very early stage of his development. While in constant danger of being eaten a predator or a dead rival, our ancestors interpreted any sign as a dangers signal.

Alternately living on his guard, they were scared of sudden sound, movement, flash of light. Usually these were harmless natural phenomena like wind or thunderstorms, but the cautious survived more often the careless, and therefore, they conveyed fear with their genes inexplicable.

The skill fixed in thousands of generations began to be called intuition. This is the vague term that we use (and which we willingly abuse) when we talk about our relations with the otherworldly.

It is interesting that such a hypothesis of the origin of religious emotions is equally convenient for its author, a convinced atheist, and for his believers, who believe that God, managing evolution, thus handed us the ability to discover his presence in this world.

In this perspective, Halloween, despite the entire commercialization of the holiday, is preserved by a fragment of a primitive attitude. The vaccine from the inevitable fear of the otherworldly, he deserves respect already because he helped us survive and become people.