I may have ranted and raved about this before, I don’t remember. If so, forgive me. I’m ranting again.
Samhain, sometimes called Halloween, is one of my favorite Pagan holidays. There is something purely magic about it as we celebrate slipping into the Long Dark, passing through the Sleeping Land, to re-emerge in Spring, reborn, rejuvenated, and grateful. It’s the end and beginning of the Pagan new year, the most important waypoint in our journey around the Unconquered Sun. This is home base, our touchstone, the biggest mile-marker on the road.
So we celebrate with disposable costumes, terrible cheap candy, sexualization, misogyny, racist tropes … Ugh. I went to our local big box Halloween store today, and disappointed and disgusted don’t even begin. I was grossed out. Sexy Schoolgirl! Yeah, cuz we need to sexualize our young women more. Sexy Nurse! Yeah, cuz those bitches need to be reduced to sexual objects. Sexy Prison Guard … I can’t even. Sexy Whatever, Jesus. A friend recently shared an ad for a Sexy Mr. Rogers costume and I about lost my lunch.
I have nothing against sex, nothing against women dressing however the hell they want, and straight to hell with anybody who thinks they are asking for sexual violence. But these are male fantasies, rarely female ones. These are costumes that subjugate women. I don’t know a single nurse who signed up for the job because they wanted to wear a too-short skirt, white fishnets, a midriff-bearing top, and a paper hat that looks like a reprint from a fast food joint.
No real power to be found here for women at all. Cleopatra? Wicked Witch? Sexy Witch?
Sure, there were bones and skulls and zombies and gravestones and ghosts, yadda yadda yadda. Undead galore. Creepy stuff. But it was all so … lowest common denominator.
Please, somebody, who is with me here, where are my Samhain Elves?
If I had time and money to burn, I’d open a weird little shop selling Real Samhain Stuff. Costumes that acknowledge death-into-rebirth. The Morrighan, who is terrifyingly sexy, makes Elvira look like a schoolgirl, but nobody would ever accuse her of “asking for it.” How about Wise Woman, or Forest Witch, even Dryad or Nymph, for those who want to play with their sexy sides? How about some real historical heroes, like Harriet Tubman, or contemporary ones like Malala Yousafzai, or gender bending ones like Billy Porter or Ru Paul?
Samhain, or Halloween (a dead rose by any other name smells … like decay), is an opportunity to explore the biggest questions of life, starting with death. And it’s a chance to let your shadow side out for a night, to let it get a few things out of its system so you can go into the New Year lighter and clearer. It’s a time to draw back the veils of reality and explore the truly fantastic, the mysterious, the monstrous, the magical. But it’s like creepy St. Patrick’s Day anymore, just another excuse to drink way too much and do incredibly dumb stuff. Yes, letting inhibitions down a bit can be therapeutic and empowering, but you have to maintain some control in order to gain the benefits.
Ah, frienily, it just makes me sad to see such a powerful opportunity wasted by so many people. Our culture is hung up on a lot of things (hence the Sexy Gravedigger costumes), including death, which we have decided to push as far away as possible and sanitize and disguise until it loses it’s necessary charge. We can’t fully live if we don’t embrace death. So let’s send our dead away and have them embalmed and put them in boxes in the ground and cover them over with dirt so we can pretend it isn’t going to happen to us.
This may be part of the reason Witches are so scary. Witches live on the edges of things, life, death and rebirth. They were the ones who would help wash the bodies and dress them and lay them out in the house so the family could vigil and mourn. Witches were steeped in death, but steeped in life, too, because they balanced on that fine line between the dying and being reborn. They were midwives to the dying and the newborn.
This is not a hill I am planning to die on. I know I will never change the attitudes of millions of people who just want to dress up, get ridiculously drunk, and get laid. But maybe I can inspire a few people to be more mindful, and use the energy of this most sacred day for their development or healing. You know what I would love? And this is probably not possible in 2021 with the pandemic on the rise again, but I would love to have a party where people come as the most empowered versions of themselves, or as their heroes, or as their favorite Goddess of Death and Destruction, and drink tea, eat apple crumbly stuff or scones or pumpkin bars, and brainstorm ways to crush the Patriarchy. Not just, “I’m fed up, grrrr, let’s curse ’em!” but seriously, thoughtfully discuss ways we can form a siblinghood that can deal actual damage to the structures that keep us down. May we make it so.
May the waning year carry you gently to the Long Dark. Bright Blessings.