October 2008

The Sand Box

In bringing our children up, I resist the Disney-fication of myth, especially as it relates to the holidays.  Halloween seems the most challenging.  How do we find right balance?  The real content of the feast, the specter of death, is something our culture purposefully avoids?  All Hallow’s Eve, the night before the double feasts of All Saint’s Day and All Soul’s Day, the night that goblins and ghouls are released from the cometary, when the un-dead take center stage, the night to face our fears of death.    

The hoarding of candy is an example of where the Disney-fication leads the content of every mythologem: consumerism.  So how do we prevent that?  How do we keep the spooks in?  The difference between a Grimm’s fairy tale and a Disney-fied offering is where the answer lies.  The working of the oral tale on the imagination in half light around a fire is an important encounter for both children and adults with the archetype of initiation.  One of the failings of mass media for our growth and development is that atrophy of our collective imagination in the face of the flood of imagery that assaults our senses.  Again, all for the purpose of consumerism.  Tonight we will share a tale from a book of fairy tales from North Wales.  And yes, the purpose is to feel the fear, to doubt the rational determinism of the limits of reality, to give the irrational a context and opportunity to surface. 

Then there is the costuming, the masks, the playing with identity.  We take the time to build our costumes and to share to develop a story of the character and role our children will play.  My son remembers each and every costume he has built and has made it a point to learn what he wore when he was an infant.  These characters map for him his growth.  Mask making and wearing is an ancient source of ritual.  We encourage our children explore and play with their costumed roles.  It needs to be more than asking for candy.  

What other values are inherent in the holiday?  Behind the sense of the ghouls is simply the seasonal death of autumn.  And with that is the celebration of the harvest.  We are fortunate to have a pumpkin patch so that the jack-o-lantern we carve we also started from seeds last April, and seeds from these jack-o-lanterns have been saved for next years crop.  The extra seeds are baked and the extra pumpkins become pies.  In this way the value of sustainability underlies our celebration.  

One afterthought: Carl Jung noted that the gods have become our diseases.  To that end how interesting to consider the undead quality of the diseases that ravage our society.  Consider my challenge to let the ghouls speak again in the light of health care reform.  Hmm…now that’s a twist.

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