Thursday, October 31, 2013

the origins of halloween


stellarhouse | Halloween, Samhain, All Hallows, All Saints or Hallow-Eve is the season of the Crone.  In ancient paganism, the word Crone denoted an elder priestess or tribal matriarch; a cognate word is "crown," the symbol of a leader. The word was made pejorative when the Christian Church redefined all elder priestesses of the old religion as malevolent witches. Similarly, the word "hag" was once derived from Greek hagia—a holy woman—and also became a Christianized term for a witch.

The divine Crone was originally a part of the trinitarian Goddess, who appeared in Maiden, Mother and Crone forms, associated with the three phases of woman's life, the three phases of the moon and the annual cycles of nature. Viewed as an underworld deity who cared for the dead, the Goddess as Crone ruled autumnal harvest festivals, when the spirits of dead ancestors could visit their descendants and share in the harvest feast. Among the Celts, the well-known "death's head at the feast" used to be an actual skull of an ancestor, set at the table to receive offerings, often with a candle set within it, to simulate the warmth of life and the light of vision. Such was the origin of the jack-o-lantern.

9 comments:

woodensplinter said...

What's that psychotic slogan you've been spouting about "soap, candles, animal feed, fertilizer and parchment grade leather? Somebody stands to make a fortune in Soylent funereal services inc. http://subrealism.blogspot.com/2013/10/why-wait-until-its-sucked-out-of-lazy.html

CNu said...

lol, no need to cast aspersions..., visionary pragmatism and thrift only slightly ahead of its time is not psychotic

woodensplinter said...

I always wonder why American black cults go to such comically great lengths to be wrong, wrong, wrong, on so many levels. Do you suppose that's on purpose? Is it part of an intentional scheme to filter out any vestige of intelligence or critical opposition?

BigDonOne said...

Is mythology Truth? Or isn't it...??

CNu said...

That all depends on how completely and faithfully the keepers/bearers of the underlying collective wisdom have maintained the mythos. Myths serve to encode collective knowledge at multiple levels of understanding. They are complex, multifunctional cultural mnemonics.

Nakajima Kikka said...

Cremation would relieve much of the space concerns. Harvest a small of portion of the deceased's tissue for genetic testing--and perhaps eventual cloning--purposes and convert the rest to ashes.


But changing a culture's death rituals is never simple or easy matter.

CNu said...

Burial and cremation require energy expenditures. Soylent biomass recovery on the other hand generates eroei, as well as useable material resources. Furnish an increasingly inexpensive genomic assay at a discount and you'll quickly begin producing happy and satisfied customers .

Nakajima Kikka said...

Does the eroei really come out positive?

OTOH, some of the biomass recovered could be processed into a kind of wafered cookie that the deceased family could give out as a gift to those who attend the memorial service.

Either way, you will need to have a tissue preservation option available to the family, in case they want to clone their loved one sometime in the future--"give his genome a second chance". A lot of families would jump at that, particularly if the person's death was avoidable, or "stupid" in some way (like an accident). Same genome, new environment, different epigenetics. "A second chance".

CNu said...

lol - who would go for those kuru cookies?



Anyway, is long-term tissue preservation feasible yet? I'm still stuck on old-fashioned cryogenics and believe that to be a boondogle through and through. But I don't know the state of the art. Have things reached the jurassic park vision of just a little viable dna?


as for the eroei, most of the fat will go rancid and has little use other than as biodiesel, just like the grease vats out behind Wendys. The tallow is reserved for keepsake soap and candles (better than kuru cookies) - skin for parchment grade leather - and meat, organs and bones for animal feed and fertilizer.

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