The Other Side
Friday, 1st November
All Saints’ Day, La Toussaint, a holiday in France and it’s dead quiet here at 5.30am as I take my first sip of coffee, open my computer. Tasha is curled up on the floor next to me. Though still dark outside, I can’t imagine we’ll see the sun on our morning walk.
Because oooh, it’s been grey. A milky, monochrome, clammy grey that clings to the topography in the Perche…
…and Paris...
Just the ambiance, you could say, for Allhallowtide, the triad of salutes to the dead: Halloween, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day.
The origins of these holy tributes and their traditions are as foggy as our weather. Halloween (All Hallows’/Saints’ Eve), yesterday, was conceived in Celtic lands and may have evolved from a pagan harvest celebration. But maybe not. What is certain is that it transmogrified when moved across the Atlantic by the Irish and the Scots into an ever bigger business ($12 billion in 2023– 24, compared to $3.3 billion in 2005) and one that in the last 20 years has caught fire in Europe too (€2 billion in 2014, a 20% increase over last year).
As for today the 1st, there are traces of festivities honouring saints and martyrs from the 4th century. The Catholic Church originally held the commemoration in May (possibly because of a Roman pagan rite), but by the 9th century (reasons unclear) had agreed on the Irish November date. While remaining a largely Catholic observance, many Protestant denominations continue to acknowledge the day of the dead, without subscribing to the sainthood clause of the insurance policy.
Tomorrow on All Souls’ Day, attention will turn, like the above Dutch nun's, to the recently departed faithful, those whose souls are still wandering the earth in Purgatory, and more particularly to the un-atoned, for whom an absolving prayer or two from the living can provide a leg up to heaven. These days, in France anyway, the saints' and souls' seem to be fused: on the 1st, people buy chrysanthemums and head to church for mass and/or to the cemetery in memory of their loved ones.
Whatever the real story behind these traditions, it’s proof that nothing happens in a vacuum. Trick-or-treating was not invented as a money-making scheme by American capitalists but is probably a riff on a European custom whereby poor children went house to house with hollowed-out, lit-up turnips (representing dead souls) and were given ‘soul cakes’ to eat for the dead. The carving and illuminating of root vegetables - and pumpkins - to keep away bad spirits long pre-dates suburbia.
In fact the term jack o'lantern may derive from the Irish myth around Stingy Jack, a wicked drunkard who twice tricked Satan. When the drink finally killed him, nasty Jack was (unsurprisingly) turned away by St Peter at the Gates of Heaven. Satan, after the dupery, didn't want him in Hell either but gave Jack an ember-lit rutabaga, with which he still wanders the earth.
And the practice of dressing up may have started as a way to hide from aggrieved ghosts, some of those recently dead Jack-types who were still roaming the area in search of vengeance.
I am aware that in many parts of the world right now it is warm and sunny (probably too warm and too sunny), that I'm only speaking of the weather in my little corner of the planet which at the moment happens to be conducive to spectral photos and blog topics.
But when November arrives the natural world in most of the Northern Hemisphere is at the end of a life cycle; the timing of these tributes to death makes symbolic sense and can, beyond the commercial hype, feel naturally eerie.
And this year particularly so, no matter what your weather. With US elections looming next Tuesday, the whole world is perched and waiting...
...with a 50-50 chance the other side will be very murky indeed.
It was certainly a dark walk this morning.
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