Saturday, November 03, 2007
BEWARE THE UNREMEMBERED DEAD
As most folks know, Halloween has traditionally been a time when the dead return to the earth to stir up trouble. Such was the case even back when the day was called Samhain. But this provokes the question: Why do the dead want to cause trouble? Why is it that dead people typically have it in for the living?
When this question popped up in my cluttered mind, I plowed through my conceptual clipping files until I came across two memories, one of the Mexican Dia de los Muertos festival, and the other of Kenyan professor John S. Mbiti's book African Religions and Philosophy. For the Mexican celebration, the dead are depicted as impish, hyper, and numerous. The grinning skulls in Posada's drawings look identical, especially when he draws the dead as mobs of skeletons. Mbiti, writing about African conceptions of the dead, pointed to a similar idea across sub-Saharan African cultures, the idea that if someone living can remember a dead person, than that dead person is not truly dead. According to Mbiti, the recent dead exist as "living-dead," and as long as those who remember the departed continue to pay the soul respects and make offerings, all is well. However, when the last living rememberer dies, the departed becomes truly dead. Personhood is snatched away, and what was once an individual's spirit now becomes a faceless part of the mass of unremembered dead, an IT. These dead resent being forgotten, and, since their humanity has vanished, tend to be vicious to the living.
It's a sad idea, that even if there is an afterlife, we really don't get to enjoy it for very long, because we are eventually transformed into something inhuman and destructive. Don't look to the Bible for solace; Sheol never struck me as appealing.
As most folks know, Halloween has traditionally been a time when the dead return to the earth to stir up trouble. Such was the case even back when the day was called Samhain. But this provokes the question: Why do the dead want to cause trouble? Why is it that dead people typically have it in for the living?
When this question popped up in my cluttered mind, I plowed through my conceptual clipping files until I came across two memories, one of the Mexican Dia de los Muertos festival, and the other of Kenyan professor John S. Mbiti's book African Religions and Philosophy. For the Mexican celebration, the dead are depicted as impish, hyper, and numerous. The grinning skulls in Posada's drawings look identical, especially when he draws the dead as mobs of skeletons. Mbiti, writing about African conceptions of the dead, pointed to a similar idea across sub-Saharan African cultures, the idea that if someone living can remember a dead person, than that dead person is not truly dead. According to Mbiti, the recent dead exist as "living-dead," and as long as those who remember the departed continue to pay the soul respects and make offerings, all is well. However, when the last living rememberer dies, the departed becomes truly dead. Personhood is snatched away, and what was once an individual's spirit now becomes a faceless part of the mass of unremembered dead, an IT. These dead resent being forgotten, and, since their humanity has vanished, tend to be vicious to the living.
It's a sad idea, that even if there is an afterlife, we really don't get to enjoy it for very long, because we are eventually transformed into something inhuman and destructive. Don't look to the Bible for solace; Sheol never struck me as appealing.
# posted by toner_low @ 11:06 PM 
