Halloween and the Rite of Reversal
By George McKale | From The Sun archives
It’s almost here. The thrill of dressing up, applying makeup, transforming oneself into something else altogether, is upon us. Halloween has a deeply rooted and rather ancient history, however, in Sonoma, ghosts are not limited to showing themselves just on Halloween. In fact, many see ghostly apparitions throughout the year.
Walk over to Vella’s Cheese Factory to hear the screams of patients from the old asylum in Eldridge, who were locked in tiny rooms, each with a different color. The experiment was designed to better understand which colors might be used to ease shell-shocked soldiers from their pain. Red was a bad color. Don’t forget Mission San Francisco Solano, where baptized Indians are buried nearby. The Sebastiani Theatre has a ghost, as does the relatively new Ledson Hotel.
Halloween’s origins began over 2,000 years ago with the Celts, who held a “summer’s end” festival known as Samhain on November 1. On this day they believed that the border between this world and the “other” became transparent and spirits, both good and evil, could pass through with ease. To ward off evil spirits and avoid ghostly hauntings, costumes and masks were worn as a disguise to elude evil intentions. Today, All Hallos’ Even, is known as the “eve” of All Saints’ Day.
Anthropologically speaking, Halloween, and the antics that go along with it, plays an important role in our society. Without out it, our society may be doomed to an existence of internal anxiety. It allows men to dress as women and women as men, children to come to terms with death by portraying it, and little ballerinas to don broom sticks with dyed black hair.
The real question is why we try to emulate our ancestors still roaming the dusty back roads of the Pueblo. Every society is bound to a set of homemade rules and regulations designed to maintain order. In turn, all cultures seem to have a ritual that encourages one day of chaos. Rituals such as Halloween are designed to release pent up energy associated with the day-to-day rigors of maintaining order. Anthropologists know this day of chaos as the Rite of Reversal.
Other rites found in various societies will often have a reversal component to them. Some purification rites will involve a reversal of roles between men and women. Ultimately, when participants revert back to the customary roles associated with their genders, order and purification of the soul is restored.
Van Gennep, a French ethnographer and folklorist, identified three kinds of rites of passage: separation, transition and incorporation. Rites of separation take place at funerals, rites of transition in ceremonies involving pregnancy and rites of incorporation for marriage ceremonies. In essence, rites of passage mark the evolution from one stage of life to another. They have also been termed “life-crisis rituals’. The only rite missing from the trilogy is the rite of reversal.
The idea behind “trick or treat” is also rooted in the concept of a Rite of Reversal. Tricking is taboo in most societies, however, Halloween allows trickery to be somewhat acceptable, one day out of the year.
