This is All Souls Day. Over time we have given it many other names —Allhallows, All Hallows Eve, All Hallow Even, Halloween, most plainly, Dio de los Muertos, The Day of the Dead. T.H. Luhrmann writes (below) of this day and night with clarity and intelligence. It is a day to wait upon and welcome the dead, not in the zombie sense but into life, as companions we do not outgrow. They are always with us, for better and sometimes for worse, in sickness and health, in joy and grief. In that sense, death is a passage we relive every day, not only on All Hallows Eve. To live fully is at once to experience living and dying. Grandparents, mother and father, husband or wife, treasured pet like Luhrmann's dog Dorethea, even sons and daughters. Our lost loves are forever presences. We do not outlive them, indeed we embody them —they are our ghosts — and we can come to live with them less painfully, more consciously and gracefully, and in doing so renew our lives and theirs. No memorial in time or stone is more authentic or heartfelt.
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New York Times
In the Presence of All Souls
By T. M. LUHRMANN
October 30, 2013
When my dog Dorothea died — she was the first dog I’d chosen for myself, and she had looked at me in a certain way when I visited the shelter, making me feel that I could not leave without her — she left a nearly unbearable ache in my heart. Dogs do this: They hold joy and love and solace in a way humans can’t, and then they die. But after she died, I heard her. I was sitting at my desk and the sounds of her nails tap-tapping down the wood floor of the hall came to my ears, and only when I turned to look for her did I remember that she was gone. Sometimes I felt her presence, like a heaviness on my lap or at my side. Sometimes I still do.
T. M. Luhrmann
It turns out that this is not uncommon. As many as 80 percent of those who lose loved ones report that they sense that person after death. These are real sensory events. People hear a voice; they feel a touch; they recognize a presence. A friend told me that a year after her husband’s death, she would still find him sitting on that bench in the park, waiting for her. She liked that. In fact, one of the central research findings in this area is that post-bereavement experiences are helpful. They’re also more likely to occur after long and happy marriages. (There appears to be no research yet on pet loss.)
One study found that one in 10 people had sensory experiences so rich and frequent that they felt their dead spouse was always with them. “Part of my life is gone,” Dame Thora Hird, a British actress, told The Daily Telegraph in 2000, about the loss of her husband after 58 years of marriage, “but he isn’t a long way away. Don’t think I’m being silly, but I sit in his easy chair in the loft and so often, I have a feeling he’s there.”
Our ancestors thought that the dead could walk and speak with us. That, of course, is the point of Halloween, or Allhallows Eve, the time of year when the veil between the worlds was thought to thin. The day probably descends from one of the great fire festivals celebrated by the Celts, All Hallow Even, the day when the souls of the departed would visit their old homes and warm themselves by the fire. “It was, perhaps, a natural thought,” Sir James George Frazer, a Scottish anthropologist of the Edwardian era, wrote in his magisterial “Golden Bough,” “that the approach of winter should drive the poor shivering hungry ghosts from the bare fields and the leafless woodlands to the shelter of the cottage with its familiar fireside.”
Of course, it was not only the dead who roamed on that night: “Witches then speed on their errands of mischief, some sweeping through the air on besoms” — or brooms — “others galloping along the roads on tabby cats, which for that evening are turned into coal-black steeds.”
We tend to treat this old folklore as so much fluff — the stuff of masks and costumes — but increasingly, scholars are finding evidence for its experiential underpinnings. Another example of a real psychological event that may partially explain our folklore is sleep paralysis. A quarter or more of all Americans report that they have awaked to find they cannot move. Often they feel a weight on their chest, hands clutching their throat and a dark malevolent presence in the room.
“I was a college sophomore,” one man recalled. “One night I went to bed early. I was awakened by the sound of my door being opened, and footsteps approached the bed. I tried to turn on the light beside my bed, but I couldn’t move or speak. The footsteps came to the side of my bed, and I felt the mattress go down as someone climbed onto the bed, knelt on my chest and began to strangle me. I had an overwhelming impression of evil. And then I did move, first my hand and then my whole body. I leaped out of bed, heart racing, and turned on the light to find the room empty.”
David J. Hufford, an emeritus professor at Penn State College of Medicine, experienced that event as a young man. He told one person — who stared at him as if he were crazy — and no one else. Later, when he did folklore research in Newfoundland, he found that the local people had a name — the Old Hag — and an elaborate description for what he had experienced. Mr. Hufford argues that this sleep-related phenomenon — widely documented around the world and in sleep science — forms the core of many events given as evidence for witchcraft practice in the 16th and 17th centuries. Here, for instance, is Richard Coman’s testimony against Bridget Bishop at the Salem witch trials of the 1690s: “The curtains at the foot of the bed opened, where I did see her. And presently she came and lay upon my breast or body and so oppressed me that I could not speak nor stir.”
To be sure, the fact that we can identify in-the-body phenomena (hallucinations, sleep paralysis) associated with ideas about the supernatural does not necessarily mean that those ideas are false. Mr. Hufford, who also studies near-death and other remarkable experiences, is very clear about that: “Learning as much as we can about spiritual experience does not make spirituality go away.”
But what this research makes clear is that when people report that they hear their dead husband or are terrified by an evil presence that groped at their throat in the night, they are not necessarily making it up, nor are they crazy. Events like these are rather what Ann Taves, professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, calls the “building blocks” of religious experience. The experiences are psychologically real events. How you interpret them is up to you.
Happy Halloween.
T.M. Luhrmann is a professor of anthropology at Stanford University..