Solarpunk Halloween/Samhain
Capitalism, Alterity, and Transformation
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In creating a mythos for solarpunk, an egalitarian culture in which nature is in symbiosis with technology, we are called to question the rituals from which we are created. A mythos includes a narrative and praxis that orients us to ourselves and our world in ways that adapt us to the challenges we face.
This praxis consists of practices, yes, but also rituals and festivals that bring our narrative to life and that bring us as characters within that narrative to life. When world, narrative, character, and praxis are aligned, we recreate that alignment through our engagement in that mythos.
Whether we’re aware of it or not, we are already characters bound within a narrative with practices, rituals, and festivals that come with it. National anthems, holidays, statues of celebrated people, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of it all, are all part of the mythos we currently live, and they are creating us as people with certain goals, hopes, and fears.
In this essay I look at the already-being-lived mythos of Halloween, and the self and society that it is currently playing a hand in creating, and what it could become in the process of creating a self and society that is far more toward solarpunk than the technofeudalist dystopia we’re currently creating.
Capitalism and Parasitizing the Parasite
When I think about Africa, I think about the Other. A different climate, a different ecosystem, the huge animals, people with different skin and different cultures that all seem so foreign to a culture forged by the long winters of Canada.
I remember reading a large book of African animals when I was a kid. It was a huge binder with photos and descriptions of the lifestyle and behaviours of each of the animals. This otherness, or alterity, seemed so exotic and beautiful. It was an adventure waiting to be had. When I was finally able to read the book, the exotic adventure was tainted by the horror of death waiting in stories of poaching and climate change.
A few months ago, I read an introduction to economics textbook and they mentioned the different strategies African countries had used to stop black market ivory. Some countries had waged war on poachers, trying their best to save the elephants from extinction through the murder of human beings dispossessed and corrupted by capitalist colonialism. Other countries had legalized ivory trade with the stipulation that the elephants must be on one’s own private land. This has created an incentive for such landowners to tend to elephant populations, which had, at least at the time of publication, allowed the populations to begin bouncing back.1
In this circumstance, the Other has parasitized the Same to survive among the horrors of alterity’s colonialist infiltration of their Same.2,3 Africa, other to me, has parasitized capitalism, which is the same to me, in order to survive the horrors of capitalism, which was other to them, as it infiltrates their world, which is their own same. The end result will be the Same. As Audre Lorde says, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”.4
The parasitizing of capitalism to achieve some extra-economic good, the sovereign right of elephants to exist and the protective biodiversity of the ecosystem we are all a part of, will imbue the powers of capitalism with legitimacy within African countries. If capitalism is what has allowed the ivory trade to exist, not only in providing a market but in the negative effects it created that produced the necessity of poaching, then the loop has been closed and the crushing systemic toxicity of capitalism will continue to spoil the biosphere and human society and economy with it.
And yet, the elephant will live (a little) longer, perhaps long enough for the system to evolve, to break open under the weight of alterity for something truly new to emerge.
The potential to survive long enough can be seen by contrast between Japan and the First Nations cultures of Canada. A Metis friend of mine recently went to Japan and commented on how capitalist their spiritual institutions had become. Seeing a temple or participating in some spiritual rite cost money. However, they took these traditions very seriously. He commented on an old Japanese man nodding in approval when he saw my friend and his fiancé respectfully following the proper code of conduct as they entered a temple. Capitalism here seems to have not yet spoiled the seriousness with which certain Japanese took their traditions. It has instead so far afforded the survival of the temples and the traditions surrounding them to at least some extent, and at least from the eyes of the uneducated foreigner.
My friend contrasted this with First Nations culture in Canada. Symbols of Indigenous culture in capitalism are routinely criticized, with sports teams pressured into changing their names and merchandise. Halloween costumes can no longer include Indigenous culture and are punished with accusations of racism. It seems like American Indigenous culture has resisted the parasitism of capitalism, and yet…capitalism has parasitized them, which means their traditions seem, at least from the outside, to be disappearing altogether. Hopefully, the pockets of resistance that remain have real promise.
The point here is not to focus on whether the statements of the last two paragraphs are true. Firstly, they’re more to illustrate a point about parasitism than anything else, to show how pre-capitalist traditions have responded to the demands of success within the capitalist system.
Secondly, it’s to show you how traditions operate within the minds of the average, uneducated population. The fact is that I don’t know really know what I’m talking about with either the Japanese or the First Nations, and that is my point. My knowledge of these things as an outsider are refracted through the capitalist prism that turns them into objects of entertainment. However dearly the insider views their traditions, there are more outsiders than insiders and so these traditions will be subject to how the outsiders determine their success within a marketplace driven by profit.
I have tried so far to show how we may be able to achieve positive ends by parasitizing capitalism, but that this opens us to being parasitized and assimilated by capitalism. While this perpetuates the system, it may be necessary in some cases to keep our traditions alive long enough for the system to change. You might ask why we would need the system to change if the traditions are kept alive well enough to be taken seriously. If privatization for survival works, then it works. That’s what we want.
We cannot confuse the effectiveness of a strategy within a specific system with its effectiveness across all systems. The nature of capitalism is what makes privatization effective. That doesn’t mean privatization is a fundamental Good or not. I’m not anti-privatization necessarily. My point is about privatization’s functional fittedness to the ecosystem that capitalism itself is and creates. Privatization is a strategy that fits a thing functionally to the capitalist ecosystem such that it can win at the games of capitalism in the shorter term, but so too does cancer for a cell in the ecosystem of the body.
As such, our rituals and traditions, the things we hope to keep alive, should not only parasitize capitalism, fitting in functionally to its ecosystem, but to also exapt or make use of the already-existing systems it parasitizes in order to evolve the system to a better form. What is parasitic on the system becomes symbiotic in the wider bio- and sociospheres.
In making a ritual out of Samhain, the original cultural practice that would become Halloween, I had wanted to go to that original meaning of ancestor worship and death of the seasons. I then realized that this would be an escape into the past rather than honouring the very real reasons Samhain has become Halloween. Our ancestors followed Samhain in order to prepare themselves as a people for the coming harshness of winter, to have one last hurrah together, and thus, create social cohesion that would last until the snow had gone.5
Living in wintery Canada, this speaks much to me despite the ease of living provided by capitalism. As we’ll see, the change from Samhain to Halloween that capitalism has afforded has kept a relation to death, but not in honour of ancestors. Samhain has survived as a ritualizing of horror, obscenity, and capitalism itself. Our children dress as monsters and go door to door to eat candy in one of the highest sales periods of candy manufacturers, rivalled perhaps only by a holiday where we eat daily chocolates until you can summon an obese elf that gives you diabetes.6
In short, Halloween is not in honour of the dead or the saints, but in honour of capitalists who are incentivized to keep the tradition going.
Adults do not go trick or treating, but offer themselves, their home, and their money to the trick or treater. Younger adults dress up as monsters or professions, pornifying themselves and these images so that intoxication can, hopefully, bring about sex itself or at least the knowledge that one is porn enough to be an abject of desire.7
Despite all that has been lost as Samhain has become Halloween, there is something rich going on here that cannot be taken for granted. There is something lurking in the dark night of this abomination of a tradition that is, if nothing else, a warning of what happens at the end of a tradition’s attempted parasitizing of capitalism. Is Halloween all that we can hope for in our attempts to survive under capitalism? A tradition so pulled from its tradition that it no longer can be called the tradition that existed before its attempted parasitizing began?
What exactly is Samhain meant to do as a ritual? How might a ritual around Samhain/Halloween hold the total complexity of all these disparate threads I have pointed to in a way that opens us up to the kind of psychology necessary for both social cohesion and transformation?
Halloween Emerges from the Structures of Samhain
Well, what exactly was Samhain before it became Halloween, and is Halloween truly so different? Spoilers on the second question, yes, but not so much as you might think. As to the first, it is popularly believed that the Celts celebrated Samhain as a day for ancestors because of the seasons’ change. The life and activity of summer gave way to the decay of Autumn and the death of Winter. Naturally, this may have had the psychological effect of making them think of death, not only for fear of their own death in the coming Winter, but of those already dead.6
Given the cyclicality of the seasons, the coming of death was not seen as an end, but rather as an end/beginning. It was transitional and transformational, with death being seen as a gateway to new life for our dead-yet-still-living ancestors and of the eventual rebirth of Spring.
We can see how the Celt’s celebration of Samhain was a ritual meant to increase their own functional fittedness to the ecosystem they found themselves in. It prepared them psychologically for the harshness of winter, connecting them with ancestors for guidance and with the promise of death’s transition into the new life of Spring. It prepared them culturally as the communal festival brought them together, reminding them that in the isolation to come they were not truly alone, and the fact that they shared these beliefs gave them far more power than believing them alone.
While all of that sounds nice, and some of it may be true, it’s hard to tell if Samhain really had anything to do with the dead before Christians came to the British Isles.6 While these Christians didn’t call this day’s tradition Samhain, for ease of reference I’ll stick to that word.
For many Christians, Samhain really was a time when they would gather together to pray for the dead in purgatory. This was the halfway point to Heaven, Dante’s Purgatorio, where the souls of the privileged dead would be able to work off the debt of their sin in order to gain access to Heaven. Living relatives could pray for them, shortening the time it took to pay their debt. Once the Protestant Reformation hit, this practice was, at least officially, prohibited.6
Think about what happens there. Not only was prayer prohibited, but the idea that we even could pray for our dead relatives in their journey to Heaven was prohibited. In other words, the Togetherness of Samhain’s ancestor focus and how that afforded survival in the ecosystem of Winter was prohibited. Remember, this was a people who believed in the fiery damnation of Hell.
Now, our fear for our relatives and for our own immortal souls was left unprotected against the horrors of Hell and the radical alterity of death. Really think about that. What could be more other to the living than death? Non-living. The entire enterprise of an after-life is in the hope of some sort of Sameness in that radical alterity. We may be dead, but we are still alive in the Same of our after-life. Again though, all that’s left here is a hope for Heaven and a fear of the torturous damnation of Hell and the evil spirits that exist there.
Let’s sum up what we have so far. We have the radical alterity of death and its representation in the changing of the seasons into Winter. This is seen as a transition from life into death into new life that is survived by the socially cohesive Togetherness brought about by honouring the dead through festivals and rituals. Here we can see the Same, the living, in relation to the Other, the dead. It is not one or the other, but the relation between the two that produces the Togetherness necessary for survival through the wintery transition from Autumn to Spring.
Now, the prohibitions of Protestantism have severed the Same from the Other, and all that remains are the horrors of death, dying, and the Hell of an after-life. The cycle of the living and dying is broken and so too is the cycle of the seasons, psychologically and culturally. We face the radical alterity of Winter/death’s transition alone without aid from or for dead. Yet, death and the dead continue to exist. In a religious system that believed in demons and monsters in the night, we are left only in defense against death’s evils without relation to its good.
Today, with the collapse of Christianity and the dominance of capitalism, Samhain has become Halloween, where the horrors of death and evil spirits are now captured in the Spooky Season culminating in October 31st. No one celebrates November 1st. We are left only with the night, the death but not rebirth of the Sun in promise of Spring. Alterity remains outside the relationality of Togetherness, and we have no recourse but to consume it with the Same. Capitalism, Halloween’s hyper-object of worship, consumes that which attempts to fit functionally within its ecosystem.
Think about that a bit. As Samhain was meant to create psychological and cultural functional fittedness into the changing of the seasons, was Halloween birthed out of the same need to fit functionally within the ecosystem of capitalism? Cultural evolution progresses not in the sudden appearance of inherently existent structures, but the dependent-arising out of what has come before. Halloween’s functional fittedness to capitalism is dependent on Samhain.
What must we do to survive in capitalism? Byung-Chul Han writes of the achievement-subject, the individual who achieves social mobility through constant work at producing consumables. The positivizing of capitalism is meant to produce the ease of efficient living so that more and more can be produced in endless, frictionless growth. It is a cult of the Same. Any Other is parasitized into the Same so that it can be consumed or used to produce something to be consumed.8
Kids dress up as the monster in order to face the alterity of strange adults. They go door to door, meeting their neighbours, facing the alterity of the Other, but for the purpose of consumption. Their facing of alterity is rewarded with consumption, the driver of the capitalist system that burns the achievement-subject out as it throws them into the world, atomized and alone.
There is a social cohesive element here, there is an attempt at Togetherness here, but it is an aborted half-thing. Going door to door for a brief moment not to cohere and commune, but to consume. Atomized individuals seeking Togetherness, yet rewarding each other with the consumptive assimilation of the Same.
Our ritual trains our children to commune in the name of transaction and consumption. We relate only in so far as you give me something to consume. The giving of the adult, the investment of their candy in the child is for the production of an achievement-subject that will one day perpetuate the tradition of producing achievement-subjects that will fit functionally into the system of capitalism’s cancerous growth.
As adults, Halloween is a ritual of intoxication and pornification. The burnt-out achievement-subject thanks God for the gift of Friday and imbibes the sacrament of numbness. Dr.’s Hirsch and Khan have written that in our hyper-sexual society we are not sexually free, but equal parts desirous and ashamed of sexuality.9 We seek the alterity of the Other, but raised in the tradition of Halloween we have been given the psychology and cultural practices that frame the Other as a thing to be consumed. We numb ourselves with alcohol or other intoxicants so that we can be uninhibited enough to consume without noticing our shame.
The Spooky Season of Samhain is a ritual of alterity as a thing to be consumed. As Africa, the welcome alterity is framed as an exotic adventure to be consumed. As the poacher and the serial killing spooky thing, hostile alterity is framed as a thing to be conquered, privatized, and sold. All leads to the more, more, more of perpetual economic growth. Even the dressing up as monsters is merely a reaction dictated by the Same. To scare evil spirits away we dress up as not what they fear, but what we fear. We conquer them by making ourselves what we fear them to be, packaging It, and selling It each year at a ridiculous price.
The capitalist ecosystem has created a ritual that creates a psychology and culture that can fit well enough into that ecosystem to make us and it function for its eternal perpetuation. No cycle of death and rebirth, no transition into the alterity of the new, just slow death as the system churns up the alterity of nature into the Same of the system that will spooky-spell the death of the substrate from which it emerges and depends on for life.
If Halloween is about horror, then I think that qualifies.
The Witch, the Other, and Transformation
Let’s take stock of the underlying themes we’ve identified so far:
Horror
Alterity
Abjectification
Sameness
Capitalism
Sexuality, pornography
Togetherness, hospitality, social cohesion
Death, rebirth
I think the “sexuality” component needs to be understood better. Levinas frames the Other as being feminine, but has been criticized by Anderson for that [patriarchal] perspective.11 The feminine is only Other from the Same of the masculine, which is true, but we also can’t deny the culture we were raised in nor the perspective that we have. The fact that we live in a patriarchal culture means that the feminine has been conceptualized as the Other and many feminists have landed on the symbol of the Witch to represent that fact.12
The Witch is the marginalized feminine Other, the herbalist, old woman, or prostitute living at the edge of society, killed by the powers of capitalist medicalization in league with patriarchal religious belief.13 She has always been associated with sexuality, of repressing sexuality, but she is now the symbol of women’s liberation, sexual empowerment or otherwise. She is a myth of transition from the worst misogynistic oppression of patriarchy to the liberation of women in the post-patriarchal. She is also one of the most popular symbols for Halloween.
At its core, Samhain/Halloween is a festival of the Witch, of alterity, of the Other, and the attempt to bring the Other into relation with the Same. We attempted to pray for the dead for their guidance and salvation so that we could survive the Winter. We came together, danced, sang, and celebrated so that we could be as one people who would survive the Winter. We now take our children door to door, showing them the world of strangers is not one of fear. We go out to party, meet people, and have fun, hopefully creating experiences we can enjoy in the moment and memories that we can look back on with fondness.
Despite all the bad things I’ve said about how Halloween has become a cult of the Same under capitalism, my issue is not with the Same. Survival through Winter was afforded by a dance of the Other and the Same into their co-infinitizing Togetherness, producing more of themselves rather than closing down in a totality. Samhain is not a festival of transition per se, but of the hope for a successful transition from this Autumn to the coming Spring, from this life to the next, from this corrupt and broken system to one that could be far better but that will also one day face its own death and Winter.
Samhain then, is about the birthing of Togetherness between the Other and the Same in order to survive the harshness of transition from life through death to new life. It is not yet that transition, but only the harshness of the reality that exists before the promise is shown to have been kept. Samhain is the promissory future, the agreed upon coherence before the delay of life that Winter forces upon us in wait for Spring.
The Other need not be feminine and the Same need not be masculine, but we have the culture we have, we have the history we have. The point is not for Samhain to transition the feminine into the Same nor the masculine into the Other necessarily, but to see how neither the Other nor the Same, just as neither the feminine nor the masculine, ought to be privileged.
All that said, does an honouring of the Witch as Other honour the feminine? Mary Ayers has written that the Witch is a form of the Succubus, the remnants of the Goddess denigrated by patriarchal unilateral power. As an archetype shaping men, she stands for the myths men have in regards to women, and thus, what kind of man they believe they ought to be.14 One modern manifestation of the Succubus myth would be the gold-digger. Even though the mythic language is gone, the same idea of a demonic, seductive female who drains men of their (financial) power still survives.
I have extended Ayers’ work to the Succubus in the digital age, what I call Epithymia. Through attention-seeking algorithms that feed on sex, envy, and outrage, the gold-digger has now become the manosphere’s hatefully worshipped OnlyFans model. This places pressure on such men to become hyper-agentic, unilaterally powerful, responsibilized, and sexually bulimic.
If ritualistic practices are meant to adapt us psychologically and culturally to the effects that changing environmental, psychological, and cultural conditions have on us, then what role does Samhain have? Remember that Samhain is a festival of the death of the world and the hope for new life. It is the beginning of transition and the hope for a fruitful transition.
In my work, the Divine Feminine is conceptualized as an archetype that can expand what the masculine is because it is other to the masculine. For men, this makes sense. For women, it’s about honouring the feminine, its oppressive history and its emancipatory future. Culturally, it’s about the death of patriarchy and the hope for new life in the post-patriarchal. Through the Witch, could Samhain be a ritual transformation of the Epithymian Succubus into the Divine Feminine?
We can re-introduce horror here. Generally speaking, I would align myself more with evolutionary rather than revolutionary change. Revolution has far too high a likelihood of bad actors using chaos as a ladder to create some new oppressive hierarchy, perhaps one even worse. Yet, revolution is sometimes what’s called for. Even evolution can operate through a punctuated equilibrium where rapid change can occur.15 Yet, as Hanzi Freinacht says, we want a protopian future rather than a utopian future. He writes:16
“we can more cautiously and realistically allow hope and faith in gradual but over time substantial improvements of society. […] Kelly views such a capacity to improve as the true opposite of Dystopia.”
Facing horror is not about being willing to commit horrors in the hope of something better, but about the response of the Same to the alterity of the Other. The post-patriarchal is radically Other to patriarchy, to capitalism, to all that we have done up to this point. To say that there is horror in the post-patriarchal Witch, and all that I have said here that she represents, is not to say that she is horrifying. It is instead to honour the Same and our demand for it to be opened and, in some non-violent sense, destroyed. Such a change is horrifying because the future afforded by the Togetherness that arises from the dance between Same and Other is always uncertain.
Hopefully, the death of patriarchal capitalism is the liberation of the feminine as a force in its own right and in relation to the masculine. However, it is also the death of the subjectivity born and giving birth to capitalism. It is no small feat to give birth to a new subjectivity, nor to the systems and cultures that birth it and are given birth by it. The horrifying alterity of this death/born/birthing is manifested in the chaos such a time creates. The Winter is the harshest, most horrifying season.
Again though, we also seek an honouring of the Same. Samhain itself was not merely the hope of Spring, but also the honouring of the dead. Hutton writes that enclosure, the process by which the commons was converted into private land during the rise of capitalism, may have contributed to the end of practices in honour of the dead in purgatory.5 Capitalism may have led to the end of the practices of honouring the dead, point being.
We thus have two traditions that need to die: the idea of purgatory and the need to pray to avoid eternal damnation, and the idea of capitalism, particularly as endless growth given our finite biosphere and the funnelling of wealth and prosperity to a small few.
However, in honouring our dead, we cannot forget all they’ve afforded us. We are where we are because of them. This includes all that we now consider so horrifyingly Other from the Same of our own still yet to fully emerge worldview and moral system.
Think about how a loss of purgatory cripples a moral system built on the collectivity of prayer. We can be of help in the moral aspirations of our compatriots, alive or dead, or we can be individuals separated from each other and made entirely responsible for the Good through only our self-interested pursuit of our own hedonistic desires.
Do you see how much here is bound up by the separation of the Other from the Same? Do you see how relative it all is? To privilege either is to denigrate itself in the eyes of each. And yet, alterity could be post-patriarchal liberation to patriarchy’s oppression, or capitalism’s colonialist exploitation of Africa. Why then does Samhain as Halloween focus so much on the horror of alterity? If we lose prayer for and with the dead, only the myths of evil spirits can continue. A loss of purgatory becomes only a fearful need for protection against that which awaits us in Hell.
In the myth of Samhain we cannot forget that the Other is not something only to be danced with, but warded against. The paradox of tolerance says that to have a tolerant world we cannot tolerate the intolerant. Tolerating racist fascists leads to a consumption of the tolerant and the rise of racist fascists. Tolerating serial killers leads to serial killing. We need to safeguard against bad actors. However, it is again the way in which we dance with the Other, the way in which we treat the Other, even the hostile Other.
Execution is to protect the Same by annihilating the inassimilable Other. Genocide is protection run amok on an undifferentiated Other seen as inassimilable.
The problem in these cases is the need to annihilate the inassimilable Other and an inability to see the Other as differentiated. The issue then is that we relate to the Other in a way that prevents finding a place for them without consuming them and in a way that differentiates our own understanding of them, and those two are likely mutually reinforcing. How then do we find a place for the Other? How do we differentiate our understanding of them?
Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas offer a way.
The Infinity of Alterity
We’ll start with Buber, who is most well-known for his distinction between I – It and I – You.10 In the former, we relate to the Other as an It, as an object to be used and manipulated for our own ends. In the latter, we relate to the Other as a You, in their whole being as a sovereignty that overflows our own ability to behold them. I refer to the Other treated in this way as the Alter because we open ourselves to be infinitized by them, opened up and altered by their alterity.
Levinas extended Buber’s work through totality and infinity. The totalizer collapses the Other into the Same, making their own theories and ideas about the Other stand in for the actual Other. The infinitizer offers hospitality to the Alter, opening themselves to the be overflown by the infinity of the Alter that cannot be totalized by any conception we could ever have of them.2
In other words, do I meet the woman standing before me in her whole being? Or do I meet the ideas I have about women and attempt to control her as an objectified It, as a means to my own end in light of those theories?17
Capitalism also functions to objectify the Other through totalization to the Same. It prevents a true honouring of the Alter. Alterity is converted into identity in the name of acquisition of the Other as an objectified resource for the purpose of endless growth of the Same. This is a positive venture in the sense of being additive. It can only add more of the Same. All value is reduced to that which can be captured by price within a market.18
OnlyFans is an example of love, intimacy, and connection being reduced to for-purchase girlfriends who provide a frictionless facsimile of relationship. This frictionlessness is idolized because it is easy and efficient, optimizing for the basest analysis of cost and benefit. The Alter is collapsed, totalized into whatever my money can get them to become for easy consumption. The friction created by the alterity of the romantic Alter is gone, and so too is any Alter to be romantic with. All that’s left is a separated and severed subjectivity feasting on its own fantasies and physiological pleasures. If you believe that this is all romance was anyway then you now bear personal witness to the still beating heart of the subjectivity that must now be put to rest.
Halloween then, offers a way to ritualize the death of capitalism via a highly capitalistic holiday. The nihilistic hedonism of candy and sex become what? What horrors lie beyond the need for consumption?
The Other as the Alter, in all the glorious alterity of You.
Is Halloween revelry not already an attempt to behold the Other despite the objectifying intoxication necessary to make It palatable in light of our fear of the Alter’s sovereign alterity and the slow death under capitalism from which we seek numbing?19
Through that ritual we enact totalization. Our children dress up based on a tradition that costumes were meant to scare away evil spirits.20 Even if the history of this idea isn’t accurate, the fact remains that the myth itself has organized the practice. The point is that we dress up as monsters to scare away monsters. This isn’t the infinity of alterity, but the totality of identity. We dress as what we fear because we can only imagine horror from our own perspective rather than from the perspective of that which we find horrifying. That would be like a fundamentalist dressing up as a flamboyant gay man to scare away flamboyant gay men.
How might we enact and ritualize infinitization? Welcoming the monster. Welcoming the horror of alterity. Yes, sometimes the monstrous Other is truly monstrous, but we do not fight the monstrous by becoming monstrous. Most of us agree that serial killers shouldn’t be housed in dungeons full of their own piss and shit while they await the next round of torture until they finally die. That is not the path to a better society.
Instead, we offer, in the dead of Winter, hospitality to the undifferentiated Other, who may be ancestor, god, monster, or child. This sets up the structure in which the alterity of the Other can open us, breaking our frame, killing the old view, and allowing differentiation to begin. We relink death to the hopeful promise of new life, thereby linking our actions today with that new life, allowing us to move beyond the pessimistic nihilism that tells us, “why fucking bother?”
Laced throughout this essay has been an unexpressed theme of tragedy. The devastation of nature, tradition, and people to the onslaught of capitalism, the oppression of women, and the need to have it all die so that a hope can once again emerge. How horrifyingly tragic. If you knew the depths the tragedy went before you were ready for it, it might cripple you. There is an enormous responsibility in showing those depths to someone, and yet we must face it.
We must face the alterity of the tragedy that exists outside our own lives, lives that for their own tragedy are likely blessed a thousand fold relative to the tragedy that alterity can contain. The simple fact that you have all that you need to be able to read this essay is likely evidence for that. To truly change the world we most move through the tragedy. Not past it in hopes of something better beyond it, but truly through it.
Right now there are human beings forced into slavery so that you can read this article, eat the food you eat, wear the clothes you wear. Right now there are people being abused by those who make the movies you watch and sing the songs you let drift you away. We are all contributing to a system that crushes the human spirit by its very nature. Are we not responsible if we knowingly hand a gun to the man who commits murder? Are we any less responsible simply because the gun was knowingly handed to a thousand more before finally coming to the killer?
We must move through the tragic, through the horror, to the post-horror and the post-tragic. By moving through the horrifying alterity of the Other we move into the post-tragic call to act with love all the same. Alterity is not simply horrifying, but also awe-inspiring.21
Vervaeke discusses the relationship between attunement and the numinous. Attunement is about attuning ourselves to the world, where we and the world fit together coherently. It is a feeling of radical Togetherness. The numinous is the mystery, the infinity of the Alter that exists beyond the Same. If we tip too far into the numinous we experience it as a horrifying experience. If we balance the numinous with attunement, then we get deeper and deeper into a profoundly meaningful experience that can only be called Sacred.21
To face the horror and tragedy of the world is not to fall into it, but to pass through it, attune ourselves to it, and to come out the other side having reckoned with it so that we might change it. This is why attunement is not radical Sameness. To attune oneself to the world is an attuning of oneself to the world. It’s an ongoing process of attunement, which means it’s a continual relation between sameness and difference, between identity and alterity, and this affords worldview change in the face of a changing reality.
How do we change then? By first changing ourselves, by learning to not fear the Other, but to welcome them, to make a home for them. Through a loving relationship, a participatory being-with-coming-to-know-together in which we play together, we may learn from them and differentiate our understanding of them.22
This element of play can be contributed to by the work of Agnes Callard on aspiration. To aspire is to play at being what we aspire to be. We do not yet truly know what it’s like to be who we aspire to be, but we can, through play taken seriously, try our best to act out our aspirations.23
Play with the alterity of the Alter allows a reciprocal opening of the Same toward the Other. This is not easy to do, it is not supposed to be easy. Vervaeke, who I got the idea of serious play from, writes that such experiences are an extension of the flow state where we are at a balance between our skill and the difficulty of the task. When we find that balance we’re pushed and stretched in our abilities so that we are always on the edge of too difficult.24 Through play we are able to ride that edge and come into an open Togetherness with the Alter.
In subsequent essays we’ll explore many of these elements in greater detail, but I hope you can see how this reconnects us with Halloween. Children playing at becoming monsters so that they may consume the dangerous Others that live around them, thereby learning that they are not dangerous, but are sites of shared food and the camaraderie that this brings. It’s through play that the children are given the opportunity to recontextualize the dangerous Other as the Alter, which affords a differentiation of their mental conception of the Other into those honestly dangerous Others that still exist and the friendly, yet still strangers that live around me.
My entire point though, has been that Halloween isn’t a perfect ritual, and the fact that this is embedded within capitalism means that the play of this ritual is attuning our children through a worldview that is contributing to the destruction of the planet. While there is a possible link between shared food and camaraderie, one wonders if this is the kind of camaraderie our digitally-divided world truly needs. We still need camaraderie, but maybe not that kind.
In a time before the internet, when neighbourly interaction was more common at places of worship and third spaces that were still widely available, Halloween may have been more than adequate to teach children. Today however, we need rituals that connect us far more deeply with the strangers we share our world with. In other words, we need to play games that get us better at changing games into better games for everyone to play.
The Overwhelming Complexity of Changing Oppressive Games
As a festival of hopeful change, as the promise of the new in the face of the horrifying alterity of the very real danger in the coming dead of Winter, Samhain is best positioned to be a festival of game change. Freinacht writes of game change as a preferable third option to game acceptance and game denial.25
Game acceptance is about accepting the current games that are being played and the hierarchies that contextualize them and that they recreate. Game denial occurs when we deny the necessity of the games and hierarchies that currently exist, considering them arbitrary and easily subject to change. Unsurprisingly this means that game acceptance is most often associated with Right wing politics, whereas game denial is more associated with the Left.25
Even though many of the games and hierarchies that the Right takes for granted can be changed, that doesn’t mean that they’re arbitrary. Even very oppressive systems function to keep the games going well enough for that society to function to the extent that it does. Removing the game and the hierarchy doesn’t necessarily mean that liberation will follow. Many of the most oppressive games are also necessary for getting food, medicine, and education to a population.
However, we cannot respond to those facts with naïve Right wing game acceptance. We can and ought to change the games and deconstruct the hierarchies. Through game change we avoid the obvious issues with game acceptance, but also the less obvious issues with game denial.
There are similarities between game change and game acceptance, especially when viewed from the perspective of game denial. It seems like kowtowing to the hierarchy. Yet, there are also similarities between denial and change. To change a thing is in some sense to deny it, yet denial occurs when we fail to take seriously enough the features of the game we seek to change.
An example of this is in denying the game of gender. Last year, I had posted an essay on the solarpunk subreddit. The fact that I talk about masculinity led to many calling for gender abolition. One of the commenters quoted Ursula K. Le Guin for having said that whatever is left over after gender has been removed is simply human. I don’t mean to put words into the commenter’s mouth or that of Le Guin, I really don’t think they mean what I’m about to say.
I think we need to be careful about how we deny humanity to those who desire to be gendered for the same reason that we need to be careful how we deny humanity to those who don’t fit into cis normative structures. Again, I want to reiterate that I am not accusing this person of having dehumanized those with gender by calling for a non-binary or genderless future for solarpunk. I’m also not even saying that solarpunk shouldn’t be genderless.
Seen aspirationally, we can’t possibly know, but again, seen aspirationally, we have to see how where we are now can actually get to where we want to go. Where we are now is decidedly not genderless. Most people not only have a gender, but desire to be gendered. Julia Serano, a biologist and trans woman, half-tongue-in-cheek warns against the compulsory genderqueerness that would rob both cis and trans gendered people of post-humanity merely because they desire to be gendered.26
The issue with game acceptance and game denial is that they both fall prey to the same hegemonizing tendency, one which, ironically, game denial accuses game acceptance of. They turn their own worldview, system, or understanding into a hegemony that dominates all to enter into the game they claim is the most moral game to be played.
The solution often isn’t to naively deconstruct the game and expect the benefits the game produced for its players to be distributed as well let alone better. Fascinatingly, this has been one of the through-lines of this entire essay. Deconstruction is all death, and so it is a specific cultural manifestation of the half-ritual that Samhain was reduced to in its evolution into Halloween. A festival only of night cannot promise the dawning of a new day. After deconstruction must come reconstruction.27
The fact is that there are games people want to play and these games may not be good for them, for society, and even for the perpetuation of the very game they want to play. As such, there are people who want to play the game of challenging those games because they are oppressive. Despite their oppression though, such games are still good enough to roughly get the experience people want out of them. This is a significant dilemma.
In the complex mix of games, critique, and change, we have an upset that is necessary but prevents people from having the experiences the old games gave them. Even though the change you seek to make will ultimately be the best thing for people, they resist the change because change requires the loss of the benefits provided by the games they were playing, until enough change has happened.
We firstly must consider this actual space, where the games are really being played. No matter what kind of game we seek to play, all games are “really” taking place in the here-and-now of the actual space. Yet, there are different kinds of games that are being played within the actual space which give them a different flavor of temporality.
We thus have a conventionally flavoured actual space in which the games of the standard way of things are being played. Such games seek to cleave us to tradition, whether traditions as they are or traditions as we imagined they were before some great tragedy took them from us.
We then also have a post-conventional flavour, which is the space of aspiration where the games we play aim us toward a future we desire. Solarpunk itself is a post-conventional place because it doesn’t yet exist. As such, we can never know what games will actually be played there. As Callardian aspiration says, from our current standpoint we can only play pretend at what solarpunk might look like.23 We thus play games that we hope aim us toward that future place.
We then also have spaces with a peri-conventional flavour. This is the space of transition, what Zak Stein has called a “time-between-worlds”.28 While every moment is a transition into the next moment in the continual emergence of becoming, reality can often work analogously to biological evolution’s punctuated equilibrium. Nate Hagens has talked about this as 10 years happening all at once.29 As such, a peri-conventional space is one that is important to understand on its own terms as a true time-between-worlds in which the conventional breaks open as the post-conventional rushes in from the potential future.
One way this manifests today in regards to games is the emergence of influencers that teach people how to play games in each of these spaces. This requires the existence of specific roles for individuals to play given where they are in the game itself.
Here we make the distinction between the conventional and the post-conventional mind. There are not only conventional and post-conventional flavours of spaces, but players who are more conventional or more post-conventional. It’s simply not as easy as saying that the players who seek a post-conventional game like solarpunk are themselves post-conventional. Some players may approach the post-conventional space of solarpunk, and the games therein, in a very conventional way without realizing it.
This can mean that there vision of solarpunk is both less-post-conventional than they believe it to be and that they enforce that vision in a way that demands convention rather than post-convention.
In other words, because they’re a conventional player, they’re less able to adequately see past the conventional space of the culture they were raised in, which means that the solarpunk they envision could be more capitalist, patriarchal, or, in a moment of self-awareness, gendered than it could be. When it comes to the games the conventional player seeks to create in order to become a solarpunk player in a solarpunk space of games, those games run the risk of being far too conventional to actualize solarpunk.
A post-conventional player would see convention itself as necessary, yet constantly shifting and evolving to meet the demands of the changing environment. Embedded in their relation to convention is a continual reflective recursivity on the boundaries and content of a convention seen as amorphous enough to keep themselves and convention adaptive and evolvable given the state of the environment.30
With all of that being said, we currently live in a peri-conventionally flavoured actual space in which rapid change is occurring in the fundamental structures of our civilization. That’s the highest order space in which games are currently being played in our civilization. A player of any kind playing a conventional or post-conventional game is playing those games in the overarching context of the peri-conventional actual space. Think of the peri-conventional space as Earth, and the various ecosystems within as the conventional or post-conventional spaces.
As such, because we inhabit that peri-conventional space, one that is not a time of mere conventional change, we cannot cleave to conventional strategies in order to hold on to the conventional space. This is difficult enough over the longer term of conventional change, but in times of peri-conventional change in which 10 years pass in a few months, this becomes a completely untenable strategy.
For example, how many influencers promise the trad-life with a trad-wife with rose-coloured glasses looking for a past that never existed, let alone stands a chance at becoming present? The fact that such influencers are popping up at a startling pace is likely the result of our being in a peri-conventional space, but one that is itself radically new given the technologies that give influencers unprecedented reach. We need new games with new roles and we have the technologies for many people to try teaching them.
Another textbook example of a conventional game within a peri-conventional actual space is MAGA. It obviously exists in the here-and-now of the actual space. While the slogan “Make America Great Again” calls to tradition in a conventional manner, for most people outside MAGA it’s extremely obvious that there is nothing traditional about them. The Red Pill manosphere is also similar, spinning a mix of evolutionary psychology, American idealism, and sometimes Christianity to talk about so-called “tradition”. Such movements exist because we’re in a peri-conventional space between the conventional and the post-conventional, yet its specific flavours render it conventional and clearly untenable.
Yet, how many conventional influencers advocate for games that they falsely believe are post-conventional? How many other post-conventional influencers advocate for post-conventional games that fail to educate the conventional well enough to be played in the manner intended, or that demand far too much change to ever be anything other than a funny little game some post-conventional players play in the woods as the world burns around them?
Two important issues here are when any space is taken as the natural way of things, which is usually a conventional way of looking at it, or the normative way of things, which both conventional and post-conventional do. The conventional player is more likely to frame normativity in terms of the inevitability of nature rather than a better state for all players. For the conventional player, that better state may truly sound nice, but it’s merely fantasy land and reality is as God or Nature ordained it be.
For the post-conventional player, reality is experienced as more flexible and malleable, and so that places greater emphasis on normativity as idealistic. The post-conventional player can more readily access post-conventional spaces and games, but they may not necessarily be able to bridge the gap between them. The normativity of their vision exceeds the actualizability of their vision, and so the vision becomes reified as a hegemony that rips the conventional open and drops every player into the abyss of game collapse.
In another yet, we currently exist in the peri-conventional space of the meta-crisis, where game collapse is threatened ecologically, economically, epistemically, educationally, and so on. The games that are being played now and that are being started now are peri-conventional games whether we attempt to flavour them convention or post-conventional. The fact that they’re being played in a peri-conventional space becomes intimately tied up with their constitution and their effects.
As such, there are players who try to make claims that are only true in such a peri-conventional space, but make them in such a way that would have them appear to be conventional or post-conventional. They may even reinforce the games being played to survive the peri-conventional as the games that should be played forever or for far longer than necessary, that elements of this time-between-worlds is itself the time that is natural or normative and should be stabilized at. They likely don’t see what they’re doing in that way, but are making such claims precisely because of their ignorance.
Recognize also that there are games for how players from one game can relate to other games and to the players in those games given the roles those players have within those games. A player in the game of fundamentalist Christianity is going to be playing a specific game with a fundamentalist Muslim while they both play the role of dishwasher in the game of restaurant relative to the role of protester in the game of political action taken to the streets.
One of the aspects of our peri-conventional space is a radical mutli-culturality in which a once monocultural stained glass portrait is fractalized with each shake of the patriarchal Church in the death throes of God.
We’re thus forced to have layers of roles for layers of rhizomatic games in which we’re sometimes required to see player first game second, and in other situations we ought to remember that the game comes first with this specific player, role, and/or game.
This also speaks to a meta-game in which players are educated well enough to play across games without needing them to unnecessarily sacrifice their own values, personhood, or standards of win within their own preferred games. What strategies do we need to make sure all games are played well enough without hurting other games? Does the insurmountability of that mean that there will always be an oppressive element to games? If we were all playing the same game it would be easy. We aren’t, and so a level of skill in the meta-game is necessary.
In other words, where players get better at playing a specific role within a game by focusing on how that role can be better played within that game, meta-game learning occurs when players learn to identify which game is being played, when a player is playing a different game, how to communicate across games even when the other cannot, how to play the game of learning to play games and of teaching games depending on the effects of player, role, and game, and, of course, how to change games and create games given the games already being played and the future we hope to actualize.
There are thus myriad games being played by a diversity of players given a variety of roles depending on which specific game they’re currently playing, and often we play multiple games at the very same time. All of that takes place in the space of actuality, the place where play flows as the actualizing of the future.
In far less words, what I’m really talking about is creating wiser players. While wisdom is a rabbit hole worthy of jumping into, with violent brevity, we can define wisdom as the ability to see the True, Good, and Beautiful mired in the bullshit of the actual. For all the complex talk of games, players, roles, and meta-games, sometimes kindness truly is enough.
How then, do we become more wisely kind?
Circling Together through the Solarpunk Samhain
As a festival of game change, Samhain is positioned best because of everything we’ve already discussed. Hutton writes that Samhain is, after-all:5
“a partial return to primordial chaos… the appropriate setting for myths which symbolise the dissolution of established order as a prelude to its recreation in a new period of time”
For a Solarpunk Samhain, we need a festival with practices that are capable of creating the kind of psychology that is able to be wisely kind, able to cut-through the hyper-individualizing tendencies of neoliberal technofeudalism such that we can coordinate collectively, and also care about the collective enough to want to do so.
Additionally, this needs to be done in a way that coordinates the various elements we’ve gathered about Samhain and Halloween. I think the following list speaks perfectly not only to the cultural history of these holidays, embedding this new tradition in an ongoing tradition, but also to the function that Samhain ought to have as a festival preparing a hopeful way through the horrifying alterity of the chaos within the dead of game change’s Winter.
To remind you of these features:
Alterity, otherness
The horror of the abject and of abjectification itself, the process of alienating parts of ourselves and others because of their alterity
This implies sameness and identity, or the current state of affairs, the tradition that defines what is acceptable or abject
Capitalism
Togetherness, hospitality, social cohesion
The cycle of birth, death, and rebirth
Tragedy and the post-tragic hope
Gender, sexuality, pornography
To be very clear, I am not going to be advocating for pornographic sex rituals. You do you, but that’s unnecessary and, given that Halloween is also about the kids, just a little unethical. Instead, I want you to understand pornography as capitalism’s parasitizing of the abjectified sexuality. We abjectify our sexuality and our bodies. Historically, pornography operated in the cultural background until capitalism provided the ground for profit-motive to unleash it into the wider culture until it becomes mainstream. We’re thus living in a culture in which the body and its sexuality are simultaneously abject and idolized.
This is a very powerful counter to the process that I’m trying to create. Pornography is the result of sexuality’s abjectification and then re-entry to the mainstream, but specifically in a context that lacks the intimacy of human connection. The viewer sits by themselves in the darkness, watching other human’s participate in a vulgar facsimile of connection, shaping their desire and thus relation to romantic intimacy, and often intimacy in general, all through the pornographic rather than the sexual.
Porn provides a real reckoning with the abjectified elements of ourselves, and porn can sometimes facilitate a re-integration of our sexual shame in ways that can be healthy. I’m not anti-porn, but here I want to draw a distinction between “pornography” as I am using the term and “sex on video for the purpose of masturbation”. The latter may or may not be pornography, and pornography may or may not be sex on video. By pornography I mean the idolization of the abject in a way that accelerates and amplifies the disconnection with ourselves and each other that abjectification initially created.
We thus are in search of a practice, again a non-sexual practice, that can help us re-integrate our abjectified parts in a way that facilitates deep, intimate connection with other people. Fortunately, this skill can obviously be applied to the sexual in an appropriate context. Unlike Freud, I do not believe that the sexual is fundamental to what we do as humans, but that relationality with the world, including with other human beings is fundamental to everything we do as humans, including also, and perhaps particularly, to sex.22 That intimate relationality between humans is what separates pornography from sexuality, and a Solarpunk Samhain from Halloween.
I think one movie that has helped me understand that profoundly is 28 Years Later, when Ralph Fiennes’ character Dr. Kelson speaks to Spike about the death of his mother:31
Dr. Kelson: Spike, memento mori, what did it mean?
Spike: Remember we must die.
Dr. Kelson: And it’s true. There are many kinds of death. Some are better than others. The best are peaceful where we leave each other in love. You love your mother?
Spike: I love her.
Dr. Kelson: And Isla you love Spike?
Isla: So much.
Dr. Kelson: Memento amoris. Remember you must love.
Memento mori ergo memento amoris. Remember death, therefore, remember love.
In a short series of essays (here, here, and here) I defined erotic agape as a form of love in which we are caught up in mutual growth with the one we love. Agape is the compassionate hospitality that the teacher has for the student’s foolish mistakes, which prepares the way for them to develop. Eros is the love that the student has for themselves, which opens them up to receive the education they need to develop. Erotic agape is the love between equal student/teachers. Where I am your teacher in one domain, in another I am your student.
Through erotic agape we’re able to participate with one another in that being-with-coming-to-know-together that differentiates our simple selves so that we might re-integrate into a higher order of complexity. Through the right kinds of relating with others we are able to become more than we are, breaking open the culturally enforced rules of abjectification that have caused us to deny our bodies, our emotions, and our dependence on each other.
To get a sense of what I mean you can think of the piece of art known as “Piss Christ”, in which a crucifix in submerged in a tank of piss.32 Think about how this piece of art gets the viewer to participate with it in a way that depends on the viewer’s status as a player, their roles, and the games they believe are most important to play.
A conventional Christian will adopt the role of outraged believer defending the sacred and give the art the role of sacrilegious offense. That player will engage in a game that involves censorship, perhaps even violence. As they engage in the world they will not merely play a game, but create themselves as a new type of person who is better or worse at playing that game. Depending on their success or failure they might learn new skills, develop new motivations, and create new allies and enemies.
Such a piece is the abject given form. Christ represents the established order of Christian patriarchy and urine, as the waste of the body, is abject. By placing Christ in a tank of abjection, the boundaries of the established order and morality are completely upset. It shows clearly that the sacred is contained within the abject rather than the other way around. Chaos exceeds order and the conventional player in the peri-conventional space in which such a post-conventional piece of art could be created is going to engage in conventional games that are doomed to failure.
The point I’m trying to get across is to notice how this piece of art created a participatory relation, one that co-created a certain type of person and a certain type of game, and that this co-creation was determined by who the person was before the relation started and what kind of games were already being played when the art was released to the public.
If our goal is a festival and practice that can bring a co-creative relation between people and the wider peri-conventional space that includes all the games being played, then we need to take into consideration the people, what kind of player they are, what games they value, and what kind of roles they feel compelled to adopt when exposed to different players, games, and roles.
When these people from different backgrounds come together, they must participate in a way that opens up their identity to each other’s alterity such that they connect in a way that helps them become the type of people better able to connect with each other. Samhain is, as we’ve already said, about the birthing of the loving Togetherness between the Other and the Same in order to survive the harshness of transition from life through death to new life.
While there may be many practices, one of the best I’ve come across is called circling. In brief, circling is a practice that could be best described as interpersonal meditation. You sit in a circle with a small group of people and vocalize your present felt awareness. For example, you might say, “I notice I feel anxious being here,” to which someone else says, “hearing you say that, I notice I feel more comfortable with my own anxiety”, to which you might reply, “hearing you say that, I notice I feel the tension in my chest melt away.”
With this practice, I’ve had moments where I feel this very rich bubble of mutuality where I feel attuned to the people around me in ways I’m not sure I’ve ever felt elsewhere. The range of emotional textures can be those of deeply healing tears met with an incredibly grounding support all the way to the warmth of shared laughter over seemingly nothing at all.
It’s also not one that denies the rupture of anger or other abject emotions. If you feel anger in response to something someone has said, you are more than welcome to speak that anger. The structure of the practice allows that anger to be spoken in a way that allows it to be processed in healthy ways. This is because circling resists getting lost in stories or insults, and instead facilitates mutually supported guidance toward the present felt awareness of emotions and the body.
Regardless of what culturally-determined narratives we have about each other, through circling we are better able to be guided into and through even charged emotions. When taken in the context of a yearly festival that honours the horrifying and the abjectified as Sacred, we’re in an even better position to allow such emotions to arise and evolve into more complex forms, granting us new capabilities to meet a reality that changes and complexifies despite our best attempts to hold it still.
A more complex form is thus not about denying your anger, disgust, or fear of alterity, but about learning to have a better relationship with it. We can never come to a point when rupture doesn’t happen and we should never even try. Rupture is the necessary breaking open of an established order that has grown corrupt and in denial of its own decay, precisely so that repair can happen, and new growth can propel us into the creative advance of reality’s evolution.33
Bittersweet Witches and a Post-Tragic Hope
Alterity can be horrifying just as much as it can be awe-inspiring. Developing practices, rituals, and festivals that allow us to meet the unknown other, whether that be other people or new forms of living, can help us ensure that we’re capable of meeting the challenges that face us as capitalism decimates the planet. Being able to meet those challenges requires that we be able to meet the tragedy of the meta-crisis and our current peri-conventional moment. Not so that we buckle under the weight, but so that we might move through it toward a post-tragic hope.
The post-tragic hope doesn’t fall for the naïve hope of the pre-tragic, believing that everything is going to work out fine because of some long arc of history. Having moved through tragedy, the post-tragic hope is able to grapple with the realities that face us so that we may actually find solutions. We cannot find solutions when we’re stuck in an optimistic haze that blocks our view of the severity of the problems.
And yet, facing tragedy before we’re ready is more likely to paralyze us than break us open so that transformation can happen. The fact that transformation requires a rupture speaks for itself. Obviously, circling is also a practice that can help us deal with these difficult emotions so that we can evolve through them. The affective structure of Samhain itself is also affording as it holds the grief of Summer’s end and Winter’s coming within a container of revelry. Looking to my own experiences circling and the pain I’ve felt and witnessed, bittersweet is the colour that comes most readily to mind.
That bittersweetness can return us also to considerations of the Witch. This essay is already long enough and there is much more to be said before we can really grapple with the symbolism of the archetypal Witch. To give a taste however, in her psychodynamic analysis of the Witch in feminist theory and literature, Justyna Sempruch has positioned the Witch as a sort of gnostic intermediary.12 According to Roger Walsh, a gnostic intermediary is one who has one foot in two worlds, and that position allows them to transmit wisdom between those worlds.34
As gnostic intermediaries, the Witch’s archetypal structure is underlaid with the affect of the bittersweet. They hold the bitterness of patriarchal violence and the sweetness of liberation. According to Sempruch, this allows them to act as the bridge to the outside of the patriarchal order.12 Barbara Creed also writes of the viewers of horror movies and their need to contend with the abject. Even when these movies force us to look away in fear or disgust, we come back for more, or we even force ourselves to look at the awe-ful horror of the scenes playing out before us.7
Why do we desire the abject so much?
Perhaps it’s an intuition that the abject holds the keys to our growth. We have a desire to contend with the bitterness of the abject because we have a desire to be broken open so that we might grow. Perhaps it’s because the abject was never only about disgust, but also about desire. Our desire is shaped and molded by power’s abjectification because that’s one of the ways in which power perpetuates itself.
As such, for a truly liberating desire, we need to live beyond mere survival. Despite everything I’ve said about Samhain celebrating the hope for survival through the dead of Winter, we have to be careful of the risks of the tragic making life feel dead. Han writes that capitalism reduces life to mere survival through a rigorous separation of life and death that strips us of narrative and fills us only with desire to continue our biological processes.8 We optimize every aspect of ourselves with Spartan diets and workout alone in a gym surrounded by strangers we don’t care to connect with. The good life has come to mean little more than that.
The bittersweetness of the post-tragic feels us through the tragedy of the Winter so that we can revel in whatever Togetherness we’re still able to create. The purpose of this essay was, after-all, to contribute to the creation of a Solarpunk Mythos, a narrative and praxis that could better align ourselves, each other, and society to the world as it is. Not so that we may merely survive, but so that we might truly live together despite the tragedy and move toward something better.
To live, according to Han, requires a functioning immune system.8 Again, despite all my talk of welcoming the abject, we can’t be welcoming to everyone and everything. Han criticizes the positivizing of neoliberal capitalism that attempts to reduce everything to the Same, which is necessary for the acceleration of capital.8 The affect of Samhain is bittersweet. The alterity of the Other includes the revivifying rupture of growth and the horrifying slaughter of the elephant to extinction.
There are people who want to hurt you. There are people who want to steal everything you have for no other reason than that they want more, or, even though it’s cringe to say at this point, merely because they want to watch the world burn. Samhain is life and death, life is life because of its death, and I wish that we could all come together in peace and harmony, but as long as there are those who want our death, we must honour that. The post-tragic is found on the other side of tragedy, not in denial of it.
There is no easy answer to this, but there are some open questions I’d like to explore far more deeply than I can here:
1. What function does the archetypal Witch play?
2. What are archetypes and why are they important anyway?
3. What is the established order we currently experience?
4. How might we evolve beyond it through the Witch?
5. What exactly is beyond it?
We could consider what’s beyond the established order as that which will be found once a large enough number of cultures and subcultures celebrate something-like a Solarpunk Samhain as a hope for transformation. As more and more of the unknown other is welcomed in an increasing scope of an open Togetherness, we become better and better able to see what lies beyond aspiration’s desire for something greater.
What better time of the year than this than to celebrate the dawning of a New Year? Some say that the Celts did this, though the evidence may not be as good as we believe.5 I think, given everything I’ve said, that it fits. Should we replace the current New Year with this? I don’t really think it matters all that much because the point is to celebrate transition and transformation. If that one day becomes a New Year or not is kind of irrelevant. It’s more an interesting thought as our mythos updates itself and new holidays come into being out of the ashes of the old.
I struggled to figure out how to end this essay, but I think that’s the best place. An interesting thought about a mythos that is, as you’ve been reading this, emerging. We are all active co-creators of the new mythos and you, unknown other, are more than welcome on that journey, whether that’s as a fellow writer, a creative, or someone keeping the infinite game going in whatever way you do. It’s in that spirit that we’re best able to honour each other as open systems co-de/reconstructing through our participatory being-with-coming-to-know-together.
If I ever do, I look forward to coming to know You.
Until the next essay, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.
References:
1 – Mankiw, N. G. (2021). Principles of Economics. Cengage Learning.
2 – Levinas, E. (2011). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Duquesne.
3 – Han, B.-C. (2017). Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (E. Butler, Trans.). Verso.
4 – Lorde, A., & Clarke, C. (2007). Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press.
5 – Hutton, R. (1996). Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain. Oxford Paperbacks.
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