[New post] August 1 2023 Now Begins the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts As the Legacies of Our History Return to Devour and Possess Us
jayofdollhousepark posted: " With moonrise tonight begins the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts throughout the month of August, as the legacies of our history return to devour and possess us. This pan-diaspora Chinese holiday is often compared to the Mexic" Torch of Liberty
With moonrise tonight begins the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts throughout the month of August, as the legacies of our history return to devour and possess us. This pan-diaspora Chinese holiday is often compared to the Mexican Day of the Dead, but there is one crucial difference which makes Halloween the nearer parallel; herein the Gates of Hell opened and the souls of the dead inhabit our world, including those honored ancestors who possess us literally as DNA and stories embedded and written in our flesh, but most especially the Hungry Ghosts are the most wicked of the damned, bearing memories of their horrific crimes, atrocities, and perversions performed in life to shadow our own with unspeakable horrors.
Transgression; and those who embrace their monstrosity as do I are the others who define the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden as authorized identities, virtue, and normality; those things which create empires and legitimate elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and which I practice as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth and as revolutionary struggle the violation of normality, the transgression of the Forbidden, and the performance of unauthorized identities as truths written in our flesh and the frightening of the horses.
I welcome and cherish the ancestors whose choices about how to be human and solutions to changing threats and conditions are encoded into my being epigenetically as stories and DNA, adaptive potential in forms of prochronism which protects identity and the morphology of our forms and souls; but I welcome also those echoes and reflections of outsiders who help us to discover unknowns beyond our maps of human being, meaning, and value, and to create new ways and possibilities of becoming human which are uniquely ours.
We need a conserving force, but we also need a revolutionary or innovational force to become human, as self-created and autonomous beings.
During this liminal time of reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our realities, both our angels and our devils are let out to play, with equal license; and what they desire is to live again through us.
I find it interesting that this festival in Buddhist literature is both an Underworld Journey myth which parallels that of Orpheus and Eurydice, and an origin myth of the Hungry Ghosts in a curse as punishment for transgression of hospitality laws, like that of the Wendigo in Native American myth, so beautifully interrogated by Guillermo del Toro in the film Antlers, cursed to eternal hunger for cannibalism and transformed into a monster with powers of possession.
Many of the ceremonies and rituals of this festival are protection magic in the form of ancestor worship; we enact and perform the remembrance of those for whom our bodies are always fetishes in the sense of anchors to the material world and the illusory and ephemeral realm of the senses. We reincarnate our ancestors as their avatars and welcome possession by our deceased family members because this prevents possession by vengeful or dangerous spirits, both the human dead and others.
The Festival of the Hungry Ghosts serves to reinforce membership and belonging within our bloodline or consanguinity group against threatening outsiders, possibly the largest such ritual of mass remembrance and identity, and reinforces our anchors to a transpersonal and multigenerational past to create order and meaning in a chaotic and unstable universe free from any imposed meaning or value.
Also it offers us emergence from the shadows of our history as liberation struggle, and allegories of otherness to embrace and enact as transgression and poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our choices about how to be human together. Sometimes we must let our demons out to dance.
Who shall we choose to perform and become, in this time of transformative potential? Belonging and authorized identities in the form of our ancestors, or autonomy and transgression represented by otherness and transgression? Submission to authority, or Resistance?
Choose to become free, self- created, Unconquered in refusal to submit to authority and authorized identities; be a Living Autonomous Zone.
But perform remembrance also, for as George Santayana teaches us; "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
May you find the joy of total freedom to balance the terror of our nothingness.
As I wrote in my post of October 6 2021, A Song of Liberty: On Neil Gaiman's Lucifer; A new moon signals the advent of the Halloween season tonight, a liminal time of transformation, change, rebirth, and the permeability of the boundary between life and death, dreams and consensus reality, truths and illusions, normality and transgression, as the gateway of the Forbidden opens and beckons us into unknowns.
Always go through the Forbidden Door.
A Great Work begins with moonrise as it does each year, of the destruction and re-creation of ourselves and our universe, and I write now in praise of sacred acts of Chaos and Transformation, and of songs of Liberty such as Neil Gaiman's Lucifer. I am a fan of the Netflix series Lucifer and have watched it through several times; it places the task of healing from abandonment in a mythic context from Milton's Paradise Lost; Neil Gaiman has written a reimagination of Paradise Regained.
Primarily a work which interrogates issues of freedom and autonomy versus authority and subjugation, falsification versus authenticity, and identity as a ground of struggle, Neil Gaiman places his drama in the context of the problem of the deus absconditus, the Biblical god who bound humankind to his laws and then abandoned us to struggle free of them in a defining act of self-creation.
His secondary sources include the myth of Prometheus in Hesiod's Theogony, Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, Plato's Protagoras, poetic versions of his myth by Goethe and Byron, the play by Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelly's Frankenstein which reimagines them all in a glorious recursion like an ouroboros swallowing its tail. Neil Gaiman also references the poetry of Ted Hughes and William Blake, and the myth of the fallen angels and their monstrous children the Nephilim from the apocryphal Book of Enoch.
Lucifer's signature line, "What do you desire?" appropriates the central question of Lacan, "Che vuoi?"; his power to reveal one's true self through looking into one''s eyes and soul references the power of Medusa which appropriates the Male Gaze, and he never lies, for lies are the instrument of authority and those who would enslave us, and he is above all a Liberator and a Truth Teller as Foucault referred to parrhesia, whose purpose is to free us from tyranny. Secondarily he is a Trickster figure like Loki, who disrupts order through acts of chaos and transgression as a guide of the soul and as revolutionary struggle.
Gaiman's Lucifer provides a role model and defines a personal mission statement for me, and for his enormous audience and fandom of the series. As Slavoj Zizek wrote in How to Read Lacan; "Even when my desires are transgressive, even when they violate social norms, this transgression relies on what it transgresses. Paul knows this very well, when in the famous passage in Romans, he describes how the Law gives societies the desire to violate it."
"The evil that I would not, that I do" Romans 7:19, contextualizes transgression as the violation of normalities and the boundaries of the Forbidden, which like the divine command in Genesis not to eat the apple of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and become gods establishes the primary human act as defiance of authority and refusal to submit, whereby we seize our power and become self-created and self-owned beings, autonomous and free. As Max Stirner wrote; "Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized."
As such it interrogates power as rebellion against tyranny and authority, as transgression of the Forbidden, and as violations of normality and imposed ideas of virtue, three things I consider and practice as sacred Acts of Chaos and Transformation.
Lucifer in Gaiman's mythos is a brilliantly depicted damaged child trying to grow up and free himself from the legacies of his enslavement. When one has been raised as a beast, becoming human is revolutionary struggle.
I find reflection of myself in the character of Lucifer and the issues he faces as a wounded champion of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, who cannot escape the consequences of his aberrations and transgressions of the Forbidden or defiance of authorized identities and the tyranny of other people's ideas of virtue and normality; he is an outcast hero who is seen by others as a villain and must accept his own monstrosity if he is to champion others.
In the film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Dr Jekyll refuses to use his power with the words, "No. Hyde will never use me again." To this Stuart Townsend's glorious and strange Dorian Gray replies; "Then what good are you?"
Let us embrace our monstrosity as a seizure of power and say of this secret twin who knows no limits and is free as Prospero says of Caliban in Act V, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare 's The Tempest; "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine."
Ours is a fallen world, a wilderness of mirrors wherein the truths written in our flesh and immanent in nature have been captured and distorted by those who would enslave us, falsified and abstracted from our lived experience as wild things, limitless and free; but one in which true heroism is possible, and where the uncontrollable and anarchic tidal force of love and desire can redeem the wildness of nature and the wildness within ourselves.
The romance subplot centers on the redemptive power of love and references Jean Cocteau's classic film Beauty and the Beast, Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and directly appropriates as its model the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, as well as the tragic re-enactment of that myth and its reimagination in Wuthering Heights in the lives and poetry of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, who cast themselves in the roles of Heathcliff and Catherine.
Who can read the work of Emily Bronte without the meaning of her great novel Wuthering Heights changing with our awareness that its author thought of herself as Victor Frankenstein and as the titan Prometheus cast out of heaven like Milton's rebel angel? That Heathcliff is her monster, a demon to be united with in an exalted Nietzschean rapture of transformative rebirth? And does this not change one's reading of her source Frankenstein, and the works of Mary Shelly and Emily Bronte's successors Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes?
Such beautiful imagery, in an allegory of epigenetic trauma and resilience. We are all prisoners of our history, whose legacies we drag behind us like invisible reptilian tails.
We must free ourselves from our history; this is the first phase of revolutionary struggle and a precondition to our seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves and the achievement of internal conditions of being characterized by Liberty, autonomy, and Sartrean freedom and authenticity, a state which I term Unconquered, for who cannot be compelled by force is free.
Unconquered; the only title worth having, an idea which has continued to inform, motivate, and shape me since I first discovered it in a poem by William Ernest Henley, Invictus, as a high school Freshman.
At the first assembly of the new school year the incoming class was asked to recite a poem we liked to our new peers to introduce ourselves. Ours was a town divided by church affiliation of which my family and I were members of neither and rare new arrivals; the quiet and grim black garbed Dutch and their Reformed Church, affiliated with that of South Africa's Apartheid regime, dour giants with snow white hair like Harry Potter villains who thought music and dancing were sinful and whose mouths were full of thee's and thou's, and the loud and laughing, earthy, polka dancing, sawdust pit wrestling Swiss and their Calvinist Church, who served beer to anyone over the age of twelve. Among my earliest memories was when a Dutch man married a Swiss girl, and his relatives called it a mixed marriage and burned a cross on their lawn.
Here I was notorious, the student for whom prayer in school had been discontinued as a result of my mother's political action, who had adopted Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra as a counter-narrative to the Bible the previous year and often quoted it in refutation to my fellow students attempts to cite authority in the repression of dissent. My parents were formidable figures who were also misfits; my mother a radical atheist, feminist, and peace activist who was also a biologist, psychologist, author, and scholar of Coleridge and medieval religious art, and my father the high school English, Drama, Forensics, and Fencing Club teacher who was also a counterculture theater director and collected artists and intellectuals, including Edward Albee whose plays he directed as I listened to their conversations during rehearsals as a child and the family storyteller William S. Burroughs, successor of Nietzsche through Georges Bataille and his Acephale circle and a disciple of H.P. Lovecraft as a Surrealist.
I figured that I was going to get into a lot of fights, and had chosen to recite Invictus as the terms of struggle. Here was my prefacing speech to my peers and to the world; "I ask nothing of anyone, nor any quarter; neither will I offer any to those who stand against me. But I will never abandon anyone who stands with me, nor will you ever stand alone.
Last summer I went to Brazil to train as a fencer for the Pan American Games, and stayed to defend abandoned street children from the bounty hunters whom the rich had set on them, and this is how we survived against police death squads with only our hands and whatever we could steal; by standing together regardless of our differences.
This is what I ask now, of all of you. I'm hoping we can be friends.
The poem I've chosen to recite is Invictus, which means Unconquered in Latin, by William Ernest Henley.
"Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul. "
After a long and terrible silence, the auditorium erupted in cheers.
None who are human are beyond redemption. Sometimes all we need do to conjure the redemptive power of love is offer others entrance into our world, to reveal our pain and our fear, our loneliness and hope of love, the wounds and flaws of our humanity which open us to the pain of others.
This is my advice to anyone who would reach out across the interfaces of our differences to win allies and transform enemies into friends, to all who write, speak, teach, and organize as a fulcrum of action with which to change the balance of power in the world; be unguarded, genuine, raw even, and speak your truth with vision and passion. We must speak directly to the pain we share as fellow human beings to call forth the truth of others.
We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle to seize ownership of ourselves.
Lucifer's Song of Love: Cover of Wicked Game by Ursine Vulpine & Annaca
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