Nameless Days, Ghost Festivals
and the Shadow
I was asked if there was a time at the end of the Mayan year similar to ‘Hopi Halloween,’ an end-of-year time of staying indoors and keeping quiet as spiritual struggles take place outside. There is, but it is unclear to me if this is because of the ancestral ties between the Maya and the Hopi, or because nearly every culture, it seems, recognizes in some way the shadow forces that share our world. The question has left me considering a trend in the ‘new-age’ movement, the embracing of a position of ‘light’ and trying to ignore the negative. This makes me nervous since we all possess a shadow side, and ignoring this, called shadow denial, seldom ends well.
Hopi is an Aztec language (Uto-Aztecan), and the Aztecs dedicated a month to Mictecacihuatl, ‘Lady Death,’ and believed that during her month the space between the living and the dead became thin, and the dead could more easily visit the living. This festival continues into the present in Mexico as the Day of the Dead, celebrated November 2.
The Mayans have many calendars. One of the main calendars is the Haab, important because it's a solar calendar used for planting and harvesting. Mayan months are 20 days long, so 18 of them are 360 days in all. This leaves 5 left over, a kind of 'mini-month' called 'Wayeb,' often translated the 'Mayan nameless days.' This time is dangerous and unlucky. The boundaries between our world and the underworld break down, or become thin, so spirits who might harm us have an open door for 5 days ever year. People stay shut in their houses, and would never start any new enterprise. Some don't even bathe or wash their hair.
The Feast of All Saints, also called Hallowmas, was begun by the church in the seventh century to remember the Christian faithful who had died. For the day, the Pope chose a pagan festival called Lemuria, a name derived from Lemur, Latin for an unwholesome ghost of the restless dead. Romans practiced rituals on this day to exorcise fearful spirits of the dead from their homes. Due to this thinning of the boundaries between the living and dead, the spectors left the entire month of May unlucky for marriages, which is why to this day we have ‘June brides’.
In the eighth century, Pope Gregory moved All Saints from May and Lemuria to November and Samhain, a Celtic festival dedicated to both the harvest and to the dead. Ancient Celts believed that on October 31, the boundaries between the living and the dead dissolved, and the dead could cause illness and other dangers for the living. The Celts sometimes wore masks to impersonate and placate the noxious spirits of the deceased, put skeletons in their windows and carved fearful lantern ‘heads’ from vegetables. In the church calendar, All Saints (November 1) begins at sundown on October 31.
There is a period of the Chinese calendar called the Ghost Festival or ‘Ghost Month,’ sometimes translated ‘Chinese Halloween’ and referred to as ‘The Opening of the Gates of Hell.’ In both Buddhist and Taoist tradition, heaven, hell and the realm of the living are opened, and the deceased can visit the living.
As there are two sides to the experience of life, the good and the evil, there are two sides to our ritualized experience of the dead – ancestor veneration and noxious spirits represented, typically, by images of decay. In life, we all possess a ‘light’ side and a ‘shadow’ side, and hiding our shadow, or worse, denying it, does not make it disappear or stop influencing us. This is a strong force is human nature, and the deeper these aspects are buried, the darker they are when they emerge, and the more convoluted our explanations become as we try to rationalize away what others inevitably see. Even the Christian gospel writers, trying to represent for us God made man, made no attempt to deny Jesus’ shadow self. Matthew includes in his gospel an aside with no clear connection to the surrounding narrative (Matt 21: 18-19): ‘He (Jesus) was on his way to the city and was hungry. Seeing a fig tree, he walked up to it but found nothing but leaves. He said to the tree, “may you never bear fruit again!” Immediately the tree withered and died.’
Does anyone doubt that the world has a shadow side? The doctrine of free will, an attempt to shift blame from the creator to the created, does not tell the whole story. We are light and we are shadow both. We need both. We can use light and shadow to achieve the same purpose. It is in denying shadow that the darkness becomes a hidden thing, an illness like a hidden tumor. We go forward in wholeness when we embrace our total self, and use our light and our dark side, as we would use both instinct and intellect, or brain and muscle, to achieve a worthwhile purpose.
So what happens on Hopi Halloween, or Mayan Nameless Days, or the Chinese Ghost Month or Samhain? What happened on Lemuria, or the Day of the Dead? What happens when the boundaries between the living and the dead become a thin place? What is going on when we feel a need to protect ourselves, to wear a mask, or keep to our homes? Many of the devils we fear the most, the scheming, deceiving, lying, dark demons that would drive us insane if we did not let them up for air once each year, are in our denied shadow, boiling like hot magma hidden beneath the snow-capped cone of a beautiful mountain. In a real ‘new-age,’ we will harness both the power of the sun and the power of the boiling forces beneath the surface, all for a single purpose.