Antiquitopia

One last post on Halloween, although I fully realize it is now All Saints Day. In my reading this morning, I ran across a passage from Victor Turner, who discusses Halloween in a series of cross-cultural calendrical rituals (as opposed to rites of passage) that emphasize the temporary reversal of roles and the importance of masks in those rites: In Western society, the traces of rites of age- and sex-role reversal persist in such customs as Halloween, when the powers of the structurally inferior are manifested in the liminal dominance of pre-adolescent children. The monstrous masks they often wear in disguise represent mainly chthonic or earth-demonic powers--witches who blast fertility; corpses or skeletons from underground; indigenous peoples, such as Indians; troglodytes, such as dwarves or gnomes; hoboes or anti-authoritarian figures, such as pirates or traditional Western gun fighters. These tiny earth powers, if not propitiated by treats or dainties, will work fantastic and ca...

I have been reading Chuck Palahniuk's Rant lately. And it is a wild ride of a read, playing with and twisting concepts of genetics, pathogens, societal constructs (from the Easter Bunny to traffic rules to religion), and time--pushing everything to the edge through creative interrelationships between them. In the middle of it, he employs Victor Turner's concept of Liminality, even folding Turner into the prose in a way few others than Palahniuk could. So, here are a few morsels that might be of interest to a religionist: On Liminality: "Common to almost all spiritual beliefs is the idea of Lim[i]nal Time. To ascetics, it can be the moment of greatest suffering. To ascetics, it can be the moment of greatest suffering. To Catholics, it's the moment the Communion wafer is presented to the congregation. The moment is different for each religion or spiritual practice, but Liminal Time itself represents a moment in which time stops passing. The actual definition is ...