Truth is a Tree: A
Halloween Tale of Pumpkins, Irrational Rituals, and Other ‘Enemies of Reason’
Neela Bhattacharya
Saxena
Round, orange, juicy and seedy pumpkins with empty innards
have been adorning the stores and doors of the American people as a lazy
October is fast approaching its end. Scary
masks are bought and sold in the market place; sugary candy hoarded. Zombies are selling insurance and spooky
movies are in. At the other end of our planet, India is whirling toward Diwali,
the festival of light; in Bengal, my part of the country, final touches are
being put on clay Kali murtis for the worship of the fiercest form of the Great
Mother, the presiding deity of the Tantras, and for many, a mark of India’s refusal
to give up its primitive religiosities.
At home in suburban America, I watch leaves in many shades
of orange, brown and red fall, and maple seeds scatter in our yard. I
contemplate the entangled nature of death and regeneration with my esteemed
anthropologist friend Frederique Apffel-Marglin who speaks of ‘subversive
spiritualities. I then learn that Richard Dawkins, the resident rationalist in
the world of culture wars, has just declared that Barack Obama must be an
atheist. To this black and white fight between patriarchal monotheists and
reactionary atheists, I offer a colorful polytheistic and non-theistic point of
view that has no quarrel with science as a rational inquiry into reality. This
is to show respect for the environmental activist Satish Kumar, one of the alleged
‘enemies of reason’ and a ‘slave of superstition’ (see interview below) according
to a British TV documentary created by Dawkins a few years ago.
Friedrich Nietzsche who had famously declared that God is dead
had also mused whether truth was a woman. He did ruffle more than a few
feathers before sinking into insanity; a supreme thinker lost in the depth of
his psyche as the western world began to come to terms with its bloody
religious and imperial history and produced its special brand of scientific
atheism. Nietzsche also wanted to
believe in dancing gods. At these spooky
times as I dance with Kali and wish a thoroughly haunted and enjoyable
Halloween to all, I wonder if truth is a tree!
Not too many of us may know that the word true in the
English language is derived from the same root
as the word tree! N J Girardot says the
Old English word ‘treowe’, ‘trywe’ meaning “firmly planted like a tree” is what
we take to be “true.” In the world of
old religions, harvest times are celebratory times; it is especially true of
autumn, a liminal time before the dark half of the year begins. In some parts of India Sharad Purnima or fall
Full Moon night is celebrated as Kojagari Lakshmi puja when Shasya Lakshmi or
the grain goddess is worshipped. During
the coming New Moon and Diwali night Dhanalakshmi or the goddess of prosperity
will be worshipped in most of India. Truth
could very well be a woman and a tree, among other names and forms of an
ineffable reality, for many Hindus.
Back to Halloween. As
a Lunar Indian and a Kali lover, I find the roots
of this festival fascinating. All
Hallow’s Eve may be rooted in a Celtic
harvest festival, Gaelic Samhain and has affinities with the feast of Pomona, Roman
goddess of fruits and seeds. It was Christianized like many other ‘pagan’
rituals; Mexican Day of the Dead is no exception to this which can be traced to
a pre-Columbian past. Not surprisingly,
it is connected to Mictecacihuatl, an Aztec goddess of the underworld. Apparently Halloween masks are worn to hide from
the souls since at this Dark Moon night the line between the outer and inner,
sanity and insanity, life and death is rather thin. Depth psychologists like M. Esther Harding, a
Jungian therapist, would have cool stuff to say about this.
The broom flying Halloween witches are distorted reminders
of a pre-Christian Europe whose medicine women and Wiccan priestesses were burnt
at the stakes exactly when a reductive ‘rationalism’ was taking over the
continent. This is the time when Cartesian
dualism, what is now known as Descartes’
Error, thanks to scientists like Antonio Damasio, was radically separating
the mind and the body leading to some of the worst excesses of racism, sexism
and rationalizations of colonialism, not to speak of the abysmal objectification
of all nature.
Leaving this unpalatable history, I now invite you to the
womblike emptiness of the pumpkins and gourds, a metaphor for the Mother
Goddesses’ creative expression in the world.
We turn to China and to eastern India’s Baul singers. Tantric sage Khepababa’s Ektara or one
stringed instrument made of a gourd, a Bengali lau (Hindi lauki), sings of the
emptiness of empty Prajna Paramita, the Buddhist goddess of wisdom. I describe
my Kali as ‘pregnant nothingness’. It was no surprise to discover that the
Great Mother of Chinese Daoism is a dark female. Girardot in his Myth and Meaning in Early Daoism asserts the truth of the gourd
mother. He says that the gourd is ‘botanically a womb.’ Who would have thought
that the orange pumpkins on American doors are strangely connected to a Chinese
autumn festival when round lanterns are lit and ‘gourds hung from the rafters.’
In the 21st century we communicate via the World
Wide Web of interconnectedness, an astonishing accomplishment of modern science,
and yet live in a precarious world where national borders cannot save us from ecological
disasters. Today such connections can be
reminders that we are embedded creatures in nature and with each other, and not
separate entities in water tight rational compartments. In spite of all the
sanitizing efforts of ‘rational religions’ and ‘scientific atheism’ people
still seem to revel in 'irrational' rituals, and consciously or unconsciously
recognize the divinity of woman, nature, and what is beyond simple
ratiocination.
Dawkins may need his crusade to save science from
fundamentalists who deny evolution and literalize their own religious myths. I also prefer an honest atheist who does not
need a deity’s prohibition to act ethically in the world over superstitious
charlatans and fear and hate mongering fanatics of any religion. However, seeing two Indians on the list of ‘enemies
of reason’ I could not help but remember British colonial days of ‘civilizing’
and proselytizing missions. While Deepak
Chopra, the super star celebrity, the other ‘enemy of reason’, has a brand to
sell like Dawkins, and needs no mention here, the lesser known Satish Kumar
should be heard in full. I leave it to
the readers and the watchers to decide if the man who made a peace march from
India to England and beyond is a ‘slave of superstition’, or like our
inscrutable President Obama who has also been called a Zen master, something
too slippery to be put in any easy box.
Halloween as a ‘holy’ evening is perhaps about wholeness and
interconnectivity between life and death, a secret that poets and mystics of
the world have always known. Robert
Frost once wrote, “We dance round in a ring and suppose,/But the Secret sits in
the middle and knows.” Looking at the denuding trees and dying plants in our
yard, I know naked truth can be hard to handle, but regeneration depends on
degeneration. I end with my hats off to
another British scientist, psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist whose The Master
and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World is
a stark reminder of the dangers of truncated certainties; he speaks of the in
between and the relational where the supreme reason of our full humanity and
not just instrumental rationality of the left brain, resides.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19Sqt-zqmrk
