Halloween’s Big “O”
The imagery and mythologies surrounding Halloween are numerous, multilayered, and full of multiple significances. In the West, the rites and liturgies of this day cumulatively gesture towards what I am calling “Halloween’s Big ‘O’.” No, it’s not THAT “Big O”! Rather I mean the Big “O” of Otherness, the Other, and Ourselves. As fallen creatures we have fallen into fear – fear of Otherness, of the Other, and of Ourselves. Halloween objectivizes these fears and externalizes them in the macabre creatures we fear in movies and books and seek to tame through costumes and toys. -We dread the sense of Otherness in the world and universe we experience as sheer transcendence, a nameless, faceless, weighty presence that neither knows us or cares for us. Aliens in particular express this fear of Otherness. We cannot help but rec...