Scapegoating the Dead

(a year of living with the dead)

I’m not scared of the dead. I’m not scared of haints and haunted houses, ghosts and entities, or the hand reaching up from the grave to drag me down into the dark. What I’m scared of is…the living.

Living human beings. Civilized living human beings to precise.

I often say I’ll always choose the spooky ghosts over the reasonable men making logical decisions in chrome boardrooms in skyscrapers.

Civilized human beings are the souls that have forgotten the long story of their souls and can no longer see with the eyes of the dead or feel the beating heart of the world. They are the one who can enslave their kin, make and drop bombs, plan atrocities, force other beings into abjection, and hurt each other. They choose to no longer know that we all come back—reborn into the city they starved and razed, reborn amid the trash they threw away, reborn into the arms of the women they subjugated, reborn into the world they have made. Living civilized people hurt each other like no other beings on this planet hurt each other and they scare me.

Why then have our various religious authorities wanted us to be scared of the dead instead?

Religions arose with civilization to police people’s encounters with the other side. From the get-go priests of all varieties wanted not only to mediate and control those experiences but to limit them. Feminist scholar Max Dashu in her book Witches and Pagans documents how early church leaders would often complain to each other that they couldn’t get people to listen to them—they were consulting their ancestors in the graveyards instead. In her groundbreaking book Witch Craze, Anne Barstow documents how often women found themselves condemned, tortured, and murdured for talking to their dead—their dead grandmothers, their dead friends, their dead loved ones. Eventually we just said that such people were kooky and dismissed them.

What makes people who collaborate with the dead so dangerous to the living is that it is harder to get them to submit to oppression and conformity. Working with the dead helps you live in an economy of prayer and care less about the economy of profit and gain. Working with the dead gives you a foundation of faith in the mercies and reunions of the long story. It’s hard to destroy the world—to plough it, to mine it, to turn it into a commodity—if people still think the trees and the rivers and the stones are alive.

We have been inside 10,000 years of propoganda to make us frightened of the dead—instead of the living, to focus our fears on the dark instead of what happens in well-lit boardrooms every day, instead of what everywhere living people are doing to each other. Our whole culture is set up to offer us a steady diet of fear—horror movies, spooky stories about ghosts come back, demons and monsters at every turn. Frightened people do what they are told after all. Frightened people forget what they should be really frightened of.

So I invite you to walk this year, from The Day of the Dead to the Day of the Dead, WITH the dead—and discover for yourself how loving and generous they all are and how little one has to fear from “the other side.” But don’t believe me, day by day, join me here as I offer experiences to ground our faith in the dead, the dirt beneath our feet, the fertile darkness of womb and tomb.

And know who the real bogeymen are and keep an eye on what they are up. They aren’t under the bed, they are in the halls of power.

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Perdita Finn is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World and the forthcoming Mothers of Magic: Recovering the Love at the Heart of the World. She teaches popular workshops on collaborating with the dead. With her husband Clark Strand she is the founder of the feral fellowship The Way of the Rose and the book by the same name.