Halloween may be much more than trick or treating.
The simulation of fear during Halloween may have psychological benefits.The American version of Halloween is widely believed to be a descendant of a Celtic harvest festival that is also designed to remember the dead . How can we explain the elevation of an ancient pagan ritual into a month-long, billion-dollar holiday in what is purported to be an advanced, modern civilization?caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous or presents a threat.
Scholars have also parsed the semiotics of Halloween, seeing contemporary meanings embedded in the two-thousand-year-old holiday. In his 2000 article “Toward a Theory of Public Ritual” published inDr. Jason Parker, a senior lecturer in the psychology department at Old Dominion University, thought much the same. “We get a physical response and afterward the accomplishment of ‘I overcame that fear,’” he said in 2002, stating that Halloween “stimulates your entire emotions system.
Death, whether articulated as skeletons, ghosts, zombies, graveyards, or some other post-life form or venue, is a staple of the Halloween experience, as that perhaps represents our greatest fear. In his 1997 , Robert Langs argued that death represented “a ubiquitous but elusive dread,” vividly capturing how many of us feel about one day disappearing from the planet. “The existential mix of human existence couples the celebration of life with the awesome awareness of the eventuality of death,” he wrote, pointing out that the inescapable awareness that life would eventually end was grounded in the fundamentals of human evolution.were common with regard to death, as were communicative defenses .
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