By EDWARD KARSHNER
This was supposed to be a Halloween column about pumpkin spice, witches, and ghosts. Folklore teaches that life is unpredictable and we must learn to pivot when confronted by the unimaginable, like hurricanes in the mountains or a vile creature returning from the past “nursing a hard grievance” toward the drēam (Old English word meaning “communal bliss and progress.” I’m talking Grendel in Beowulf…of course). Folklore is always pedagogical. Specifically, autumnal folklore teaches that every moment is its own micro-Apocalypse. When our ancestors lived with a natural orientation, death and endings were apparent in the shortening days of autumn. Autumn (possibly from the Etruscan Vertumnus, the god of changing seasons, by way of the verb vertere, “to turn”) is a long, dark pivot into what Ray Bradbury called “the Undiscovered Country of Old Death.” That’s the real turn, the slow moving from the past to the future. Two places we aren’t: the future where we will never be (we always arrive in the present) and the past where we will never be again.
November is autumn’s month. Originally the ninth month (novem, Latin for nine) in the Roman calendar, November numerologically represents the interconnected totality of the universe. In history, this moment of cultural and cosmic synthesis was managed with festivals that marked the difference between ordinary and hallowed time. November began with All Hallows’ (Saints’) Day on the first. The Celts called it Samhain (Summer’s End). In medieval Scandinavia, it was Vetrnætr (“Winter Nights). The Romans kicked off November with the Harvest Festival of Pomona, Goddess of the Orchard. In Old English, November was Blótmōnaþ (Ritual Month). Festivals were celebrated with bonfires, feasting, repayment of debts, and stories.
If you’ve read my columns since the start, you know my jam is the folklore of time and place. This topic appeals to me because I’m always trying to figure out if I’m in the right place at the right time. In rhetorical theory, this is called Kairos, a critical or proper time for speaking. I mention this because writing, for me, becomes more difficult in the fall. Too many memories, too many highlight reels playing through my head while I’m trying to sleep, concentrate, get through the fall semester. Ironically, even as I struggle to write, the stories are there. I just can’t access them. As I’ve tried to find my way through this moment of disruption, I’ve concluded that I needed to, as my daughter says, “get over” myself and start thinking about time and place as situational, rather than something personally attached to me (my time). I need to find my festival, my ritual.
My hometown holds the annual Pumpkin Show—a carnival, a farmer’s market, a true harvest festival that starts the third Wednesday of October. In the past, this was my time with my dad. This year, I stood at the intersection of Court and Main Street with my daughter Alex, feeling his haunting absence. I realized that I was haunting this place, too. That’s the original meaning of haunt, to return to a familiar place. We think only Ghosts “haunt.” “Ghost” comes to us from the German geist, meaning the animating principle of the mind, an inspiration. Ray Bradbury writes that we remember those who have passed as “Ghosts called in [our] heads. Memories, that’s what ghosts are.” We haunt ourselves with memories.
Ghosts can be public memories, too.
In line at Lindsey’s Bakery for pumpkin donuts, once home to the world’s largest pumpkin pie, I told Alex about, here accuracy matters, the “original world’s largest pumpkin pie.” Growing up, the giant pie in the window was a symbol of social and economic fecundity. As challenges came from other bakeries, the pie grew defiantly until it was too big for the kitchen, and it looked like we would have to cede our gourd glory.
Some factory workers, who had worked the furnaces at the now closed glass plant, realized that an oven and a furnace were pretty close and built a huge pie oven in the city park. That was the last year we had the biggest pie. Now, the original pie is displayed as just that…the proto pie. It’s a ghost conjured, first as a memory and then a story. As Mark Fisher might say, the displayed pie represents a lost future haunting us with the sepia ghost of nostalgia.
When I think about the interplay between memory, nostalgia, writing and craft, storytelling functions as a ritual for making a place in the turn between times. I’m fascinated by this idea of story as a place. Viking Age historian Neil Price observes that Pre-Christian Scandinavians lived alongside an “invisible population” of gods, land spirits, and ancestors. Only the world of the ancestors could be intentionally evoked. Price says that when a person passed, if worthy of being remembered, their absence opened a portal to the world of story. Those ancestors became immortal as part of a story told. Price says that we all live through, in, and die into the world of story.
When I allow myself to approach storytelling as a ritual rather than a job, I find creativity in uncertainty. Complexity, contradictions, and turns in time are openings into the world of story not obstacles to it. The ever present past, those remembered ghosts, manifested in my words.
As November closes, it offers one last ritual for remembering before the winter solstice asks us to look forever forward to spring. This Thanksgiving, instead of being thankful for the imagined ancestors of someone else, I’m going to tell all the stories I know about my own, and welcome them to the table as their absence invites me into their world of story. I’m also going to remember those loved ones still here—so close in time, yet physically so far. My gratitude will be for those I long to be with and the stories we’ll share come the inevitable spring.
Further reading/learning:
I quote Ray Bradbury from The Halloween Tree. It is one of my favorite seasonal reads and a great primer to the history of Halloween and other autumn festivals.
My friends at Grimfrost have a great presentation on Old Norse religion with Dr. Neil Price here: https://youtu.be/ruQw7ieoGJM?feature=shared. If you’re interested in pre-Christian ritual and magic, beyond horned helmets and leather pants, give this a watch!
Read more of Ed’s work here at Reckon.
Edward Karshner was born in Ross County, Ohio and grew up in the Salt Creek Valley of Southeast Appalachia Ohio which draws together Ross, Hocking, and Pickaway Counties. After earning a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Philosophy from Bowling Green State University, he began to explore cultural rhetoric as expressed in folklore. His primary interest was how landscape influences folk-ideologies. In the early part of his career, he travelled extensively in China, Slovakia, Austria, and the Czech Republic before spending over a decade working with the Dinè(Navajo). Now, as a Professor of English at Robert Morris University, he has returned to researching, teaching and writing about Appalachian folklore, magic, and mysticism. A 2022 Research Fellow in Folklore at Berea College’s Special Collections and Archives, Karshner is the author of “These Stories Sustain Me” in the collection Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Replies to Hillbilly Elegy. His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and in Still: The Journal.