Reflecting on the upcoming and rather secularized celebrations of Guy Fawkes Night,
commemorating the foiled Gunpowder Plot of the Fifth of November where the
triggerman Guy Fawkes is burned in effigy, it is curious how in some four
centuries of historical memory documenting revelry, sentiment and celebration,
we witness perhaps the process of transposition and myth-making. The many hypotheses regarding Christianity
supplanting pagan feasts with their own holidays in order to ease the
tradition, like All Saints’ Day and Halloween for Nordic and Celtic Samhain or
Christmas for Roman Saturnalia, cannot be tested and accounts are only implicit
and worked backwards.
From the
evolution of children making and parading straw men (
guys—the word entered the
English language because of Guy Fawkes) to burn, the excuses for partying, the
waxing and waning of traditions to the modern day trappings and personae of
anonymity and disestablish- mentarianism. A
roundly reviled character has been elevated and romanced as a folk-hero, but as
a charitable abstract of their original motives, to return the monarchy to a
Catholic throne and stop the persecution and punitive taxation of recalcitrant
Catholics. Such movements, I think,
would not like to swap one dominating authority for another, nor order for
chaos neither. The celebratory mood may
have been co-opted or evolved convergent with the close lying customs of
Halloween and poses a strange puzzle to unravel, despite being faithfully
recorded. This year there is quite a bit of healthy competition, with the election, as to what day might be the scariest. The choice of symbols is often
a bit ironic, I think, like the Alamo where the Texan freedom fighters lost and
their ranks decimated or the sign of the Cross. This year, on the eve of the presidential elections of the United
States, there are some vague and unclaimed threats to kidnap and ransom the
executive and legislative branches until the government is returned to the
people. I only fear that the plotters’
ambitions will be forgot and the aftermath celebrated as another reason to brag
and to continue girding ourselves against all threats--real, imagined and opportunely
rebuffed.
