Part 3: In Celebration of Halloween and Day of the Dead

This honoring of the spirits is exactly what Shen Te did in The Good Woman of Szechwan, when she was the only person in her community to invite the gods into her home. Also, the Day of the Dead positively values beings that are widely seen as “evil,” thus transforming the dichotomy of “good” and “evil.”

The histories of both Halloween and the Day of the Dead reveal how the Christian tradition has devalued and attempted to destroy these celebrations of the connection between the living and the dead. When that agenda failed, the Church succeeded in masking these indigenous festivals with church-sanctioned holidays. 

In the Jewish tradition, this is a time of beginnings and endings as well. We just celebrated multiple Jewish holidays. First was the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah (“head of the year”). Yom Kippur, the day of repentance, followed.  This is a day when we think about the wrongs we have committed in the past year and ask forgiveness from those we have hurt.

Last week we celebrated Simchat Torah, a holiday that marks the completion of the annual cycle of weekly Torah readings. On Simchat Torah, we read the last Torah portion, then proceed immediately to the first chapter of Genesis. This reminds us that the Torah is a circle that never ends.[1] 

This fluidity between beginnings and endings, between life and death is a common thread through these diverse belief systems. Yet there is a tendency to split life from death, to call one good and the other evil. And oftentimes, it is women who are deemed evil, as Shen Te’s community judges her evil for practicing sex work.

The witch figure is an example of this demonization of women. There are witch-like characters in both Jewish and Mexican traditions. According to Jewish mythology Adam’s first wife was Lilith. The two did not get along because Lilith wanted to be his equal and Adam wanted to be in charge. When Adam tried to force her to have sex with him, she said the magic name of God, rose into the air and flew away to the shores of the Red Sea, a region supposedly abounding in demons.[2] Lilith became known as a demon, flying in the form of a night owl, stealing newborn children, seducing and deceiving men. Mothers and children wore amulets to protect against her evil powers.[3]

Lilith has been reclaimed as a Jewish feminist heroine because she refused to be subservient to Adam.[4] Why did a woman who stood up to her husband become an evil witch who was believed to kill children and seduce men when all she did was assert her right to control her own sexuality? When a woman acts like a man, she is punished, oftentimes by death.

This almost happens to Shen Te in The Good Woman of Szechwan. The townspeople think Shui Ta, Shen Te’s invented male cousin, has killed Shen Te. They put her on trial for her own murder.  When a woman acts like a man, she risks execution.

Killing women who acted like men was common practice during the witch-hunts in Europe. The overwhelming majority (85%) of people murdered in the witch-hunts were women, making them WOMEN hunts. Many of the women killed were folk healers and midwives who owned their own property; they were independent, and not submissive to men. Before 1550, they were useful, sought-after members of society. Afterwards, they became suspect, evil, hags, superstitious old fools, and devil’s servants. Oftentimes, the midwives were blamed for children’s deaths. The accusers stole the midwives’ property and executed the women, justifying their violence by calling the healing women witches.[5]

In the Mexican tradition, La Llorona is portrayed as a treacherous, selfish woman, dressed in white, who wanders through the night wailing for the loss of her children, who she has often drowned herself, because of insanity, neglect, abuse, and/or revenge for being abandoned by a lover. Like Lilith, she is connected to water. Lilith traveled to the Red Sea to escape Adam and La Llorona drowns her victims. Both figures are seen as baby-killers. [6]

A Chicana feminist reinterpretation of the traditional La Llorona myth suggests that indigenous women in Mexico had to kill their children to prevent the Spanish colonizers from enslaving them and thus were actually protecting their children.[7]

La Llorona began as Cihuacoatl (Thee-whoah-koh-aytlee), the goddess of earth, war, birth and midwives, who embraced both death and creation. During the time of the Toltecs, before the Aztecs took over, when matrilineal descent was still in existence, women held the supreme power in Tula, the capital city. The supreme leader’s vice-emperor occupied the position of Cihuacoatl (Thee-whoah-koh-aytlee) or “Snake Woman.”[8] The militaristic Azteca-Mexica regime, manipulatively demanded sacrificial victims for their war gods, and focused on Cihuacoatl’s (Thee-whoah-koh-aytlee’s) destructive aspects by replacing her child - a sign of fertility - with the sacrificial knife. This switch of symbols made Cihuacoatl (Thee-whoah-koh-aytlee’s) into an agent of destruction and erased her life-giving powers as a fertility goddess. 

Women with power, like Lilith, Cihuacoatl (Thee-whoah-koh-aytlee) and women healers in Europe were turned into evil witches who killed children. Women who break patriarchal gender roles and assert their sexuality, become women to be feared.

During this season that for thousands of years has been seen as a time when life and death, beginnings and endings are most connected, let us reconsider what we have traditionally called “good” and “evil.” Is a woman evil because she makes her living as a sex worker, asserts her right to control her own sexuality, or heals using natural methods? And let us redefine what it means to be female and male, so that we can more fully express our whole selves.

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[1] “Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah” from Judaism 101 (www.jewfaq.org/holiday6.htm)

[2] “Chapter 10: Adam’s Helpmeets” in The Hebrew Myths by Robert Graves and Raphael Patai, 1964, pp. 65-69 (gnosis.org/Lilith)

[3] “Lilith” JewishEncyclopedia.com

[4] “Lilith’s Evolution: Introduction: Changing Literary Representations of Lilith and the Evolution of a Mythical Heroine” (http://feminism.eserver.org/theory/papers/lilith/intro.html)

[5] Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Witchcraze, 1994

[6] “From Llorona to Gritona: Coatlicue in Feminist Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros” by Ana María Carbonell

[7] “From Llorona to Gritona”

[8] Anzaldúa, Gloria. (1989). Entering into the Serpent. In J. Plaskow & C.P. Christ (Eds.), Weaving the Visions (pp. 82-3). San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco.