Nine Night

For Halloween - a cold autumnal festival - I thought I'd whisk you all off to hotter climes, where spirit-life burns slow like a sweat cramp under a tropical sun...

The Carribean.

The most famous piece of writing about the Carribean occult is Maya Deren's justly praised 'Divine Horsemen: Living Gods of Haiti'. It's a fantastic book, read it. However Zora Neale Hurston also wrote a powerful, if less well-known, book on mystical beliefs in another part of the region - Jamaican Obeah. The book is called 'Tell My Horse', it's an oral history of the society and customs of early 20th century Jamaica and quite beautiful. I thought I'd reprint a passage from it - about the ceremony known as 'Nine Night'.

'Nine Night' was a ritual enshrining of the belief in a soul's survival after death – the belief that there is no death, merely the fact that one's activities are changed from one bodily state to another, non-corporeal, one… In Jamaica, a 'duppy' is a kind of restless spirit - somewhere between a ghost and a poltergeist - a personification of the soul no longer inside it's human shell and after someone dies, part of the management of grief is this - their 'duppy' must be slowly eased to the the next life so that we can continue in ours. This process takes nine nights.

"One day you see a man walking down the road, the next day you come to his yard and find him dead. Him don't walk, him don't talk again. He is still and silent and does none of the things that he used to do. But you look upon him and you see that he has all the parts that the living have. Why is it that he cannot do what the living do? It is because the thing that gave power to these parts is no longer there. That is the duppy, and that is the most powerful part of any man. Everybody has evil in them, and when a man is alive, the heart and the brain controls him and he will not abandon himself to many evil things. But when the duppy leaves the body, it no longer has anything to restrain it and it will do more terrible things than any man ever dreamed of. It is no good for a duppy to stay among living folk. The duppy is much too powerful and is apt to hurt people all the time. So we make Nine Night to force the duppy to stay in his grave."

[On the 3rd night the duppy rises from his grave – he visits all the places he used to go and then, on Nine Night he goes back to the room where he lived last and takes with him the shadow of everything he wants. His loved ones prepare everything he wants in that 'Dead Room' so he will leave happy and not return to harm them]

"to make him happy so that he will rest well and not come back again" .

[There is much singing, everyone is there, a big feast all for the duppy. And at midnight, the dead is finally discharged:]

"Whether him is gone to you, Lord, or to Satan help we to discharge him from this house forever. The living has no right with the dead, Amen."

[Turning to the duppy:]

"We know you come and we make you welcome. We give you white fowl; we give you rice and leave your bed for you. We leave you water and we do everything for you. Done!!! Go on to your rest now and no do we no harm. We no want to see you again. You must left and you not to come again. No come back! Mind now, you come again we plant you!"

And so, it ends. The spirit is discharged.

Another part of the book decribes the 'specialists' - old women who spiritually and physically groom and prepare girls on the cusp of maturity for their adult life. The specialist would school their charge for another existence - that beyond childhood after which, Hurston, writes

"This young, young thing went forth with the assurance of infinity."

Which is far too beautiful a line to include in a Halloween post.

But I just can't help it.

[PS: the other classic book about Carribean occult - Jamaican Obeah again - is also by a woman with poetic, visionary style: Jean Rhys' novel 'Wide Sargasso Sea'. If you haven't read it, do so - it has an immense, intangible power. And it's very short]