The first people to have lived beside the River…

The first people to have lived beside the River Ganges were sun-worshippers, our guide told us. I imagined them kneeling in the sand, looking up, light in their eyes.

It was the summer of 2004, and my friends and I were watching evening prayers on the river. Candles stacked in pyramid frames flared as they were moved in rhythmic circles by five priests. Each priest stood looking out at the river, the running goddess. People sat and watched and clapped their hands with the robust drumming that rang all around us. A man’s voice sailed out and a communal answer followed. Monkeys grouped together, high above the ghats. Men sat in old boats with oars resting on their laps. Eventually the floodlights were extinguished and the drumming lulled. A window lit up red. Candle-light landed on the surface of the river. People cradled their heads in their arms.

I was 18 when I watched this ritual in Varanasi. The intricacies of meaning in the priests’ actions were entirely lost on me. I was an outsider, locked out and peering in, at the aarti, the prayer underway. I leaned my head on my arm and watched from our boat while our guide added footnotes now and then.

When I returned to Scotland in the autumn of that year, everything seemed cold and neat and small. I longed for the feeling I had briefly experienced on the river: the feeling of being ensconced in communal activity, a benign wildness, a simultaneous awe and belonging.

Despite a thrillingly blood-thirsty Old Testament religious education (thanks to Mrs Mackenzie’s Sunday school) I grew up unenthusiastically agnostic. I tried to con myself into believing. I was always very keen on the aesthetics – whisper-patter in pews, frail Bible paper, footsteps on a stone floor. I especially loved to examine the little candles lit with a prayer and left behind; all that love and patience and hope burning for everyone to see. I dearly wanted to be a part of it, and as I grew up I could see, beyond the little candles, a precious respect for contemplation. Faith meant access to this spacious world. Yet I remained outside, looking in, unable to fake it.

Scotland is increasingly atheistic in outlook: a Scottish Social Attitudes survey earlier this year returned the result that 52% of people describe themselves as ‘not religious’ (up from 40% in 1999, when this survey was first carried out). I wonder how many of us without faith feel a certain envy for those who have it – for that security, that expansive arena in which they can consider the bigger things, that feeling of belonging, that abundance of ritual.

When I sat in the boat on the river, I was acutely aware of my ignorance of the ceremony I watched, but there was another feeling too, separate and indistinct. I could hardly put it into words, but I suppose that is the point: ritual is a bodily memory, unmoored from intellectual scepticism. Despite being a foreigner and an outsider, I felt I belonged, and it was a familiar feeling. Sitting in our boat we found ourselves part of an irresistible communality. We shared rhythm, drumming and light with hundreds of others, all of us quiet, resting, watching. That feeling can be experienced entirely at face value, in the moment, one second to the next. For better or for worse, the human need for social bonds is much stronger than our individual doubt.

Which brings me to this autumn, 12 years after that night on the river.

The sun’s shadow is growing taller in the evening. When I first noticed a dour grey rolling of clouds and a chill in the air, I felt a shiver of excitement for the upcoming festivities. Especially in Scotland, with that homecoming feeling when the temperature falls (now here is weather we can trust). The urges we let loose at Halloween and on Bonfire Night are endearingly transparent. We’re being brave and showing that we’re not afraid by lighting up the night sky. We’re defying the dark and making bold with our fears, conjuring monsters, donning disguises and spooking each other. We’re invading the shadows, turning them inside out and making them safe and known. We collude together in this, unquestioningly celebrating a mish-mash of mixed ideas, some of them so old that the origins are almost entirely buried now.

All Hallows Eve and its acknowledgement of the faithful departed, and the home-grown harvest festival of Samhain, are uncomfortably united in our sugar-high horror-fest fright-night Halloween. I still clearly remember the moment I understood that we celebrate the death of Guy Fawkes, not the audacity of his attempt to destroy the establishment. By the time I got more of a handle on what, exactly, we are celebrating, I understood that these specifics are irrelevant. What we are really indulging in is our need for a shared shout about the seasons, an observation of change and growth, the cyclical nature of life itself. Autumn festivities focus on the corporeal, and as such, couldn’t be more tightly wound up with our elementary nature. We are all sun worshippers.

So, faithless but forever enticed by aesthetics, I’ll be joining everyone else again this year, for the fun, the man-made thunder and light of fireworks, the temperate innocent pyre of a bonfire.

By Amy Jardine | 21 September 2016

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