Beth of Fresh Air — Episode 46: Hallowed Be with Marisa Love

<p>We’ve entered death season.</p><p>The final quarter of the year is here. The growing season is ending. Plants die back. Leaves fall. What has completed its cycle begins returning to the earth.</p><p>And human attention turns toward death too.</p><p>Halloween arrives with its ghosts, skeletons, monsters, gore, murder, cannibalism and fascination with everything frightening, grotesque and macabre.</p><p>Why?</p><p>This week on <strong>Beth of Fresh Air</strong>, Marisa Love is joining me to go down a particularly spooky rabbit hole and look at what this season is actually doing to us.</p><p>We’re going to take a much deeper look at Halloween, investigate some of the myths and stories surrounding <strong>cannibalism</strong>, and ask why fear becomes entertainment at precisely this point in the natural cycle.</p><p>Why does our culture invite us to rehearse death, horror, violence and terror for fun?</p><p>Who benefits when enormous numbers of people willingly give their attention, imagination and emotional energy to frightening imagery at the same time?</p><p>And what happens to consciousness when we do?</p><p>We’ll explore the possibility that there are modern psyops riding on top of something much older and more archetypal: <strong>the closing of a cycle, the completion of a spiral wrung (or as Gurdjieff calls it, an octave)</strong>.</p><p>There’s a real death happening around us every autumn. A year of growth is coming to completion. The body is responding to changes in light, temperature, food and environment. We’ll talk about the idea that seasonal changes can affect the body’s processes of elimination and detoxification, and what we actually know—and don’t know—about that.</p><p>And then we’re taking cannibalism somewhere you might not expect. In addition to exploring folk and fairy tales that depict it, we&#39;ll be asking this question. What if consuming another person doesn’t only mean eating their flesh?</p><p>What happens when we consume someone else’s terror, humiliation, suffering or destruction as entertainment?</p><p>Can our fascination with fear itself become a kind of <strong>psychological cannibalism</strong>?</p><p>And if attention is one of our most valuable resources, what happens when we willingly feed it to images designed to shock, frighten and hypnotize us?</p><p>Marisa and I will look at <strong>Hallowed Be</strong> from a whole bunch of angles: nature, death, seasonal cycles, physiology, folk tales, ritual, cannibalism, Hallowe