Category: shamanism

Fixing New Zealand’s Public Holiday and Festival Schedule

suninwinter

The most absurd thing I ever saw in my life was in Brisbane in mid-December, 2001. On a sweltering Queensland summer day I walked to the corner dairy to buy a soft drink. The neighbourhood I was staying in was having a competition; the object being to best decorate your house for the season.

What the season apparently meant to Queenslanders was evident by the piles of fake snow, strings of bright lights and plywood sleds replete with papier-mache reindeer and a Santa in a thick red coat. It’s no better in New Zealand, because the core problem is that we celebrate Christmas in entirely the wrong season.

Christmas is known as Yule in Northern Europe, from where we inherited the cultural tradition. The Yule festival is celebrated at the same time of the calendar, which is of course the middle of winter in Northern Europe. The reason why this festival evolved in the cultures of the North is because, on the 24/25th of December in the Northern Hemisphere, the Sun noticeably begins to climb from the nadir it reached a few days previously at the Winter Solstice.

This means that Christmas has a spiritual meaning that makes perfect sense to a Northern European in late December: the time of peak darkness has passed, and now light returns to the world. This is why the Yule festival is characterised by lights. The lights symbolise the human spirit that burns brightly in even the darkest times. And now that the darkest times are over, it’s time to rejoice.

The reason why Christmas is the “season of good cheer” is precisely because it represents a point in the natural cycle of the seasons at which the most difficult period, as measured by length of the day, has been overcome. It’s also the natural time for people to come together because it is very cold. Coming together in the cold to celebrate the return of the light in the days after the Winter Solstice has probably been a tradition for thousands of years before Abrahamism came to Europe and called the festival Christmas.

Therefore, celebrating Christmas in the middle of summer playing cricket and drinking cold drinks at the beach while stinking of sunscreen makes no sense at all. If anything, midsummer is a time of mourning in the European North.

Likewise Easter. The reason why we celebrate Easter with chocolate rabbits even today is because Easter is a fertility ritual (the word Easter is connected to the word estrogen, the female fertility hormone, and is celebrated at the full moon, the Moon being also a symbol of the feminine).

Celebrating a fertility ritual in early April makes sense if you live in the Northern Hemisphere. It is, after all, the advent of spring there, and after a long and dreary winter people are coming outside again and noticing how nice the girls look with less clothing in a bit of sunlight, especially if you’ve just spent a long winter with nothing but your sisters, mother and grandmother for company. In Northern Europe this is still commonly celebrated with a dance around the maypole (although this happens on Midsommar in Sweden and not early May), an obvious phallic symbol.

Halloween is another example that makes no sense. Although this is not a public holiday and is not likely to be, the theme of it suits the Northern Hemisphere and not the South. The last day of October is also about six weeks after the Autumn Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, and therefore marks the day when the warmth begins to follow the light into the depths of winter.

This is why it is themed with symbols of death and foreboding. The point of the ritual is to treat the small death of winter as something fun and light-hearted, in order to lessen the sorrow one feels towards one’s inevitable big, and final, death. One enjoys Halloween to the degree that one is unafraid of death – this is why it is usually celebrated mostly by the young and by the old.

In New Zealand it feels ridiculous to drive down a street in late October when the evenings are just becoming very bright and to see young people in dark clothing trying to look spooky. We ought to celebrate Halloween on the last day of April, when the shadows are becoming long and the trees are red and yellow. This would make sense as the approaching winter would provide the right backdrop for a ghoulish festival.

My conviction is that New Zealanders of all cultural heritages must accept that if they are loyal to this country then they are Polynesians first and any cultural traditions from ancestral lands must be adapted to Aotearoa. The penalty for failing to do so is cognitive dissonance and a deeply unfortunate disconnection from the spirituality of the natural world.

In so far as we celebrate British seasonal events in a Southern Hemisphere country it appears as if our hearts are still back in Britain. The first thing we should correct in order to fix this is to celebrate our public holidays on days of the calendar that make sense for New Zealand, not for London.

After all, if there’s one thing that New Zealanders of all ancestries can agree on, it’s that New Zealand is dark in June and cold in August, and bright in December and warm in February.

Suggestion for a 14-day public holiday schedule:

(1) 01 JAN – New Year’s Day.
(2) 06 FEB – Waitangi Day.
(3) Some weekend in late March to serve as Queen’s Birthday Weekend (we don’t actually celebrate the Queen’s Birthday on the Queen’s Birthday so can change this).
(4) 25 APR – ANZAC Day.
(5) 31 APR – A Southern All-Souls Eve along the lines of the Northern European Halloween.
(6) Matariki in late May/early June – this is extremely important as it represents the first efforts of anyone in New Zealand to associate a time of spiritual practice with a regularly occurring natural phenomenon (the rise of the Pleiades cluster when viewed from NZ).
(7, 8, 9) 3 days over winter to replace Christmas, probably the 24 – 26 JUN. This would mean we have time off to celebrate having survived the winter with our friends and family.
(10) 09 AUG – This is the day that George Nepia played his last All Blacks Test. The point of a national holiday on this date would be to celebrate New Zealand’s sporting achievements in all disciplines and to celebrate how sport has broken down barriers of class and race in New Zealand. It would also break up the period between Christmas and Easter.
(11, 12) 2 days for Easter – the Friday before the weekend closest to the first full moon immediately after the autumn equinox in late September and the Monday immediately following that. This sounds complicated but it’s literally the reverse of what is done now. This would therefore fall in late September on most occasions.
(13) 4th Monday of October – Labour Day.
(14) 31 DEC – New Year’s Eve.

Trip Report – 405mg Mirtazapine

Mirtazipine

I learned from PsychonautWiki that the antidepressant Mirtazapine could work as a psychedelic-deliriant. Thought it sounded fun. Having some mirtazapine left over from a previous prescription I took took 9 x 45mg tablets at about 6.30pm, for a total of 405mg. I weigh 115kg (255lb) and am very drug resistant, so this dose should not be considered a guideline of any sort.

Little happened for an hour. I had low expectations considering this is a legal pharmaceutical. At about 7.30pm I started feeling lightheaded and a bit euphoric. At this time I started watching a rugby match.

Although I have a passion for rugby, it was hard to concentrate after about 8.00pm. My head was swimming and I started to get a generally good buzz, not unlike being drunk but without the sickliness.

I walked outside. Walking was very difficult and I stumbled like a drunk, almost taking a header down a flight of stairs, but wasn’t concerned about falling over.

At the bottom of the stairs I decided to take a piss on the lawn. My cat ran up to me and I thought to be careful as it was getting close to the stream of piss. I looked again, and it wasn’t a cat at all – just a field of long grass that formed a dark shadow and which appeared to move in the wind.

I looked at the night sky. For some reason my visual acuity had sharpened tremendously. Even without my glasses, I could clearly see many stars in the Southern Cross. Normally I can see four, and five if I stop and look hard. Now I could see about ten. I didn’t even know there were than many, and I found it incredible.

Looking at a wider field, I could see hundreds of stars surrounding the Southern Cross and the Pointers, and then I could clearly see the Milky Way galaxy itself, appearing in a broad band across the sky.

The Milky Way stretched right across the sky, and I had the most bizarre sense of the entire galaxy being alive, and that I actually could comprehend my place in it. Here I was, on a planet facing away from its star, beholding the entire galaxy, which I knew to be utterly full of every kind of life imaginable. Somehow I comprehended that out there was all manner of life that would and will astonish us in all kinds of ways.

Then I was in front of my laptop, doing some reading and eating some chocolate (that tasted orgasmic). I heard music, and realised that it was coming from somewhere non-physical. It sounded some Asian pop, and it seemed like my brain was tuning into its frequency despite that frequency not being the same as my physical one.

That was the psychedelic part of the experience. The delirium came shortly after. I forgot who I was and what I was doing, but there was a deep sense of everything being alright.

I returned upstairs and lay in bed, now feeling sleepy. I could not sleep and had a bit of restless leg syndrome but also had amazing closed eye visuals. I saw what looked like psychedelic drawings of Robert Crumb, only in full colour, and in the psychedelic greens and purples so characteristic of late sixties iconography.

These displayed themselves as posters that were advertisements for a movie or band of some sort. They looked good, and they flashed before my eyes at a rate of four or five per second, always different, as if viewed through a kaleidoscope.

I was conscious enough to be astonished at the range of creativity showed by whatever force thought up the formation of these movie posters. Being an experienced psychedelic user, I remembered then that the brain filters the Great Fractal out from the conscious experience so that consciousness can focus on the consensual reality of this frequency, and that I had temporarily broken that filtering, hence I was seeing the movie posters.

I slept lightly, coming to awakeness only when something loud happened in the cricket that was playing on the television. Soon I felt a deep, relaxing, physical euphoria that made my body very sensitive.

When I woke up the next day I felt relaxed but a bit slow and irritable.

I think a high dose of mirtazapine would be good for making love on, because of the enhanced physical pleasure. It is hard to concentrate on it though, and the deliriant effect was moderately strong, which makes it poor for socialising. Probably the nicest use for it would be out in nature during a summer evening.

– CERVANTES DE LA HOYA