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Episode: How Hyper Capitalism has made Halloween more terrifying than its Pagan beginnings

Author: Blindboyboatclub
Duration: 00:51:14

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How Hyper capitalism has made Halloween more terrifying than its Pagan beginnings  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_02
Pierce the steeplechaser's earlobe, you groany bronis. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If this is your first podcast, consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast.

00:00:15 Speaker_02
Thank you all for the wonderful feedback for last week's podcast. Last week's podcast, I kind of pulled it out of my hole. It was, I did a walking tour. I did a walking tour of Limerick City and I freestyled.

00:00:33 Speaker_02
I just freestyled because I've been away in Spain. I went for a little holiday in Spain at a wonderful time, but I needed to have, I needed two podcasts pre-recorded before I left for Spain. I didn't have enough time really to put out two podcasts, so

00:00:50 Speaker_02
I freestyled last week's podcast rather than put out nothing. I didn't want to miss a week. I didn't want to miss a week. So I put out last week's podcast and the feedback was fantastic. He really, really liked it. So I'm thrilled that that's the case.

00:01:06 Speaker_02
So I might do more walking tour podcasts if the fancy takes me. I'd like to do a Halloween podcast this week. I think I'd do a Halloween podcast each year. I'm fascinated with Halloween. It just, it stands out from all the other holidays because

00:01:30 Speaker_02
It's an Irish, it's an Irish Iron Age festival that we still celebrate. But what we understand to be Halloween now is completely disconnected from its roots. Like we speak about the Irish cultural footprint around the world, like St. Patrick's Day.

00:01:53 Speaker_02
That's kind of unique. That's fairly unique and strange. That Ireland has a national holiday, St. Patrick's Day, and it's celebrated all around the world, even if you're not Irish. When it's Paddy's Day, no matter where you are in the world,

00:02:10 Speaker_02
People are just going to go out and wear green and get shitfaced. And that's fairly unique. I can't think of I can't think of another small country who has a festival that's as celebrated as as ubiquitously as Paddy's Day.

00:02:26 Speaker_02
But then you take fucking Halloween, right? Halloween is massive, fucking huge, way bigger than Paddy's Day. But we don't associate it with Ireland. If you went to America and said to the average American, are you aware that Halloween is Irish?

00:02:42 Speaker_02
They don't have a clue. If you went to fucking Ireland, most people in Ireland, if you said, did you know that Halloween was Irish? They probably wouldn't know either. All traces of Irishness have been removed from Halloween.

00:02:58 Speaker_02
So, I mean, Halloween now, I'd call it American. That's what I'd call Halloween now. Halloween right now, let's say the past 20 years is, it represents a very A very ugly, a very ugly type of disposable capitalism, even more so than Christmas.

00:03:19 Speaker_02
There's so much cheap disposable shit that's sold for Halloween, there's so much waste.

00:03:27 Speaker_02
I mean, when I was when I was a child in the 90s, you could buy like plastic Halloween masks, shitty little plastic Halloween masks that were made in Ireland or England.

00:03:39 Speaker_02
And if you had a few quid, maybe a better rubber mask of a Frankenstein or a zombie, and you would hang on to it until next year. And then the rest of the costume that you made.

00:03:53 Speaker_02
You had to be creative, you had to use fucking bin bags, rags, face paint, whatever. If people wanted Halloween decorations, they had to be creative, they had to make things, they had to paint things.

00:04:06 Speaker_02
There was no pumpkins when I was a kid, like fresh fucking pumpkins. That didn't exist when I was, not in the 90s. People were not carving pumpkins, what they were doing was...

00:04:17 Speaker_02
They'd have cardboard cut out pumpkins that were painted orange, paper ones that you'd hang. Actual big orange carved fucking American pumpkins. That's maybe, that's about 20 years old. So when we were kids, you'd dress up in a shit costume.

00:04:34 Speaker_02
Like I'd be half Frankenstein, half fucking vampire. I'd have a shit plastic Frankenstein mask and then a black bin bag around my neck as a cape. And that was my costume. And I was a Frankenstein vampire. You did trick or treat.

00:04:51 Speaker_02
You knocked on people's doors. No one had any sweets. You were given monkey nuts or money. That was it. I sound like a fucking elderly man. I'm aware that I sound like a very, very old man. But this was the reality of Halloween when I was a child.

00:05:07 Speaker_02
And then I got a little bit older. Nine or ten. And it stopped being about trick-or-treating. It became about eggs and fireworks.

00:05:17 Speaker_02
Eggs and fireworks, illegal fireworks, black cat bangers that would take your finger off and throw eggs at buses and people's houses. And I loved it because I was shit at sports. I was never any good at sports, but I had a brilliant throw.

00:05:38 Speaker_02
I had the best fucking throw. I was known for having a good throw. I was great at throwing stones. I could throw stones farther than anybody else, and I was really accurate too. And I was brilliant at throwing eggs.

00:05:53 Speaker_02
I have a pain in my shoulder, my right shoulder, that comes back. And I'm convinced that's from my childhood, throwing stones and throwing eggs. And we used to throw eggs to get a chase. I don't think we were dressing up. We'd wear balaclavas.

00:06:07 Speaker_02
We'd dress up as the IRA. We used to dress up as the IRA and smoke fags and throw eggs at people's houses for no reason and throw eggs at buses. And I used to be able to throw an egg farther than anybody else. I can hear it now. I can feel it.

00:06:27 Speaker_02
Crisp, crisp fucking October 31st. The smell of tarf smoke, tarf smoke and old coal, not the smokeless shit. Dangling in the air like a bent curtain. I used to buy pullets eggs. My dad would call them pullets eggs.

00:06:48 Speaker_02
They were size zero eggs, the small eggs. And I would place the egg between my thumb and my index finger. I'd pincer it. and I'd hurl it into the air, spinning towards the blackness of space.

00:07:05 Speaker_02
And then wait, and I'd wait to hear the satisfying pop of that egg hitting off somebody's fucking window. I'm getting a little rush of adrenaline just thinking back, thinking back of

00:07:18 Speaker_02
waiting to wait to hear did you hit the fucking window because if you if you hit the if you throw the egg and hit hit someone's wall or hit the brickwork the person inside the house doesn't know about it until the morning but when you hit the window when you hit glass

00:07:37 Speaker_02
That's loud. It frightens everybody inside. It doesn't break the window. They'll have to clean it off. But when you hit someone's window and you frighten the family, then it's taken personally. Then they take it personally.

00:07:51 Speaker_02
And then that person, they get out of the house, they get into the car, and they chase you. And if they've got sons, the sons get into the car too. And you've got a family

00:08:00 Speaker_02
chasing you in a car through the neighborhood and you have to run like fuck because if they catch you, they'll kick the shit out of you. And it was terrifying. It was awful. It was terrifying. But the rush of it was phenomenal.

00:08:15 Speaker_02
And if you were really lucky, the guards would show up, the guards would show up and the guards would chase you. And that was especially terrifying and electrifying. And if you did this shit any other night, any other night, wildly unacceptable.

00:08:30 Speaker_02
No, you wouldn't. That's too bold. But on Halloween, this was allowed. And then you go throw eggs at buses, terrify the people sitting in the back of the bus at nighttime. It's all bright on the inside of the bus.

00:08:41 Speaker_02
And then you're hiding at the bus stop and you smash the egg against the window. I was about nine or 10. I used to love it because I was good at it. I was good at it. And I'd gotten the name for myself at being good at that. And it all ended.

00:08:54 Speaker_02
I suppose it was my last Halloween. I was probably 13 or 14. I probably told you this before, but I... I had a dog who was my friend. By the name of Jeff. Jeff the dog. And Jeff... He was like a Dalmatian-German pint or mix.

00:09:14 Speaker_02
But the thing with Jeff, Jeff was consistently on an erection. All the time he was on a dog erection. And his penis used to drool. Dog pre-cum. But only with this one Halloween. I was stocking up on eggs. You know, I was really stocking up.

00:09:33 Speaker_02
I think it was about 64 eggs. And the rule was, if you were a child, shops wouldn't sell you eggs in like three weeks before Halloween if you were a child.

00:09:47 Speaker_02
Even if you were buying them for your ma, even if it was part of groceries, shops would not sell you eggs because they knew what you were going to do with them. So I had to buy all my eggs in September.

00:10:00 Speaker_02
So in my bedroom, in like my sock drawer, I had 60 eggs. I had 60 eggs in my fucking sock drawer. And then my ma came in and she found them and she knew what I was going to do with 60 eggs.

00:10:15 Speaker_02
And she knew as well, they'd be rotting for like three weeks before I got to throw them in Halloween. So my ma went apeshit with my 60 eggs and she took 60 of my eggs And made this giant omelette. She made one giant omelette with 60 eggs.

00:10:35 Speaker_02
It was about 7 inches thick. And I had to go outside with the frying pan and the 7 inch thick omelette. And she made me feed that 7 inch thick omelette to Jeff the dog. And he slobbered on it with his big pink lipstick dog Mickey.

00:10:53 Speaker_02
dripping pre-cum on the tarmac. And that was my last meaningful Halloween. After that, Halloween just became a boat. We'd go out drinking and we tried to kiss girls. That's what you do from about 15 onwards.

00:11:08 Speaker_02
And if you're still throwing eggs at 15 or playing with fireworks, you were weird and you'd get arrested. Now kids are still playing with eggs and playing with fireworks.

00:11:18 Speaker_02
But today's Halloween is unrecognizable to the Halloween that I would have grown up with. You don't see shit Halloween decorations anymore. You don't see shit Halloween costumes. You don't see children wrapped in black plastic bags with terrible makeup.

00:11:37 Speaker_02
You don't see bad Halloween decorations. Now you see incredible Halloween decorations. Big orange bright LED pumpkins and scary robotic skeletons with light up eyes. And all the kids have the exact same costumes.

00:11:57 Speaker_02
The visual standards have increased massively. There's pop-up Halloween shops you can just walk in. You can buy whatever costume you like, not to keep but to throw away as soon as you wear it. You can buy outstanding decorations for your front garden.

00:12:13 Speaker_02
Robots! all really cheap. No one's handing out monkey nuts to trick-or-treaters now. They're handing out American fucking candy, that's the new thing. In my Duns this week they're selling big novelty size bags of Reese's peanut butter cups.

00:12:29 Speaker_02
Just for trick-or-treaters, just for Halloween. And Hershey's chocolate. People are handing out American sweets as standard. But nothing feels like Halloween anymore because

00:12:41 Speaker_02
All of these costumes and these decorations are so mass-produced that they start selling them in August when it's sunny and hot. There's this shop in Limerick called The Range. I fucking hate The Range.

00:12:54 Speaker_02
It's a gigantic shop that sells cheap shit for your house. I suppose it'd be like Walmart. There's Ranges everywhere. It's almost a hardware store as well. Everything is really cheap. and awful. And if it ever breaks, they have no customer service.

00:13:17 Speaker_02
You're fucked. They're just too big. But the range is the type of place that you'd go to, to buy your cheap Halloween decorations. Like really good ones. Animatronic fucking pumpkins. Big skeletons with moving arms.

00:13:31 Speaker_02
You can walk into the range now, spend 200 quid and have the type of Halloween display for your front garden that you would have dreamed of as a child. But they start selling them in August when it's not Halloween.

00:13:44 Speaker_02
And when you go into the range now in October when it is Halloween, they're selling the Christmas decorations. It's winter wonderland. It's winter wonderland and October 31st hasn't happened yet.

00:13:56 Speaker_02
So this hypercapitalism is removing all the fun from these festivals, that lovely feeling of oh it's Halloween, oh it's Christmas. They're giving us everything we thought we wanted and killing the magic.

00:14:11 Speaker_02
I know Santa Claus isn't real but nothing says Santa Claus isn't real than having all your Christmas decorations out on the first week of October and Halloween's over. Halloween hasn't even started yet in the range and it's over.

00:14:25 Speaker_02
It was over a couple of weeks ago because it's Christmas now in the range. It was Christmas in Homebase. I was in Homebase a couple of weeks ago. It was Christmas in Homebase at the end of September. There's a mass-produced

00:14:39 Speaker_02
high quality epidemic of decorations happening. And I say high quality, high quality compared to what we would have had as kids.

00:14:47 Speaker_02
When we were kids, big fancy Halloween decorations or big fancy fucking Christmas decorations and lights on people's roofs. That was something you saw on TV. That was something that only very wealthy Americans had.

00:15:00 Speaker_02
Now anyone can have that quite cheap and the same the same animatronic plastic skeleton that I can buy in Limerick is the exact same animatronic plastic skeleton that you're buying in Australia or Canada or over in England and all of us are looking at Christmas decorations in fucking June and Halloween decorations in April and the mass production of

00:15:25 Speaker_02
Yeah it's higher quality but it's ruining the magic of the seasons. It's October and they're already selling the big tins of Quality Street. Big plastic tubs of Quality Street that you only saw in December that were desperately exclusive.

00:15:44 Speaker_02
Again I'm going to sound like an old man. I am an old man. When I was a child When I was a fucking child, Quality Street chocolates came in a tin, a tin that was made out of metal. And it was so fucking expensive that it was bought once a year.

00:16:03 Speaker_02
And this tin of sweets, this tin, this religious object, this relic was so important that when everyone had eaten the sweets on Christmas Day, you didn't throw the fucking tin out.

00:16:18 Speaker_02
Your ma took that tin and said, wow, what a magnificent, wonderful container. I'm going to put knitting needles inside here. And that's where your ma kept the knitting needles inside the tin, the tin of Quality Street.

00:16:31 Speaker_02
Do you think anyone's doing that now? You can buy three giant fucking tubs of Quality Street made out of plastic for a tenner straight into the recycling bin. And if you had knitting needles... Like, do you know why my ma had knitting needles?

00:16:45 Speaker_02
To literally make clothes for people. To make people jumpers and scarves.

00:16:49 Speaker_02
Most people who have knitting needles now, it's for the hobby of knitting and they have a dedicated knitting needle box with loads of plastic compartments that they were able to purchase quite cheaply. They don't need a tin of quality street.

00:17:04 Speaker_02
But how did all this start to happen? When did this type of shit start to happen? How did it start to happen? Particularly the decorations. These really cheap but amazing decorations for Halloween. The simple answer is China.

00:17:20 Speaker_02
China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001. China has a communist government. with a form of capitalism that is state controlled. Over the past 20 years, China built entire cities just for manufacturing. China is the world's factory.

00:17:41 Speaker_02
And when China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, it opened itself up to the West and fueled our addiction, our addiction to consumerism. And the relationship that the West has with China, it's completely unsustainable.

00:17:59 Speaker_02
It's destroying the planet. It's a good idea that Quality Street chocolates are something so exclusive and expensive that you buy once a year in a tin box. Because that's how it was when I was a kid.

00:18:15 Speaker_02
It's a good idea that it's so valuable that you hang on to the tin that it comes in to repurpose it and use it for knitting needles. Quality Street used to be made in Yorkshire. The chocolate and the tins were manufactured in Yorkshire.

00:18:28 Speaker_02
People were paid properly to make Quality Street. So it was expensive. It was exclusive. You bought it once a year. It was really special. It was sustainable. Now Quality Street is owned by Nestle. The plastic tubs, they come from China.

00:18:44 Speaker_02
And now your Quality Street is stacked 10 foot high in the supermarket in October and you can get two for a tenner. And there's no value anymore. And it's not special anymore. And you might buy one this weekend, even though it's not Christmas.

00:18:58 Speaker_02
Not only does it remove the magic and the scarcity, it's unsustainable and terrible for the planet. I'm supposed to be talking about Halloween, but I'm talking about fucking Quality Street.

00:19:09 Speaker_02
But that's because the Quality Street is beside the Halloween decorations. A few years ago there was a woman in Portland, Oregon over in America. It was about 2011.

00:19:19 Speaker_02
And I remember this because a friend of mine from school had moved to Portland, Oregon and I was friends with them on Facebook. And I remember them posting in 2012. That a woman in Portland, Oregon had bought some Halloween decorations.

00:19:37 Speaker_02
They were big plastic tombstones. The type that'd look really cool in your garden now if you were doing Halloween decorations. The type that you're gonna buy in your supermarket or your hardware store.

00:19:50 Speaker_02
Big cool fucking tombstones to put into your garden as Halloween decorations. So this woman bought these in Walmart or wherever the fuck in 2012. But when she opened the box, there was a note inside and the note was written.

00:20:07 Speaker_02
It was written in English, in poor English. And the note said, if you occasionally buy this product, please kindly send this letter to the World Human Rights Organization.

00:20:17 Speaker_02
Thousands of people here who are under the persecution of the Chinese Communist Party government will thank and remember you forever. The note said that the tombstones had been made in Masanjia labor camp in Shenyang China.

00:20:33 Speaker_02
It said the inmates there had to work 15 hours a day, 7 days a week and if they didn't they would suffer torture and be beaten. So this woman in Portland, Oregon She's buying these cheap, these cheap Halloween decorations.

00:20:50 Speaker_02
These tombstones, these incredible things that we're all consuming right now. She's bought these things. And now there's a note from a human being on the inside saying, I'm a prisoner in China. You have to help me.

00:21:03 Speaker_02
I'm making these fucking Halloween decorations. I'm being tortured. And it's these conditions that are causing A lot of the influx of really cheap goods that we've seen over the past 20 years.

00:21:17 Speaker_02
There's forced labour camps in China, whether it be the Uighur Muslim population or this crowd called Falun Gong.

00:21:26 Speaker_02
Thousands and thousands of people are imprisoned in China and sent to forced labor camps to keep the costs down to nothing at the expense of people's human rights. People are being enslaved basically or indentured, indentured servitude at least.

00:21:41 Speaker_02
And a huge amount of the goods that we buy, Halloween decorations, Christmas decorations, our clothes, the shit that comes from China, a huge amount of this from the manufacturing center of the world is actually made under slave labor conditions.

00:21:58 Speaker_02
But then shell companies are set up in the middle of all this. A shell company, it's like a fake company. These are set up to effectively launder these goods.

00:22:09 Speaker_02
So when it comes to America, Europe, when it comes to us purchasing these goods that are made in slave labor conditions, the supermarkets that we buy them from in the West, we'll say, or the global North,

00:22:25 Speaker_02
They get to say, I don't know that these goods are made with slave labor. How would I know that? I bought it from this company. You're going to have to ask them. So incredibly cheap, cheaply produced Chinese Halloween decorations.

00:22:42 Speaker_02
are made at a gigantic scale and shipped all over the world. And that's why, whether it's Australia, America, Ireland, we all have the same fucking decorations. They're all really cheap and they're all pretty fucking cool, too.

00:22:59 Speaker_02
There's a good chance that it was that they're made with slave labor. It's hard to really know. This is this is this is the unconscious mind of modern capitalism.

00:23:10 Speaker_02
We understand that dark forces are at play when it comes to purchasing the cheap goods that we enjoy. We know that some dark shit is happening. In order for us to have a four-foot light-up pumpkin for 50 quid, that shouldn't exist.

00:23:26 Speaker_02
It didn't exist when I was a kid. It would have been too expensive. It would have been unthinkable. But now the unthinkable can be purchased for our entertainment and thrown away and bought again next year because that's how cheap it is.

00:23:38 Speaker_02
And like I said, I first heard that story about the woman, the woman who bought those Halloween decorations, the tombstones, and she found that letter, that letter from the person who was being kept prisoner and forced to make the tombstones.

00:23:51 Speaker_02
I first heard that in 2012. The body of mine had moved to Portland. and it used to pop into my head every Halloween. Every Halloween when I would see Halloween decorations.

00:24:05 Speaker_02
When I'd go to the hardware store in the summertime in fucking August and there's a big huge plastic jack-o'-lantern. I'd think of that story. And this year, I decided to fucking follow it up. I decided to follow it up.

00:24:21 Speaker_02
And it turns out that they found the dude, they found the dude who was the prisoner who had sent the lady that note because she'd gone to the papers about it. It was widely reported in 2012. This fella had since gotten out of the labor camp.

00:24:36 Speaker_02
and had seen her story and had seen that she had found his note. So he contacted her and then journalists got involved to find out his story. So it was a man in China called Sun Yi.

00:24:49 Speaker_02
And in 2008, he was arrested for being a member of an organization called Falun Gong. Now, I don't want to get into Falun Gong. That's a separate podcast. That's too big a rabbit hole once I fucking go down it. Basically, China is quite authoritarian.

00:25:03 Speaker_02
There's a one party government. Falun Gong is like a new religious movement, hundreds of thousands of people. The Chinese government made it legal and then sent hundreds of thousands of Falun Gong supporters to forced labor camps.

00:25:17 Speaker_02
They also do it with Uyghur Muslims. So this fella Sun Yi was sent in 2008 to one of these forced labor camps where they were making Halloween decorations. Now he's Chinese, he'd never seen or heard of fucking Halloween.

00:25:34 Speaker_02
He would look out the window of his dormitory and he'd see people carrying skulls and bones in the distance and he thought they were human bones. He thought he was at some type of extermination camp.

00:25:46 Speaker_02
And then suddenly he found himself working 17-18 hour days with no pay making tombstones. Tombstones, tombstones, tombstones. He didn't know what he was doing, he didn't know what they were for. It was known as the ghost job.

00:26:04 Speaker_02
He was said to have the ghost job. He was getting freaked out and then he asks one of the guards, he said, what the fuck am I doing here? And one of the guards had a bit of knowledge and said, it's for the West.

00:26:16 Speaker_02
In the West, they have some type of holiday where they celebrate death or skeletons. Halloween, they call it. So this fellow was under such

00:26:24 Speaker_02
Harsh, terrible, inhumane work conditions, making Halloween decorations for the West, that one day he decided, I'm gonna write notes in English into these fucking decorations and hide them in the boxes and hopefully someone will report this labour camp.

00:26:42 Speaker_02
Now what happened to Sun Yi? As soon as he started speaking to western journalists, within months Chinese agents showed up and then suddenly he died of a kidney disease. Now one thing and I have to say it, All of that may very well be 100% true.

00:27:02 Speaker_02
But also, anything you read in the English language about China right now could very well be Western propaganda made up or planted by the CIA, because that's literally what they're doing now.

00:27:16 Speaker_02
They're spending billions on that, on anti-Chinese propaganda. And this story, this story about forced labor, Halloween decorations, your man sending the note, coming clean, suddenly dying. It probably is true, but it also works.

00:27:34 Speaker_02
It works as anti-Chinese propaganda. So if it works that way, then I have to have a degree of criticality towards it. What I'm teasing at with all this

00:27:46 Speaker_02
is Halloween is particularly rife for exploitation with this new form of hypercapitalism that we have. It's a holiday that's mostly celebrated by children. It happens on the same day once a year, so it's incredibly predictable.

00:28:03 Speaker_02
It doesn't really change. Scary shit, skeletons, spiders, pumpkins. So for mass production within capitalism, Halloween is perfect. Same with Christmas. Just keep churning out the plastic fucking skeletons, the tombstones, the pumpkins. Every year.

00:28:23 Speaker_02
Guaranteed big bucks. Send the designs to the factories in China. Put in the orders. Don't worry about how they make it. They're going to do it real cheap. And that satiates our desires to have big, giant fucking plastic pumpkins with lights inside them.

00:28:39 Speaker_02
But my hot take is that the darkness and evilness of this particular type of hypercapitalism, the slave labor, is actually after realizing the pagan Irish roots of Halloween.

00:28:56 Speaker_02
So Halloween wasn't called Halloween in Ireland a couple of thousand years ago. It was called Samhain. It was a harvest festival. It was the end of the harvest.

00:29:06 Speaker_02
When winter comes it was like the ancient Irish new year and when the old year died and the new year was born there was one day there where the veil between Our world, reality and the other world was very thin.

00:29:26 Speaker_02
If you go deep into Irish mythology, you look up the book of invasions and the story, the mythology of how people came to Ireland. The book of invasions will say that There was a race of people on the island of Ireland called the Tuatha Dé Danann.

00:29:47 Speaker_02
And these were magical creatures, very powerful magical creatures. But then when humans came to the shore of Ireland, there was a great battle and the humans won.

00:29:58 Speaker_02
And the humans drove the Tuatha Dé Danann, this magical race, underground into the other world. where they became a dark force. Unseen. We knew they were there but they were unseen.

00:30:14 Speaker_02
Sometimes they might pop up and trick us or harm us or steal our children. They became the fairies. So within Irish mythology you have this persistent paranoia of

00:30:27 Speaker_02
There's another world, a parallel reality, with these fairies, who are a race of people that we humans have defeated. But these fairies, they can come back at any time. And especially, they can come back on the night of Samhain, Halloween.

00:30:45 Speaker_02
When the veil between the other world and our world is thin, the fairies, the scary fairies, can walk the earth. They can pop up.

00:30:55 Speaker_02
So we're going to light bonfires and we're going to dress up as scary monsters to confuse those fairies on Halloween night. And those traditions go back to the Iron Age. You know, that's Irish tradition.

00:31:07 Speaker_02
And if you you can fucking visit where Halloween happened. This is what I adore about Ireland. Go up to Roscommon, go to Roscommon, go to a cave. There's a fucking cave in Roscommon called the Cave of the Cats. Only Gat.

00:31:24 Speaker_02
And this is where Halloween comes from, this one cave. It's a limestone. It's a narrow cave that you can go into. I was in there last summer. It's run by a fella called Daniel Carley. He's a historian and an expert, a fascinating person, and he's sound.

00:31:41 Speaker_02
Go up to Daniel, tell him Blind Boy sent you. You can go to where fucking Halloween started thousands of years ago in this one cave in Roscommon called the Cave of the Cats. And the front of it looks like fuck all. It looks like a fox's hole. It's tiny.

00:31:59 Speaker_02
You wouldn't even think it's a cave. But then you get muddy. Then you go into it. And it's this deep limestone crevice. And just as you get into this cave, there's an inscription in Awum. This inscription could be thousands of years old.

00:32:18 Speaker_02
Awam is, it's a writing system that we had in Ireland before Latin script.

00:32:25 Speaker_02
Now we couldn't write books with it, because Ireland was an oral culture, we couldn't write books with it, but we did have a system of writing that was used on stone, not to tell stories, but to declare ownership.

00:32:39 Speaker_02
And what this Awam script reads, it says, Freac, son of Maeve. But the Maeve they're referring to there, that's fucking Queen Maeve from the Tyne. This cave, this cave is only a 10 minute walk from Rathcrogan.

00:32:56 Speaker_02
Rathcrogan is the giant hill where kings were made, where they crowned kings in Ireland, going back a couple of thousand years before the Brits, before Christianity. But Rathcrogan is also the hill

00:33:10 Speaker_02
where you can tell the epic story of the town in the absence of writing by reading the landscape. But the other thing about this cave, where Halloween starts, so Maeve, Maeve isn't just a queen in a story, Maeve is the goddess of the land.

00:33:29 Speaker_02
So this cave may very well be her vagina. Within Irish pre-Christian beliefs, there's a strong chance that the land was the goddess, the goddess Maeve up in Connacht. And the king was married to the land.

00:33:47 Speaker_02
The king was married to the goddess of the land. And the fertility of that land, the health of the people, the health of the cattle, that was the fertility of the land goddess. But if we're to go back

00:34:03 Speaker_02
We'll see the Iron Age origins of Halloween and how it relates to this one cave in Rascommon and how it's told in Irish mythology. So Samhain, the 31st of fucking October, right? This is the end of the harvest.

00:34:19 Speaker_02
So the food is harvested and now you're getting ready for winter. And on this one day, this one night in particular, the scary fairies and the puka, they can walk the earth.

00:34:32 Speaker_02
So the story goes is that these horrendous demons, they shoot out of this cave. Terrifying demons and these terrifying fairies shoot out of the cave, the Onigat cave in Ras Khaman.

00:34:47 Speaker_02
And the first demon to shoot out of this cave on Halloween night is the Ellentrekkin, which is a three-headed monster and it rampages all across Ireland and tears the leaves from all the trees and lays bare to everything.

00:35:04 Speaker_02
And then the next monster to fly out of this fucking cave out of the earth are these flocks of birds, terrifying crows, demonic crows and they wither all the plants and strip the leaves and bring ice to the land and then finally the last

00:35:27 Speaker_02
demons to leave this cave to come from the other world. On Halloween night are these herds of supernatural pigs. So thousands of these supernatural monster fairy pigs roam Ireland. They come out of this cave, they roam Ireland and they eat everything.

00:35:47 Speaker_02
They kill all the crops, they destroy everything. And then they go back in and the next morning you wake up and it's winter. And that's really what the story of Halloween is. That's what it is. Going back fucking 2000 years.

00:36:03 Speaker_02
It's wonderful, interesting stories that let our ancestors know winter is coming. It's the end of autumn. The harvest is done. Now shit's about to get cold and everything's going to die.

00:36:17 Speaker_02
And you better take in your cattle and you better get warm and you better make sure that your food is stored from the harvest because fucking winter is coming.

00:36:25 Speaker_02
and they rationalized and explained the death and darkness of winter through these stories of demons. shimmering in from the other world.

00:36:37 Speaker_02
This race, this race of supernatural demons that the Irish had beaten in the past, they're going to come back every year for one night. And all the wonderful summer that you had in the warmth and the crops, that's fucking gone.

00:36:51 Speaker_02
Because for one night, they're going to fuck it all up. And now you're back into winter. So it's useful storytelling. In the absence of writing, in the absence of clocks, calendars.

00:37:05 Speaker_02
It's very useful storytelling that lets you know about the world that you're living in. And that's where Halloween comes from. It comes from that.

00:37:12 Speaker_02
And we held on to those traditions and those beliefs over thousands of years because it was so important because it's around the Harvest Festival. And also they're great stories. They're wonderful stories. And we like frightening ourselves.

00:37:26 Speaker_02
And great, terrifying change happens every winter. Things get dark and we love to have stories so that we can navigate. The frustration of uncertainty, so that we can know. Like Jesus Christ, imagine living 2,000 fucking years ago and winter comes.

00:37:46 Speaker_02
You can't grow any food. You don't have science. You'd start thinking to yourself, fuck it, I hope this winter isn't forever. I hope the sun is going to come back. I hope it's going to be spring again. So you have these stories to go. Yeah, don't worry.

00:38:01 Speaker_02
Of course spring is going to come back. It's just last night. The fairies got to blow off steam. They do this every October 31st. They do it. It's normal. It's a cycle. It's what happens. So we kept those traditions.

00:38:17 Speaker_02
Then Christianity came about, changed it around. It went from being Samhain to All Hallows Eve. We kept some of those traditions and it became about worshipping saints.

00:38:30 Speaker_02
And then the Irish took it to America and the Scottish did as well, because you have to remember, For about 300 years, from the 5th to the 7th century, the western part of Scotland was known as Dalriata.

00:38:44 Speaker_02
It was an Irish kingdom where Gaelic was spoken, so Halloween was Scottish too. So Halloween moved over to America with the massive amounts of Irish immigrants that went there from the 1600s onwards. It was practiced by the Irish,

00:39:00 Speaker_02
We used to carve turnips as jack-o'-lanterns. We didn't have turnips, so that turned into fucking pumpkins over there. And when Halloween, like how did Halloween become this huge global thing that we have today?

00:39:13 Speaker_02
How did it become mainstream American culture and now mainstream global culture? world war one and the flu pandemic of 1918 so between 1914 and 1920 80 million people died in the world.

00:39:36 Speaker_02
People in America lost loved ones in World War I and also the fucking flu pandemic. The flu pandemic of 1918, the Spanish flu as they called it, it was like COVID, it was like the COVID pandemic except it was 1918 and it was way worse.

00:39:53 Speaker_02
because there was a war going on and people didn't have enough vaccines, didn't have the science we had today. So there was mass deaths.

00:40:02 Speaker_02
So because so many people in England and in America had lost loved ones between the period of 1914 and 1920, there was collective grief and people started getting into Spiritualism it was known as. Ouija boards. Seances.

00:40:21 Speaker_02
It wasn't considered weird witchcraft anymore. It got kinda mainstream. Your man Arthur Conan Doyle who wrote fucking Sherlock Holmes. He used to do speaking tours about it.

00:40:35 Speaker_02
So society in America, even the Protestants, it became kind of normal to want to believe that your recently dead relative who died from the fucking flu pandemic or died in World War I, it became acceptable to believe that their ghost walked among us and that we could use Ouija boards or have a seance to communicate with the ghost of a person you love.

00:41:02 Speaker_02
30 years previously, especially the Protestants, that was fucking witchcraft. That was witchcraft. You didn't entertain it. That was blasphemy. That was witchcraft. 1920, it became kind of, it's okay to entertain this. Horoscopes.

00:41:18 Speaker_02
This isn't black magic anymore. Maybe my dead brother is here. I've got so many unanswered questions. He died young. I want to know what he was thinking.

00:41:26 Speaker_02
So it's said that this period of the popularity of spiritualism because of the fucking pandemic and World War I, this laid the cultural foundations for Halloween to become popular in America.

00:41:42 Speaker_02
now it wasn't a weird holiday that the dark poor Catholic Irish are celebrating and lighting bonfires now the more middle-class Protestants in America are going what's this you've got this there's this festival that happens on October 31st where our dead relatives can walk among us really that doesn't sound so witchcrafty anymore maybe let's have a bit of fun so Halloween starts to become

00:42:09 Speaker_02
part of American culture then. And then by the by World War Two, World War Two, sugar was was rationed. And then when World War Two ended, sugar wasn't rationed anymore. So there was an explosion of sweets and chocolates.

00:42:27 Speaker_02
And that led to trick or treating and fucking sweets brands deliberately targeting children. And from there, Halloween becomes an American holiday. Let's be honest, Halloween as we know it today is completely American.

00:42:42 Speaker_02
It becomes an American holiday that's then sold back to the rest of the world. It's sold back to us in Ireland. And we've forgotten that it was fucking ours from the Iron Age. But the hot take that I'm getting at.

00:42:55 Speaker_02
Halloween has now intersected with hypercapitalism. The things that made it attractive to our Iron Age ancestors, which is, it happens on the same day every fucking year. It's predictable, we need this thing as a calendar.

00:43:09 Speaker_02
That's also the same thing that makes it predictable for the speculative forces of the market to invest in it. So like I said, Halloween every year, we know we can make a lot of money, let's just make

00:43:22 Speaker_02
tons and tons of Halloween decorations over in China. The worker in the forced labour camp in China who doesn't even know what Halloween is, who's living in a strange liminal purgatory where he's making tombstones that he doesn't understand.

00:43:43 Speaker_02
He has become the fairy. He has become the hidden dark forces of Halloween. He's the unconscious mind of capitalism. He's in that liminal world in the prison camp. For we in the West don't really know if it exists or not. Just like the other world.

00:44:02 Speaker_02
We have a feeling it does exist, but we don't like to think about it. It's scary. And he's writing little notes and putting them into tombstones in the hopes that someone will read it. Like a ghost or a poker.

00:44:17 Speaker_02
trapped in the liminal otherworld, trying to communicate with our world right now. Hypercapitalism has made Iron Age, pagan fucking Halloween a reality. It's not just stories anymore.

00:44:34 Speaker_02
Tortured souls are trapped in hell, in hell on earth, to make our Halloween decorations. And they're trying to let us know that they're suffering. So that's my hot take for this week. Let's have a little ocarina pause.

00:44:54 Speaker_02
I'm in my office with my giant big fucking ocarina that never works.

00:45:03 Speaker_03
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00:45:52 Speaker_00
Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently, I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes.

00:46:01 Speaker_00
And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous two-year contracts, they said, what the fk are you talking about, you insane Hollywood ahole?

00:46:09 Speaker_00
So to recap, we're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch.

00:46:17 Speaker_04
$45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details.

00:46:31 Speaker_02
I suppose I won't be bothering any dogs with that. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page. Patreon.com forward slash TheBlindBoyPodcast.

00:46:47 Speaker_02
If this podcast brings you marth, merriment, distraction, entertainment, whatever the fuck, please consider becoming a patron. This podcast, it's my full-time job. It's how I rent out this office. It's how I pay all my bills. This is how I earn a living.

00:47:03 Speaker_02
This is a 100% listener-funded podcast, and I'm not beholden to the whims of advertisers. They can't tell me what to fucking do or what to talk about. Each week, I turn up and I speak about what I'm genuinely passionate about. That's what I do.

00:47:19 Speaker_02
And that's only possible because of patrons. So patreon.com forward slash the Blind Boy Podcast. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. If you can't afford it, don't worry about it. You listen for free.

00:47:35 Speaker_02
Listen for free. Because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. So everybody gets the exact same podcast. I get to earn a living. What more could we want? Gigs. Australia and New Zealand 2025. That's now sold out.

00:47:53 Speaker_02
My next gig, I believe, is fucking Vicar Street on the 19th of November. Very few tickets left for that. Come along. That's going to be a lot of fun. Wonderful Vicar Street November gig, Tuesday night. It's gonna be great.

00:48:08 Speaker_02
February, 9th of February, Leisureland Galway. Glamorous stuff. Then, more glamorous shit. I mean, try that. On the 21st of February, up to Belfast and the Waterfront Theatre on the 28th of February. 25, anything else? That's about it, is it? All right.

00:48:36 Speaker_02
So listen, regarding this week's hot take. I'd love to have had another day, and I'm literally just back from Spain. I'm just back from Spain, and I've been thinking about all that shit. I said I was going to take a week off.

00:48:50 Speaker_02
It wasn't my fault taking a week off. I was over in Spain. thinking about Halloween decorations back home. My head was in the range thinking about shit Halloween decorations.

00:49:03 Speaker_02
So I'll be honest, I would have loved to have had about another day to refine that hot take there, but I'm just back from fucking Spain. And also, I don't know if you can tell, but

00:49:15 Speaker_02
Winter has not been kind to me with coughs and fucking colds because I've got another sore throat of an agonizing swollen tonsil that made this week's podcast quite difficult and sore to do. Normally I've got four or five days to do a podcast.

00:49:30 Speaker_02
So if I do, I might do one take and do an entire podcast and go, you know what, that could be better. So I redo it the next day and refine it and refine it until I'm happy with what I put out. But I had less time to refine this one.

00:49:44 Speaker_02
And tomorrow I'm going to put this out and then I'm going to wake up tomorrow and be pissed off at myself because some other hot take will jump into my head and it'll be too late.

00:49:53 Speaker_02
I've had people complaining about my voice, my voice when I'm a bit sick. What can I do? There's nothing I can do. With radio stations, if the fucking radio presenter is sick, they ring someone in and they come in and do the radio show instead.

00:50:09 Speaker_02
I can't do that, nor would I want to. So I'm just going to turn up and do it with a sore throat. That's what I'm going to do. There's nearly 400 episodes. You can go and listen to an earlier episode if you like, where I don't have a sore throat.

00:50:22 Speaker_02
This is just what happens. I haven't gotten a sore throat in about four years. It's the fucking pandemic. The pandemic is over. And whatever it is about this year in particular, people are obviously mingling more and the coughs and colds are back.

00:50:38 Speaker_02
So I bid you farewell now. I have a very special guest next week. Cillian Murphy is coming onto the podcast next week. I recorded it already with great crack. Cillian's not too fond of doing interviews, but we'd wonderful crack.

00:50:55 Speaker_02
We just spoke about art and creativity. That's it, speak about art and creativity, nothing else. So I'll be showing you that next week, an interview with the magnificent Cillian Murphy. Okay, dog bless.

00:51:06 Speaker_02
Hug a worm, rub a swan, visit Only Gat Cave up in fucking Roscommon because... It's one of the fucking most incredible sites that we have in Ireland. We've got Onagat Cave, where Halloween started, and then you've got the hill of Rathcrogan.

00:51:25 Speaker_02
You're talking about a history as rich as the fucking pyramids, and it's just up in Rascommon. I have a documentary coming out next month. It's about the history of the Irish, Irish writing, but I go right back to the 500s.

00:51:42 Speaker_02
And I spend a lot of time on that hill in Rathcrogan, learning about how an epic like the Tán can be written using the land instead of fucking paper. And I spent some time inside in that cave.

00:51:57 Speaker_02
But go up and visit that place if you want the day out and chat to Daniel Carly. Get him to give you the guided tour, the guided. He's an expert and he's sound. Get him to give you the guided tour of that cave and the Rathgrogan Hill. Dog bless.