“There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.” —Albert Camus
It seems there has always been a draw to horror stories, the weird, supernatural, and unknown powers lurking just beyond our view. All of the mysterious creatures from classic horror dwell in the darkness, where our unconscious can project our deepest fears. In an industrial society, real darkness is quite rare. We are subjected to near constant light emanating from our cell phones, our street lamps, computers, and televisions. Light is so omnipresent that near major cities it blocks out our vision of the stars.
Literally and figuratively, light reveals the world in all of its intricacies. We use the illumination of science to dominate the world utterly. Within the world of the light, there is no mystery or wonder, only facts. It exposes and demystify the sacred. What little darkness remains is both compelling and frightening. Intolerable, the darkness is a direct assault on our sense of control.
Unnaturally extending the hours of light had many unintended side effects. Physically, access to light on demand has resulted in hormonal changes, upsetting circadian rhythms which has been linked to cancer, diabetes, depression and a host of other health ailments, but the greatest effect has been psychological.
History Professor Roger Ekirch at Virginia Tech notes that sleep patterns were significantly different in the time before artificial light. Depending on the time of year, there could be up to 14 hours of darkness every day. Typically people would sleep for four hours, broken by a roughly four hour period of being fully awake before returning to sleep for another four hours. People would use this time to visit neighbors, ponder their dreams, or make love. Countless religious books from the period provided special prayers for the hours between sleep.
Spiritual author and former Zen Buddhist monk, Clark Strand calls these periods between sleep “The Hour of God” and insist these traditional sleep cycles provide us with a necessary respite where we can achieve a fuller level of introspection and intimacy. It is a chance to be closer to the divine.
Our desire to be in control, to have full access to light whenever we want it, is like a “death grip.” “There’s a tension between the part of us that wants to move along at speed, infatuated with our ever proliferating array of screens and gadgets and the part of us that deeply hates them too,” Strand writes in his book, Waking Up To The Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age. “Few of us realize how saturated our minds and bodies are with light. Even fewer realize how modern media poisons the soul.”
Long periods of sleep broken by periods of wakefulness fell out of fashion as the industrial revolution added new constraints on time, demanding workers meet the needs of factory life. The widespread use of electric light made night a productive time, encouraging people to lump all eight hours into a single period of sleep. The non-productive hours of introspection faded into obscurity, observed by almost no one who has access to electric lighting.
To non-industrial societies, darkness is simply another way of being. They know the darkness, and so darkness is not a source of fear. Indian tribes have ghost stories and tales of supernatural human animal hybrids, but they are not horror stories. Within Indian ghost stories, the only monsters are men.
One legend of the Canadian Indian tribe of Mi’kmaw tells of a small boy trapped in a cave after being abandoned by his jealous step-father. Within the darkness, the boy can see the glowing eyes of the animals, who instead of preying on him, work together to help him escape the cave.
To the Indians, darkness is not evil or inherently threatening. It can be mysterious, but mystery and wonder are a part of living without instant answers derived from technological networks. To be in touch with nature is to be in touch with darkness.
Indeed, horror did not become a genre until industrial man became estranged from darkness. Having rarely experienced darkness, we no longer know it. For we are creatures of the light only, darkness represents the absence of knowledge. We project our subconscious fears into it.
For the psychically besieged dweller of industrial civilization, darkness is the home of the vampire, ever ready to devour the life force of beauty. The werewolf represents the animal heart of man and the fear of anarchy. The zombie’s unthinking consumption haunts every mall and office in America. The ghost is the astral projection of our many, many victims back for revenge. And of course, the monster of Dr. Frankenstein is the definitive symbol of science run amok.
In industrial and light based cultures, darkness represents everything that is unknown and therefore a potential threat. The knowledge obsessed man of industry cannot tolerate such ambiguities. To the industrial society, there is no value to darkness. It is not productive. It obscures knowledge, making it inconvenient at best and possibly dangerous. Because we have so little experience with darkness, we cannot dispel this myth. The solution for the light based society is to eliminate all forms of darkness to prove there are no monsters. Of course, monsters are real. They exist within us.
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