Crucifixion, Resurrection - Good Friday and the Catholic macabre

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While I've been pondering about why ghost stories appear to be an essential part of human story-telling and maybe, some might argue, vital to the general health of our human psyche, Easter has caught up with me.

I am writing this on Good Friday 2019. Gibraltar is gloriously quiet - none of the thunderous clamour of construction around the many building sites in this tiny city, hardly any traffic noise and even the shipping in the harbour is puttering away slowly rather than growling about its daily business. Quiet is something rarely associated with Gibraltar - unless you are in the depths of one of the caves - and therefore to be savoured.

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But rather than potter outdoors in the reprieve in between the bouts of bad weather that we seem to be having today, I am staying indoors, tending my flu-ridden family and pondering why Easter, the Catholic religion, and grim, ghastly ghostly goings on seem to be so powerfully linked.

I guess part of it must be the very visual nature of Catholicism. I was raised a Catholic, as many Gibraltarians are, and I confess (yes, one of those Catholic habits) that I am no longer much of a believer. Our brand of Catholicism is very Spanish in nature and visual imagery is very powerful in Hispanic Catholicism, as in other Mediterranean cultures. As a child I found the plaster and stone statues in the local churches macabre. The life-size statues representing Christ on the cross and his mourning followers that adorns (I use that term with a great deal of reservation) the Cathedral of St Mary the Crowned in Gibraltar's Main Street was a source of regular nightmares that tortured my childhood. Why on earth any sane relative (I think it was one of my Rosary-bead-clicking, black-garbed widowed aunts that insisted on my lighting a candle at the feet of the statues and praying for long-dead ancestors) would think it was a good thing for a five-year old to stand and stare at a representation of a tortured, dying man and despairing mourners is utterly beyond me. I woke up terrified on many nights after that with that image of the agonised and dying Jesus and his bleeding forehead and hands and feet burned forever into my imagination.

There's an even worse statue at the Iglesia de la Imaculada Concepcion in La Linea, our neighbouring town in Spain. That statue depicts Jesus having been taken off the cross, clearly, judging by the state of the wounds and the greenish hue, several hours after death. Gross! That one doesn't haunt me so  much - I was an adult by the time I was exposed to that horror and had survived numerous Wes Craven movies. And I cannot apologise if I offend religious sensibilities here - it is not people's faith or the religion that I judge, it is the utter lack of artistic mastery or spiritual sensibility.

But it was the whole Catholic Easter story imagery that got me thinking about the link between ghost and horror stories and religious imagery. Not only is Catholicism very visual, many of its images and even rituals, are pagan in origin. The antiquity of these is shrouded in mystery, which is interesting, because while Catholicism tells us it is a very bad thing to be superstitious, rely on idols or consult psychics or talk to the dead or seek to divine our future - in other words, to keep well away from 'the occult' - Catholicism is full of "holy mysteries" we are told we must believe and secrets that only those who enter (via complex preparation and initiation rites) the upper echelons of the Church are permitted to know. I'm just thinking of the third secret of Fatima which was eventually revealed in 2000, or the many scrolls uncovered in Qumran that the Vatican held back from academic study for so many years.

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Catholicism is itself defined by belief in ghosts. One third of the Holy Trinity is the Holy Ghost. We are asked to keep away from the occult and the supernatural but we are asked to believe the unbelievable like the resurrection of the dead (could this be linked to our beloved zombie stories?); the transformation of wine and bread into the blood and flesh of a man-god (cannibalism story?) and a plethora of visions of people dead for centuries (notably saints and the Virgin Mary).

Ghosts and Catholicism go together perfectly. The doctrine of purgatory works ideally to generate ghost stories of all sorts but particularly those with some kind of moral that can be useful to teach humanity a lesson. The doctrine of purgatory was formulated in the  Councils of Florence and Trent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Purgatory is a place in the after life where souls of the dead wait for a final purification - entirely different from the punishment of the damned that takes place in the dominions of hell. Ghosts are therefore spirits which cannot pass into heaven because of some sort of unfinished business largely associated with obtaining atonement for sins during life. The ghosts that are permitted by God to wander back to haunt the living are generally cast into three types: those who are still rather nasty and malicious and taunt the living, such as poltergeists, and need a fair few more centuries of purgatorial cleansing; those who revisit their lives until they have atoned and may be seen in places that were familiar to them or at scenes of their misadventures; and those who are closer to a state of glory and revisit their living loved ones with a message of love and hope. Purgatory is a perfect resource for ghost stories!

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And then there are demons. Whole hosts of them. We have to believe in demons because we must believe in the Devil and these are his servants. If we are to believe in the redemptive power of Christ, and the goodness of God and in how he is to overcome all evil with the Second Coming, then we must believe in the Devil and his terrible minions. And if we (the millions of Catholics around the world) are to be kept in our proper meek and highly exploited place while dominated by a wealthy male elite, we must be terrified into submission by the belief that even the slightest misdemeanour will be punished by an eternity in the company of said demons in the pits of hell. I say the slightest misdemeanour, not to be facetious, but in memory of finding out that missing Mass on a Sunday was a mortal sin as was the ingestion of the Blessed Eucharist if you had eaten something within the hour prior to allowing said blessed wafer into your stomach. But another terrific store of stories of terror is contained in the mythology of demons promulgated by religious belief, which, after all, hinges on the eternal supernatural struggle between good and evil.

So starting with the Crucifixion - a horror story in itself based on the torturing and death of an essentially good man,whether you believe he was divine or  not, and ending with the rising of the dead - Easter is pretty unnerving as festivals go. And, I suppose, this reinforces my thinking about the importance of ghost and other horror stories. In his Letter to Artists, Pope John Paul II said: "Even when they explore the darkest depths of the soul or the most unsettling aspects of evil, artists give voice in a way to the universal desire for redemption."

But I will finish this post with the master of horror himself, Stephen King, who in his book, Danse Macabre, said: "Horror movies do not love death, as some have suggested; they love life. They do not celebrate deformity, but by dwelling on deformity, they sing of health and energy. By showing us the miseries of the damned they help us rediscover the small joys of our own lives. They are the barber's leeches of the psyche, drawing not bad blood but anxiety...for a little while anyway."

And now I'm going to spend the rest of Good Friday watching old episodes of "The Walking Dead" which is more a reflection of the darkness and the light in humanity, of what makes us good or evil, rather than a contemplation of flesh-eating zombies as some might suggest!

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