A look into Darkness

Humanity: truly we are a blessed species with a great curse. While the ordinary animal has no time to think outside of "When can I eat?" or "Where is food?", we are a creature that has a unique ability. That ability, my friends and readers, is the ability to create abstract thought. One such abstraction is darkness. Not the physical definition such as "the absence of light" but rather it's symbolic definition, it's poetic meaning, the impact it has on our abstract minds, and our religious or moral ideas. The opinions I express aren't entirely mine but rather the generalizations I have picked up from various pieces of media, culture, and observations I made myself.

It's symbolic and poetic meaning is generally that which most Humans have: darkness is unknown, foreign, strange, dangerous, even sinful. Here be dragons if you will. During the 19th century in a string of events most historians of the West declare as the "last land grab" in which the major European imperialist powers cut Africa into areas of control from the British, French, Germans, Belgian, the big powers of the time if you will while America was building it's little empire in the Pacific as a result of "Manifest Destiny" mentality and is notably marked with the Spanish-American War, the Philippines War, and the Indian Wars of the western frontier. These major western powers, primarily those of Europe, referred to deeper and deeper territory as "Dark Africa" in which most of the lush jungle and land was not touched by Western hands. The best example is the famous novella written by Joseph Conrad called Heart of Darkness, in which the main character recants a tale of him traveling into the Congo to find a dubious ivory collector. While examples of the piece will ruin plot points of the story, the imagery of the story being told at dusk and finishing at night while the man's name is spoken of without his true motifs and doings done shows greed in humanity.

But what of our minds? We see darkness, we acknowledge it, and yet we fear it. While it is typically in our nature to fear what we can't see, darkness has an interesting category in that we fear what is in it. Take, for example, our eyes. Only able to take in a certain area of the electromagnetic spectrum, our vision is actually very limited in that we need light. In darkness, we are blind and unable to see anything. When a single sense is eliminated, our remaining ones increase to compensate. A single stirring startles us, bumping into a table hurts more, we can smell and taste things more vividly, and even our supposed "sixth" sense makes us begin to hear and see things not present. Our minds begin to race: make sense, make sense, make sense dammit! As creatures of light and day, we have the predisposition to get tired with the night. Some of us even embrace the night as a friend, a companion, a creature that allows us to be at peace with our souls and minds. It's not too surprising to understand that for some the night is a time of sanctuary, salvation, even a thing to be worshiped. Though such people in a predominately Judeo-Christian or Muslim society might find such things with the devil or against the Creator, so little do we forget that it was by a star that signaled the birth of Christ or the miracle of the oil now celebrated as Hanukkah.

Why do most religious people find the darkness fearful? The primary case I've observed is that all religions declare themselves right thus, by default, their god or gods are those which reside in the sky and are beacons of light in a world of darkness. In nearly every establish culture and civilization of the ancient world, from the Aztecs to the Sumerians, there has been a god or goddess of the sun and a god or goddess of the moon. Some scholars believe that this duality might be the startings of the modern monotheistic religions in which the worshiped god is a graceful yet powerful being (like the sun) while the opposing force is more associated with lunatics and the creatures of the night (like the moon). In most religious stories, there is never total darkness. When Moses led the people of Israel through the desert, there was fire to guide the way with the fire being symbolic of the sun, or light, and thus Yahweh divinely guided His people. It is almost a universal idea that dark clouds or a dark day in a story is foreboding, ominous, a sign of danger. Again, this derives from the basic essence of darkness: the unknown. That which is foreign and wrong to us is dark.

What is darkness? Darkness is that fear which can't be explained, that knowledge and desire which can't be spoken of, and all things beyond our comfort zone.