AN INNER HALLOWEEN

Here we are again with pretend spider webs lining fences, scary masks and costumes, kids playing trick-or-treat and enterprising souls carving out pumpkins. Halloween, October 31, is a fun festival that migrated from its source in Scotland and Ireland to the USA where it grew bigger and more ostentatious. It arrived in my country Australia some years ago, replacing the English tradition of Guy Fawkes bonfires and ‘firecrackers’. Big stores have caught on and now stock heaps of plastic Halloween merchandise.

The name Halloween means ‘hallows/saints eve’, referring to the night preceding All Saints Day on November 1, followed by All Souls Day on the 2^nd. On these days in church tradition the days were set aside first to honour the saints and martyrs and second to pray for the souls we dearly loved in this life, who may be dealing with their former wrong deeds. In the past it helped to remind worshippers that the spiritual realms were real and that eternal damnation was always a possibility. 

Halloween coincides with Celtic Samhain. Christianity has a long history of appropriating pagan festivals and this date may have been chosen by the early Catholic church as another useful take-over.

The sun provides celestial events that influence natural shifts on earth. These earthly events are called the solstices and equinoxes. When the sun shines over the equator at the two equinoxes, day and night are of equal lengths. Symbolically the earth stills her breath and there is a moment of harmony and equilibrium before she breathes again and the sun continues its onward cyclical journey towards the solstices around 21-23 June and December.

In the northern hemisphere Samhain marked an anxious, restless time. By the end of October, the summer equinox had passed and Mother Nature was breathing out, like a long, deep sigh before her wintery hibernation. There was a rush to complete the harvest before the earth fell into darkness.

Perhaps it was within this sighing, this spirit-bearing breath that people became more aware of souls in the liminal place between earth and spirit. For them it was as if a space opened and spirits, both benign and mischievous, moved in a parade between the otherworld and earth.  Hence the offerings to honour the good spirits and the bonfires and fierce masks to keep the other spirits at bay. Hence the fear and the need to be on one’s guard lest the nasty spirits wreaked havoc in field and home. The church merely redirected this fear towards the afterlife, and the evil spirits that would torment you unless you followed the church’s guidance and ‘saved your soul’.

Today this spirit-based thinking has mostly faded. Halloween is an enjoyable event that encourages community. Yet behind all the ghoulish fun and games, the chance to party and stock up on sweets, and ongoing beyond Halloween, the wide popularity of shocker movies, lies the urge to alleviate fear of things unknown by enjoying our constructed frights.

This in part helps us to look away from real-world horrors we humans have inflicted here on earth. And significantly it directs us away from another reality. The spiritual realms are also real. The ancients understood this.

Spirit is all around us, behind and within all that is physical. And here within our souls is where spiritual forces contend – both damaging and beneficial. We do need always to test the spirits. We invoke the demons of destruction if we act according to lower impulses that draw from that human-damaged world. And we invoke the spirit of love when we align with the realm of pure love.

We can know and experience this beautiful spiritual realm because we are body, soul and spirit. This spirit is our higher self, the essence of who we are. Our souls dip down into a physical body and sojourn on earth in these bodies for a certain number of years. Soul is the mediator between spirit and the physical. But our true home is spirit.  

Being in physical body in a physical world has been vital for the evolution of human consciousness. But in many ways over the aeons humanity has gone so very wrong. Myths, legends and religious festivals became a means of reminding us of our intimate link with the spiritual world of love because the physical world of things exerts such a strong pull. Our sense-based minds tell us that this is reality. And today we are in danger of losing touch with who we are, even in many religious doctrines.

The answer to what we fear and what we try to avoid, even death itself, lies within our human potential to change, to seek for higher things, to live according to our spirit. This is the story of the inner Halloween, the deeper meaning behind this fun festival and the festivals of saints and souls. It is really a festival of hope and light shining in the darkness.