In Defense of Halloween
Oct 21, 2006 10:37 Filed in: Spirit
I first published this on October 20, 1999 in the Jackson Progressive and again offer it in the spirit of the season. - Tom Lowe
In a few nights, children will walk from door to door wearing ghoulish masks and costumes and calling "trick or treat"--we must give candy or catch mischief. Children love Halloween. Most adults love it. But some well-meaning Christians regard it as demonic and evil. I think they are mistaken.
Halloween clearly has pagan origins. In Medieval Europe, it was commonly believed that the dark, mischievous spirits of the night celebrated the change of season that would lengthen the nights and shorten the days. During those supposed nocturnal demonic celebrations, young men ventured about pulling pranks in imitation of the spirits, a throwback to the animism that permeated primitive societies prior to the coming of Christianity.
Halloween, of course, is short for the Eve of All Hallows, the latter known as All Saints Day, a celebration of the communion of saints. The early church originally established the Feast of All Saints to honor saints without a specific day. Although it was first set in the spring, the feast was later moved post-harvest to October 1, when adequate provisions could be made for the many pilgrims that flocked to Rome. It was only over a long period of time that the celebration of the nocturnal spirits became the eve of All Saints.
I suspect that most Americans living today acquired their understanding of Halloween from Walt Disney's Fantasia, which included an animation of the Russian composer Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain. In Fantasia, the spirits of the dead emerge from their graves and flock to the top of a great mountain, where the devil himself holds court. He sports with the dancing evil spirits, torturing them by throwing them into fire and molten lava, but when the church bell strikes, signalling the advent of morning and All Saints Day, he retreats into his mountain and the dead return to their graves. The scene ends quietly.
The movie is, of course, preposterous. It has no basis in Christian theology and only slightly in the pagan myths that underlie Halloween. It is no more than imaginative storytelling—entertaining, even terrifying—but hardly the stuff of belief. It is unfortunate that some persons have taken this version of Halloween seriously, not literally, but as a celebration of evil. Halloween is in fact a much deeper phenomenon than Disney's two-dimensional portrayal.
Festivals and celebrations do not survive for centuries out of mere nostalgia or sentimentality. On the contrary, they survive because they express in dramaturgic form the soul's condition and movement. To understand them we are compelled to enter the realm of myth. It has been said that a myth is a collective dream and that a dream is a personal myth. To understand the message of Halloween, we must study it with a mythical eye, rather than literally. Halloween and All Saints come together. Is this merely a chronological accident? Perhaps, but probably not.
Masks and costumes are archetypal. They change a person from an individual into a symbol. In Greek tragedy, staged during the festival of the god Dionysos, each actor wore a mask, a "persona," and it is clear that in wearing the masks, the actors represented something other than themselves, something bigger, something quite universal. Darth Vader, for instance, is clearly archetypal, with an imposing black mask through which his voice is painfully distorted. At the end of the movie and the end of his life, Vader's face, unmasked, is seen to be fatherly and kind—the hidden face behind the monster's mask.
Likewise, the children knocking at our door wear the symbols of death: ghosts, goblins, skeletons, witches and monsters (astronaut, ballerina and hobo costumes don't count). But we know that these grotesque wrappings hide beautiful, innocent, faces. Is it possible that the strange attraction of Halloween lies in its evocation of the profound, submerged knowledge that underneath the gruesome and frightening masks of death lurks a reality both innocent and beautiful? Could it be that the deepest fears of our lives, our psychic "skeletons,"once we summon the courage to face them, become harmless, and even beneficent?
Alan Watts once wrote that God plays peek-a-boo with us, much in the manner that adults play peek-a-boo with children. The psalms are abounding with prayers begging God not to hide his face from the psalmist and lamenting the fact that the Lord had hid his face. "How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?" (Ps. 13:1) "My soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning." (Ps. 130:6) "Do not hide your face from your servant, for I am in distress—make haste to answer me." (Ps. 69:17) In counterpoint to the mood of the lamentations is the delight of the psalmist in the revealing of God's face. "For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him." (Ps. 22:24) "So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory." (Ps. 63:2)
The Bible could even be defined as the record of the progressive revelation of God, first, as a stern, avenging, oriental-style monarch who reacts at humanity's sinfulness by flooding the earth, then, as a rule-making celestial executive who adopts a Semitic tribe and gives them a code of laws, and, finally, as a loving father who reveals himself in a fully human incarnation. It is as though God had been slowly withdrawing a stern, frightening mask from His face, but only as quickly as humankind was able to accept the revelation.
The proposition that good lurks underneath the appearance of evil is not exclusive to Christianity. In Plato's Symposium the drunken Alcibiades compared the homely Socrates to a Silenus, a small statue of the father of the god Dionysus, ugly on the outside but when opened, being found to hold images of the gods. And one must not omit The Eumenides of Aeschylus, in which the furies, ruthless creatures tormenting Orestes for the crime of matricide, were propitiated by the goddess Athena, who made them protectors of the City of Athens.
The Tibetan pantheon contains frightening and grotesque deities that are not really gods, as Westerners understand the term, but aspects of our own existence, who, when acknowledged and honored, become friendly and loving. In one story, two monks sat in a mountain cave, meditating in an attempt to evoke a particularly fearsome deity. After much time and effort, the deity appeared, terrifying beyond all imagining. One of the monks took leave of his senses and ran down the mountain, totally mad. The other monk, although frightened, remained, and began to study the visage standing before him. Immediately, he perceived that the monstrous deity was actually Amitabha, the "Buddha of Boundless Light," and that the fearsome appearance was merely an illusion caused by his initial failure to perceive the true nature of reality.
The complementarity of Halloween and All Saints Day reminds us that the saints, before they march in the heavenly procession, must face squarely, acknowledge and even "treat" the goblins and monsters in their own souls, who, when courageously confronted, reveal themselves to be helpers, not hindrances, but which, when denied and concealed from consciousness in the underworld of the soul, do not disappear, but return in vicious and harmful forms to cause dysfunction and suffering.
The child in monster costume proclaims "trick or treat." The child is an actor in a cosmic drama. Either we open our door and honor these masked children, or else they will return to do mischief, just as we must open ourselves to our own "monsters"—our deepest fears, angers, attachments and aversions—so that they do not do us mischief.
Halloween, therefore, is a ritual enactment of the dark night of the soul, a reminder of our need to enter and explore some of the darkest corners of our being, and that the reward for such a journey is not despair or hopelessness, but joy, love and peace.
Copyright Thomas Lowe, 1999. All rights reserved. Published in The Jackson Progressive, http://www.jacksonprogressive.com. Noncommercial reproduction of this article in its entirety is authorized, provided that this notice accompanies any reproduction.
Tags: Halloween, Plato, Euripides, mask, Mussorgsky, Silenus
In a few nights, children will walk from door to door wearing ghoulish masks and costumes and calling "trick or treat"--we must give candy or catch mischief. Children love Halloween. Most adults love it. But some well-meaning Christians regard it as demonic and evil. I think they are mistaken.
Halloween clearly has pagan origins. In Medieval Europe, it was commonly believed that the dark, mischievous spirits of the night celebrated the change of season that would lengthen the nights and shorten the days. During those supposed nocturnal demonic celebrations, young men ventured about pulling pranks in imitation of the spirits, a throwback to the animism that permeated primitive societies prior to the coming of Christianity.
Halloween, of course, is short for the Eve of All Hallows, the latter known as All Saints Day, a celebration of the communion of saints. The early church originally established the Feast of All Saints to honor saints without a specific day. Although it was first set in the spring, the feast was later moved post-harvest to October 1, when adequate provisions could be made for the many pilgrims that flocked to Rome. It was only over a long period of time that the celebration of the nocturnal spirits became the eve of All Saints.
I suspect that most Americans living today acquired their understanding of Halloween from Walt Disney's Fantasia, which included an animation of the Russian composer Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain. In Fantasia, the spirits of the dead emerge from their graves and flock to the top of a great mountain, where the devil himself holds court. He sports with the dancing evil spirits, torturing them by throwing them into fire and molten lava, but when the church bell strikes, signalling the advent of morning and All Saints Day, he retreats into his mountain and the dead return to their graves. The scene ends quietly.
The movie is, of course, preposterous. It has no basis in Christian theology and only slightly in the pagan myths that underlie Halloween. It is no more than imaginative storytelling—entertaining, even terrifying—but hardly the stuff of belief. It is unfortunate that some persons have taken this version of Halloween seriously, not literally, but as a celebration of evil. Halloween is in fact a much deeper phenomenon than Disney's two-dimensional portrayal.
Festivals and celebrations do not survive for centuries out of mere nostalgia or sentimentality. On the contrary, they survive because they express in dramaturgic form the soul's condition and movement. To understand them we are compelled to enter the realm of myth. It has been said that a myth is a collective dream and that a dream is a personal myth. To understand the message of Halloween, we must study it with a mythical eye, rather than literally. Halloween and All Saints come together. Is this merely a chronological accident? Perhaps, but probably not.
Masks and costumes are archetypal. They change a person from an individual into a symbol. In Greek tragedy, staged during the festival of the god Dionysos, each actor wore a mask, a "persona," and it is clear that in wearing the masks, the actors represented something other than themselves, something bigger, something quite universal. Darth Vader, for instance, is clearly archetypal, with an imposing black mask through which his voice is painfully distorted. At the end of the movie and the end of his life, Vader's face, unmasked, is seen to be fatherly and kind—the hidden face behind the monster's mask.
Likewise, the children knocking at our door wear the symbols of death: ghosts, goblins, skeletons, witches and monsters (astronaut, ballerina and hobo costumes don't count). But we know that these grotesque wrappings hide beautiful, innocent, faces. Is it possible that the strange attraction of Halloween lies in its evocation of the profound, submerged knowledge that underneath the gruesome and frightening masks of death lurks a reality both innocent and beautiful? Could it be that the deepest fears of our lives, our psychic "skeletons,"once we summon the courage to face them, become harmless, and even beneficent?
Alan Watts once wrote that God plays peek-a-boo with us, much in the manner that adults play peek-a-boo with children. The psalms are abounding with prayers begging God not to hide his face from the psalmist and lamenting the fact that the Lord had hid his face. "How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?" (Ps. 13:1) "My soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning." (Ps. 130:6) "Do not hide your face from your servant, for I am in distress—make haste to answer me." (Ps. 69:17) In counterpoint to the mood of the lamentations is the delight of the psalmist in the revealing of God's face. "For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him." (Ps. 22:24) "So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory." (Ps. 63:2)
The Bible could even be defined as the record of the progressive revelation of God, first, as a stern, avenging, oriental-style monarch who reacts at humanity's sinfulness by flooding the earth, then, as a rule-making celestial executive who adopts a Semitic tribe and gives them a code of laws, and, finally, as a loving father who reveals himself in a fully human incarnation. It is as though God had been slowly withdrawing a stern, frightening mask from His face, but only as quickly as humankind was able to accept the revelation.
The proposition that good lurks underneath the appearance of evil is not exclusive to Christianity. In Plato's Symposium the drunken Alcibiades compared the homely Socrates to a Silenus, a small statue of the father of the god Dionysus, ugly on the outside but when opened, being found to hold images of the gods. And one must not omit The Eumenides of Aeschylus, in which the furies, ruthless creatures tormenting Orestes for the crime of matricide, were propitiated by the goddess Athena, who made them protectors of the City of Athens.
The Tibetan pantheon contains frightening and grotesque deities that are not really gods, as Westerners understand the term, but aspects of our own existence, who, when acknowledged and honored, become friendly and loving. In one story, two monks sat in a mountain cave, meditating in an attempt to evoke a particularly fearsome deity. After much time and effort, the deity appeared, terrifying beyond all imagining. One of the monks took leave of his senses and ran down the mountain, totally mad. The other monk, although frightened, remained, and began to study the visage standing before him. Immediately, he perceived that the monstrous deity was actually Amitabha, the "Buddha of Boundless Light," and that the fearsome appearance was merely an illusion caused by his initial failure to perceive the true nature of reality.
The complementarity of Halloween and All Saints Day reminds us that the saints, before they march in the heavenly procession, must face squarely, acknowledge and even "treat" the goblins and monsters in their own souls, who, when courageously confronted, reveal themselves to be helpers, not hindrances, but which, when denied and concealed from consciousness in the underworld of the soul, do not disappear, but return in vicious and harmful forms to cause dysfunction and suffering.
The child in monster costume proclaims "trick or treat." The child is an actor in a cosmic drama. Either we open our door and honor these masked children, or else they will return to do mischief, just as we must open ourselves to our own "monsters"—our deepest fears, angers, attachments and aversions—so that they do not do us mischief.
Halloween, therefore, is a ritual enactment of the dark night of the soul, a reminder of our need to enter and explore some of the darkest corners of our being, and that the reward for such a journey is not despair or hopelessness, but joy, love and peace.
Copyright Thomas Lowe, 1999. All rights reserved. Published in The Jackson Progressive, http://www.jacksonprogressive.com. Noncommercial reproduction of this article in its entirety is authorized, provided that this notice accompanies any reproduction.
Tags: Halloween, Plato, Euripides, mask, Mussorgsky, Silenus
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