Restoring Halloween

Halloween, like most American holidays, has lost much of its original meaning. While many mistakenly condemn Halloween as a celebration of evil, others see it only as a "Hallmark holiday," an occasion for spending too much money on costumes, candy, and decorations. Instead, let’s take a few moments to recall Halloween's true meaning and purpose.

All Hallow's Eve originally marked the beginning of a three-day festival to honor the dead, which included All Saint's Day (Nov 1) and All Soul's Day (Nov 2). Pope Boniface proclaimed this holiday in the seventh century to absorb a similar pagan festival. All Hallow's Eve originally served an important purpose - celebrating the cycle of life as seen in the seasons, and in our souls. When summer's long and vibrant days gave way to the coming of winter's gloom, our ancestors' attention turned toward thoughts of eternal pairs like life and death, good and evil, light and dark.

Even today, those attuned to the inner life of the spirit understand the value of this kind of reflection. The search for "knowledge of the heart," known to the ancients as "gnosis," provides a process by which we can recognize the illusion of opposites, begin to understand them, and ultimately transcend them. Jesus spoke of this in The Gospel of Thomas, when He said, "Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the all."

Along with this process, the pre-Christian myths provided a content model to help people deal with dualism. The ancient Gnostics described a human body formed only of clay, but containing a spark of divine light secretly hidden within by Sophia - divine wisdom. This dual nature, the Gnostics speculated, explained our constant struggle between earthly and material distractions, and the yearning of the Spirit for God. Mainstream Christianity speaks of this dualism, too, but usually counsels suppression and denial of our darker sides. Mystics of many faiths, though, maintain that we must recognize and understand these aspects of ourselves before we can hope to master them. This sounds surprisingly like depth psychology, and in fact no less a figure than Carl Jung considered the Gnostics the world's first psychologists. The process they used, according to Jung, closely paralleled what he called "individuation," or the path to psychological and spiritual maturity. To reach this maturity, children as well as adults need to follow a process of seeking, finding, reconciling, and mastering life's difficult questions. Myth provides a framework for learning to deal with opposites - good and evil, weakness and strength, safety and danger, day and night - the same themes that Halloween can help them explore.

Now, our forebears understood the value of the mythical battles in our souls. But what would contemporary psychologists say about the value of Halloween in helping children to understand such complex issues - issues which most adults have not yet resolved? Consider these words from Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment, which explored and celebrated the value of folk and fairy tales for our childrens' inner growth: "While the Old and New Testaments and the histories of the Saints provided answers to the crucial questions of how to live the good life, they did not offer solutions for the problems posed by the dark sides of our personalities. The Biblical stories suggest essentially only one solution for the asocial aspects of the unconscious: repression of these unacceptable strivings. But children need fantasy satisfaction of these "bad" tendencies, and specific models for their sublimation."

Halloween, which originally revolved around folk tales and fantastic stories of wicked witches, ogres, ghosts, and devils, used to provide such a method for sublimation and maturation. But contrast that with the stories and rituals provided to children today, which seek to protect them from harm by hiding the darker side of life. Folk tales embody both good and evil in the form of symbolic characters and their actions, in the same way that the propensity for good and evil can be seen in every human being, and in life itself. We shouldn’t deny this, says Bettelheim, for, "When the unconscious is repressed and its content denied entrance into awareness...the unconscious mind will be partially overwhelmed by these unconscious elements...by denying access to stories which implicitly tell the child that others have the same fantasies, he is left to feel that he is the only one who imagines such things. This makes his fantasies really scary. On the other hand, learning that others have the same or similar fantasies makes us feel that we are a part of humanity, and allays our fear that having such destructive ideas has put us beyond the common pale." Those who have sought to shield children from the dark side by exterminating all monsters, he says, "missed the monster a child knows best and is most concerned with: the monster he feels or fears himself to be, and which also sometimes persecutes him. By keeping this monster within the child unspoken of, hidden in his unconscious, adults prevent the child from spinning fantasies around it in the image of the fairy tales he knows. Without such fantasies, the child fails to get to know his monster better, nor is he given suggestions as to how he may gain mastery over it."

A child needs not only permission to indulge in fantasy, but a way to externalize these often frightening inner processes, to grasp and ultimately master them. In normal play, we can observe children using dolls or other toy figures to represent aspects of the child's feelings which they find confusing or unacceptable, feelings they would find extraordinarily difficult to handle at a young age if considered as parts of themselves. The child now faces the challenge, though, of preventing the externalizations from becoming dominant. Bettelheim describes one way for a child to do this: "When he experiences the emotional need to do so, the child not only splits a parent into two figures, but he may also split himself into two people who, he wishes to believe, have nothing in common with each other."

Consider, then, how Halloween might allow a child to "split himself (or herself) into two," as Bettelheim continues: "When all the child's wishful thinking gets embodied in a good fairy; all destructive wishes in an evil witch; all fears in a voracious wolf - then the child can finally begin to sort out his contradictory tendencies. Once this starts, the child will be less and less engulfed by unmanageable chaos." By dressing up in costume, the child can act out the archetypal fantasies that rise from the depths of the unconscious, and learn to gain mastery over the less-desirable characters which inhabit the heart and mind.

Do these tales and characters inspire fear in children? Certainly! But, as Bettelheim points out, once they become better acquainted with these myths, "the fearsome aspects seem to disappear, while the reassuring features become ever more dominant. The original displeasure of anxiety then turns into the great pleasure of anxiety successfully faced and mastered.

So here we find the meaning and value of Halloween. We can, if we wish, restore the deeper meaning of this holiday, allowing our children to benefit from the cultural and psychological richness of myth. Costumes and ghost stories take on a new aspect in this view, helping our children to master their anxieties.

For vampires return each morning not to coffins filled with dirt, but to hearts filled with unspoken fears. The evil witch's brew contains only the power our helpless feelings allow it to have. And just as the villagers hunt for the werewolf who lurks on the moors, we would do well to hunt for him in the darkness of our souls, remembering that only when exposed to the light of day does he become his true and better self once again.