Thoughts on Halloween-2011

It has been ages since my last post! I do plenty of writing of my own but I can’t seem to get the motivation to get it on the computer. I prefer writing on paper. I can relate easier to my own handwriting than to an automatic font that anybody can use.

My latest thoughts have been about Halloween. Well maybe I should start a little before Halloween. I’ve been really sensitive about The Otherworld for some reason. When I use to term “The Otherworld” in this blog I’m not meaning Hell or any place that’s “evil”. I feel like that is an important thing to start off with. I mean it more like the Celts used it as the place of the dead. It’s a concept that has been used long before the concept of Hell came about.

These thoughts started when I started watching those ghosts’ shows on TV. I would get so mad while I watched them! I felt like these people that host the shows had no idea what they were getting themselves into. Like it was just a game they were playing with a serious issue.

Then as Halloween came around I started learning about where the traditions came from and why we do what we do for Halloween. Basically I’ve learned that America has done to Halloween what we’ve done to all the rest of our holidays. We’ve taken these celebrations and turned them into self gain. I’m not going to go on a rant about greed. I just wanted to “raise awareness” to why we do what we do instead of doing it out of habit.

Every country in the world has a day where the people honor the dead. There’s Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) in Mexico, in Brazil they celebrate Dia de Finados, there’s All Saints Day and All Souls Day in the Roman Catholic heritage in Europe, The Bon Festival is Buddhist for honoring departed spirits of the ancestors. The list goes on and on but I think that’s enough to show the point that Halloween in America, which started off as All Hallows Eve, has really become cutesy and tempered down, really having nothing to do with the dead at all.

On Halloween the veil between this world and The Otherworld is the thinnest. We started dressing up as a way to spook the otherworldly creatures away from us and our homes (especially faeries. Faeries are anything but cute and sweet!). Jack o Lanterns are cool. They used to be made out of turnips and radishes. When you carve pumpkins it’s best to carve one for every head that lives in your house. The jack o lantern protects the people in your family so having one for everybody covers everyone’s assets! :D In some traditions people would set a place in their house for their dead loved one’s spirits by preparing their favorite meals and feasts. So maybe this year just to keep our departed loved ones in our hearts maybe we could start by passing out their favorite candies they liked and just sharing memories you have of them; the good and the bad. You might even come to a resolution with them if you let them speak with you.

Halloween is a time of awakening. When I started really thinking about all of this, I decided to pull cards (as per usual) from my Halloween Tarot Deck. I got the Queen of Wands (which has been popping up constantly for me the past little while), XX Judgment and the 8 of Wands. In the tarot XX Judgment is a rebirth and awakening card. To have gotten this card in regards to Halloween is pretty right on. Halloween is a time for the Dead to rise from their grave (which is the typical image in the card) and to face their choices, nothing being hidden or censored from their minds. The character Shadow in the book American God’s by Neil Gaiman goes through that very same thing when he dies and has his heart weighed to that of a feather. In the story, Shadow feels everything he has ever felt in his life. How would that feel like? To be faced with memories and choices we’ve made that have been pushed down into our own “Shadow’s” and having to own up to those hurts? To be quite literally naked (just like the dead figures in the XX Judgment card) in front of a divine being who is giving you your “final” judgment. To us moments like this happen infrequently. We can be faced with repercussions of a choice we made and have to correct so we can move on. What about the spirits? What about the spirits for whatever reason still hang around us?

When I pulled the Queen of Wands (in the Halloween Tarot deck the wands were changed for Imps. I’m just using the typical symbol the Wands so I don’t get confused lol) for some reason the first “hit” I got was Spirit. Whenever I get Court Cards in readings I always get stumped. The court cards can represent a lot of different things. They can represent a person, which to me is hard to pinpoint because it could represent any number of people. They can represent the archetype of you that is directly involved with what is going on in your life at the moment or they can represent the personality of a situation if that makes any sense. When reading the cards we have to always go by our intuition. That’s why the “first hit” or first thought is usually the answer to the question. When I got the Queen of Wands I first decided to ignore my instincts because to me it’s hard to prove who the card could be about! Ok, so I feel spirit. What does that even mean? Does it mean a spirit of someone I know? Is it the spirit of Halloween? I decided that the traits of the Queen of Wands should be applied to the spirit of Halloween. The Queen of Wands is a sensor of the natural world. The Otherworld is a part of our natural world so she would be a sensor of that energy in our lives. She is usually depicted with a black cat. So she may be the witch with her black cat that you encounter on Halloween night. The cat is a magickal creature who is said to walk between the worlds. The Q.ofW. reminds me of Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter. She is a fiery witch who you would never dream of crossing and she just so happens to turn into a cat. But not to go into more harry potter metaphors because I know I could go on for hours…. Maybe she is the Faerie Queen of the Tuatha De’ Danann from Irish mythology? Who knows?

Then I get the 8 of Wands. This one seemed to stump me as well for a bit. The 8 of Wands is a card of action and fast movement. My tarot teacher called it the “email and texting card”. It’s a card about messages, about energy going all sorts of which ways. It can also be a harmonious card when every element is synched together like music or plays. For Halloween it could possibly be a card about the excitement and the anticipation! Maybe it could be a card about harmony between us and the otherworld.

I guess a good message to gain from these cards concerning Halloween would be to learn how to become sensitive to the spirits of our ancestors and our friends in the otherworld, to help awaken to our shadows so that we can move on and evolve and to work together with these beings in harmony without fear because the spirit world is a scary concept for people.

So while we dress up like Zombies, pop stars and sexy cats this year, just think about the spirits that are waiting just outside our earthly vision and how we can honor what they have left behind for us…