The Inner Meaning of Halloween

I don’t know about you, but I love Halloween. I love nearly everything about it. I love watching kids dress up and go trick or treating. I love giving out little Milky Ways and Snickers to the kids that would come to our door. I love that it’s a holiday where everyone just gives with no thoughts of receiving. Even if the gifts aren’t big, like they are at Christmas, the energy of giving is there just the same. I love dressing up, and trying on new identities. When I lived in New Orleans, where Halloween is one of the three most important holidays of the year, I loved going out and losing myself in the music that spills from every bar on Frenchman Street.

And now as I have gotten older, and my spirituality has developed, I love the symbolism and inner meaning of Halloween. Halloween is the time of year when the veil between the spirit world and the physical word is thinnest. This is because the year itself is dying. We entered harvest season with the fall equinox, and the days have been getting progressively shorter. The leaves are turning colors, ready to fall of the trees. Astrologically, by the time Halloween rolls around, we will have entered Scorpio, the sign of death and rebirth. Scorpio knows the great mystery that it is through the experience of death that we regain new life, and now is the time of year when we collectively experience that death, to be reborn again in Midwinter, when the days once again begin to grow long.

In North America, Halloween is celebrated mostly as a children’s holiday, but in South America, they celebrate it as Dia de Los Muertos. It is not a children’s holiday but a feast to honor the dead and the ancestors. Halloween in the Christian calendar is All Hallow’s Eve – the day before two holidays that honor those who have gone on before – All Saint’s Day and All Soul’s Day. And in the pagan calendar, it is Samhain, a time when the veil between worlds in thin and the ancestors cross over to this side more easily to give us messages.

In Asia, where I now live, honoring the ancestors is an integral part of life. On the first and fifteenth day of each lunar month, you can spot little fires in the street, where people are burning fake money and other items to send to their relatives in the afterlife. Each house has an altar with pictures of parents and grandparents and great grandparents that have passed, and incense is lit to honor them. We have largely lost this custom of honoring our ancestors, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important. When we take the time to honor and connect with those who have gone before us, we can find a foundation of love and support that goes beyond time and space. Halloween is a great time to set up some kind of altar for your ancestors, with pictures, mementos and a candle. Light the candle and think about your ancestors, pray for them, call them to you and feel the love and support come.

Honoring the ancestors is also important because we can carry their trauma in this lifetime. Trauma is passed down from parent to child through the body, and many of our ancestors, who lived much more difficult lives than we do now, died with unresolved traumas inside their bodies. When we honor our ancestors, learn about our family tree and their experiences, we can begin to separate what is us from what is a family legacy. We can begin to let it go. When you light your candle for your ancestors, you can ask that any trauma that is not yours, any ancestor who is unhealed, be taken up into the light of source and healed. This can begin to free you from things that were perhaps not yours to begin with.

We are all points in a great web, a great family tree. The sheer number of people who lived and loved before us, just so that each of us could be here is awe-inspiring. Now is a great time to connect to that vast web, the web of all the people who came before. What will you do to honor your ancestors this Halloween? Let me know in the comments below.