The Real Ghouls of Halloween

Halloween—and every scary movie ever made is playing on Netflix.  Ghouls and goblins and ghosts of all kinds decorate the streets, and even the major media publish semi-serious reports on how to defend yourself in the Zombie Apocalypse.

Halloween is always a contradictory holiday for real Witches—those of us committed to the ancient earth-based spirituality and healing practices from pre-Christian, pre-Judaic Europe and the Middle East.  For us, Halloween, the Celtic Samhain, (pronounced sow-rhymes-with-cow in) marks the ending of the old year and the beginning of the new.  The veil is thin between the worlds, the dead are close by—but that’s not scary.  Our Beloved Dead, family, friends and loved ones, are still part of our community, and this is a time to remember them and celebrate their lives.  Death is merely a station on the circle of rebirth.

But this Halloween, there are real ghouls and goblins all around us, and there is so much to genuinely make us afraid.  Here’s a quick guide to some of the grimmest of them:

The Ghoul of Dehumanization:  The very worst things we humans do to one another are inflicted on others when we define them as non-human, subhuman, animals.  This Ghoul manifests as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim prejudice, hatred of all kinds.  Just in the last few weeks, we’ve seen Hamas commit atrocities against Israelis and Israeli leaders respond by unleashing a firestorm of indiscriminate bombing against the people of Gaza as a whole, calling them ‘human animals’, killing thousands of children.  This Ghoul warps our thinking and sucks away our compassion, and it’s running rampant right now.

The Goblin of Revenge:  This is the sidekick of the Ghoul of Dehumanization.  I suppose it is a natural, human urge to want to strike back at someone who has hurt you, but when the Ghoul and the Goblin ride together, we lose all sense of proportion and end up slaughtering the innocent. Violence begets more violence, pain begets pain.  The abused become abusers in turn, and only the carrion eaters benefit.

The Zombie of Indifference:  While the Ghouls and Goblins rampage, the Zombie strikes us mute and paralyzes us.  We stand and watch, dumbstruck or distracted, while the carnage goes on.

The Vampire of Despair:  Partner of the Zombie, the Vampire sucks away our hope, our energy, and our will to action.  Paralyzed, we lose even the will to struggle.  What’s the use?  It won’t do any good.  The work of change seems overwhelming, and even if we were to undertake it, it won’t change anything.

Scary creatures, indeed—and they are all around us!  To counter them, I can only offer the four traditional Witches’ magical tools:

The Sword of Discernment:  Instead of blanketly condemning whole groups of people to subhuman status, we cut through the miasma and recognize that we are all human beings, all of us capable of doing terrible things, all of us with the capacity for great works of kindness and beauty.  People may do evil things, but none of us are ‘pure evil’—and the most evil acts often arise from the deepest, unresolved pain.  So we look to underlying causes for evil acts, and, instead of responding with atrocities of our own, we ask, “How do we change the conditions that spawn such horrors?”

The Wand of Energy:  The wand is the tool of fire, passion, energy!  To wield the wand, we must acknowledge and embrace our rage, but not let rage be our ruler.  We must feel and express our anger, but not let it guide our decisions and actions.  Anger is a life-force emotion, that energizes us when we are under attack, but anger is not strategic nor compassionate.  Embracing it without valorizing it, we can resist zombification, and use that energy to not to just inflict blows but to create regenerative change.

The Cup of Compassion:  The cup is the tool of water, of emotion.  When we drink from the cup, we feel our grief—the deep grief of our losses, the pain of death, the longing for those we miss, the dismay and disgust at what we humans are capable of.  And when we do, we open the door to compassion, the ability to imagine another’s pain, to see the world from another point of view, to feel the humanity in one another.

The Pentacle of Manifestation:  The pentacle, the five-pointed star, represents the four elements coming together under the guidance of spirit, bringing life and growth back into the world.  The five-petaled flower is the apple blossom, symbol of rebirth, and the rose, the flower of love.  Holding this tool, we do something, anything, in the physical, material world to call for greater understanding and love.  Call the President, march in the streets, feed a hungry child, clean up your room, do whatever most immediately lies before you, small or large.  That’s how we vanquish the Zombies and the Vampires, one small step at a time.

Wielding our magical tools, representations of the four elements, we evoke the fifth: spirit, that intangible quality that unites them all.  There are some losses too deep for comfort, some hurts too great to bear.  Yet we live in a world that is filled with compassion greater than indifference, beauty more intense that the worst horror.  We can never stamp our violence with more violence.  Yet we can overcome hate with love.