All Hallow’s Eve
Halloween: What are you going to go as? It’s that time of the year where we publicly pay regards to the darker side of life. As we watch the leaves shrivel and fall and we prepare for the hardships of winter, nature reminds us that summer is balanced by winter and life wouldn’t exist with out death. Light creates shadow. Duality is the nature of human experience.
We experience this dark side both within ourselves as individuals and within the larger culture. This shadow within our psyche contains the parts of ourselves that we have not yet brought up into the light of consciousness. When we look inside ourselves instead of outside, we can meet up with our shadow, often triggering a feeling of alarm or fear, and then we reject or suppress what we find. This is true even of undeveloped shadow aspects of ourselves that may ultimately be integrated as positive qualities. What’s in the shade isn’t all evil, it’s just unknown. And we tend to fear the unknown. With humans collectively, the culture’s shadow is also feared and disowned and often projected onto others in the form of racism, hate, or discrimination.
Robert Johnson in Owning Your Own Shadow writes, “All healthy societies have a rich ceremonial life. Less healthy ones rely on unconscious expressions [of shadow]: war, violence, psychosomatic illness, neurotic sufferings and accidents are very low-grade ways if living out the shadow. Ceremony and ritual are far more intelligent means of accomplishing the same thing. Ceremonies the world over, and from every age, consist mostly of destruction: sacrifice, burning, ritual killing, bloodletting, fasting and sexual abstention. Why? These are the ritual languages that safeguard the culture by paying out the shadow in a symbolic way.”
So we arrive at Halloween, a yearly ritual of safe expression of all forms of shadow— vampires, werewolves and ghouls— but also our inner princess, Super Man and fireman. Collectively, we project shadow onto nature’s owls, spiders, wolves, crows, bats and snakes.
Erik Ackroyd writes in an introduction to dream psychology: “Whatever pain or unease your shadow may cause you, it consists of precisely those parts of your total self that you need to utilize if you are to achieve full personal growth… We must learn to accept [shadow] and allow it proper expression under the control of our conscious mind. Then it will cease to be…terrifying and hostile.” Sounds good. Let’s get to work. Let’s find those conscious, safe ways to embrace and dramatize all those terrifying parts of ourselves. Let’s become fully human by integrating the inhumane potential within each of us.
So, what are you going to go as?
