“From ghoulies and ghosties, and long leggedy beasties, good Lord deliver us.”
Some claim the old saying was Scottish, others it was Cornish—but who cares? Halloween is gaining ground as an annual festival. In Latin America there is a celebration of the Day of the Dead. In the Catholic tradition the festival is of All Saints Day, followed by All Souls Day, but historians trace its origins back to a Celtic celebration of the end of Summer—using bonfires to ward off evil spirits. In Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, the fire festival became more linked to the flames and rockets of the once-Protestant celebration of Guy Fawkes’ Night.
Today’s Halloween festival, especially in the northern hemisphere, has become wholly commercialized with little lights on houses, garden decorations, and fancy garb. For children there is touring neighbors’ houses to play trick-or-treat on them, and for adults there’s celebrating in costume parties with an excuse to drink something black—or blood red, to match the costume you’re wearing.
The festival is now commercially supported: by farmers selling pumpkins and the last fruits of autumn, by makers of fancy costumes, by chocolate manufacturers, and by anyone who can get into the act to encourage the public’s buying habits in the frenetic run-up to Christmas, the Pavlovian music of which is already to be heard in some stores.
Friends tell me Halloween is their favorite festival, because it is full of good humor and neat ideas. Christmas is full of compulsion to send cards, give presents, visit family, attend annual office parties, and so on. New Year’s night is for sexy young adults getting tight in the middle of the night. But beloved Halloween is when you may hear giggles of children’s laughter and open the door to hand out small chocolate bars to wide-eyed tots dressed up as witches, ghosts, goblins, and little Frankenstein—however did he get included?
WODEN SAYS: I’ll be dishing out the treats this year as Mrs. Woden (a goddess in her own right) is off working somewhere. Hopefully we will overstock the sweets so I can put on a little weight eating up what is left. Woden truly is a weighty deity.
In our increasingly secular world it is easy to make a mess of All Souls Day, ghosts, witches, and the like. Halloween is an entry point for children into the world of adult fear: fear of ghosts, fear of the paranormal, and especially, fear of death. And our society is truly afraid of death. Compared with the Middle Ages, we’re less fearful of hell (which was why we used to burn witches) and more fearful of total extinction (which is why our bookshops today reflect the pitched battle between the forces of God and the forces of atheism).
We need to bring a little light to this celebration. Human beings really need to understand what happens to the soul at death. Souls are destined to transition Home at death. That’s the norm and most souls do just that, especially if they’ve had a few lifetimes already and know the drill. Each soul, when it incarnates here on planet Earth (or other planets used for soul training), leaves a portion of its energetic self as an anchor and as a conduit for Source energy to flow. So the homeward pull is built into the system. But instant recall to the realms of light does not always happen and souls stay around for a while. Why?
There are no accidents. Souls get confused as they approach death. Some confusion is physical and some concerns the nature of death itself; some is linked with religious teaching on divine punishment for sin; some is anger related to the cause of their death; much is related to an unresolved fear of dying. There are many variations—involving the desire to control others or to get revenge.
When souls are lost in this way, the memory of how to return Home is self-obliterated for a while. This memory will eventually return, usually stimulated by the persistent whisper of friendly spiritual guides. Until that happens, the soul remains body-less (discarnate) in the energetic interface between the heavy energy band of planet Earth (the third dimension), and the lighter fifth dimension of the Other Side, which is Home to us all.
In this discarnate state the soul may take on the semi-human appearance that we associate with ghosts, or may, unseen, play energetic tricks on people (as poltergeists), or may even seek to occupy the body space of a living person. Lost souls may amuse themselves with malicious tricks or black magic, but in the main, discarnates are just lost with nowhere to go and nothing to do. It should not surprise us that this is so—the Earth is full of people without purpose in life. We call them “couch potatoes.”
In the end? The control freaks discover they cannot control the living; the lost do find a purpose; the malicious finally get bored; those who imagine themselves in hell see the Light. Then the normal working of the universe operates—like the Prodigal Son they come to their senses and go Home. The soul is a fragment of the Source of life: You cannot trap or kill the soul.
Revenge
Thursday, March 11th, 2010A week ago, a Taliban fighter detonated a car bomb near a police checkpoint in Kabul. Ten died, among them two members of the United Nations delegation. They were not engaged in military operations. Both the men were Afghans, as was their assailant. Over fifty Afghans were injured in the blast. The UN expressed its distress at the loss of life, but does not intend to close its operation in the Afghan capital. Life must go on as usual, it seems.
The attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, triggered this war. When the US invaded Afghanistan it was to remove the ruling Taliban who had created a safe haven for al-Qaeda. Hamid Karzai was installed as president after the rapid defeat of the Taliban. The Americans, who have never dislodged Osama bin Laden’s terrorists, effectively bungled the operation, and are still—eight years later—fighting the Taliban and looking for bin Laden.
There is a clear winner in this conflict:
• It is not America and its NATO allies, led by Britain. They are mired in a war that threatens to kill increasing numbers of troops and, some commentators have said, could last 50 years at the rate things are going.
• It is not the Afghan people, who are dying in increasing numbers in a conflict that they never asked for and that causes great suffering.
• It is not the Pashtun ethnic group, which we simplistically identify as the Taliban. They call the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan their homeland. Pashtuns see the war as an unfinished struggle for freedom and self-determination.
• It is not Pakistan, which has seen its borders invaded by NATO’s army and is now suffering from a hail of deadly explosions in its urban areas at the hands of the Taliban insurgents.
The winner—already—is al-Qaeda.
Despite losing some of its top commanders, the influence of this fundamentalist Islamic group has seen its campaign strengthened immensely by this war. Intending to win more hearts and minds of radical Muslims throughout the world, it has more than achieved its objective in every month of each of the eight years of conflict. In mosques and madrassas, in big groups and little terrorist cells, the world has seen an enormous rise in acceptance among Muslims of al-Qaeda’s anti-Christian, anti-Zionist thinking and organization. Were the Americans to kill or capture Osama bin Laden today, the event would only strengthen the movement’s radicalism. The West is infinitely more in danger of terrorist hits by al-Qaeda now than it was eight years ago.
WODEN SAYS: Sir Francis Bacon once called revenge “a kind of wild justice,” and there is plenty of revenge in this tangled situation.
I am reminded of the story of the old French farmer who had a traffic accident with his horse-drawn cart and a much younger neighbor riding a modern tractor. The magistrate ruled in favor of the neighbor, although the farmer was without doubt the injured party. So the farmer dragged the broken cart into his driveway, where the neighbor would see it every day. For years the farmer looked upon the cart and seethed in fury, plotting revenge. For years the neighbor passed by the gate thinking, “That old, broken-down cart looks quite picturesque there.”
The farmer’s wife knew the anger that was in her husband’s heart, a desire for revenge that paralyzed and sickened him. Worrying about him made her so ill that she died. Their son, a businessman, came from Paris for the funeral. Seeing the driveway blocked by the cart, he asked a neighbor to pull it to the dump with his tractor—yes, same neighbor, same tractor.
Without the cart to remind him, the farmer forgot about the injustice and lost his desire for revenge. He felt better, and even struck up a friendship with the neighbor’s widowed mother, and in the fullness of time, they married.
The NATO forces in Afghanistan include the German army, formerly a sworn enemy of France and Britain, Poland and the Netherlands, all of which are also with Germany in the European Union. Japanese goods and people are welcomed in the United States, which formerly opposed Japan and dropped atomic bombs on her cities. Making peace can be done, and has been successful. The symbol of change is the Berlin Wall that fell 20 years ago this week.
Revenge is indeed a wild justice, and it motivates this impossible war in all its aspects. So, with all the power that an Anglo-Saxon deity can muster, Woden says: “Enough is enough. Mr. Obama, pull out of this war.”
Tags: Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden, war
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