At a shopping mall near you, on a cool autumn night when all the world was fast asleep, there suddenly materialized a temporary pop-up shop from a national chain that comes this time of year before disappearing just as suddenly amid the sound of smashing pumpkins.
It is a Halloween megastore, spacious as a cemetery, with all matter of costumes, seasonal decor, and enormous animatronic figures in varying guises of demented, deranged and demonic. “Cemetery,” is in fact the most fitting word to describe this ghoulish cavern of grotesque gewgaws, for in it one finds the entire history of Western Civilization reduced to counterfeit and caricature, to plastic goods made in China and imported on planet-destroying ghost-ship galleon.
Everything once grand and noble has been reduced to a silly commercial exchange; one of the adult costumes, in fact, is actually called “noble knight.” (The plastic sword, should you choose to hold it in the sign of a cross and kneel before the vault of heaven, must be purchased seperately.) The megastore’s aisles are arranged around themes, some based on pop culture, others on actual history. There are pharoahs, Medieval sacred kings, Roman senators, and the goddess of love herself, Aphrodite. Among the decor aisles is one called “mystical” that features talismans of the Western Mystery Tradition, signs and sigils that once held the key to the higher realm of metaphysics and the sacred science of God’s immutable laws. These had always been secretly guarded, being incomprehensible and dangerous to the ignorant masses, but here they are lined up for mass consumption. It is truly a tragic cultural graveyard, this Halloween megstore, so perfectly symbolic of civilizational winter, of exile from Tradition into a capitalistic netherworld, of the fall so deep from spirit into matter that no light can enter it.
And in keeping with the satanically inverted character of the times, the name of this melacholy mercantile emporium is, naturally — or rather unnaturally — Spirit.
Writing in the interwar years, Funcanelli — so-called last of the alchemists best known for his esoteric exegesis of Notre Dame Cathedral — warned that the world was on the cusp of a great magnetic inversion, a time in which the Good, True and Beautiful would become incomprehensible to the demonically possessed masses ruled by the pernicious power of the Bad, False and Ugly.
As a child in the 1970s, I adored Halloween. This was back when costumes and decorations still drew upon the supernatural wellspring of the Gothic imagination and traditional Western folklore, such as witches and vampires, werewolves, and other fearsome boogeymen of the imagination. All this resonated deeply with a child of seven, as if such archetypal images were inherited in the blood from the otherworldly realm of gargoyles and goblines, witches and wizards. But Halloween changed with the times, becoming harsher and more violen, descending from the uranian realm of the archetypal and the perennial battle between good and evil into the sublunary shadows, the yellow-lit urban streets and sleepy suburbs where serial killers and deranged clowns stalk innocent victims. But the seasons change, the world turns, and even the cosmos has its cycle. At some point the devil must have his due.
These days I find that my childhood love of Halloween has become all too real, for now every day feels like All Hallow’s Eve.
Like a character out of Poe, I live with the windows drawn, so dreary are the soulless ones who traipse by on all sides. When forced to leave the house to procure a jug of wine and loaf of bread, I walk invisibly among a motley throng covered in tattoos, their posture slumped and their faces ever frowning, slunk over their death-device and schlepping along like undead sleepwalkers. This is now a normal person: without gods, ancestors, history, culture or tradition. And increasingly without family, emotion, or even the light of intelligent awareness, as, according to recent viral videos from schoolteachers in the age of pandemic, it’s as if students are mere soulless bodies: all energy gone, the divine spark entirely extinguished.
On the present path, in the all-too-near future the Halloween megastore will allow lifeless citizens to dress up as a “Happy Imaginative Child Of The ‘70s,” as yet another archetype leaves the world of reality to haunt the graveyard of a lost culture. — CHRISTIAN CHENSVOLD
Image: detail of an illustration to the tales of Edgar Allan Poe by Harry Clarke.