“‘Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world: now could I drink hot blood.”
(Shakespeare, Hamlet, ca. 1600)
On the thirty-first of October, countries as distant as Mexico, Brazil, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Canada, and, above all, the United States, celebrate one of the strangest and most popular pagan holidays: Halloween. Over the past two decades, this festival has also taken root in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and other Eastern European countries, where it overlaps with the Christian commemoration of All Souls’ Day.
Its origins, however, reach back more than two millennia to the ancient Celtic custom known as Samhain, once celebrated in northern France, England, and Ireland. In various forms, this archetypal motif appears in religions and myths across the world. The theme that Halloween brings to consciousness holds deep psychological significance, as it addresses a core insight for curating the well-being of humankind.
The Celts called the festival Samhain. The old Irish and Gaelic word samfuin means “the end of summer” or “the setting of the sun.” The festival marked the conclusion of the harvest and the beginning of the Celtic New Year. The Gallic calendar divided the year into two halves—the dark and the light—each beginning with the months Samonios and Giamonios, respectively. Samhain thus opened the dark half of the year, a time when the sun withdrew and the fires of transformation were kindled. The New Year’s celebration lasted three days—Trinoux Samoni—a triple feast that symbolically contained the movement from life toward death and back again.
The Celtic calendar aligned itself less with the course of celestial bodies than with the organic rhythm of the earth; in this way, its basis was more psychological than astronomical. Ritual bonfires blazed on high hills; families gathered in their light and offered sacrifices to the gods so that divine wrath would not fall upon them during the long winter. The rites were both agricultural and spiritual: offerings, sacrifices, and symbolic deaths ensured the survival of the community. In Ireland and Scotland, this day was called Feile na Marbh, the festival of the dead, for winter inevitably claimed human lives as well. Even today, in certain regions of Ireland and Scotland, people dedicate this night to their ancestors and recount the stories of those who have gone before.
According to Celtic tradition, when one half of the year overlapped with the other, the world of the living came perilously close to the world of the dead. This contact produced strange and frightening phenomena—what we would today call perhaps paranormal events. During this threshold time, the dead were believed to enter daily reality and for one day to walk among the living. However, those spirits brought both blessings and terror: they could destroy crops or whisper prophecies to the Druids, the Celtic priests who in turn can share them with their people. They advised on matters of love and marriage, on the number of children to come, and on the food stores needed to endure the winter.
The Druids built great fires around which families gathered in symbolic unity, seeking communion with the divine. People dressed in animal skins and wore masks that evoked creatures of the wild, acknowledging that the human being and the animal share a single psychic ground. From a Jungian perspective, such a ritual can be seen as an act of integration—an acknowledgment of instinct as the foundation of psychic vitality but also its use as a tool during difficult times of survival. Though the festival contained a sense of dread, it also carried fascination, beauty, and awe. Most importantly - it built resilience through embodiment and development of a new attitude. The participant experienced the ritual in its totality—with pathos, fear, reverence, and wonder—precisely the conditions under which transformation of consciousness can occur.
When the Romans conquered most of the Celtic lands around 43 BCE, the native rituals did not disappear but gradually intertwined with the religious life of the empire. This fusion was not imposed by any imperial order; it unfolded naturally through interpretatio Romana—the Roman practice of assimilating local gods and festivals into its own pantheon to maintain harmony across the provinces. The Romans rarely abolished native deities; they translated them into their own symbolic language, recognizing in them familiar divine forces. Thus, Samhain began to merge with the Roman observances of Feralia and Pomona.
Feralia, a solemn day dedicated to honoring the spirits of the dead, brought families to graves with offerings of food and wine, affirming the continuity between the living and the departed. Pomona, by contrast, introduced a gentler, life-affirming note. As goddess of fruit and orchards, she presided over the fullness of harvest before the world withdrew into dormancy. The apple, sacred to her, became a symbol of regeneration—the life hidden within the seed at the heart of decay. It is likely through this blending that both apple and, later, pumpkin entered the imagery of Halloween.
Pomona belonged to the numinous company of the Numina—divine presences inhabiting woods, streams, and sacred springs. These forces guarded both nature and the human soul, protecting home and spirit from chaos. In them we can sense an early intuition of what Jung would later describe as the psychoid realm, where matter and spirit interpenetrate. Thus, Pomona’s care over orchards and hearth symbolized the safeguarding of the soul’s inner dwelling against destructive powers that arise when the boundary between worlds grows thin.
Through this organic blending of Roman and Celtic imagination—not by decree, but through shared archetypal resonance—two spiritual sensibilities met and transformed each other. The Feralia contributed solemn remembrance; Pomona offered sweetness and renewal. Their union gave rise to a ritual vision in which death was no longer the final end but part of the natural rhythm of life—a quiet prelude to the descent into winter and the soul’s return to its mysterious roots.
By the eighth century CE, Celtic lands had come under Christian rule. Pope Gregory III declared the first of November to be All Saints’ Day, honoring martyrs and the blessed who beheld God in heaven. The following day, November 2, became All Souls’ Day, commemorating those still undergoing purification. The papal intention was to replace the pagan Samhain with a Christian feast, yet the ancient symbolism persisted among the people. Elements of the older rituals were absorbed into the Christian observances, giving rise to All Hallows’ Eve, the night before All Saints’ Day—eventually shortened to Hallowe’en and later Halloween.
Only in modern times did Halloween separate from the church calendar and return to its pre-Christian date of October 31, regaining its “pagan status”—to the dismay of ecclesiastical authorities, who have often viewed it either as “foolish indulgence” or as “the celebration of demonic forces” (Rogers, 2002; Hutton, 1991).
The festival itself, however, has a deep symbolic meaning that transcends both condemnation and commercial trivialization. Its psychological function lies in confronting what civilization habitually represses—the instinctual, the nocturnal, the proximity of death, and the haunting presence of the unconscious.
Halloween, originating in Ireland, reached North America around the mid-nineteenth century and spread across Europe during the twentieth. The celebration includes masks and costumes—especially ghostly and monstrous ones—visiting haunted houses, telling frightening stories, watching horror films, and lighting bonfires. Children go from house to house with the playful threat “trick-or-treat,” receiving sweets as a symbolic exchange. The carved pumpkin, glowing from within, has become its most recognizable emblem. During this season, America swarms with skeletons, devils, and ghosts; according to the National Retail Federation (2024), Americans now spend around four billion dollars on costumes alone, contributing to a total Halloween expenditure of nearly twelve billion dollars each year. Cinemas and streaming platforms earn millions more from horror entertainment. In sheer commercial magnitude, Halloween rivals even Christmas.
Yet rituals honoring the dead or the spirits of the departed are not unique to the Celts or the West. They appear in cultures worldwide—in the Greek Anthesteria, the Egyptian Feast of the Valley, the Australian Alcheringa rites, the Hindu Shrāddha, the Tibetan Ullambana, the Chinese Zhongyuan Jie, and in Mexico’s Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), celebrated on November 1 and 2. Each of these ceremonies dramatizes the human encounter with mortality and the unseen.
If such festivals were mere remnants of archaic superstition, they would long ago have disappeared. Their persistence suggests a deep psychological necessity. Recent surveys in the United States reveal that one-third of adults believe in ghosts and nearly one-fifth in witches and curses (Harris Poll, 2021). Beyond literal belief lies an archetypal need—the psyche’s urge to symbolize what cannot be grasped by reason alone. The psyche speaks through symbols; rational thought is only one mode of understanding. The symbolic dimension is its native language—an archaic, primordial way of relating to reality that allows meaning to emerge where logic reaches its limits. Let’s look at it through Jungian lenses.
Death, after all, is as fundamental to psychic life as birth. It is the boundary that gives shape to existence, the horizon against which life becomes meaningful. Without death, life would lose its direction and its moral gravity. As Jung observed, “Life is teleological only in so far as it is self-limiting; its goal is death” (Jung, 1934/1960, CW 8, para. 812).
The non-existence of consciousness would mean immortality, but also the absence of life. Only that which is reflected by consciousness truly exists. A lifeless world “in itself” is meaningless to the sentient being. To exist psychically, the world must mirror itself in at least one tiny mirror, in one consciousness. The nature of this reflection defines life and that is to say the quality of life. The world perceived by the Dalai Lama is not the same as the one reflected in the mind of a small child—not merely because of knowledge, but because of the depth of freedom experienced in each reflection.
Life and its counterpart, finality, are inseparable. It is almost impossible to imagine existence without death. If death were abolished, moral and social laws would dissolve into a chaos of endless relativism. Life without its counterpart would become a prison—an infinite prolongation stripped of meaning, purpose, and orientation. Its sense is anchored in individuation: the ongoing attempt to find the most conscious and ethical response to the complexities, perplexities, and reversals of existence. Purpose itself can only be measured against our striving within the limits of ultimate choice, defined by the absoluteness of death—finality.
Death remains the greatest unknown of life, the silent justice from which none are exempt. Psychologically, it is the ultimate mystery—a dark realm beyond consciousness, from which only faint voices of faith, imagination, and fantasy reach us. At times these voices whisper terror and cruelty; at others, they promise solace and continuity. Yet though their truth can never be verified, we can still enter into a relationship with them. Death stands as the most enigmatic object of projection—the screen upon which the psyche casts its deepest images, fears, and aspirations. From this interplay, paradoxically, the meaning of life itself begins to emerge.
Since the birth of symbolic agency, death has held a double meaning: fear of absolute annihilation, and the hope of blissful continuity. Both evoke anxiety, for the final answer remains forever uncertain. As Paul Tillich (1952/2000) said, the greatest anxiety is not fear of punishment but “the anxiety of meaninglessness,” the dread that life itself may lack significance.
From the standpoint of the ego, death means dissolution—the collapse of individuality, the annihilation of being. From the standpoint of the unconscious, it signifies return and reunion. Myths across cultures portray death as a joyous homecoming, the restoration of unity with the divine. The moral dimension of this return—heaven or hell, redemption or damnation—merely clothes the archetype in cultural garments.
In this sense, contact with the dead in ritual form fulfills a profound psychological function: it helps integrate - to contain - the existential anxiety. The spirits of the dead truly “live” in the unconscious; translated into psychological language, they are the latent fears and unresolved complexes surrounding death. For archaic humanity, the acknowledgment of these spirits occurred through projection onto the outer world. During Samhain—and later Halloween—the dead could appear as ghosts and monsters. Fear thus took visible, graspable form; it could be acted out rather than merely endured. What was once diffuse anxiety became embodied symbols. The vague unease of the soul found a face.
This process is not an expression of primitive superstition but a psychic necessity coming from the deep archetypal wisdom. To “express” fear in symbolic form is to externalize and ritualize the inner tension between life and death. Such dramatization mirrors the process of active imagination in Jungian analysis, where unconscious contents are personified and engaged in dialogue rather than split-off and sent off as projections.
In the Celtic lands—especially in Ireland, where winters were long and harsh—the collective psyche carried deep fears of darkness, hunger, and death. Such seasons of isolation and loss filled the community with emotions too heavy for consciousness alone. Festivals like Samhain served as sacred vessels for these tensions. Around great fires, through masks, dance, and story, people gave form to their fears and released them into ritual space.
In this way, the Celts transformed fear into meaning. Samhain was a psychic act of courage—a collective “holding” of darkness rather than being consumed by it. From a Jungian perspective, these rites contained the unconscious, allowing archetypal energies of death and renewal to rise into awareness. By facing the shadow together, the Celtic people found balance and prepared the soul—and the land—for facing the Giamonios, the dark side of the year.
The overlapping of the worlds of the living and the dead corresponds psychologically to the overlapping of consciousness and the unconscious. During Halloween, the unconscious gains energy, forcing consciousness to respond with heightened attention. Contents once denied or repressed—fear, aggression, guilt, and desire—arise as ghosts and walking dead. Yet in this symbolic space, they can be acknowledged and even embraced.
Confronting fear within a defined, socially sanctioned ritual—whether through costume, storytelling, or bonfire—parallels the therapeutic encounter with shadow material in a safe analytic setting. Here, safety isn't provided by the analyst, but by the ritual container itself, which allows for emotional enactment and play. Many people intuitively seek this controlled exposure to fear, choosing to watch horror films or read Stephen King precisely at this time, engaging with frightening content under the reassuring psychological condition of "as if."
It would be naïve to think that only children take Halloween seriously. Beneath the laughter and play often lie adult anxieties. Denying them does not free us from their power. Every ritual works unconsciously, and therefore partly against our conscious positions. Children, being closer to instinct, experience the festival more directly and deeply; for them, fear and fascination are still united.
The atavistic identification with animals, monsters, and ghosts—so typical of Halloween—can thus be understood as a psychological attempt to integrate the unconscious. It represents a phylogenetic regression, a descent of ego-consciousness into its instinctual roots. This descent naturally provokes fear of disintegration. The ego feels anxiety as evolution appears to reverse itself, plunging back into the archaic. Yet establishing a relationship with the inner animal is essential for psychic wholeness. Instincts that “modern” people believe they have outgrown have merely sunk into the depths, living silently like coelacanths in the ocean of the unconscious.
Halloween, therefore, serves not as a mere exposure to fear but as a nature-guided process of transformation. The descent into the "underworld" (Tír na nÓg), the world of instinct, corresponds psychologically to a descent into the unconscious. Because every symbol contains something ineffable and numinous, confrontation with it is always mysterious. It brings forth emotions that were previously unknown, split-off, and considered too painful or unbearable for consciousness to hold. Immersion in that horrific and fascinating mystery—whether through ritual, dream, or creative expression—can be turned into a cleansing and healing bath if the mind finds the right propensity and courage. The ego, bathed in the transformative waters of the unconscious, will always emerge more courageous and grown.
Jung said: "The true man is a child who has had his eyes opened. The darkness that hides the good is the same darkness that hides the bad, and we can draw the good out of the darkness only when we can also find the bad there." (CW 16, para. 544)
The ancient Celts understood that the confrontation with darkness carries a transformative purpose. Confronting the spirits of the dead was not simply an act of terror, but an initiation. Through the symbolic death of the ego, a new life could be born. What we now call the “unconscious,” early humanity referred to as the “world of spirits.” Among the ancient Irish and Celts, this world was known as Annwn or Tech Duinn—realms of the ancestors and of the unseen forces shaping life. From that world came both wisdom and power. By honoring the dead during Samhain, people maintained a dialogue with the invisible realm, ensuring that life remained in balance with its hidden source. Through such rituals, they derived strength to endure existence in the body with all its sufferings and limitations, understanding that descent into darkness was not an end but a passage toward renewal.
Through myth and ritual they summoned their spirits, expanding the image of the world beyond the boundaries of individual existence. Faith in those spirits opened access to the living wellspring of the unconscious—a capacity that many modern people have forgotten. Few civilizations cultivated this art of dying as profoundly as the ancient Egyptians, whose mysteries aimed to initiate the living into the life beyond death. Psychologically understood, this “life after death” represents an initiation into a higher state of consciousness—the transcendence of ignorance and unconsciousness. In this light, death is not the negation of life but its incomplete form, existence without awareness, deprived of the experience of the divine—the divine as the ever-present, eternal ground of life itself.
We find similar parallels in the Greek mysteries, in Christian liturgy, and in other ancient religions. The Bardo Thödol, or Tibetan Book of the Dead, can likewise be understood as a guide for awakening the soul to its original divine nature, forgotten at birth (Jung, 1935/1958, paras. 841–842). As Jung wrote, “The dead who seek recognition are the voices of the dead within us; it is they who demand the work of transformation which leads to individuation” (CW 11, para. 856). The spiritual climax is attained precisely at the moment of bodily death, when the soul is initiated into a higher mode of awareness.
From the depth-psychological perspective, such ritual dramas view life and death symbolically, for the projections surrounding death can never be entirely rationalized. Communication through symbols is not a trivial game of conjuring spirits but a moral and transformative act through which ego-consciousness enters into relation with the deeper reality—a world that continually calls for ethical participation and conscious engagement with the mystery of being.
Halloween, in its contemporary form, is indeed a simplified echo of such ancient initiations. The Druids, guided by instinct, enacted the same process that the Bardo Thödol describes in sophisticated theological language: conscious participation in the transition from one mode of being to another. In a similar way, Jungian analysis is an initiation into new life, assisting the integration of the Self into ego-consciousness. As Jung (1955/1966) wrote, “Penetration into the lower strata of the psyche is a kind of Socratic maieutics which brings to birth psychic contents that were hitherto only in a germinal state, subliminal and therefore unborn” (CW 13, para. 163).
Life “before” birth, therefore, can correspond to the original unconscious totality—the Platonic realm of the Good (to agathon). In Plato’s philosophy, this realm was also called the hyperuranion topos—the “place beyond the heavens”—where the eternal Forms dwell, unchanging and pure, and where the soul contemplates truth before descending into the body. In the Celtic imagination there is a similar symbol-image of the “Land of Youth,” or Mag Mell, the “Plain of Delight”—timeless realms of harmony where the soul dwelled in unity with the divine prior to incarnation. Both express the archetype of primordial wholeness that the human soul seeks to recover through experience of reality. Thus, when the soul remembers its divine origin, it will be reborn. Depth psychology understands this process of transformation as spiritual rebirth. By entering into dialectical relation with archetypal forces—the living symbols of the unconscious—one attains the highest form of wisdom: a consciousness that reconciles the opposites of the mortal with the eternal within the Self.
Archaic humans possessed an advantage over the modern: ritual contact with archetypal powers was an organic part of daily life. They lived immersed in symbol, in continuous dialogue with the unconscious, which ensured psychic balance and continuity. Modern humans, by contrast, have overvalued—and even deified—rationality to the point of blindness, leaving themselves defenseless before archetypal energies they no longer recognize or understand. The archetype, as a source of image, emotion, thought, and impulse to act—the very wellspring of psychic energy—cannot be “thought away.” The task of modern humanity is not to banish or subjugate these forces, but to rediscover their roots and, like the ancient Druids, to enter into conscious relationship with them—an attitude that once again aligns life with the deepest and most natural rhythm of being.
The so-called primitive lived in dialogue with his gods and therefore with his own soul. Jung (1961) observed that “while the man without faith walks toward nothingness, the one who entrusts himself to the powers of the archetype walks toward life through death. Both move in uncertainty, yet the one lives against his instincts, the other in accord with them” (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 306). When archetypes—or “spirits,” are ignored, they turn against us.
James Hillman (1977) demonstrated this in Suicide and the Soul. When the symbolic dimension of death is denied, its archetype may possess the personality, producing the literal urge for self-destruction. Death and rebirth are then experienced as bodily necessity. But the soul, which knows no body, expresses this as an archaic longing for transformation. The task is to understand that the body need not die; it is only the old psychic form that must perish so that a new, spiritual body can emerge. When we follow an archetype concretely, we become trapped in its literal meaning. When we apprehend it symbolically, its energy can be sublimated and transcend the body and its compulsions. Physical destruction is no longer required; the work with the archetype of death leads instead to renewed life.
The “ghosts” that haunt us—the unrecognized contents of the psyche—belong to what depth psychology calls the shadow: all that lies beyond the light of awareness. The more we repress these contents, the more destructive they become. Halloween reminds us that by consciously approaching this danger—whether through mockery, laughter, or the deliberate evocation of fear—we learn to live with death rather than turn away from it.
Here we encounter a phenomenon no longer confined to America—the growing fascination with brutality and violence. The modern obsession with horror films and violent games reveals, on one level, a conscious trivialization of death, and on another, an unconscious build-up of unacknowledged aggression. When the natural impulse toward aggression is dissociated, it sinks into the unconscious and returns as compulsive imagery. What consciousness neglects eventually takes possession. This process, known as psychological compensation, reflects the psyche’s instinctive effort to restore balance by bringing the rejected material back into awareness.
Just as excessive sexual restraint gives rise to obsessive erotic fantasies, and rigid dieting provokes compulsive overeating, an exaggerated attachment to life strengthens the pull of its opposite—death. Nature seeks equilibrium and continually brings both poles before consciousness. Only when the denied and the desired unite can true psychic freedom emerge. Instinctual and moral forces must meet in reflective harmony, converging at the center of the psyche—within what Jung called the transsubjective reality of the Self.
In the ancient Samhain, the world of spirits and the world of humans overlapped, allowing people to face the harsh winter not trembling with fear of death but strengthened through communion with their ancestors. Likewise, modern humanity, if it dares to gaze into its own darkness, may discover guidance rather than terror. The spirits that once haunted the night are, in truth, reflections of our own unlived life.
Vlado Šolc
