Episode Details

Hello and welcome back to Gnostic Insights. The Halloween season is upon us. I’m having a Halloween party, a block party, here in the neighborhood, and I’m going to sing an hour’s worth of spooky songs. I was assailed yesterday by a Christian lady who said I’m doing the work of the devil, because these are not good songs. And she also urged me not to share this Gnostic business with someone in particular, because he doesn’t need that sort of confusion, she said. Of course, she doesn’t know what the Gnostic stuff is. She hasn’t listened to the podcast or even talked with me about it. She just puts up her hand and waves me away if I try to bring up the Gnosis. So I would say that if Halloween glorifies Satan in your mind, then you should not partake in it, because we don’t want to glorify evil or glorify the Slanderer.

However, there was a verse in Colossians that addressed this subject, in my opinion. In Colossians 2:15 it says,

Stripping the Archons and Powers, he exposed them in the open, leading them prisoner along with him in a triumphal procession. Therefore let no one judge you for eating and drinking, or for taking part in a festival, or in a new moon celebration, or in Sabbaths. These are a shadow of things to come, but the solid body thereof is that of the anointed. Let no verdict be passed against you by anyone affecting humility and a religion of the angels, venturing upon visions he has never had, blustering aimlessly by the mind of his flesh, not holding to the head from whom all the body, furnished and knitted together by its joints and ligatures, will grow with a growth from God.

We spoke about freedom from the Law in depth a couple of episodes ago, when we talked about Colossians. Of course, this presupposes that we who are freed from these laws and restrictions have the love of God, the love of Christ, dwelling within us. That’s what has replaced and made null those sanctions against things like Halloween. We can’t do it on our own. This verse in particular in Colossians refers to eating and drinking, festivals, new moon celebrations, and Sabbaths. It seems to me that we may infer that some of these festivals were not sanctioned by the Old Testament. It may also be that, if they were official calendar days in Judaism, that early Christians were divided about whether they should apply to the followers of Jesus, as in the example of modern Seventh Day Adventists who strictly keep the Saturday sabbath and believe all other Christians are in mortal error for switching the sabbath to Sunday. Or the festivals may be syncretistic, meaning they combined pagan and religious elements to form a new celebration, as is the case with Christmas. Or the festivals could have been entirely pagan, such as May Day celebrations to usher in springtime.

The quote says that all of these activities referred to in this verse are only “a shadow of things to come.” Surely Halloween is not to be found in the ethereal plane, because the spooks, goblins, and witches are “shadows” of the Fall, and we know that shadows is another word for archonic. They did not exist before the Fall and will not exist after the cosmos passes into nothingness. Indeed, Halloween can be seen as an example of we Second Order Powers “stripping the Archons and Powers… leading them prisoner along with [Christ] in a triumphal procession.” Wouldn’t that be a fun activity at a Halloween Party? A parade of conquered Powers?

Halloween is a time when people acknowledge that the world is not always as it seems. It is a time when folks who normally dismiss the ethereal and the archonic realms ac