All That Impedes Thee From the Golden Round

On Spirit and the Imagination VI

Katsushika Hokusai, The Ghost of Kohada Koheiji

Let me begin by acknowledging that our modern Halloween is a complex blend of traditions and cultural energies that is not rooted in a singular premodern source or extended practice, such that in philosophizing or theologizing to any degree about the day as it now exists is responding to something like a genuine novum. Perhaps, on those grounds, this really belongs in the Zeitgeist Zephyrs column, but in keeping with the “spirit” of the month and its series, I have instead included it here. I will also acknowledge that contemporary Halloween, not unlike contemporary Christmastide, is so thoroughly commercialized in especially American culture that the notion of something sacred inherent in it might strike the seasoned reader as a bit silly.