All Saints Day and Halloween; death and rebirth. What is the connection??

October 2023 comes to an end today, on the 31st. The last day of the month delivers All Hollows Eve, known as Halloween. This celebration is an inheritance from the ancient Celtic festival of Shamhain, when people dressed in animal heads and skins and lit bonfires to bring light into the darkness of the winter ahead and to keep at bay the dark spirits or ghosts, of the dead returning to earth that day. The Celtic tradition was incorporated by the Romans into their celebration of Feralia, the day of the dead and Pomona, goddess of fruit and trees.

Her symbol was the apple, hence perhaps the bobbing of the apples (catching an apple with your mouth, no hands, floating in a barrel filled with water). It was also incorporated by Pope Gregory the III, during the 8th century A.D. into All Saints Day, a day to celebrate all saints and christian martyrs, on November 1st. The night before all saints day, was called all hollows eve (middle English ‘alholowmesse’ meaning ‘all saints’). In our days, besides candy and trick or treating, we also celebrate this day in an attempt to understand and come to terms, with not only the finality of all living beings, but the infinite cycle of death and rebirth. The zodiac sign most preoccupied with this infinite life cycle, is the Scorpio.

This is the one zodiac sign that understands, at a deeper level, regeneration and transformation. On October 23 the Sun entered Scorpio and on the 28th we experienced a powerful Full Moon/Lunar Eclipse in its polar opposite, the Taurus. Taurus resists change and can’t be bothered with transformation. If things could stay in the same, comfy level, that would be fine by the sweet Bull!

There seems to be an uncanny timing here, between a holiday rooted in ancient time, when people’s daily existence depended on the surrounding unpredictable natural elements and the fears that emerged from those, manifested through vengeful gods, life and the afterlife, and a powerful Eclipse, the last one on the Taurus-Scorpio polarity, after a grueling year and a half. I can not help but wonder; Is there a connection and something important to learn here?

Perhaps by assessing the last 2 years of our life, keeping what deserves to be kept, tossing what needs just that and exploring new ventures, helps us transform and start fresh. Burying the past, in so many ways, becomes cathartic. Perhaps, by celebrating the dead, we can better truly absorb, just how fragile our earthly world is and how infinite the circle of life is. A look at the events in the Gaza strip, the Ukraine, the Amazon Forest and many other troubled spots currently on our planet, is a testament to this. At the end of the day, we luckily, are not all the same but we are equals. Hopefully we can begin to appreciate the value of our limited time on this planet and galaxy and make the most of our earthy existence.

As October comes to an end and November is colored by the Scorpio-Taurus axle, the lesson here is, to seek the balance between our earthly possessions (Taurus*) and our soul’s deepest needs (Scorpio*). If the scale tips either way, the imbalance will have dire consequences for our collective and consequently, individual existence.

We are all equal. We are all ‘saints’.