I’m having trouble with that analogy.
Or (in the case of ghoulish and demonic looking costumes and images) it desensitizes the child to occultic images.
That’s OK. Analogies don’t always fly.
In his book The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis wrote this in his preface:
There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.
I think the greater danger is that people get so used to the trivialized images that they forget the level of deceit and glamour the devil can put on. In other words, people now are less likely to become magicians according to the pseudo-“ancient” (Victorian-medieval-Egyptian-whathaveyou) imagery, which is what Halloween uses, and instead either disbelieves that the devil exists at all or else get in line with some New Age “spirit powers” nonsense that holds that what everyone torments as ghoulish or demonic at Halloween is the focus of the legitimate religion that is ignorantly getting a bad rap. I don’t think Halloween makes that situation any worse, however.
In Letter #7 of the same book, the author has the senior devil, Screwtape, write this advice to his nephew (as this is a letter written in the voice of a devil, of course “the Enemy” refers to God…since the devil would never refer to God as God, for all the obvious reasons).
*MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
I wonder you should ask me whether it is essential to keep the patient in ignorance of your own existence. That question, at least for the present phase of the struggle, has been answered for us by the High Command. Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal ourselves. Of course this has not always been so. We are really faced with a cruel dilemma. When the humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all the pleasing results of direct terrorism and we make no magicians. On the other hand, when they believe in us, we cannot make them materialists and skeptics. At least, not yet. I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalize and mythologize their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, belief in us, (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy. The “Life Force”, the worship of sex, and some aspects of Psychoanalysis, may here prove useful. If once we can produce our perfect work—the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls “Forces” while denying the existence of “spirits”—then the end of the war will be in sight. But in the meantime we must obey our orders. I do not think you will have much difficulty in keeping the patient in the dark. The fact that “devils” are predominantly comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you.*
IOW, dressing up at Halloween doesn’t desensitize to the real occult as much as trivializes it–people who used to put those symbols on their garage for the amusement of school children aren’t likely to accept them as real religious symbols–but in doing so could c
onceivably create one picture of the occult that is ridiculous while
perhaps allowing people to fall for something else that looks different on the outside and actually is a form of occult, but that people don’t see as “the occult” because it doesn’t fit the melodramatic Halloween picture.
I don’t think that dressing up scary or not changes that all that much. The difference is whether or not children and young people are taught the real marks of the occult: any practice intended to give one “spiritual power” in one’s own right or to harness such power as if one were harnessing a river with a hydroelectric dam, any practice that cultivates an affection for or a devotion for any “spirit” or “power” that does not point the soul to God and God alone, or any practice that does not put God at the center or lead one toward adoration only for God, service only for God, love only for and in God.
Or, as they say at the Treasury Department, you cannot possibly learn to recognize every kind of counterfeit currency, and you don’t have to. The main thing is to know what marks make the real thing real. Then if you run across any kind of counterfeit, you’ll know it. As long as Halloween does not cross the lines that would show it as a counterfeit, I think it is OK. It is important, though, not to take it for granted that there is no boundary. I don’t even give that much to Christmas, let alone Halloween. The adversary is too clever and relentless for that.
