Hungry Ghosts

Sometimes in the night I feel it
Near as my next breath and yet, untouchable
Silently the past comes stealing
Like the taste of some forbidden sweet.

Along the walls; in shadowed rafters
Moving like a thought through haunted atmospheres
Muted cries and echoed laughter
Banished dreams that never sank in sleep.

- Dan Fogelberg, Ghosts

All Saint's Day follows All Hallows Eve - Halloween. Intended to glorify the saints, known and unknown, it falls around the time of the Celtic festival of Samhain, which marked the beginning of the darker half of the year. In Scotland turnips were carved much like we carve Jack O'Lanterns; these Samhnag were used to ward off the restless shades of the dead.

The ghosts of the dead have long been thought to tarry, often to complete a task left undone, or to atone for misdeeds:

I am thy father's spirit,
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away.

- Hamlet, Act I Scene IV

In the Orient there is a very peculiar sort of ghost, the hungry ghost. The ancient Hindus thought that these spirits were obsessed with a particular object, and thus were in effect imprisoned by their desire. A Hungry Ghost is said to have a mouth the size of a needle's eye, and a stomach the size of a mountain.


Joseph Campbell described them in Transformations of Myth Through Time:

Amitabha is the Buddha whose lieutenant is Avolokiteshvara and whose incarnation on earth, then, is the Dalai Lama. Embraced by his shakti, known as the "Woman in White," his quality is mercy, compassion. And what do you suppose the [corresponding] vice would be? Attachment - attachment to that being for whom you feel love. [As described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead] if you die with this attachment you will be reborn in the world of the hungry ghosts. They have ravenous bellies and pinpoint mouths, so they can never eat what they desire.

These people cared too much, and doomed themselves to a twilight world of regret and pain. That's a powerful meditation on living your life.

The older I get, the more I find myself moved by the idea of Grace, that gift that breaks chains made of precisely this attachment, regret, and pain. On this All Saint's Day, may the mystery of grace embrace us, and banish those sleepless dreams.

UPDATE 11 September 2010 00:18: Removed picture at the request of the copyright holder.