The night of drunken carousing that now passes for Halloween bears little resemblance to the festival of old. Like spiders slurping the innards of a beetle, disenchantment and commercialization have bled it of meaning. And yet the carapace remains. Halloween’s history is a signal case of the process by which Western institutions descend into decadence. “All that is meant by Decadence is ‘falling off,’” writes Jacques Barzun in his magisterial history of Western culture, From Dawn to Decadence. This “falling off” is unmistakable throughout our cultural institutions. They have lost their animating force: the spirit of play.
