A client of my art shop commissioned bat imagery for a recent custom Astrology Star Chart art piece, and I had to use it again.
In my building the kids go ham for Halloween. I theorize the youth have an unspoken miraculous truce with the HOA.
Within our fright-festooned hallways, one decoration has leapt out at me: bats.
This shouldn’t vex me. Bats are an emblem of the season after all. But lately I notice them everywhere, peppering the walls in hordes, their arched wings jutting out from snarls of spiderwebs and caution tape.
As this newsletter centers on surprising tarot connections, I regularly scan T. Susan Chang’s Tarot Correspondences. I stopped at the Death card, which corresponds to our current astrological season of Scorpio.
I hadn’t realized that one of the animals Chang says corresponds to Death is — yep you guessed it — the goth plumeless bird things themselves!
This begs a deeper question.
Why are bats associated with Halloween and spookiness? Is it the vampiric lore? The night? The built-in dramatic capes? IDK, the screeches???
Taking a cue from the building’s kids, I asked the kiddos in my supreme auntie life why they suppose bats are so Halloweeny.
Behold these exquisite minds, these poets:
Love all of these
Bats are scary to kids. But is it because we told them to think so?
Maybe it’s because I’m a millennial who treasured Stellaluna, but I see bats as cute communal animals with radar. Even the internetz of late presents them as misunderstood goth-type Pokemon.
This baby doesn’t understand taxes and neither do I.
A Scorpio moon in their natural habitat.
Yes, some types of bats do look concerning, like those shrunken-down Nosferatu ones. Or those that resemble a pile of oyster mushrooms that got microwaved around a slipper. But others are just furry petite blobs or puzzled dogs, perplexed by everything and rabid only for tender fruits. Maybe we are all bats, deep down.
Fruit bats are corgis for those with eyes that wish to see.
Key turning points for bat branding
Long before anyone bought a Spirit Halloween bat costume, these dangling mammals established a varied résumé.
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, two daughters spurned Dionysus to stay home and weave instead of go drinking (relatable) and the god turned them into bats as punishment. In the 1300s Dante’s Inferno described the devil sporting wings with “no plumes” that were “in texture like a bat.” In Shakespeare’s The Tempest he depicts the spirit Ariel flying on the back of a bat in a way that was sus, if not absolutely fierce in retrospect.
In 1897 Bram Stoker’s Dracula famously cemented the idea that vampires could morph into bats, seizing on tales established by earlier Victorian fright-stirrers. Around this time, naturalists observed blood-drinking bats in South America and connected them to the vampires of Slavic folklore. It was a lot, emotionally, spiritually.
The points above helped with bats’ associations with Death. But the wellspring for the Bats x Halloween collab is Samhain (pronounced SOW-in). And there’s an ecological reason behind it!
Samhain is the Gaelic festival that marks the start of winter. At Samhain, huge bonfires roared at night, lit to (depending on who you ask) cleanse and protect homes or to mark the path for souls heading to the other side.
When Irish and Scottish immigrants brought their autumnal traditions to the northeastern US in the 1800s, late October happened to be peak bat season. As fires blazed, licking the inky sky, this hubbub would naturally attract bugs. Imagine the moths enticed to your single patio light, but on a massive scale. It was bug town.
But when bugs appear, so do the things that eat them.
The theory goes that the bonfires lit for the night-cruising dead naturally drew bugs, which naturally drew bats.
Sasha Velour eats, too!
Imagine looking up, believing that spirits were traveling above, and then seeing a streak of satin wing flash against the glow before dissolving into darkness. Boston University bat researcher Nate Fuller suggests those newcomers saw the bats and folded them into the holiday.
To people of the past, bats were a sign of death, even though to the bats it was simply a sign of dinner. Bats were at Halloween because well wouldn’t you be if the sky were suddenly made of food?? Don’t we all emerge when free snacks appear? Who am I to judge a bat? Me, who recently attended a gathering just for the crab rangoon?
Do bats connect to the Death card at all?
Oh, right, this is a tarot newsletter. Previously, I’ve discussed Death as change, through the lovely metaphor of orgasm. Bats, uh, don’t relate, as far as I know.
Tarot GOAT Rachel Pollack speaks about how death “connects us to nature.” While those at Samhain honored those who have died, their souls forever changed and their bodies no more, the bats were given more life, at least for a bit. Call it the circle of life or call it a fearsome frenzy our human minds try to make meaning from, Death is present all the same.
Happy Halloween! If you encounter a child with a bat theory, please email me!
Thanks for reading,
Cristina
PS: Further exploration
PPS. I thought it amusing that the ad below is essentially about staving off death and change.
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