Why "All Souls Day" Has a Special Place in My Heart

Poets in Limbo (1890), Gustav Doré

All Souls Day gets little attention compared with yesterday's feast of All Saints and the eve prior to All Saints popularly called Halloween.

As a secular Catholic — or whichever epithet you prefer to call me (I prefer "Cajun Queen") — there is a special place in my heart for All Souls Day.

I think All Souls Day must have a place for me.


If there is a hell, it will probably be Dante's Inferno, and I have already packed my bags for residence in the palace of the virtuous pagans.

I'd like to make a liturgical calendar for the virtuous pagans.

We'd celebrate all the souls, but just call it all the minds day.

I'd start with Gertrude Stein on January 1st, and be sure to include Amitav Ghosh and Virginia Woolf.

We'd replace the Feast of the Transfiguration with Catharsis day and Good Friday would be called Denouement. Holy Thursday will be Climax Thursday and instead of Easter, we'd call it Deus Ex Machina Sunday.

Celebrate All Souls. Those pluckered souls. Those beleaguered Bartleby the Scrivener Souls and "Call me Ishmael" souls.

All Souls. All mind. All body. All heart. Strung from the lattice of time, splayed out on this terrazzo floor called life, I'd rather be a damned soul than a forgotten soul.

The soul is dead. Long live the soul.

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Image Courtesy: Gustave Doré's Poets in Limbo from Dante's Divine Comedy