Could Halloween as a matter of fact be a religious festival? I mean that taking stock of the otherworldly, that sense of life when touched by ghostly, supernatural presence, – a frank admission of fright, of something inscrutable about what life and death means…

Nietzsche writes a speculative account of someone who experiences a vision of spiritual insight, who concludes that he/she is a messenger, a conduit of divine intention.

Forgive me, but the passage strikes me as supremely ironic and scary, a pretty good Halloween story. I visualize Nietzsche’s tale unfolding in a Stanley Kubrick-style noir genre…  There was this guy or gal who…

How can any one
regard his own opinion of things as a revelation?

This is the problem
of the formation of religions:
there has always been some man
in whom this phenomenon was possible.

A postulate is that such a man
already believed
in revelations.

Suddenly, however,
a new idea occurs to him one day,
his idea;

and the entire blessedness
of a great personal hypothesis,
which embraces all existence and the whole world,
penetrates with such force into his conscience
that he dare not think himself the creator of such blessedness,
and he therefore
attributes to his God
the cause of this new idea
and likewise the cause of the cause,
believing it to be
the revelation of his God.

How could a man
be the author of so great a happiness?
ask his pessimistic doubts.

But other levers are secretly at work:
an opinion may be strengthened
by one’s self if it be considered
as a revelation;
and in this way
all its hypothetic nature is removed;
the matter is set beyond criticism
and even beyond doubt:
it is sanctified

The Dawn of Day by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by J. M. Kennedy, aphorism 62